The
man who murdered pop
Morrissey's
sublime, unprecedented genius in the 80s was just as
destructive as Margaret Thatcher's social policies - and we
are reaping the results of both in this decade, argues Mark
Simpson
Friday November 5, 1999
The two greatest post-punk performers of the 80s are still
around - and still provoking more passion and outrage than
anyone from the 90s. Both have recently been the subject of
TV programmes where their former associates put the boot in.
One has just finished a rapturously received week's tour of
a seaside town, the other is just about to start a national
tour. Come on down, pop-star anarchist Margaret Thatcher and
former Prime Moaner of Great Britain, Stephen Morrissey.
Of course, at the
time they were thought to be intractable enemies. Morrissey
led his Smiths Party - with its manifesto of vegetarianism,
lyricism and fanaticism - to landslide victories in the
indie charts, garnering the votes of tens of thousands of
unhappy young people who rejected the brash, flash,
carnivorous 80s that Thatcher lorded over. He even penned a
cheery song called Margaret on the Guillotine, complete with
the sound of the blade falling.
However, it's now
clear how much they had in common despite their denial, and
how comparable and in fact complementary their greatness is.
Both outsiders, both considered mad, both Little Englanders;
acutely aspirational, out for revenge, and iconic - they
both stamped their authority all over the 80s.
Yes, Morrissey, the
son of modest Manchester Irish working folk, may have been
avenging the working class while Thatcher, the petit
bourgeois, was annihilating them as a political class, but
they had something in common which sealed their greatness:
hatred. Both Maggie and Morrissey were inspired destroyers,
which is to say, lovers. Thatcher destroyed the British
establishment and the Tory party. Morrissey destroyed pop
music. Together they destroyed England. As Morrissey's
mentor, the lover-destroyer of 19th-century polite society
Oscar Wilde put it, each man kills the thing he loves.
If it has become
something of a cliche that Morrissey is "the last pop
star", no one seems to notice that the reason why the
great tradition of English pop stardom ends with him is
because he choked it off with his bare hands. After
Morrissey there could be no more pop stars. He was an act
that was impossible to follow. "The ashes of pop music
are all around us if we will but see them," Morrissey
pronounced back in 1987. And he was right. But he was the
one holding the box of matches.
Morrissey's
unrivalled knowledge of the pop canon, his unequalled
imagination of what it might mean to be a pop star, and his
breathtakingly perverse ambition to turn it into great art,
could only exhaust the form forever. Moreover, Morrissey's
mastery of Englishness was so self-conscious, so ironic, so
devout, so evil and finally so played out that English pop
and even Englishness itself could never hope to recover.
The unnatural,
analysing, stripping heat of Morrissey's love of
Englishness, the grainy black-and-white 60s iconography of
the Smiths' sleeves, the lyrical world of iron bridges,
humdrum towns, repression, frustration, and amorphous
desire, could only end up separating Englishness from
anything solid and turn it into a free-floating signifier.
When the Smiths
finally expired in 1987, after guitarist Johnny Marr walked
out of the group, Morrissey may well have risen again on the
third day to pursue a successful (if uneven) solo career,
but the body of English pop lay lifeless in the tomb,
hopelessly extinct, wrapped in back issues of the NME. A
large rock blocked the entrance, rolled there by Morrissey
himself.
The so-called
"Britpop" phenomenon of the 90s did not represent
a resurrection of English pop, merely a galvanic motion
induced by the application of large amounts of cash. Britpop
was nothing but commercial footnotes to the Smiths, a
belated and somewhat hysterical attempt by the record
industry to cash in on the legacy of the original "indie"
four-boys-and-guitars band whose money-making potential was
never fully realised in their lifetime.
It may be
impossible for a generation raised on a diet of hype to
comprehend, but the Smiths were never played on daytime
radio. Their singles barely grazed the Top 20. They never
made it into the papers, except to be denounced (for risqué
songs such as Handsome Devil - "a boy in the bush is
worth two in the hand / I think I can help you get through
your exams"). And they refused to make pop promos. In
other words, by today's slaggy standards they were a bunch
of losers.
Yet they had a
large and fanatical following and are revered today by many
as the greatest pop group ever. Their album The Queen is
Dead has been officially ensconced as the 80s album by
critics. By contrast, the media-PR-record biz conglomerate
known as Britpop had the keys to the world handed to it on a
plate - "indie" now merely means "mainstream
niche marketing" - and yet it failed to inspire a
single Kleenex's worth of the devotion that the Smiths did.
Under the arc lamps they kissed, and although they ended up
with sore lips, it just wasn't like the old days any more.
