I found this non too flattering article about Morrissey from the Times regarding the Nottingham show.

Morrissey
Nottingham Rock City

STEVEN PATRICK MORRISSEY began this decade as a national institution, his reputation as one of the most acclaimed and original singer/songwriters since the Beatles seemingly carved in stone. But the 40-year-old ex-Smiths frontman greets the new millennium as an increasingly marginalised figure, without a record deal, vilified by his former champions in the music press, living an exile's life in Los Angeles.

Although his influence remains strong, on bands ranging from Pulp to Suede to Manic Street Preachers, years of creeping musical stagnation and an unhealthy fixation with a homoerotic fantasy underworld of racist thuggery have threatened to alienate this former bedsit laureate from a generation which once worshipped him.

Even so, there was no shortage of disciples at Rock City in Nottingham on Tuesday for the sold-out opening night of Morrissey's first British tour in three years. Feverish with anticipation, the capacity crowd beckoned their Mancunian messiah and his faceless rockabilly band onstage with rowdy football chants.

Looking like some craggy retired matinee idol, the wilfully anachronistic crooner returned his public's undying goodwill with a middling set of mostly recent material such as Boy Racer and Alma Matters. Where once his every performance packed an electrifying emotional charge, Morrissey now seems stuck in second gear, over reliant on laboured puns and gracelessly average melodies.

But even more frustrating were the teasing flashes of past glory which punctuated Tuesday's show.

The finest compositions from the singer's solo back catalogue were those dating back to his immediate post-Smiths period, including the brisk satire on London mores, Hairdresser on Fire, and the touchingly muted elegy to lost youth, Break Up the Family.

These tracks, as well as the audacious hymn to disability, November Spawned a Monster, still exhibited a sparky freshness which the more generic recent material sorely lacked. When presented with the evidence in such bald terms, it is difficult not to view Morrissey's career as being in slow but steady creative decline.

Tellingly, the biggest audience frissons of the evening were reserved for a smattering of choice archive gems from the Smiths scrapbook. The witty glam rock romp Is it Really So Strange? revisited Morrissey's love/hate relationship with his Northern roots, while a rare revival of the 1985 vegetarian anthem Meat is Murder was rapturously received.

Finally, a brusque encore reading of Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me recalled an era when the singer's trademark pithy self-pity still felt vital, full of inspired humour and vengeful vitriol, rather than merely churlish. But all three tunes seemed smaller and clumsier than their original versions.

The patron saint of kitchen-sink melancholy claims to have matured and left his depressive youthful persona behind, but he clearly remains all too aware of how his lacklustre recent work cowers in the shadow of his exquisitely dolorous past. Although this latest tour may not diminish his already tarnished legend it is, equally, unlikely to win many new converts.

STEPHEN DALTON