Disgusting Bliss (5 page)

Chris started his Stonyhurst College school career at St Mary’s Hall, a feeder prep school in the grounds of Stonyhurst itself. His was a small class who were encouraged to think of themselves as the elite among children who were all pretty bright and driven. There were about fifteen to twenty of them in that group who formed tight friendships that lasted throughout their school careers. They received a more intensive schooling than most and were generally marked out for glory in the top sets at the main school. All prep pupils took the general entrance exam at thirteen, though St Mary’s was a special scholarship class with a £100 prize for the smartest.

‘There was probably a high degree of arrogance in our year. Most of us thought it would all fall into our laps,’ says Phil Godfrey, a friend of Morris and fellow St Mary’s pupil. ‘We would be merciless whenever there was a teacher who couldn’t handle us.’ Morris’s class was characterized by a lot of eccentric talent; all the pupils were trying to assert themselves, and he didn’t seem to be marked out for success more than anyone else. There were other pupils who went on to have prominent careers in law and in the music business and seemed at the time to be more likely to make a name for themselves, though Morris did well in the sciences and was popular and gregarious. They were useful traits to have at the school.

Stonyhurst was an isolated and small community. Some of the parents, in the forces or working overseas, had effectively parked their offspring there. Morris was one of those whose parents had sent him through choice, because they felt he would receive the best education, but it wasn’t easy for anyone.

‘You had to be fairly emotionally tough,’ says Phil Godfrey. ‘I certainly wouldn’t send my kids there. There was an air of religious oppression. You were praying every two hours, it seemed. By the time we left we were telling each other we wouldn’t need to go to church for another thirty years.’

There were some imaginative approaches to spirituality at the school, and the Jesuit way of education had an impact on all the pupils. Morris and his friends were naturally inquisitive, and their restless thinking was encouraged.

‘We were difficult to pin down,’ says Godfrey. ‘We were rejecting all the Jesuit values.’ It was a common reaction, but the head teacher later told Godfrey that they had been particularly ‘awkward’. Their set was more rebellious, made more fun of the teachers and later on there were more big drinkers among them than among the rest of the school population.

The education could be quite overwhelming for some, particularly the many Stonyhurst students whose roots were an unsettled part-Irish, Spanish and Maltese or Gibraltarian. Morris was part of the Establishment, with his Middle England village background. He had a natural sort of confidence on which the Jesuit teachers built, reinforcing how privileged the students were to be receiving such a high standard of education.

Morris’s inner core seemed to give him a physical assurance as well. He had a birthmark on his face and later very apparent acne, but friends and colleagues throughout his life barely noticed their presence. Years later, a journalist friend doing a programme on removal techniques for birthmarks asked if Morris would be interested in trying it. He was told not to worry; it wasn’t a problem. At school Morris also got along with a false tooth he had from prep school until he got a proper replacement in his late teens. He used the fake to make faces and would drop it out for comic effect. The original tooth came out in a fierce under-twelves inter-school rugby tackle that resulted in a hospital trip.

Morris also played cricket and the game became an early obsession for him, leading him to practise with friends with a rolled-up newspaper. Jeff Thompson, the fast bowler, was such an idol that Morris was nicknamed after him, but his enthusiasm outmatched his ability and he never made the first team. In the holidays the Morris brothers played cricket in the garden and watched test matches, and Chris would spend hours impersonating cricket commentary. He was also able to do a good impression of Mick Jagger, distinguishing himself by being able to do the mouth. The Rolling Stones were then hitting their peak of creativity with
Exile on Main Street
and
It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll
and Morris preferred them to the groups his friends were into – the likes of Led Zep, Floyd, Genesis and Yes, whose progressive sounds were an inescapable feature of the early 1970s all over the UK.

