Autobiography
"Maladjusted had been recorded once again at my spiritual home, Hook End Manor. Time at Hook End had always been a time to reflect on velvet lawns of dreaming spires where the quiet winds its way. The most bucolic spot of winsome British charm, the lithely blithe Hook End shelters specters dating back to the 1700s, and an underground tunnel from the 1200s. Unmarked by the injuries of time, the bosom of Hook End melted everybody’s heart with its greenest of greens against the bluest of skies; a paradise of deafening birdsong around the red- and mellow-bricked splendor of jutting chimneys and latticed windows – all leftovers from the Jacobean era of liturgical dramas. Silence always, except for the occasional 747 waved off at Heathrow, or the caws of crows as they chase off a bird of prey. There are lush lawns for games never played, and majestic trees blocking out the ugly outer world. To live this way forever, amid lavender and foxglove, cracked flagstones and fluted birdsong, jet-trails and giant snails, batty bats just missing your hats, show-off peacocks on outhouse sheds, where watching television seems like a sinful waste of life. The staff and their pets, the owners and vets, all change with time, yet I remain, a constant of three decades of waxed floors and soothing mid-day soup. The photographs for the original Kill Uncle are taken on the Hook End lawns; the smiling Greatest Hits cover taken in the White Room; the lounging Piccadilly palare cover taken in the same room; the Our Frank cover taken in the woods behind the house; the Ouija board video filmed in those same woods; the Sing your life photographs taken further into the same woods; an NME ad sees me emerging from the dining-room doors; the sleeve for Interesting drug taken in the Brown Room upstairs. Hardly a yard of Hook End stands without its Morrissey mark, a history full of sentiment for me, if no one else, with tears always gathering at the final umbilical slash."