In the Midst of Life, Morrissey is in Debt, etcetera
As a teenager, I felt Morrissey had seen into my soul when he sang, “Everything depends upon how near you stand to me / And if the people stare, then the people stare / I really don’t know and I really don’t care”. It seemed obvious to me that he was a kindred spirit, that he had been through what I was going through. That was before I knew anything about Morrissey, and the more I learnt, the less I understood and the further away from him I drifted.
Morrissey has been in steady decline for years. He is no longer the man whose songs of loneliness and working-class heroism have touched the souls of millions for four decades, who, he says, set his diary to music for generations of misfits and loners, and whose solo albums have consistently reached the top five in the UK album charts. He is a pariah. Indeed, seeing him on stage now is a sad spectacle of a man so in love with himself, and yet so consumed by bitterness, that all that remains is the pantomime of being Morrissey. The catch is that while it is impossible not to see Morrissey’s manifold faults, it is equally impossible to walk away. Every time his voice courses through my veins, I feel at one with him and everything I took him to stand for, but the irresistible, illustrious, indelible frontman of The Smiths has become a cipher, too tragic to be parody, too dazzling to be nothing.
The journey from teenage fan to middle-aged sceptic has been a rough ride. Thinking about Morrissey now is conflicting, and it is not a conflict that could have existed for me twenty-five years ago: listening to his best work, the old magic shines through, but, at the same time, as a grown man in possession of my intellectual faculties, I cannot countenance the character he has become. Remarkably, nothing he has said or done has dented the unbridled joy I feel when listening to The Queen is Dead or Vauxhall and I, but when the music stops and reason kicks in, I find myself uncomfortable with the man behind the magic. It is only, I sometimes think, a rush and a push until it all comes tumbling down, but there he is again like a bad debt that we cannot pay, and so we think he will always be there in our hearts, lighting our lives with his songs of passion. But that is all in the past. Artistically and creatively, Morrissey is past his best; songs that used to give voice to the voiceless are now just hollow vehicles for an aging rock star’s narcissism and vitriol. And it is with this artistic critique that I commit the utmost heresy, since it seems that people would sooner call Morrissey a racist than admit that he is creatively spent.
It remains difficult to pinpoint when the first chink in the armour appeared. Following the demise of The Smiths, Morrissey set about a solo career, producing four albums between 1988 and 1994 – Viva Hate, Kill Uncle, Your Arsenaland Vauxhall and I – that were almost as good as anything The Smiths produced, but they were also the swan song he never intended to sing. Perhaps the earliest sign was the 1992 album, Your Arsenal, which Morrissey promoted with a diatribe about the tragedy, as he saw it, of the Americanisation of our culture, claiming that “We once had a strong identity and now that’s gone completely”. Careless words so lightly thrown by a man who, a few years later, sought permeant exile in LA. But perhaps it was before that. The end of The Smiths possesses the character of a freak accident: the story goes that one day Johnny Marr was feeling down and was thinking about quitting the band, so he confided in his friend and Morrissey, in a display of humility, sympathetically agreed. And that was it – the end of The Smiths. Morrissey has rued the day ever since. He says he did not mean it and was just trying to be supportive to his friend, but one of the greatest bands in history perished on the guillotine of insincerity. Perhaps it is the eternal haunting of these careless words in the heat of a moment of despair, that inspired him to rebel and rage against the very hand that rocks the cradle ever since. If not that, then something else must have dislodged in Morrissey’s psyche that caused him to spend the last three decades dashing the greatness that was his for the taking. What went wrong? And why can we not let go?
