Next month, Linder is set to show new works at the Sorcha Dallas gallery in Glasgow and stage a special performance at the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. One constant in her life has been her relationship with the musician Morrissey.
The two met in Manchester in the mid-1970s and quickly became friends. While Linder and Morrissey have continued to work around and alongside each other—in 1992, Linder published an intimate collection of photographs, Morrissey Shot, from her travels with him on a world tour—this interview marks the first time they have spoken publicly since 1979, when Morrissey interviewed Linder for a U.K. fanzine. Their questions and answers, written back and forth between each other over a span of weeks, are as much inventories of two poetic masterminds as lyrics all their own.
When Morrissey wrote his first questions for this interview, he closed his letter with the following message to Linder:
“I shall love you till that final stretch of sand that the sea never quite reaches is finally swathed by crashing waves. Or, perhaps longer . . . if there’s time.”