Up on the edge of the moorlands of Lancashire, it was harder to keep up with pop culture that wasn’t on the national radar. Even developments in London often passed them by, though Phil Godfrey recorded radio shows with a tape machine and a mike when he returned there during holidays. Through him, Morris got to hear Capital Radio, albeit in lo-fi. The station had been set up in the early 1970s as one of the first legal commercial alternatives to BBC radio. It was home to Kenny Everett, whose pioneering use of multitracking, bizarre characters and mastery of the technical aspects of radio were allied to a fierce irreverence. The Capital shows were a revelation for Morris. Everett was not only a renegade but a technical perfectionist, using his own studio so he could record chorused jingles. His shows featured improvised comedy and a barrage of ridiculous voices. He sang along with records and was an instinctively brilliant DJ.

Equally inventive was the literary comic favourite of both Tom and Chris, a collection of hoax letters sent by Humphry Berkeley as a Cambridge undergraduate in 1948. His creation was a headmaster of fictional Selhurst School he called Rochester Sneath, whose requests to real heads affectionately poked fun at the pompous instincts of the private teaching profession and spurred many of them to respond to the most unlikely requests.

The Master of Marlborough College was asked how he managed to ‘engineer’ a royal visit. ‘I did nothing whatever to engineer the recent royal visit,’ he wrote back crossly. ‘No doubt the fact that the King’s Private Secretary, the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury are all Old Marlburians had something to do with the matter.’
¹²

The surreal nature of Sneath’s demands provided clues for those not quite so caught up in the dignity of their position. The head of Wimbledon College agreed to perform an exorcism, saying he would need a ‘Bell, Book and Candle, a gallon of holy water and a packet of salt. The latter is required for sprinkling on a certain part of the ghostly anatomy, so it should be loose and capable of being taken up in pinches.’
¹³
The Cambridge college authorities were less amused when the hoax was revealed and a deluge of headmasterly complaints followed. Berkeley was sent down for two years, though it was made clear on his return that unofficially the senior fellows thought his endeavour was quite funny. An otherwise upstanding member of the Establishment, Berkeley went on to be a MP and writer and waited a respectable twenty-five years before publishing the letters as
The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath
in 1974.

Morris’s early comic favourites also included the Goons and the comic musical stylings of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, whose lead singer, Vivian Stanshall, was a major influence, though in interview Morris was later reluctant to name heroes as such. ‘The temptation is to create an ideal football team of all-comers, but I don’t find it works like that,’ he said.
¹⁴
But he liked Peter Cook and at school appreciated the sweary humour of Cook and Dudley Moore’s Derek and Clive. Morris was drawn to verbal humour, though the noise and rhythm of comedy came before the words.

Like many of his friends, Morris was into drama. He appeared in school plays, and Tom was also involved with theatricals but found it a frustrating experience. ‘I certainly had direct conflict with the authorities at the school about creating work, making theatre, which defined the experience for me,’ says Tom. He wanted to put on various shows and events but there wasn’t a system to support it. Permission had been given in the 1960s for a show that wasn’t kind to the teachers, but Tom’s headmaster turned a similar request from him down without discussion. The school promoted the academic abilities of its students but just seemed no longer geared to bringing the best out of the pupils in the way it had.

Having kept up with his music, in the sixth form Chris joined a band with his friend Simon Armour. ‘We called the band Nosmo King,’ says Armour, ‘because I had a No Smoking sign and cut it in half. It was also a bit ironic, because in those days we all used to slip out to the woods to smoke.’ Their set included classics like Santana’s ‘Samba Pa Ti’, ‘Message in a Bottle’ by The Police and – a particular favourite for Morris – the Rolling Stones’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.

‘I’m sure to hear it nowadays would be painful,’ says Simon, ‘but the constant playing gave us a better idea of rhythm and harmony – and how to keep playing your guitar when someone pours a pint over it.’ Twice a year the Jesuits shipped in a busload of girls from a Preston school for a disco. ‘I can imagine they went back to their rooms and prayed nothing serious happened. Of course, for us this was like heaven, with unlimited booze and girls everywhere.’