One of the reasons Morrissey has managed, by some unholy miracle, to evade being cancelled, is that he confuses people. As Simon Goddard says, Morrissey is “pro-working class, anti-elite and anti-institution. That includes all political parties, parliament itself, all public schools, Oxbridge, the Catholic church, the monarchy, the EU, the BBC…Because his comments are not consistent with any one political agenda it confuses people, especially on the left”[1]. He is that baffling mixture of ultra-liberal and worryingly right wing, so you never quite know where he stands. His notorious propensity to say awful things is not merely a case of his being ‘outspoken’, as the press often characterise it; it reveals him to be washed-up, irrelevant and uncreative, desperate to be shocking in leu of being interesting and vital, never again to recapture the supernatural brilliance he once possessed.
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In the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing, Morrissey took to Facebook to criticise Sadiq Khan on immigration and political correctness, saying, “In modern Britain everyone seems petrified to officially say what we all say in private”[2], which is precisely the kind of thing people say when they know what they really want to say is wrong. In 2007, he told the NME, “Although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears”[3], and we thought perhaps the man doth protest too much. In 2010, he called the Chinese – all one billion of them – a “subspecies” because he disapproves of the way they treat animals. And in 2013, he said he admires Nigel Farage “a great deal”, which, like so many of Morrissey’s opinions, is one of those things that was probably better left unsaid. More recently, he said Anthony Rapp, one of the claimants in the 2023 Kevin Spacey case, should have known what was coming the moment he entered the star’s hotel room.
Songs like ‘The National Front Disco’ and ‘Bengali in Platforms’, which features the line, “Life is hard enough when you belong here”, rub salt into the wound on two levels. First, they seem beyond risqué without even analysing the lyrics; they touch a nerve that makes reasonable people wince. Second, and more damaging, they allow the thin defence that art is open to interpretation, leading to the defence that if only you read it this way rather than that way, it is not what it seems. Indeed, of ‘The National Front Disco’, it is claimed that it is ironic, which is how bad people try to get away with saying bad things. But sweetness, oh sweetness, he was only joking when he said…
And so it continues. In 2017, Morrissey claimed the UKIP leadership election was rigged – which sounds too much like Trump for comfort – against Anne Marie Waters, whose anti-Islam views were well known at the time, as if we thought Morrissey should care about the UKIP leadership. Then in 2018, he doubled down by wearing a For Britain badge on stage and the, during an appearance on Fallon, reaffirming his support for Waters, saying, she “believes in British heritage”. Then, he plumbed a new depth: “It’s very obvious that Labour or the Tories do not believe in free speech … I mean, look at the shocking treatment of Tommy Robinson” [4]. At a certain point – and the margins of error are miniscule – a gown-up, educated, white, privileged man in the media spotlight must know the difference between what to say and what not to say, and defending the leader of the English Defence League falls resolutely into the latter category. The perverse thing is that a terrifying majority of fans would still leap in front of a flying bullet for Morrissey without so much as a passing thought of the rising flames.
Interestingly, this support for Robinson and Waters was one of the surprisingly few occasions on which Morrissey’s pronouncements had tangible consequences. Spillers Records in Cardiff, the world’s oldest record store, refused to stock his latest album, California Son, and Merseyrail removed all posters advertising it. Still, these are small punishments when you consider that Morrissey has been at it for decades with impunity.
Morrissey has always proceeded with an air of invincibility, but in the glory days it was of an entirely different character. In the 1980s, pop music possessed a certain erotic charge and a visceral, sometimes ambiguous, sexuality. Morrissey was a contemporary of Boy George, George Michael, Marc Almond and Elton John, and he was not so dissimilar from them as one might think. The cultural landscape fostered an environment in which popstars coasted along under the radar of neat labels, at least until it became untenable to do so. Morrissey’s triumph is that he, against all odds, made himself an exception to the rule.
It was a time when culture reacted against political conservativism: while Margaret Thatcher was expounding the values of the family and free market capitalism, artists were effacing the boundaries between genders, dismantling binaries and celebrating freedom of self-expression. Adam Ant’s face paint, Spandau Ballet’s shirts and Boy George’s flamboyance were tantalising digressions from the stiff, monotone image of decency and old-world decorum that Thatcher’s Britain sought to promote and maintain.
