Years before the Smiths reconfigured the definition of indie - and influenced generations of musicians to come - in the early 1980s, the band’s central figure was a shy, bedroom-based teen aching for the world to recognise his seemingly self-evident genius…
In the long, dull years leading up to a teenage Johnny Marr fatefully knocking on his door (in the early summer of 1982), Morrissey led a relatively reclusive life. These formative years, between 1974 and 1979 have now been illuminated by a tranche of never-before seen letters, written by the teenage Morrissey to his Birmingham-based pen-fried Simon Pitt.
