The earliest pictures
show her in London in 1961, fresh off the train from West Yorkshire,
high-kicking in a bowler hat and cane. Beside her – gleeful, bright-eyed, full
of wonder – the newspapers printed her legendary quote, announcing her intention
to: “Spend, spend, spend!”
Viv Nicholson, who
died last weekend aged 79 after a long struggle with dementia, was often held up
as a cautionary tale of how vast wealth can soon be frittered. Her image and
that headline summed up the story of how she won the Littlewoods football pools
with her husband Keith – £152,300, 18 shillings and eight pence – and ran
through it all in just four years.
But for many music
fans, Nicholson’s image meant something more. In 1984, long after the money had
all gone, she appeared on the cover of the Smiths’ single Heaven Knows I’m
Miserable Now, standing in a deserted terraced street, grim-faced in a pale
coat, her hair wildly backcombed.
The picture, and
Nicholson’s associations, echoed the sentiments of the song – the misery of the
working life, the valuable time wasted on those we dislike, the brief, happy
haze of a drunken hour – but it was soon reinterpreted and swept up in tabloid
scandal.
The Smiths had chosen
as the single’s B-side Suffer Little Children, a song about the Moors murders.
Upon its release several newspapers whipped themselves into a fury, suggesting
that the song glorified the murderers, even positing that Nicholson had been
cast as the record’s cover star because, with her bleach-blond hair and early
60s style, she bore some resemblance to Myra Hindley. Woolworths and Boots duly
withdrew the single from sale.
It was not in fact
Morrissey’s first tribute to Nicholson – on the Smiths’ debut album he had
borrowed the line “Under the iron bridge we kissed, and although I ended up with
sore lips …” from her autobiography for the lyrics of the song Still Ill. There
was more to come: the following year, the Smiths featured Nicholson on a record
sleeve again – this time the German release of Barbarism Begins at Home. The
picture had appeared in her autobiography and was titled Viv at the Pithead. It
showed her in a crocheted minidress and knee-high boots, standing beside
Castleford pit with a suitcase at her feet, and was taken just before she
relocated, briefly, to Malta.
The same image would
be used on the Meat is Murder tour programme, and it was on that tour, in
Blackpool, that Nicholson first met Morrissey. Several years ago she recounted
in the Observer the oddity of that first meeting – how surreal it was to walk up
to the venue, surrounded by huge promotional pictures of herself. “I was quite
astounded,” she said
“I was asked to go up
on stage,” she recalled. “There was this young man wearing a hearing aid and
thick-rimmed spectacles with a tree hanging out of his backside, and I thought:
‘My goodness, who is that?’ It was Morrissey. Wow, I thought, here’s two weirdos
together.” There are still pictures of them together, both short-haired and
bespectacled, a strange distorted echo of one another.
In 1987, the Smiths
cast Nicholson again for a reissue of The Headmaster Ritual, but this time
Nicholson objected to the use of her image – a black and white picture showing
her painting at an easel. The problem, apparently, was that as a Jehovah’s
Witness, she took issue with the expletive in the line: “Belligerent ghouls/Run
Manchester schools/Spineless bastards all …” Nicholson’s friendship with
Morrissey promptly soured.
You can place
Nicholson beside many other female stars of the Smiths’ record sleeves, among
them Rita Tushingham in A Taste of Honey, Patricia Phoenix as Elsie Tanner,
Yootha Joyce in a still from Catch Us if You Can, Billie Whitelaw in Charlie
Bubbles, the screenwriter Shelagh Delaney, Avril Angers in The Family Way,
Alexandra Bastedo, Sandie Shaw, Diana Dors in Yield to the Night, and see the
thread that draws them together. They are strong women, working-class sirens,
women whose lives have often been touched by tragedy or dragged down by feckless
men. Many of them appear to have been trapped in some way, but they have dreamed
of escape, and all of them, no matter their circumstance, have clung to their
dignity.
Dignity was not
something that was often afforded to Nicholson. Even that early picture had the
lick of mockery about it – here is the daft northern factory girl, about to blow
her fortune. And ever since, the story of her life seems to have been told
merely as a series of numbers and objects: the winning ticket found in Keith’s
trouser pocket, the £7 a week she earned at a cake factory, the borrowed tights
she wore to collect her winnings, how the first thing she bought was a watch,
followed by furs, fancy hats and a fleet of cars in which she unfailingly
knocked over the neighbours’ plant pots. There were the three children, the four
husbands, the failed boutique and the job in a perfume shop, and above them all,
the sense that all of these things added up to nought.
If there is a story
that sums up the way the world has regarded Nicholson, it might perhaps be the
tale of her failed stint as a stripper in a Manchester nightclub, paid £50 a
night to undress to the tune of Big Spender. The job ended abruptly when she
dropped her dress but failed to remove her bra and knickers. “I couldn’t do it,”
she said. “I just wasn’t a stripper.”
What I like about this
story is the fact that Nicholson refused to be reduced to nothing, and in its
telling lies a gleam of the woman we see on those Smiths covers: jaw set,
steady-gazed and dignified.