Morrissey, although he seems a far cry from Boy George, actively and consciously participated in this culture of ambiguity and liberation from (hetro)normative values. Perhaps at the time it did not seem all that outrageous in light of what everyone else was doing, but his irresistible melding of working-class heroism and Hollywood glamour with a touch of camp and homoeroticism, stands out as something that was both of its time and incongruous with it.
There was something confusing, yet enticing, in the way The Smiths – a group of four Northern boys in their early twenties – adorned their record sleeves with images that were nothing if not suggestive. The Smiths cultivated a clearly defined aesthetic that neatly cohered with the prevailing mood of 1980s Britain: they directed a distinctly male gaze at the notions of masculinity and working-class life, played out on the streets of Manchester with more than a nod to the likes of Shelagh Delany’s A Taste of Honey, with a simmering tension that was somehow both sexual and asexual at the same time. Their first single, ‘Hand in Glove’, featured a photograph of the actor George O’Mara’s bare bum and their eponymous debut album featured the naked torso of 1960s sex symbol and protégé of Andy Warhol, Joe Dallesandro. They went on to feature images of Jean-Alfred Villain-Marais, Terrance Stamp and James Dean, all men who were pin-ups of their day. Add to this Morrissey’s open shirts and bunches of gladioli, his hairless, skinny torso writhing and wobbling in front of any wiling lens, the stills from Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1964), which is exactly as it sounds, and the collaboration with Derek Jarman, and you have a band with an image that should have been anything but ambiguous.
On the surface, it looked as if The Smiths were aesthetically, if not so much musically, aligned with their peers, but it is implausible to think it was a group ideology; the band likely did not go along with it so much as they were pulled along by Morrissey’s fearsome, self-assured leadership. Bassist Andy Rourke recounts how his dad asked him about the ‘Hand in Glove’ artwork: “He said to me, ‘That’s a bloke’s bum’ and I said, ‘yeah’ but when he asked me why I just didn’t have an answer for him” [5]. It was all Morrissey’s doing, of course, and presumably his dictatorship, combined with the band’s blossoming success, silenced all questions.
However, when push came to shove, having ramped up the camp and homoeroticism and then basked in the adulation and reaped the spoils, Morrissey retreated to a territory of absolute silence. He constructed a persona that was irresistible to men – and, if we are honest, almost exclusively men – that tangoed with the forbidden but that was also just glamorous and hard-edged enough to defy categorisation, even in the face of the apparent evidence. All this combined to create the crest of a wave that never quite breaks.
Musically, this finds its ultimate realisation in the very fabric of what makes The Smiths timelessly magnetic: the juxtaposition of Marr’s jangly, primeval guitar and Morrissey’s crooning vocals that are not a million miles away from Elvis emanate the vibe of a Las Vegas lounge in the 1960s – a kind of controlled, rigorous showmanship on the surface but seductive, maybe a little seedy, underneath. Several of the songs on The Smiths seem to allude to a forbidden love, which is a diplomatic way of saying that under linguistic scrutiny and in the climate of the time they read like tragic gay love stories. ‘This Charming Man’ – the only pop song about a predatory homosexual[6] – narrates a dilemma, familiar to young gay boys of all epochs, of whether to accept an invitation from an older gentleman; ‘Hand in Glove’ is transparently a narrative about a forbidden love and will always be, for me, a song to comfort those who feel they must hide their true selves; ‘What Difference Does it Make?’ feels like the defiant lament of a jilted lover scorned by society as much as by his intended; and in ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’, Morrissey intones, “I’m not the man you think I am”. It all adds up, unless Morriessy is to be believed, in which case nothing adds up to anything.