The Britpop bands
themselves seemed strangely deathly - much more slavishly
retro than the Smiths, who were denounced at the time for
their nostalgia. Blur were the Kinks for students and
confused teenage girls who mistook Damon Albarn for someone
sexy. Suede were David Bowie before he went all Let's Dance,
with some Marc Bolan licks thrown in for good measure. Oasis
were a Beatles tribute band for car thieves and New Labour
MPs who by only their third album, Be Here Now, managed to
become their own tribute band.
This gang of
Manchester working-class boys with Irish antecedents were
seen as the Smiths minus the troublesome, effeminate, evil
genius - which is to say, Marr without Morrissey. And indeed
Marr, the scally Beatles fan fond of partying, could perhaps
have trodden the same football-crowd-pleasing path if he
hadn't had the Sandie-Shaw-worshipping introvert to nag and
pervert him down a much more creative one. According to
legend, Noel Gallagher even decided to become a pop star
after seeing Johnny Marr on Top of the Pops playing with the
Smiths - typically, Blur's Damon Albarn decided to form a
band after watching a South Bank Show profile of them.
So Morrissey was
burnt at the stake by the NME in 1992 for appearing on stage
with a Union Jack. Banner headlines accused him of
"racism". Of course, this was, like Maggie's poll
tax faux pas, merely a pretext for a coup against him by his
former supporters. Just a few years later the Union Jack
would become an official part of the NME-sponsored Britpop
merchandise.
After all, Oasis
were an ethnically cleansed version of the Beatles, with
pasty-faced Noddy Holder in place of John and Paul's
admiration of Chuck Berry. The infamous court case - in
which the Smiths' former drummer Mike Joyce was awarded
equal royalties with Morrissey and Marr by a judge who had
to have Top of the Pops explained to him - was an
opportunity for unlimited and, given the implications,
somewhat reckless schadenfreude.
Morrissey had to
become an unperson in order for the 90s to happen. Put any
of the Britpop "stars" alongside him and you can
see why. Pop stars (like politicians) have turned into mere
celebrities. Even their fans don't pay much attention to
what Damon and Brett have to say, which is probably just as
well. Jarvis Cocker promised a great deal but threw it away
with that embarrassing Michael Jackson tantrum at the Brits
and a general post-Different Class shabbiness. Skinny Richey
Manic had the good sense to disappear before his band became
famous, fat and fatuous.
The actual wake for
English pop was kindly laid on by Oasis fan (and ropey
Margaret Thatcher impersonator) Tony Blair in 1997. Having
decided to "rebrand" Britain as Cool Britannia, he
invited the celebrity executives of Britpop round to No 10
for a drink and a finger buffet provided by Meg Mathews. The
new apparatchiks of the English political establishment and
English pop finally met in a schmoozing embrace for the
cameras, and it was rather more difficult to tell them apart
than it should have been.
It was left to that
old 70s pop-rocker-turned-panto-dame Elton John to sing the
music at the actual funeral of English pop, in the form of
the Diana tribute Farewell England's Rose. To the hundreds
and thousands lining the streets, and the hundreds of
millions watching the funeral live around the world on what
amounted to the last ever Top of the Pops, Diana was the
nearest thing to an English pop star the 90s produced. Which
is of course the greatest indictment of that decade.
Morrissey's laughter still echoed through Westminster Abbey
on that September morning in 1997, unnoticed by the
assembled feudal dignitaries and their heirs and successors
the celebs, but mightily frightening the pigeons nesting in
the gargoyles.
The last laugh
really was Morrissey's. Not only did Britpop fail to achieve
the only thing that would have justified it - to halt or
even just tread on the toes of the advance of dance - it
failed miserably in its main, material ambition: America.
Britpop faltered in the US and then promptly imploded over
here, because America already had the genuine article in the
form of Morrissey, thank you very much, and didn't see what
it was supposed to do with all these third-raters. Like his
doppelganger Maggie, Morrissey's solo career has been much
better received in the US than here, where it has continued
to grow throughout the 90s, far exceeding the popularity of
the Smiths.
It is probably too
much to expect that what's left of England will embrace
Morrissey again, even though the 90s and Britpop are over.
After all, to invoke another Wildism, society often forgives
the criminal, but never the dreamer. And Morrissey is both.
However, anyone with an interest in this outmoded artform
should take advantage of the opportunity during his UK tour,
and catch live the man who killed pop. With his genius.
• Morrissey
starts his tour at Rock City, Nottingham, on November 9. Mark
Simpson's Saint Morrissey is published early next year
by Little, Brown.