Like many such victims at the time, I was in deep denial about what had happened. I pretended it was just a bit of fun, a laugh. That is was just “pop music.” I tried to forget about it. Put it down to experience. After all, I didn’t have time for such foolishness. I was Going to University, I was Going to Experience Life — or at least leave home, make some new friends, get drunk, and maybe even get laid. I certainly wasn’t going to let this blousy madman spoil it all.
The reality is that I’d taken a lift to a place from which I’d never quite be able to come back; I’d just met someone I would never quite manage to get rid of.
Within just a few months, I was to give up higher education as a bad mistake and find myself, in January 1984, on the dole and shivering in a rented room in Levenshulme, a depressed and dilapidated district of South Manchester without the romance of Whalley Range. I kidded myself that I was still in control, that I was hot on the trail of Real Life now – and somehow managed to overlook the fact that I’d ended up in Morrissey’s hometown.
And then the Smiths’ eponymous debut album was released.
I can’t remember how I came to buy it. I didn’t plan to; it just happened. In a haze. But listening to/mainlining that album, as I did constantly for weeks, I was happy to be shipwrecked in Manchester, and Morrissey was both siren and man Friday to me — the seductive architect of my doom and my sole, loyal companion in the wilderness. I lay on my mattress gasping and panting as I listened (above the sound of my teeth chattering): “Under the iron bridge we kissed.”
Who needs heroin or analysis when you have lines like these? With their curiously hypnotic, self-sufficient, self-mocking nostalgia, they speak of a longing for something lost that was almost certainly never possessed in the first place and that could never be recaptured anyway, even if it had been. The mixture, the intimacy of longing and lack, is so acute, so intense, that it even produces “sore lips.” It’s a song of innocence and experience that is entirely adolescent but at the same time seems to do away with adolescence altogether.
The pathology at the root of “Still Ill” and The Smiths and Morrissey’s art is the familiar modern malaise of self-reflexivity — an illness that the singer makes entirely his own but somehow universal at the same time. It’s melancholia mixed with nostalgia and incubated in Morrissey’s heart, head, and mouth to produce . . . melanalgia . “ Does the body rule the mind/Or does the mind rule the body?/I dunno.”
Sickness had never sounded or felt so good. For my part, sharing that box room and mattress with him, I was like thousands of others at that time, rapidly developing a full-blown case of melanalgia myself. I may have felt unloved and unlovable, but I also derived an exquisite, narcotic satisfaction from the knowledge of these things and the ability to laugh under my breath at the perversity of that knowledge. Instead of feeling eighteen and inept, I felt a thousand years old and wiser than the hills, and somehow, this allowed me to float above the pathetic reality of my life. To this day, Smiths songs reek of cheap hair gel, unwashed sheets, damp walls, badly ventilated gas fires, and impossible, intoxicating expectations. That’s to say, a time when I had everything.