One thing that weaves the mystery deeper still is the lack of pronouns in the songs. Nowadays we see it as common courtesy not to assume anybody’s gender, but in pop music the rules are different. It is a fairly flat landscape that hinges upon traditional binary notions: gender plays a key role in rendering songs relatable, where popstars sing songs about the man or the woman who is the object of their affections with a commonplace and seemingly innocuous use of pronouns, so it is only when the pronouns disappear that a question arises. Forgive the generalisation here, which holds for most pop songs in history and continues to do so, with noteworthy expectations, but Morrissey was in good company with, for example, George Michael in ‘Careless Whisper’, which is a masterclass in saying it without saying it.
And all the time, The Smiths did not breathe a word to anybody. To this day, nobody who knows Morrissey has uttered a single syllable in that regard, and we all know how he repaid that loyalty. I once had lunch with his good friend, the writer Michael Bracewell, and pressed him on the matter to no avail, only to be gently, good-naturedly nudged on to the next topic. How Morrissey has succeeded in extracting this impossible confidence from his friends, where so many others have tried and failed to do the same, remains one of the great mysteries of pop music.
The point is not that Morrissey ever did or ever does have to issue a categorical statement on his sexuality, because of course he does not. The point is that he created a mystery and then, against all odds, sustained it for the rest of time. At this cultural moment, it matters less than it ever has because we – queer people, at least – have moved beyond labels and binaries. This is the great triumph of the generation after mine: us aging Millennials are still inclined to say we are gay, or whatever binary label applies, whereas Gen Z have reclaimed the word ‘queer’, and rightly so, to capture the dynamism of the spectrum of human sexuality. But Morrissey, unlike his peers George Michael and Boy George, bided his time until the culture caught up with him. Perhaps the only thing we can safely say in this regard – and it is a big perhaps – is that Morrissey, in the final analysis, was queer long before the current concept of queer gathered ground.
The thing that irks me, as somebody who is younger than Morrissey but not young enough to claim to have grown up in a different time, is that his silence, his eternal ambiguity, is a product of his immense privilege. Most of us who lived through the 80s and 90s – both the celebrities and the civilians – could not hide ourselves for long; we were, at some point, dragged out of the closet by a world that would not let us live in peace. I cannot say, of course, that Morrissey is gay or queer or anything, but the evidence – which he himself constructed – points in an unambiguous direction. So the sting in the tail is not that he has never revealed the truth, not least because he may not really even know it, but that he has been afforded that luxury by his position, which so many us never had, and he has repaid all the people around him who said nothing, and the fans who stood by him, and the press who did not ultimately intrude even if they occasionally asked the question by becoming this nasty, self-indulgent egoist. That absolute fortress around his personal life, is something that almost none of us – gay, queer, straight, whatever – get to have or maintain for long. I do not begrudge him it, but looking back I wonder why he, above all people, has been afforded that privilege. It is not enough to say he has given us so much, because he has not; he gave us a few great albums, a fleeting sense of companionship in our younger years, and a barrage of vitriol, which, at some point in time, we felt we had to defend. And this not an easy thing for me to say because I respect, and will defend, Morrissey’s absolute right to his privacy, but I cannot understand why he deserves it, and why I and my husband and my friends, not to mention the millions before us, did not deserve it.
However, there is a further complication here that it is imprudent to ignore. Morrissey has constructed an image so ambiguous, and yet so obvious, and refused to say anything about it, leaving us on tenterhooks for ever more, so that, when people ask Morrissey about his sexuality, which they really should not, they do so without a thought for the possibility that the question might just be a site of deep trauma for him and one that he himself has no answer to. That is why, in the final analysis, I see my personal qualm as essentially just that – an opinion which may just have little further-reaching consequence. The reason we do not ask such a question is a matter of human decency and we should not do unto Morrissey as others have done unto us.
