Why did Morrissey ditch his first name?
Even the most casual Smiths listener will likely be aware that the band’s erstwhile frontman, the ever-polarising and decreasingly pompadoured Morrissey, was born with a full set of generically inoffensive Christian names.
So let’s break down why Steven Patrick Morrissey decided to mononymize himself in the early 1980s, and more importantly, why he did it the wrong way around.
As a keen student of old Hollywood and kitsch 1960s pop, young Steven would have been quite familiar with the one-name tradition in showbiz, from Dion and Donovan to Lulu, Ann-Margret, and, of course, Cher. In the vast majority of those cases, however, the celeb in question chose to keep their given first name and jettison the rest, which has basically remained the standard operating procedure in the decades that have followed, with the likes of Prince, Madonna, Adele, Beck, Beyoncé, Drake, and Rihanna using their first or middle names as their public personas. Danzig springs to mind as one of the few fellow exceptions to the rule, which makes one wonder if long sideburns have something to do with it, but I digress.
As it turns out, Morrissey wasn’t always committed to his surname-only idea. Back in his pre-Smiths days in the early 1980s, when he was writing books about his favourite subjects (the New York Dolls and James Dean) and album reviews for Record Mirror magazine, he briefly created an entirely fresh nom du plume for himself, Sheridan Whiteside, a vague reference to a character from the 1941 Bette Davis film The Man Who Came to Dinner. Thankfully, even Morrissey realised that calling himself Sheridan Whiteside could potentially undermine The Smiths’ hopes of being taken seriously once they started recording, so due to not having a unique nickname worthy of the Bono or Sting treatment, he merely lopped off the part of his real name that resonated with him the least.
“The thing was that I was always getting called Steve,” Morrissey explained to the Observer in 1992, “And I was never a Steve. I thought, ‘Well, I only need one name anyway’. And it was such an unusual name that I thought I wouldn’t ever be confused with anybody else. I mean, do you know anybody else called Morrissey? These days, I only hear the name from strangers, as a term of supposed intimacy.”
Unbeknownst to the younger Moz, there are actually quite a lot of Morrisseys running around out there, including a fair number who’ve had success in entertainment, from the British actors David and Neil to the late American singer/songwriter Bill. Still, if we’re to believe that the Mozzer truly did choose his moniker simply because he didn’t fancy himself as a ‘Steve’, that’s a much better reason than the more likely one, which is that he was trying to fast-forward himself into icon status, a la Picasso, Garbo, Dylan, and Pele, or even Keats, Yeats, or Wilde for that matter.
By the 1990s, Morrissey’s iconography problems had moved way beyond whatever he was opting to call himself. By this point, his already antagonistic relationship with the press had boiled over considerably as he entered into his early solo career, which wasn’t helped by his mild fascination with skinheads, flag-waving, and writing songs about the National Front, leading to growing murmurs about whether he was actually the bookish lefty socialist everybody had presumed him to be.
One of the genuine lefties who knew him, fellow indie musician and tour-mate Billy Bragg, put it this way in 1992: “I don’t think Morrissey has ever quite got his politics worked out,” he said, “The real problem with neo-fascist symbolism is that it is extremely difficult to retain an attitude which is neutral or ironic, which is what I think he is attempting to do.”
Maybe Morrissey was just more of a Steve all along.
