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next. Very friendly and complimentary, highly libellous
asides splatter the whole interview. Julie is no stranger
to the libel courts, but some of her comments will not
appear on Spike as none of us of course would like to
see this fine site shut down. One borderline accusation
about a satirist I adore leads to her virulent hatred of
Catholics. When I mention that I’m a Catholic her generous
gallantry storms through once more “No, you’re
not! Fuck off! Do you practice birth control?!” No of
course I’m a very very lapsed one Julie. “See I knew
you were, listen, lapsed Catholics are the aristocracy of
the earth. I never met a lapsed I didn’t like. But them
that cleave to their faith. I’ll shoot the fuckers.”
I ask about the time when one of my idols Morrissey
walked through her door unannounced back in 1994 to
a frosty reception…
“God I’d forgotten about that! That was like a very,
very bad marriage in three quarters of an hour: imagine
the play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf in the space of
three quarters of an hour. It’s not your dream; you’re
in love with someone for five years and they turn up
and we start arguing about whether you should put milk
in Earl Grey tea or not. I knew I had to get him out
before he visited the bathroom; ‘Why do you squeeze
the toothpaste from the bottom?’ Fuck off!”
Julie wrote an acerbic piece about their encounter at
the time. For “acerbic” read “hatchet job”. Incredibly,
given Morrissey’s famed propensity for dropping peo-
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
ple who’ve offended him at the drop of a daff, they’ve
restarted a friendly e-mail correspondence over the past
few years. Clearly he couldn’t resist someone who’s
even better at bitching about people than he is.
“I adore the man. He seems to be very civilised now;
he seems more happy. Isn’t it funny it took America to
make him more relaxed? I said to him, ‘You’ve grown
into your looks, you look like someone’s sexy uncle
that you’d get off with at a wedding.’ And he said in his
brilliantly witty way ‘Why do you think I go to so many
weddings – known to me are not?’ What a wonderfully
Morrissey thing to say. Would you sleep with Morrissey
if he asked and you were gay? If he was straight
and I was single I still think I wouldn’t do it. I’d just be
thinking ‘Oh fuck its Morrissey!’ the whole time.”
Well, I must confess since early teenhood I’d always
thought he’s the one man who just might ‘turn my head’
as it were…
“You would?! But you’d have to slap him round a
bit afterwards!! That’s what Madonna said about Billy
Ray Cyrus. She said ‘I’d do him, but I’d have to slap
him round a bit and make him cry afterwards because
of ‘Achey Breaky Heart’’ and I’d have to do that to
Morrissey because – what’s the crap thing he’s done?
‘Bengali In Platforms’? Course he’s a genius, but you
wouldn’t wanna live with him would you?”
While her talk is littered with her trademark bile
Julie assures me that she is far less keen to cause fuss in
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