If anything, the crucial misstep was the one time he attempted to say something about it. In his Autobiography, he recounts two relationships – one with a man and one with a woman – in characteristically circular, poetic terms. He uses the phrase, “the eternal ‘I’ became ‘we’”, to encapsulate his feeling when he met Jake Walters and then persists in describing their two years together, sharing hotel suits and Morrissey resting his head on Jake’s belly, without ever calling it a relationship, leaving us in gasping, wanton doubt. Throughout the entire narrative of this dalliance, Morrissey comes across as tender, affectionate, vulnerable, which is absent when he describes his relationship with Tina Dehaghani as one in which the pair discussed having a child in a purely business-like manner. Make of that disparity what you will, but that unsatisfying attempt at setting the record straight should probably never have happened, more for Morrissey’s sake than anybody else’s.
Morrissey’s attempts to justify or explain himself, as if he is playing lipservice to the very request of the media that he has openly vowed never to meet, continue in Autobiography[7]. Greeted with great fanfare, it is a whirlwind of a read for all the wrong reasons. It was likely commissioned as an attempt to hit the jackpot – a sensational, tell-all bestseller, the dramatic, long-awaited moment of revelation in the Morrissey story – but what they ended up with is nothing of the sort. It is essentially a monologue, delivered in a dizzying and grating style that switches between past and present tense, that narrates, without chapters and in multi-page paragraphs, key incidents in the life of Morrissey in painstaking, sometimes excruciating, detail, like a sort of Mancunian Proust without the technical prowess or the saving grace of self-awareness. It is a voracious, hate-filled, antagonistic diatribe against everybody and everything that has irked Morrissey since his mother had the gall to give him life.
That is not to say, however, that it is entirely without its charms, for one of the things we love about Morrissey is his way with words and in that respect he does not disappoint. The opening pages are a glorious love letter to Manchester that begins, “My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets. Streets to define you and streets to confine you, with no sign of motorway, highway or freeway” [8], painting a picture of tumbling terraces that remain the gritty backdrop to Morrissey’s entire vision. Notice that ‘is’, where the awkward use of the present tense leaves Morrissey’s childhood hanging in the air as something neither past nor finished, as if that is all we need to know. But the poetry is too often used to squalid ends, as Morrissey finds evermore pithy and creative ways of denouncing people who seem to have committed, at most, minor misdemeanours, such as Marc Bolan, who refused the teenage Morrissey an autograph, of whom he says, “His new album will enter the chart at number 50, and mental illness is artistic activity is mental illness is artistic activity”[9].
He has more than enough bile and abundant barbs for everyone, from his teachers and friends to journalists, record company executives and colleagues alike. And it is all delivered with maximal passion and minimal compassion, which is reserved for non-human animals; it is a litany of broken friendships where the one constant – Morrissey himself – is oblivious to the efficacious role of that constant. Throughout, the refrain is the same: it is somebody else’s fault, other people are unreasonable, their motivations are vague, inadequate or malicious. Without dwelling on more examples, which are too gruesome to quote, consider that a sensitivity reader would have a field day poring over the manuscript.
Shortly before its publication, he threatened to pull the plug over ‘editorial disputes’, which surely amounted to little more than an editor at Penguin doing their job, but he lured them back with the promise of spectacular sales and then demanded that the book be published under the Penguin Classics imprint. They should have walked away rather than be bullied by a tyrant, since any loss they would have incurred should have been insignificant for a multinational publishing house which was willing to make a stand against brutality. But no, they stayed and let the man have his way, and his way was to tangle one convoluted delusion in another until a meaningless stream of consciousness infuriates the reader into submission.
