Morrissey was the lead singer for the Smiths, a British band that gained a loyal following during the 1980s. His career got a boost with the band named The Smith, where he was the lead singer from 1982 to 1987. Later on, the band got disintegrated, and Morrissey started his solo career and landed up giving many hits. He supported many animal-related charity initiatives.
Background
Stephen Patrick Morrissey, who is most commonly referred to by his last name, was born on May 22, 1959, in Manchester, England. The son of a hospital porter and a librarian, Morrissey was a moody, introspective child. He was named after Steve Cochran. He found an early love in poetry and writing, outlets that helped him cope with the occasional bouts of depression that gripped his life. Morrissey especially adored the work of Oscar Wilde.
For Morrissey, pop music provided a needed escape from his "dreary" childhood in Manchester. "Pop music was all I ever had, and it was completely entwined with the image of the pop star," he told The New York Times in 1991. "I remember feeling that the person singing was actually with me and understood me and my predicament. A lot of times I felt I was engaged with an absolute tangible love affair."
Education
As a teenager, Morrissey had a difficult life, because of the chronic depression that he was suffering from. Hailing from a modest background, he found a cure for his depression in the form of Pop Music. It relieved his mental pain, and he also wrote poetry to distract himself. Becoming more interested in music, he felt the urge to create music of his own and started his first band The Nosebleeds.
Morrissey began his education at St. Wilfred's Primary School. He failed his 11-plus exam and proceeded to St. Mary's Technical Modern School. Later he attended Stretford Technical College.
Career
Morrissey left school at 17. Jobs as civil-service clerk, hospital porter, and the record-store salesman did not interest him past the first paycheck. It was guitarist Johnny Marr's 1982 invitation to join a band that finally got him out of the house. Within months, the Smiths burst onto the British music scene. As the result of several BBC radio broadcasts, the band landed a contract with Rough Trade Records along with an impressive and enthusiastic following - this even before the release of their debut album, The Smiths. Stereo Review's Steve Simels referred to the album as "mostly midtempo love ballads with a not-so-subtle homoerotic ambiguity. Morrissey has a vocal style that manages to walk the tightrope between being affectingly plaintive and cloyingly sensitive." With the 1985 album Meat Is Murder entering the British charts at number one and going gold within a week, the Smiths had made their mark. Writing for the Nation, Frank Rose described their sound as "a difficult but strangely compelling amalgam of American blues and British folk set to a spinning beat. Morrissey doesn't sing with the tune, he sings all around it, and the resulting tension is as hypnotic as it is disorienting." The release of 1986's The Queen Is Dead further deepened their impression on the music world. Johnny Rogan, author of Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, hailed them as the most.
Yet, by the time Strangeways, Here We Come was released, in 1988, the Smiths had disbanded; Marr had decided to work with other artists, and the group simply dissolved. What would become of Morrissey was a mystery to critics who assumed he would be nothing without Marr. "The general opinion was that once Johnny Marr unplugged that umbilical cord I would just kind of deflate like a paddling pool," Morrissey told Spin's Steven Daly. Mark Peel, for example, declared in Stereo Review, "Morrissey seemed headed over the abyss."
Morrissey defied them with his first solo release, Viva Hate. Melody Maker called the album "implausibly fresh: the music's breathing again, free of a certain stuffiness and laboriousness that had set in seemingly irreversibly in the Smith's twilight period." Critics seemed to lose faith in Morrissey with the 1991 release of Kill Uncle. Excerpts from several Melody Maker reviews clearly define their position: "devoid of magic, melodies, and memorability," "Morrissey revelling in mundanity," "such a tragic, turgid pathetic record one can only assume it's an act of spite"; and finally, "Morrissey's future probably lies in America. Over there, [it] was critically acclaimed, his gigs were received rapturously and he even made it onto the Johnny Carson Show." And although a bigger American audience was discovering Morrissey through Kill Uncle, Rolling Stone felt it "only hints at the achievement of the earlier album. What Kill Uncle lacks is the musical coherence, let alone the stick-in-your head charisma, that would lend the album the consistency of the singer's previous work. [I]t plays more like a fragmented collection of polished studio outtakes than a finished album."
Morrissey's fans were at last vindicated in 1992 with the release of Your Arsenal; although they had never given up hope in his ability, his critics were beginning to. "But on Your Arsenal," wrote Jeremey Helligar in People, "he pulls back from the brink of self-parody and delivers some of his strongest tunes yet bless his bummed-out soul." Mark Coleman of Rolling Stone called Arsenal "the most direct - and outwardly directed - statement he's made since disbanding the Smiths. Buoyed by the conversational grace of his lyric writing, Morrissey rides high atop this album's rip-roaring guitar tide. His penchant for maudlin balladry held firmly in check by taut arrangements and riff-driven melodies Your Arsenal is stockpiled with the rock and roll equivalent of smart bombs: compact missives that zoom in on their targets with devastating precision. The repercussions last long after the rubble is cleared." According to New York Times contributor Jon Pareles, "The band can also strut and stomp with the brawn and moxie of a rockabilly band. The contrast between the introversion of Morrissey's smooth, vibrato-rounded croon and rock's brashest tradition only heightens the piquancy, and Morrissey knows it."
