Just as fans respond to each new tour, album or photo shoot that the Mozfather unleashes on his eager public, so too does the man himself keep up something of a running commentary on one of his own fannish obsessions, Granada Televisions thrice-weekly soap opera Coronation Street.
You'd think someone who jets so avidly around the globe from mansion to mansion would accept the loss of regular Corrie viewings as just one of the minor downsides to fame, but no. Moz is a fan, and if it's one thing fans do well it's keeping in touch with the object of their fandom, even if they be separated by time, distance and a temperamental modem. And Moz loves his Corrie.
Morrissey's devotion to the show is an established part of our collective idea of him. The Johnny Rogan book helpfully shed some light on what had been hitherto a semi-apocryphal titbit:
"He was stone mad on Coronation Street", recalls [school friend] Mike Moore, and his enthusiasm provoked a brief correspondence with the series' producer... the dreamy dramatist claims to have concocted several unlikely scenarios for the series."
This reaches a climax in his school's 1969 nativity play:
"It was like a Sixties kitchen-sink drama set in a terraced house similar to Coronation Street. I think Morrissey played the mother."
How wonderful, and how Morrissey! At the age when most of us are dreaming of being ballerinas, spacemen or sporting stars, the young Moz has his sights set on a cramped cobbled street set in a Mancunian television studio.
And what's interesting is that he never really takes his eyes off it. Long after his dreams of producing the scripts have vanished along with his need to wear short trousers, Moz keeps watching, and keeps telling us he keeps watching. Jo Slee, in her superb work Peepholism, includes an interview Moz conducted with Corrie actress and all-round Archetypal Strong Northern Woman, the one and only Pat Phoenix. The interview, and its accompanying photo shoot, is singled out as a significant part of the Morrissey canon, on an equal footing with the first Smiths single, Top Of The Pops and selling out American stadiums. In recent years he's kept us abreast of his thoughts on the latest storylines and character trends, in exactly the same way that he now makes observations on Britain and British life from the perspective of a self-imposed exile. Corrie is Moz's UK social barometer.
And not just Moz's. When a TV show has been around as long as Coronation Street, odd things start to happen. It's never INFLUENCED British life exactly, but occasionally does seem to warp the edges of our culture slightly in its image - the youngest Webster child's happy use of the word "chav" to describe herself was the first time I heard it used as something other than an expression of middle class distaste. And it caught on. Then there's the way the Street changes, a necessary part of the Corrie formula, if only on a practical cast-list basis, with actors who make a nuisance of themselves in public being written out as discreetly as possible almost as if they really ARE scandalous distant members of our own collective family. Social changes too are reflected amongst Corrie's fictional populace - in 2004 it finally registered the existence of homosexuals. Imagine!
Coronation Street is, however, in no way, shape or form 'realistic' and never has been. As a programme it's an assemblage of recognisable images, preferring not just a stock set of revolving types, but exaggerated versions of people you see in any small community - the wideboy, the old battleaxe, the nosey neighbour, the rebellious whining teenager... even the occasional homicidal maniac stems from the sort of figures that fill, oh, whole columns in local newspapers. For all the inherent oddities of TV drama (stories unwinding in neat 15 or 30 minute segments, coincidences and plot twists on an epic scale), if enough attention is paid to the details then it feels somehow 'right'. Corrie's success is down to it being as approachably daft and implausible as any fiction, but being layered at the same time with immediately familiar signifiers.
Why are any of these things odd then? Because (and here one dusts off my old copy of Postmodernism For Dummies) these very signifiers of familiarity have come to mean something else, unique to themselves. "Rita's Kabin" isn't just the sort of local newsagent's you see in any street corner, it's Rita's Kabin, home to the Rita and Norris double-act and prominent source for gossip; the Rovers Return isn't just the local pub, it's The Rovers, iconic hub of local life and a place you can now actually visit (make no mistake, the Granada Tours experience is like something out of Baudrillard, where You, The Public can now fictionalise yourself on the 'real' Corrie set. Fun for all t'family).
'The Street', whose glamour once relied on it being easily identifiable as a (then rare) glimpse of Northern 'reality' on the telly, has evolved into a televisual space unique in and of itself. Coronation Street, the street, the programme, cannot be confused with any other fictional street or programme. Moz's probable attraction to the soap is the way it can be easily annexed into Morrissey World, that parallel dimension of idiosyncratic women with 60s bouffants, tooled-up kosh boys, boy racers and boxers. It's 'real', and comes with associations to real times, dates, events and places (Moz's own boyhood, amongst others) but patently fake and romanticised at the same time, with brassy barmaids, cartoony characters, and a sense that the world being presented to you, despite its apparent mundanity, can be, and is being, scripted, directed, designed, made up and played with - just as Moz appropriates 60s figures for his cover art, and just as we appropriate Moz songs for our own personal soundtracks.
As the Street moved from its post-war beginnings and developed its own history and legends, passing into household British folklore, its present is well aware of its status AS Coronation Street. Its opening titles have been tweaked through the years, but despite the changing geo-architectural landscape of Manchester in the latter half of the 20th century, Corrie asserts its status as a unique domain through That Cat.
Infamous now as a commonplace icon, the Corrie cat slinks its way through a succession of ordinary looking back alleys and rooftops during the opening titles; it's an animal totem as much as it is a mascot, inviting us to follow it onto its turf. Thankfully the fact it appears on TV is enough for it to mark its territory, rather than in the conventional feline manner.
Whether it's on film or high-def, mono or colour, the Corrie cat, which is itself capable of trying on a variety of new coats over the years, promises us that despite the cultural changes it's been witness to, SOME things can, if we will them to hard enough, stay the same. The attraction there is obvious to anyone who's ever heard Moz's grumbling about the declining state of social and popular culture, something we've loved him for from 'Steve Wright' through to "oh, why oh why must Franz Ferdinand have such dull cover art?"... and I think that to some extent whenever Moz opens his mouth to an interviewer or swings a mic lead onstage, he's performing much the same function for us. Moz is unlikely to suddenly decide to go all experimental on us - his styles may change, but Morrissey as an artist and performer has always been about maintaining a worldview that has always remained more or less consistent.
Be it tattoo'd boys from Birkenhead, skinheads in nail varnish or pretty petty gangland criminals, Morrissey World (and I swear to God that's the last time I'll be boring you with that phrase) is the result of an act of will - this is how he sees the world, and if he wants to stage it as life 'should' be staged, with drama and blood and doomed romance and the occasional gratuitous use of sepia tones, then by God that's how it's GOING to be staged.
Both Morrissey the artist and Corrie the programme are results of similar post-war events in Northern English culture, with everything from economic swings, upward (and outward) working class mobility, immigration, 50s theatre, commercial television and a booming pop culture all feeding into each other and paving the way for two such different yet similar phenomena. And I'd point out also that both, despite frequent discursions into wider territory, always seem to come back to core dramatic impulses that are based in the violence of living in proximity - everything from "Rusholme Ruffians" to "The Father Who Must Be Killed" read like internal memos for Corrie's script editors as much as they do mini pop operas.
In the mid 80s for The Queen is Dead album, Morrissey had his Smiths pose outside the Salford Lads Club, earning its place in pop history and a special place in fans' hearts. The Club lay on the corner of....
Coronation Street.
But you probably knew that already.
