You can grow up to be Morrissey or you can grow up to be Johnny Marr – which are you?

My son is the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar. 

When he was nine, I wrote a poem after we built a den in the woods.

It pondered on whether this would be our final piece of den building (it was). It was only when I first performed it that I found out it made everyone cry. In Liverpool, a young man approached me and said that I shouldn’t worry, the adventures never end. His mother then leant in to say, “Yes, but there were a few years where it was pretty hard to get you out of bed to have an adventure.” 

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He was right. My son is 16 now and, without any mind control by me, has become a huge fan of Johnny Marr, and therefore also The Smiths. Unlike me, he is aware that Morrissey goes politically skew-whiff and ends up promoting an extremist right-wing political party, whereas for many of us, it was a twist in the tale (despite certain interviews that were a little more disconcerting when we reread them decades on). 

We went together to watch Marr at Hammersmith Apollo, his first gig there. My first gig there was to see Rik Mayall and all as the spoof metal band Bad News, creators of The Warriors of Genghis Khan and Masturbike. 

Johnny Marr is a shaman. I don’t know if he had to sell his soul at the crossroads, but if he did, we got
a great deal from it and we will all still be listening to his work as he sizzles in hell. Just as building that den was a very special moment, so was sitting side by side and bellowing There is a Light that Never Goes Out.

Parents dread the teenage years, waiting for the grumpy, truculent child to break out of their chrysalis and reveal a bulky black caterpillar resembling Harry Enfield’s Kevin rather than a butterfly, but there is no certainty that this will be your fate. 

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Much is written about the generational divides – endless columns on Gen Z, Gen Y, Gen X, Boomers and all. But the differences are wafer thin, and just another way of creating a division; from distracting us from the real divisions of wealth and poverty, power and impotence. 

I have recently been touring cinemas with Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson showing films from The Comic Strip Presents… The Comic Strip was hugely important to me as a teenager. Their films were anarchic, strange, hilarious. They meant to me what The Clash meant to the generation before me. 

Some nights people in the audience say that they wish The Comic Strip came back because that would be a kick against “all this woke stuff”. It seems that they have forgotten that The Comic Strip and alternative comedy of the 1980s was the woke stuff of that generation.

Just as teenagers do not have to become grumpy misanthropes, “You don’t understand me and you don’t understand my music/video games!”, so we do not have to get to middle age and start agreeing with Laurence Fox and repeatedly saying, “The problem with kids NOWADAYS”, and complaining about pronouns. 

There will be dicks in every generation and there will be kind people too, who remain vivacious
and curious.

You can grow up to be Morrissey. Or you can grow up to be Johnny Marr. 

Robin Ince is a comedian, writer and broadcaster.

His book Bibliomaniac (Atlantic Books, £10.99) is out now. You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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