The casualty of all this has been the music. Morrissey’s first four solo albums were within touching distance of anything The Smiths did, although nothing could ever be that good, but something happened after that which caused the music to dwindle into a series of repetitive, vacant refrains on familiar, tired themes. The High Court case of 1996, in which Smiths drummer, Mike Joyce, sued Morrissey and Marr for royalties, seems to be the most obvious candidate for the hose that sprayed cold water on the fire of creativity. Morrissey devotes more than 40 pages of his autobiography to the supposed injustice visited upon him by one man’s quest for fairness. He claims Joyce and Rourke agreed, on some mythical hazy day in 1982, to a royalty split of 40-40-10-10, which funnelled The Smiths’ earnings into Morrissey’s and Marr’s pockets, even though it is completely unbelievable that two men in their early twenties would have agreed to only a 10% share of something in which they were equal partners while their friends took the loot. Morrissey expects sympathy as he tells us the courts drained £1 million from his UK bank account to compensate Joyce, on whom he wishes “the worst of all things for the rest of his life” [10], and thus seems oblivious to the fact that his and Marr’s defence – namely that they agreed to the split because they were regarded as session musicians – is nothing short of unbelievable. So unbelievable that, in court, even Marr quietly abandoned the claim, leaving Morrissey to limp along with his rotten case. The affair shows Morrissey in the worst possible light, as he fought an unwinnable case in which he was almost certainly the purveyor of injustice, piling insult upon insult without the faintest hint of a rational argument or an evidence-based account of what had happened. The judge, Mr Justice John Weeks, in his summing up, branded Morrissey “devious, truculent and unreliable”, which Morrissey subsequently claimed defamed his character, as if his own actions had not done enough of that already.
The album after that, Maladjusted, was muted and insipid, which Morrissey attributed to the trauma of the court case, even though he had hoped the album would recoup some his losses, which it did not. He had lost his touch, which was only briefly regained for 2004’s majestic comeback, You are the Quarry, after years in the wilderness in which he ensconced himself in LA, living in JD Salinger’s house with his dog and his Jag. Imagine that – of all the houses in Hollywood, Morrissey ends up buying JD Salinger’s to while away his lonely, sick days in the former home of an irascible, self-indulgent recluse. Since You are the Quarry, however, nothing Morrissey has done has stirred even the faintest glimmer of his former glory; occasionally, there is a song like ‘I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris’ that whispers in the dreamer’s ear, but of 11 albums in the past three decades, only one has been great and only a smattering of songs have tickled the edges of achievement.
It is not so much of a mystery as Morrissey likes to claim as to why only stone and steel will accept his love. The ugly truth that die-hard fans will balk at is that Morrissey is good, but he is not that much good by himself, since he has always achieved greatness by surrounding himself with exceptional talents like Marr, and later the great Stephen Street, Alian Whyte and Mick Ronson. Now, though, those exceptional talents will not touch him. Since 1987, Morrissey has had at least 15 record deals, each one ending on acrimonious terms, and so the mud thickens and he sinks deeper into the territory of a pariah.
By early 2023, Morrissey had two unreleased albums under his belt. In 2002, when he was between labels, it was an unthinkable reality, a near absurdity, that he did not have a record deal, but one nonetheless materialised off the back of a world tour that premiered the songs that would go on to comprise You are the Quarry. The likelihood of that happening now seems slighter than ever in light of Morrissey’s response to Capitol Records’ alleged snubbing of his 2021 album, Bonfire of Teenagers, which the label did not release but has retained. He has said the album is “too diverse” for Capitol, which again sounds like the kind of thing Trump would say, and a statement on his website continues, “Morrissey has said that although he does not believe that Capitol Records in Los Angeles signed ‘Bonfire of Teenagers’ in order to sabotage it, he is quickly coming round to that opinion” [11]. Moreover, his 2022 recording, Without Music the World Dies, remains without a label, shelved indefinitely. That is two unreleased albums. Perhaps the music industry is, finally ready to hang the DJ because the music that they constantly play says nothing to us about our lives.
