Morrissey take a bow

He was singing in The Smiths, and then he left the Smiths and heaven knows he's legendary now. As Nottingham prepares to host the first date of his British tour, we look at this charming man's career

BY MARK PATTERSON

Manchester, the Arndale Centre, 1985: Years before the IRA made a mess of this monstrous 1960s shopping centre, I'm in a cheapo record shop and handing my money over for two vinyl albums. One is Meat Is Murder, by The Smiths, which has come out on this very day. The other is a singles compilation by The Buzzcocks, another band from Manchester, where I'm going to university in a few months' time.

The Buzzcocks album is for a bit of Manchester punk heritage. The Smiths album, though, is all about today and now, 1985-style.

The Smiths were already huge by then, and while this second album lacked the starry glamour of its best-selling follow-up The Queen Is Dead, it definitively summarised The Smiths' sound and the concerns of their pale, be-quiffed and articulate singer, Morrissey vegetarianism, working class Manchester kids with names scratched on their arms in fountain pen, the barbarity of school, sexual yearning for the unreachable, all embedded in Johnny Marr's shimmering guitar and Andy Rourke's mobile, treble-high bass.

When the band inevitably split in 1987 after four albums, Morrissey dove into a solo career which has had a critical approval rating more violently volatile than a barometer in rainy Manchester. An anti-pop star hero and supreme individualist to fans, a puzzling misery to others yet a legend nonetheless, Morrissey has been absent from the UK music scene for what seems like half a lifetime but is back on Tuesday when he begins a short new British tour at Nottingham Rock City.

The show has sold out, but the tickets were not snapped up overnight as perhaps would have happened at the start of his solo career or certainly would have had The Smiths been playing.

Yet with no new album, single, video or T-shirt to promote, the new tour is all about reminding the music-buying public that this great icon of the 1980s is still breathing.

"You've also got to bear in mind that it is quite an expensive ticket price £17," says Rock City promoter Andy Copping. "And the reason for that is that Morrissey is in a position where he could play much bigger venues and he's got to reflect that in the ticket price. He also wants a lot of money to play."

So why did he choose Rock City as the first venue for the tour?

"As far as I can understand it, he wanted to do a back-to-basics tour. He's quite capable of filling much larger venues than Rock City. He had played Rock City before in his time with The Smiths and funnily enough, when the rumours started that he was going to do a tour, the only date that was being written about was Rock City. I assume the reason he chose Rock City to play on this tour is that he has good memories of shows here before."

However, you still have to wonder about Morrissey's pulling power with people on the better side of 30.

A generation weaned on dance music and its myriad mutations has grown up into a world where Steps are allowed to exist.

Since then, Morrissey and Marr have weathered an ugly legal fall-out with former Smiths drummer Mike Joyce over royalties, awarded damages of £1m in 1997, while Morrissey went through an NME- concocted controversy about alleged racism partly over his use of Union Jack flags at shows.

Today, he's adored in the USA, where he has the same fey "eccentric limey" appeal as Hugh Grant, and treated with quiet respect here.

The talk in the music press last week was that Morrissey had cancelled a gig in Germany because the venue was a former slaughterhouse.

Indeed, it was also rumoured that he had re-introduced the song Meat i s Murder into his live set. It suggested that Morrissey was happy to perform other titles from the Smiths back catalogue.

There is an unclassifiable something about Morrissey which attracts people from a strange spectrum of ages and backgrounds. Just ask Tony Shaw, a 48-year-old Morrissey and Smiths fan from Nottingham, who says: "The Smiths were definitely Morrissey. It was his erudition, his enigmatic character. And then there was the sexual ambivalence.

He was supposed to be celibate, but there was this suggestion of homosexuality. It's a shame he's been more or less expelled to the States now."

And this fan's favourite Smiths album? Without hesitation, he replies Meat Is Murder, which brings us back round to the Arndale Centre, Manchester, 1985, and all that...

Post-gig article from marktowle:

A charming man, never out of style

It was like he'd never been gone! The fervour, the adoration, the sheer worship which greeted Morrissey last night at the start of his first UK tour for donkey's years had to be seen to be believed.

If the Beatles re-formed and played The Boat Club they could expect a welcome no more enthusiastic

The man with the voice that broke a million bedsit-anchored hearts in the 80s has clearly been missed by his old disciples - but the audience was also studded with those barely born at the time of his heyday. Perhaps they had come to see what all the fuss was about in those far-off indie days.

They had their answer. Exploding into Boy Racer, November Spawned a Monster, and Tomorrow, he proved what an original figure he still is. And those lyrics! If any of today's chart contenders had his way with words, maybe pop wouldn't be dead after all.
The crowd loved all of it, throwing their clothes and even themselves at the returning hero all night long.

So perhaps it was churlish for this old fan to have longed for more of the tunes that made Morrissey great. (And ominously, not a single new song was performed among masses of solo stuff).

Although a stunning encore solved that, just three Smiths songs - Is It Really So Strange?, Meat Is Murder, and Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me - in a show lasting barely 75 minutes left me feeling a little empty, too.

By Sean Hewitt
Nottingham Evening Post - 10th November 1999