Chris also played bass in the school’s official sixth-form dance band, Upper Syntax and Poetry. Head of history Tom Muir used to train and organize the front line, comprising trumpets, clarinets and trombones, including Tom Morris, while teacher and school archivist David Knight organized the rhythm section of guitar, bass and drums. Both Morrises were, recalls Knight, ‘wayward’: ‘Chris neither sought nor, indeed, needed any advice. He was less malleable to my own suggestions than was usually the case with boy musicians. But then he was more competent than most, so I would like to think of this as merely a comment rather than a criticism. I believe that Tom Muir had a similar experience with Chris’s brother Tom.’

Chris read sciences at A-level, and David Knight says Stonyhurst teachers remembered ‘a bright boy from the top class who did well but less than spectacularly academically’, though this was in the context of a school where most of the pupils were, on average, pretty good. Yet Morris didn’t seem to be set on a particular direction in life at that point. Tom would win an exhibition for Pembroke College, Cambridge, but Chris took up zoology at Bristol University in 1980. Having been a fan of children’s TV staple Johnny Morris and his
Animal Magic
anthropomorphism, it was amusing and a bit of a thrill to be going to study in the town from which his namesake had broadcast his most famous programme.

Among his fellow Bristol zoology students was Mark Pilcher: ‘Chris had long bushy hair – almost touching his shoulders at one stage, I think. I have a photograph of all the students in 1980 and, now I look at it, Chris has one of, if not
the
biggest, most stripy tie of all the undergraduates.’

Morris shared a house in the Clifton area of Bristol with legal student Caroline Leddy, who would be a long-time friend and much later work on producing
Brass Eye
. A cousin of Morris from America also lived there. She was training to be a medic and went out with a music student named Jonathan Whitehead. Though he and Morris didn’t get to know one another at that time, Whitehead was later to become a friend and key musical collaborator. Both were bassists in bands, Morris playing in Expresso Bongo, a rhythm and blues outfit in the mode of the Stones.

Morris was still into the Bonzo Dog Band and began using one of their techniques for fun. The Bonzos had once gone out near their studio to record vox pop interviews on such nonsense notions as the importance of the ‘shirt’. The resulting confused responses from the public were used to lead into an album track of the same name. Morris took a big reel-to-reel tape recorder to the streets of Bristol for his own interviews on similar subjects which he played back to friends in his room. ‘He asked daft questions and was surprised that he got all these really serious answers,’ says Phil Godfrey.

A student revue put on by Morris’s department targeted the staff in one of the items. ‘There was a tall, thin lecturer in botany who had a funny haircut and an odd way of pronouncing certain words,’ says Mark Pilcher. ‘Great ammunition for Chris.’

In the summer of his third year Morris produced a project on lizards under the general supervision of tutor Roger Avery, who can now recall little detail of either the work or the student who produced it. As at Stonyhurst, Morris hadn’t particularly stood out in his year for good or bad. He graduated with a 2:1 in 1983 and headed back Cambridge way to home in Buckden.

The most striking thing about the direction of all three Morris brothers as they started out on their careers was the way they’d had a family background in medicine, had been strong in sciences as students, but then moved decisively into the arts where both Tom and Chris made their own distinctive impact. Tom studied renaissance drama and poetry at Cambridge and then wrote plays and began working out of the theatrical mainstream, becoming artistic director at Battersea Arts Centre in London. By 2009 he was artistic director at the Bristol Old Vic and as respected as Chris for determinedly forging his own path. He has no idea at all why they ended up in similar areas and sees as many differences as shared characteristics.

‘My route through alternative theatre is a matter of taste which may connect with his choice of work,’ says Tom, ‘but is far more open to the influence and inspiration of what other people are doing in the field than his extraordinarily self-contained approach and process. I regard us as very different kinds of people within our slightly similar creative fields.’ At Battersea Arts Centre, Tom Morris was ‘a bit further away from the creative anvil, so the work that I did and enabled to happen at Battersea was very much inspired by a sense of boredom with what I perceived to be the Establishment in theatre. There were artists who could be challenged to work in different ways. And if I hadn’t been Chris’s brother, then he would have been one of the artists whom I was trying to challenge in those ways to reinvent the rules of theatre in whatever way was appropriate to what he wanted to say.’