Do you blame anyone or anything for you being alive?

Not at all. But I wouldn���t want to inflict it on anyone else . . . I cannot understand having children. Even if the opportunity arose, I would definitely turn it down. No, I don���t blame anyone for bringing me into the world, but I do feel that life is excessively overrated.

So you fell in love with images.

It wasn���t really my fault that images rather than people appealed to me. There were a lot of people about . . . I went to school and briefly to work, I did see people. I lived on a heavily populated council estate. There were people all around. But no one was bothered to penetrate this great wall there was between us. Yes, I was selfish. But I was also, and remain so, the sort of person that not many people want to know. It���s hard to believe!

You were forced to construct your own reality?

Yes. This took me a long time. But more importantly, I think that when someone is not at all popular, for whatever reasons, one tends to develop certain forms of survival. A survival which excludes friends, which excludes social activities. That in a sense is how I organised my life. If you cannot impress people simply by being part of the great fat human race, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you don���t impress people by the way you look, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you are now going to ask is everything I did just a way to gain some form of attention, well that���s not entirely true. It is in a small way, but that���s in the very nature of being alive.

Wanting to be loved?

To be seen, above all else. I wanted to be noticed, and the way I lived and do live has a desperate neurosis about it because of that. All humans need a degree of attention. Some people get it at the right time, when they are thirteen or fourteen, people get loved at the right stages. If this doesn���t happen, if the love isn���t there, you can quite easily just fade away. This could have happened to me easily. Several times I was close to . . . fading away. It doesn���t give me great comfort to talk about it. I do not wish to relive those experiences. But I came close . . . In a sense I always felt that being troubled as a teenager was par for the course. I wasn���t sure that I was dramatically unique. I knew other people who were at the time desperate and suicidal. They despised life and detested all other living people. In a way that made me feel a little bit secure. Because I thought, well, maybe I���m not so intense after all. Of course, I was. I despised practically everything about human life, which does limit one���s weekend activities.

What else was there?

Nothing. Books. Television. Records. Overall, it���s a vast wasteland.

Has the memory of those years been destroyed?

No, not at all. I remember it all in great detail, I seem to remember it every night and re-experience the embarrassment of it. It was horror. The entire school experience, a secondary modern in Stretford called St Mary���s. The horror of it cannot be overemphasised. Every single day was a human nightmare. In every single way that you could possibly want to imagine. Worse . . . the total hatred. The fear and anguish of waking up, of having to get dressed, having to walk down the road, having to walk into assembly, having to do those lessons . . . I���m sure most people at school are very depressed. I seemed to be more depressed than anyone else. I noticed it more.

So how, after all this, did the ���great call��� come?

The great call . . . that sounds very nice. In a sense, it was always there. But I felt by the time I reached 21, 22, 23, that it couldn���t possibly be there. I couldn���t see how it could be in pop music. I was paralysed for a start. I couldn���t move. I couldn���t imagine dancing, and I felt that movement was practically the whole point of the absurd ritual. I could just about imagine singing, but even then I didn���t really know what to do with the microphone and the mike stand. But I had this strange mystical calling. There���s no need to laugh! Once again, because I had such an intense view about taking one���s life, I imagined that this must be my calling, suicide, nothing more spectacular or interesting. I felt that people who eventually took their own lives were not only aware that they would do so in the last hours or weeks or months of their life. They had always been aware of it. They had resigned themselves to suicide many years before they actually did it. In a sense I had, yes.

What stopped you?

I made records. I got the opportunity to make records, and miraculously it all worked.

So has being Morrissey saved your life?

It has been a blessing and a burden. It saved me and pushed me forward into a whole new set of problems.

Problems you seem to quite enjoy.

No I do not! Why do people insist that I scour the world and life searching wilfully for atrocities to punish myself with?

But you always seem to derive pleasure from anxiety.

It was always a very insular pleasure. It was always a matter of walking backwards into one���s bedroom and finding the typewriter and perhaps hearing much more in pop music than was really there. The point is, I had always entertained the idea of making records and just as the door seemed to be closing and I was thinking less and less about it happening, I got the chance. Suddenly those avenues were open and I utilised them.

What did you think would happen?

I felt that it would be either totally embraced or universally despised. In a way, both things happened. I often think that people take me either insultingly lightly or uncomfortably, obsessively, neurotically seriously. I was obsessed with fame, and I couldn���t see anyone in the past in film or music who resembled me. So it was quite different to see a niche of any sort. So when I started to make records, I thought, well, rather than adopt the usual poses I should just be as natural as I possibly could, which of course wasn���t very natural at all. For me to be making records at all was entirely unnatural, so really that was the only way I could be. Unnatural. Which in a sense was my form of rebellion, because rebellion in itself had become quite a tradition, certainly after punk. I didn���t want to follow through those established forms of appearance and rebellion. And by the time I was making records, I was 23, an old, thoughtful 23, so I knew there were certain things that I wanted to do. I was very certain. And I do feel very underrated, by and large, considering what I have achieved.

Was it easy?

Success is never easy. It could have gone hopelessly wrong for me. It never really gelled until the fourth single.

If it hadn���t worked, would you be dead now?

I would certainly be in intensive care.

Paul Morley interviews Morrissey in Blitz in 1988