Losing in front of your home crowd

The towel has been thrown. You have lasted one round - a brazen, stroppy assault on “This Charming Man” - before falling to your knees in agony, struck down by a fierce, strange, piercing pain, and swooning to the stage. Your starry eyes close, as if for the last time. Is this really where it is all going to end? Age 50, face down on a wet Saturday night in the Swindon Oasis? Even Diana Dors had the wit to get out of this town by the time she was 14. 

You have dreamt of more glorious exits. Ceasing upon midnight with no pain against the pale porcelain of some Parisian baignoire. Pulled from the mangled mess of a Porsche Spyder on the dead man’s curve of Sunset Boulevard. Dredged up between the shopping trolleys and barnacled bicycles of the Manchester Ship Canal. But maybe tatty old Swindon, after all, has the requisite “Bugger Bognor” bathos. It feels, somehow, very you. You can dimly foresee the blue plaque, the misguided monument, the soggy Tesco daffodils left by specky pilgrims.

The house lights come up in the auditorium. The crowd, accustomed to your fits of the vapours, food poisoning, attacks of sinusitis, are booing lustfully. There’s an almost erotic edge to the dismay, the familiar thin line between murderous desire and raging hatred you know all too well. Last year, back in Camden at the Roundhouse, you slipped off stage after four songs, your voice a sorry husk, leaving the none-more-motley crew of Russell Brand, David Walliams and Jonathan Ross to face the brickbats and make your apologies. “His voice was giving out!” spluttered Ross amid the hail of plastic pint pots. “You don’t want to kill him in his pwime, do you?”

Things had been looking so good. Just a couple of years ago the BBC anointed you the second greatest living British icon, next in line behind Sir David Attenborough, but somehow streets ahead of Sir Paul McCartney, David Bowie and even dear old Alan Bennett. You curated the Meltdown Festival, squirming with glee as Sparks, Nancy Sinatra and the New York Dolls lined up to serenade you, your mid-70s record collection lavishly recreated for the Royal Box at London’s Festival Hall. 

You somehow stage-managed the most remarkable comeback of the twenty-first century, re-emerging from Californian exile to claim top ten singles, platinum discs, NME covers and the finest Roman gelato…

But heaven doesn’t seem to be your home. There is some indomitably perverse itch deep in the cell of your heart that revolts against the idea of being patted on the head and installed in the cosy hutch of the English cultural pantheon.You still cringe lividly at the memory of Exit Smiling, the manuscript you rattled off in the depths of late 70s desperation, and which Babylon Books has just seen fit to republish in an abominable limited edition. But it captured, maybe better than your most finely wrought couplet, something of your essence - your intimate understanding and love for box office poison, the unaccountably shunned, justifiably shamed and utterly doomed.

What, after all, became old Oscar more than the poise with which he approached his final damnation? Far far better to reign disgracefully in the hell of oblivion than serve in showbiz ambrosia.

As the sirens scream and your ambulance speeds through the Wiltshire night your mind is racing, your pulse is pounding and you can feel your flagging spirits stir quite perversely. There is still so much to be done, so many stray details to complete. A Vegas residency and a season on Broadway. Keys to the city of Tel Aviv. A dedicated Morrissey day announced by the Mayor of Los Angeles. A whole album of cover versions, paying extended homage to Jobriath, Buffy Sainte Marie and Melanie. A moody biopic of your pre-fame puppyhood. A late, demented flirtation with a perfectly atrocious political party. A poisonous autobiography, settling old scores and rubbing salt in new sores - to be published - naturally - in the silver cover of the Penguin Classics. A ludicrous, bulbous salutation of a novel. And is it too much, in these dismal days of downloads and streaming platforms, to hope for one final, crowning number one single?

The lapels of your jackets are tatty from all the badges you’ve worn over the years to proclaim your undying allegiance and devotion: Marc Bolan, the Dolls, Sparks, Patti Smith. These days you mostly opt for plain, monochrome capitals:

FAMOUS WHEN DEAD.

In your bed at the Great Western Hospital your senses are slowly returning. Swindon has not claimed you yet. But you have had such rich and strange visions. Part of you now knows that your stardom, the sick and sorry point of you, will only truly bloom and come to perfection at the hour of your death. You can surely wait a a little bit longer. 

Maybe it is just the morphine, or the lingering delirium, but you can somehow hear the voice of your mother, reading the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde to you as you lingered, home from school, in your childhood sickbed.

“So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and the thorn touched her heart, and a fierce pang of pain shot through her.” she reads. “Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb.”

They are going to miss you when you’re gone.