Surfing with Morrissey

Morrissey in Hollywood? The prophet of doom might not have a record label or a manager, but he's huge in America. And even bigger on the Net

Sam Taylor

Sunday November 14, 1999

Morrissey, Nottingham Rock City

Los Angeles, suntanned skin, the Internet: these are not things one has traditionally associated with Morrissey. But, like Sheena Easton and Tracy Ullman before him, the former Smith has left the rain and small-minded derision of his homeland for a place that treats him with more respect. In America he is worshipped in a way that overshadows even the lookalike obsessiveness of Smiths fans in the mid-Eighties.

Click on to one of the numerous Morrissey websites on the Net and you will find devotion of a kind usually only accorded to religious sects and football teams. Morrissey-solo.com has five or six 'news stories' on Moz every day, each followed by lengthy, hyperintense e-mail debate among followers with pseudonyms taken from Morrissey lyrics. For example, an article posted at 9.18 am on Tuesday had drawn 33 responses - some hoping that 'a corner has been turned', others lambasting their hero for having a leather chair in his home, many making bitchy, pedantic remarks about the lack of knowledge shown by fellow fans - within 24 hours. 'Buck-toothed girl from Luxembourg' (it's a lyric from The Smiths' song 'Ask') was practically ejected from the website for demonstrating ignorance of the Morrissey Scriptures. Most of the web addresses were American.

One of the themes that recurs in those scary online correspondences is of Morrissey's betrayal by his homeland, and in particular the 'British press'. 'England stabbed Moz in the back,' writes one apostle, while in an interview with the German edition of Rolling Stone , the man himself claims: 'The only thing that the British press will review positively is my death.' Yet in the last two weeks alone, this same hateful British press has eulogised him as 'The last great pop eccentric' and 'The man who murdered pop - with his genius'. Not too bad for a singer who is currently managerless and 'between record labels', and whose last album, the frankly awful Maladjusted, barely scraped into the Top 50.

As ever with Morrissey, rumours swirl around him. Previously, he has been accused of racism, misogyny and the glamorisation of violence, but this time round the whispers are more benign: he was supposed to be touting a new 'Mexican direction', inspired by Mexican Elvis impersonator El Vez, who was meant to be supporting him on his UK tour. On Tuesday night, however, he is supported by a pedestrian Irish cod-Smiths band called Sack, and there is not a sombrero in sight.

The fiery adoration that accompanies his every move in the States is absent, too: while all the gigs on this tour sold out quickly - I had to pay a tout £30 to get in - the crowd is less 'hardcore' than you might expect. Not many quiffs, only one bunch of daffodils, and an average age of 35: a football-style chant of 'Morri-seee, Morri-seee, Morri-seee' is as wild as it gets. You get the sense he doesn't feel his British fans are really worthy of him any more. 'This is from the album you didn't buy,' he smiles. 'It's a good job I know the words.'

As for Moz himself, well, he's in good shape. The quiff is greying, but still healthily thick, while the usual T-shirt and jeans ensemble is topped with a velour Gucci smoking jacket. His long-serving band of middle-aged teddy boys seems designed purely not to distract attention from the singer.

Months of playing American arenas have not improved his stage technique, though. The rhapsodic dances of his Smiths days are long gone, replaced only by an irritating habit of pretending his mike lead is a whip. For most of the night he looks slightly bored; the only song which provokes any kind of fever is 'Meat Is Murder', The Smiths' 1984 veggie anthem, and even that seems tainted by the new 'leather chair' controversy.

Despite claiming to have written his next album, Morrissey plays no new material at all. There are three Smiths songs - 'Meat Is Murder', 'Is It Really So Strange?' and 'Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me' - and a quixotic selection from his patchy solo albums. So 'Speedway', 'Tomorrow' and 'Now My Heart Is Full' are all wonderful, as they were on record, but the triteness and insipidity of tracks like 'Hairdresser On Fire', 'Boy Racer' and 'Alma Matters' have not disappeared with age. They still sound desperate and hollow, as though the master lyricist has simply run out of things to say. I'm sorry, but 'You're just so busy/ Busy, busy/ Busy, busy/ Oh hairdresser on fire' is simply not on the same rich plane as 'What do we get for our trouble and pain?/Just a rented room in Whalley Range'.

In his most recent interview, Morrissey let slip the idea that he might release his next album on the Internet. This produced great excitement among the e-apostles. 'We wait with bated breath,' wrote one. It would certainly make sense, now that the lyric from 1992's 'Glamorous Glue' - 'We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/ London is dead' - has come true in its author's own life. He may wear a West Ham Boys' Club T-shirt, but England is no longer his and it no longer owes him a living. The man who once spurned videos is now a .com icon.

"Misery Mozz" by Jamie McGinnes

It is curious that Mancunian Morrissey should choose Liverpool as his North-West reunion gig.

This was part of the first UK tour in over two years for the former Smiths frontman who presently resides in Los Angeles.

Unsurprisingly, there was a heavy contingent of Mancs, as confirmed by the huge crowd response to Morrissey's "hello to all the rough men and women from Manchester here tonight."

CROONING

Just as the tunes harp back to his 80's career, the audience themselves, being generally 30 or over, are mementoes of the past. There are scatterings of die-hard Union Jack-wearing fans.

There was certainly no attempt to woo new admirers with a predictable blend of gloomy crooning.

Surrounded on all sides by teddy boy, quiff wearing clones, the band had the appearance of 50's jivesters.

In the same, retrospective way, Morrissey made nostalgic (if unintentional) tributes to his 80's life with the Smiths.

His tunes haven't changed much, his voice is no different and what's more, the inspirational guitar riffs of Johnny Marr are missing.

There are flashes of quality, from songs such as the intriguingly-titled November Spawned A Monster, but little or nothing to separate most of them from one another.

Lyrically, Morrissey's song-writing has always been strong, if downbeat and depressing. His solo career is no different from the melancholy of the Smiths.

Everyone has their low points, although it's difficult to believe a successful musician is consistently depressed.

WIZARDRY

Showing his veggie beliefs, Morrissey admonishes those gathered to give up eating animals, before appropriately leaping into Meat Is Murder - only recently reintroduced into his live show.

It's a welcome, if controversial, addition to his set with it's powerful critique of the meat-eating modern culture.

Encore song Last Night I Dreamt allows for some cracking fiffs and Morrissey vocal wizardry - so lacking in many of the songs.

STAR RATING

Morose-y ***

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

I just called Bass and found out that tickets go on sale for the Fresno show at the Rainbow Ballroom on Thursday Nov. 18 @ 10am through Bass. Tickets will be $20 general admission with a $5.50 Bass charge. I know the Bass charge is a little ridiculous, but I think you can also buy tickets at the Rainbow Ballroom on Broadway Ave in Fresno.