Morrissey continued releasing a steady stream of material through the mid-nineties, but only 1994's Vauxhall and I elicited the same excitement as Your Arsenal. A single from Vauxhall and I - "The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get" - played on MTV and reached the top 50 singles chart, introducing the singer to an American audience. Bolstered by his success in the United States, Morrissey moved from Dublin to Los Angeles where he began work on a new album for Mercury in 1996.
If fans had greeted Morrissey's Kill Uncle with anger, they greeted 1997's Maladjusted with indifference. "The last album was not a showstopper," Morrissey recalled to Marc Spitz in Spin. "The sleeve was dreadful. I look like a mushroom or a leprechaun. It was designed by the record company, and they were collapsing." Following the album, the singer dropped out of public view (with the exception of sightings at Libertines and Sex Pistols' concerts) for the next seven years. During this period he devoted a great deal of time to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and working in coordination with the Los Angeles Animal Police.
In 2004 Morrissey returned to the music scene with the release of You Are the Quarry. Speaking of his long absence, he told Spin 's Spitz: "It was very frustrating. But I absolutely believe in fate and I knew that it would end. I felt like I was being carried along by something, and perhaps it's all the better that there was a gap." Critics and fans, meanwhile, warmly embraced the new album, calling it a return to form. "At its best," wrote Allison Stewart in the Washington Post, "it pulls off the near-impossible trick of being both a good wallow and a sharp stick in the eye. Even at its worst, it's simply irreproducible, the rare record that's actually about something." Morrissey launched a tour in support of the album, which included an appearance at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. In reviewing that appearance, Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter declared that the singer was "in fine voice and as bitterly ironic as ever."
Despite an up-and-down solo career, Morrissey remains an icon in the pop music world. Unfortunately for fans of the Smiths, he has ruled out the possibility of a reunion. "I would rather eat my own testicles than re-form the Smiths," he said in 2006, "and that's saying something for a vegetarian."
In 2013, Morrissey released an autobiography, which was called, simply, Autobiography. The book covers his childhood, including his teenage fondness for the New York Dolls, a band of transvestites. "Jerry Nolan on the front of the Dolls debut album is the first woman I ever fell in love with," he wrote.
Religion
Morrissey is a lapsed Catholic who often criticizes the Catholic Church.
Politics
Morrissey is an open supporter of the far-right political party For Britain Movement.
Views
Morrissey is both a vegan and an outspoken animal activist, calling out the cruelty of the meat and dairy industries frequently, and even releasing the Smiths’ album Meat Is Murder to get his message across. This even effects the venues and festivals he agrees to play at, since he demands that any place hosting him goes fully vegetarian on the night he performs.
Quotations:
"I lost myself in music at a very early age, and I remained there ... I did fall in love with the voices I heard, whether they were male or female. I loved those people. I really, really did love those people. For what it was worth, I gave them my life ... my youth. Beyond the perimeter of pop music there was a drop at the end of the world."
"Don't talk to me about people who are "nice" cause I have spent my whole life in ruins because of people who are "nice"."
"Artists aren't really people. And I'm actually 40 percent papier mache."
"All I said was "bring me the head of Elton John", which would be one instance when meat would not be murder, if it was on a plate."
"That was the problem with the 'celibate' word because they don't consider for a moment that you'd rather not be, but you just are. I was never a sexual person."
"I do think it's possible to go through life and never fall in love, or find someone who loves you."
"I've always assumed there's a dark river flowing beneath my fans' desires."
"I say a lot of things I don’t mean."
Personality
Morrissey maintains an extremely private personal life. His sexual orientation has been a matter of debate for quite some time, and media speculations have tended to portray him as a gay man. He was also rumored to have been in a relationship with Jake Walters.
Morrissey claims to know a lot; he is notorious for his forthright opinions: "Michael Jackson has outlived his usefulness," he said in People, "Prince and Madonna are of no earthly value whatsoever." While he's fond of British singer-songwriter Paul Weller and Prefab Sprout's Paddy McAloon, he told Entertainment Weekly that "I certainly think Britney Spears is the devil. The way she projects herself and the fact that she is so obviously vacuous. I think it's such a shame that she became so influential to very small children. Most of the faces I see on the covers of American music magazines are just dreadful - people with nothing to offer the world at all."
Over the years, Morrissey's temper and outspokenness have continued to make headlines. In 2010, while commenting about animal cruelty in China, he said, "You can't help but feel that the Chinese people are a subspecies." His ire has also been directed at Kate Middleton, Lady Gaga, Madonna and Victoria, and David Beckham.
Morrissey is a staunch vegan - his rider stipulates that meat is not at all allowed in the buildings that he performs in.
Usually scathing about footballers, Morrissey had a soft spot for the Manchester United legend. In his autobiography he reflects: "Arbitrarily illiterate, football players remained in the stuckness of their own dull social units until George Best spoke and teased and joked and made sense."
Physical Characteristics:
Height: 177.8 cm.
Weight: 82 Kg.
Quotes from others about the person
"The truth of it is, I absolutely encouraged and backed up everything that Morrissey did and was really, really happy to do so. All his words, everything he said in the press. When we cancelled gigs, I backed him up to the hilt." - Johnny Marr
"I'm sure that when Morrissey finds that he's getting an endorsement from the leader of the Conservative Party, he will think "heaven know's I'm miserable now". I'm a big fan, I'm afraid. Sorry about that."