As a last-ditch attempt to resurrect some of the fervour I once felt, I went to see Morrissey in March 2023. At some point in the preceding year, I had formally resigned from any interest in seeing Morrissey live; it no longer seemed either a worthwhile expense or a morally acceptable enterprise, but then something clicked on a trip to see Bret Easton Ellis talk about his novel, The Shards, at the Southbank Centre. In the course of riffing on the idiocy of cancel culture and how the 1980s, when the novel is set, were gloriously devoid of the notion that ideology should interfere with judgements of artistic merit, Ellis urged the audience to listen to the music and not the chatter. In that moment, more than a little bit spurred on by my faith in Ellis, I resolved to give Morrissey one last chance, so I went home and bought a ticket, and set about listening to all the albums again.
It was a disorientating experience, at once euphoric and tinged with sadness. As he crooned away, shuffling around the stage like a has-been, it was clear that Morrissey had lost his gravitas and relied on the seated crowd’s fervour to create the atmosphere that he himself is now incapable of stirring up. He did not have a support act, either because nobody will be associated with him or because he is too good for that, and he played for a measly 90 minutes the same songs he has played on tour for years. He did some Smiths songs – ‘Half a Person’, ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’, ‘Sweet and Tender Hooligan’, ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ – but they sounded hollow, dead in the water without Marr’s guitar.
There was an aching sense that he was playing the gig for himself, basking in the glory of the crowd’s usual football chant of “Morrissey Morrissey Morrissey” without really responding to it with anything like grace or energy. In between songs, he attempted slivers of wisdom such as, “Free speech is returning to this country” and “Don’t watch television, just keep flicking between the channels”, hoping we would read the subtext so he would not have to explicitly state what we knew – or he hoped we would know – he was thinking.
Nonetheless, if you forget everything you know about Morrissey and filter out the mythology, the good songs, such as ‘Suedehead’ and ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’, were still charged with that vital, electrifying, spine-tingling elixir that got us hooked in our teenage years and they still vibrate deep within as anthems of an iconic existential longing. In the lyrics and in his voice, at least, the reasons we loved Morrissey remain intact. ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’, ‘I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris’ and ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This Once Before’ had the rousing effect you would expect, but while the music thundered on, Morrissey plodded, tired and reluctant.
It was both magical and tragic in the way that one might stare agape at the burning out of a star in the cosmos. It was clear in that moment, as he stumbled from one song to the next without any change of tempo or mood, that Morrissey shields himself with the adulation of his fans, which insulates him against the cold world that he has rejected but that has not had the good sense to entirely reject him. I am certain that it is only on the strength of The Smiths and those early solo albums that we are just grateful enough for Morrissey’s existence that we do not rise up and demand he pay the debt he has promised us. Being a Morrissey fan, in middle age and in the 21st century, is a dashed hope of kinship and humility from a man who once stood tall with us against a cruel, unforgiving world. It is finally time, with the dusk of Morrissey’s career burning in the embers of the Californian sunlight, that we say, frankly, Mr Morrissey, this position I’ve held, it pays my way but it corrodes my soul.
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[1] Quotes are from Dorian Lynskey, ‘When did Charming become Cranky? Why a Middle-Aged Morrissey is so Hard to Love’. The Guardian. Retrieved 06 April 2023.
[2] Lynskey, ‘When did Charming become Cranky? Why a Middle-Aged Morrissey is so Hard to Love’.
[3] Lynskey, ‘When did Charming become Cranky? Why a Middle-Aged Morrissey is so Hard to Love’.
[4] ‘Morrissey expresses sympathy for jailed EDL founder Tommy Robinson’, The Guardian, 7 June 2018.
[5] Emily Barker, ‘The Smiths – The stories behind all 27 of their provocative album and single sleeves’, NME, 3rd August 2015.
[6] I have always thought that music critic, Paul Morely, said this, although I cannot trace a source. I think it was on television in 90s, but perhaps I imagined it. Either way, it is apt and true.
[7] Morrissey, Autobiography (London: Penguin Classics, 2013).
[8] Morrissey, Autobiography.
[9] Morrissey, Autobiography.
[10] Morrissey in The Importance of Being Morrissey, Channel 4, 2002.
[11] Morrisseycentral.com, 3rd February 2023.