Farewell cheerless marshes

As you check in your luggage at Heathrow Airport you feel a strange, refreshing lightness. Is it your long promised liberty? Or simply the levity of having nothing left to lose? In 1998, for the first time in 15 years you are truly alone. You have no band, no manager, no record label and no publishing deal. After the release of Maladjusted, which limped dolefully out of the album charts after just three weeks, do you even, truly, have much of a career?

As you make your way through security, it must seem obvious what you are flying away from. Since Judge John Weeks, in the most withering tones of the English establishment, ruled in favour of Mike Joyce in his pursuit of unpaid royalties from the Smiths, your humiliation has seemed complete. “Devious, truculent and unreliable” - the condescending high court character assasination, treated by the tabloids as though it were some dazzling epigram - now seems destined to be your epitaph.

But in truth the long march to exile began many years before. Maybe in August 1992, when emboldened with the spirit of Mick Ronson, ready for battle off the back of the resurgent Your Arsenal, you took to the stage of Finsbury Park in gold lamé and bovver boots, attempting to court Madness’s crowd of leathery bevvied skinheads by twirling around with a Union Jack and singing “England for the English”? 

As you stock up on teabags before the long flight west, the duty free shops are lousy with Cool Britannia tat. Is this the same flag that scandalised the NME just a few years ago? The music rags in Smiths are full of your progeny, from Radiohead to Blur to Oasis, even dear old Robbie Williams - all the bands who were schooled on your songs now scorn you, persona non grata.

You were an imperious phantom through the mid-90s, setting up home on Regents Park Terrace off Primrose Hill, even as the Britpop boys and girls made Camden their playground. For a while it felt as if Vauxhall and I would be your perfectly bittersweet swansong, a farewell to arms, as you discovered domestic contentment, loved up with your lodger and the charms of taking tea with your neighbour Alan Bennett. For a second, over the regal, fading chords of “Now My Heart is Full” - your very own “All The Young Dudes” -  a gilded retirement, somewhere midway in the enchanted English empyrean between David Bowie and Dirk Bogarde, beckoned fleetingly. But, as you know all too well, trouble is your real soulmate.

Your flight takes off, and you rise above the gloom of London into the pale blue horizon. There is more than enough to leave behind. But what are you running towards? Is it simply the open, ardent embrace of America? A few years ago you loudly denounced the forced Coca Colonisation of England, the pestiferous sprouting of McDonalds and Starbucks on every street corner, the loss even of the English language to slackjawed slang of the slacker generation. Now, as you touch down at LAX and the vacant, smiling airhostess insists you “have a nice day”, you welcome the uncomplicated blue skies, the unfamiliar warmth of the sun on your pale English skin.

For a long time now Los Angeles has seemed home to your most unhinged admirers. You wouldn’t know it from the NME but you fled Madstock with your band of rockabilly ragamuffins to complete an American tour through the autumn of 1992 of unprecedented pandemonium, culminating in two nights at the Hollywood Bowl which sold out in 23 minutes flat - faster even than at the supersonic boom of Beatlemania.

Elizabeth Taylor was on your starry guest list that night. But as your cab cruises down the 405 to Beverley Hills there is precious little Technicolor splendour to be spied through the smog of fin de siecle Los Angeles. Your new home is an Italianate villa, nestled in the west Hollywood hills behind the Chateau Marmont, and your noisy neighbour is reportedly Johnny Depp, who cultivates his own version of Sunset Strip debaucherie at the Viper Rooms. Are you here simply as one more glamour-hound, a Hollywood ghost-hunter spending his dotage in search of the fading spirit of James Dean on Sunset Boulevard, hoping to reserve a plot near the gates of the Hollywood Forever cemetery?

But your audience, you are thrilled to discover, is not simply the community of silver screen spooks and the pale, morbid cliché of Angeleno Anglophiles. It turns out that something in your songs has crossed cultures and languages and touched the vibrant, beating hearts of the city’s Latinos, indeed has reached beyond borders into Mexico and South America. You failed, it’s true, in your bid to dream up a new English audience of ambisexual “skinheads in nail varnish”. But here is something altogether richer and stranger: impeccably quiffed Mexicali boys with your words and your name extravagantly tattooed along the napes of their necks. It is a pop miracle, and just the latest strange testament to the way the catholic keening in your voice has reached far beyond the reach of the English judiciary and newspapers, beyond the damp bedsit walls of Whalley Range.

Your walls are now white stucco, surrounded by palm trees and the sound of cicadas, and the blue air smells suddenly full of promise. You tip your driver, turn the key in the door and carry your baggage across the hearth into your new home. You walk into your empty kitchen and put the kettle on. Somehow, despite everything, you feel a fresh head of steam, you feel ready to start from scratch once again. Hooray for Hollywood.