Young Morrissey Letters Head to Auction With £22,000 Estimate at Dawsons

Q: What hidden secrets about Morrissey's teenage attempt to join The Clash are finally being exposed in this £22,000 auction?

There is no evidence in the auction material of any dramatic “hidden secret” about Morrissey trying to join The Clash. What the £22,000 sale appears to newly expose is simply that, in his own teenage correspondence, he said he had visited New York’s CBGB and had attempted to join The Clash during his pre-fame punk years. The letters matter because they document this episode in Morrissey’s own voice, alongside other early ambitions and experiences that were previously less well documented. They show him as a young obsessive immersed in punk, moving in circles that included Patti Smith, Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, and trying to push himself into the scene before The Smiths existed. The broader significance is not that the archive reveals a sensational unknown outcome with The Clash, but that it places the attempted join in context: Morrissey was actively seeking a route into music, later fronted the Manchester punk group The Nosebleeds, and was already writing with the self-mythologising wit that would define him. In one letter he boasts, “I’m in showbusiness… I’ll spring on this unsuspecting world yet.” So the auction is exposing a vivid, primary-source snapshot of Morrissey’s teenage hustle and ambition, including his failed effort to attach himself to one of punk’s biggest bands, rather than uncovering any major buried scandal.

3 articles · Updated · bbc.co.uk · Jul 25

Dawsons Auctioneers will sell Morrissey’s pre-Smiths letters on 26 August, with the 1974-79 archive expected to fetch a combined £22,000.
The letters, sent to Birmingham pen friend Simon Pitt when Morrissey was 14 to 20, capture his early ambition to become “a rock ’n’ roll star” and his claim that “I always said I was a genius.”
They also trace his immersion in punk and music culture, including seeing the Sex Pistols in 1976, meeting Patti Smith, visiting CBGB’s and fronting Manchester punk band The Nosebleeds.
Beyond music, the correspondence records his views on 1970s Britain — including a hostile reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election — before he formed The Smiths with Johnny Marr in 1982.