Free Autobiography by Morrissey

netherworld encounter for Mackay, but a great joy for the pesky boy. There is new meaning to everything as Roxy Music inexplicably jump to number 4 with their first single, Virginia plain , a pursed-mouth whirl of low noise and words used for sound value only. There is no chorus and nothing is repeated. The song is madcap in construction, and singer Bryan Ferry is an honored northern guest – escapist but shy, a slither of glamor rippling like the sea. Roxy Music are resolutely odd, and Agatha Christie queer; the smile of Ferry is Hiroshima mean, as he shuffles crab-style from stage right to stage left ... like someone who’s had his food dish removed. It’s a voice of cold metal, just barely skin deep. I eagerly catch his first Radio One interview wherein he falls asleep at the drone of his own replies. Eno, on the other hand, uses words that no one else can spell and is wrapped in so much sexual allure that Top of the Pops cameras avoid him for fear of frightening the frighteningly drab majority. The technical detachment of Roxy Music is, briefly and possibly accidentally, a radical experience, one that they swiftly dispense with once they establish a large audience. But before they lose their strangeness they are magnificent, and the drabness of true artifice comes alive. Also billed for this night at the Hardrock are the New York Dolls, who have yet to make a record, but about whom the press had already written so much. Bumped up against the front of the stage, I, and others, sigh heavily as it is announced that the New York Dolls will not appear due to the sudden death of their drummer three days earlier in London. In these limping, impeded days of 1972 there is no way that such news could reach our social quarter, since our houses and our lives are shut down from instant communications.
    In this year I also see Mott the Hoople and Lou Reed live, and my senses never return. Lou Reed is unimpressed by applause, and lives a life detached from custom. His stare is cold and his romanticism is brutal. His songs are half-sung melodies of menace. He might drop dead any second, and is therefore the real thing. Examined ravenously like a museum exhibit, Lou Reed is evidently spiked to excess, and strangely loveable. This feared raggle-clatter of pop species is changing everything. The womanly David Bowie is attacked by the Daily Mirror as being ‘a disgrace’ – although how he is a disgrace, or why , is not explained. Bowie’s extraordinary effect of menace upon British culture is largely forgotten now, but I watched it break like a thundercloud in 1972, and its presence was as volcanic as that which later would be termed Punk. An even darker force controlled the personalities of the New York Dolls, who are younger than Bowie and who are more-or-less transgender in appearance. Melody Maker announces them as ‘the world’s first homosexual rock band’, which, of course, is what they are not. On face value, the Dolls are menacing rent boys who are forcing the world to deal with them. Their arms drape lovingly around one another in photographs at a time when young men are assumed to want to look like Bobby Moore, Jimmy Greaves or Terry Venables. Disc magazine gives a warning on its front page: Lock up your sons, it’s the New York Dolls! , as singer David Johansen lurches forwards in color. The suggestion that yoursons rather than your daughtersmight need to be protected from a male rock band had never previously been considered. The cautionary headline from Record Mirror is ARRIVAL OF THE DOLLY BOYS , and David Johansen advises the same magazine: ‘We’re not butch’ – an astonishing confession in rock’s macho Zeppelin age.



T ACKY, TACKY, TACKY shouts another Dolls headline, and in 1973 the Dolls’ first 45, Jet boy , and their first studio album are very heavily promoted in all of the British music papers. The Dolls meet with all of the obvious condemnations, for this is still an era of darkness and drowned