Morrissey is back. And he’s sassy as hell. At the O2 on Saturday night, the once-waifish Smiths frontman turned stocky solo crooner cast shade on the haters: ‘As you all know, the jealous bitches tried to get rid of me, but thanks to you, and thanks to me, I’m still here.’ It was classic Mozzer: withering, self-aggrandising, hilarious.
With a European tour and a new album about to be released, Morrissey is in a score-settling mood. And with good reason. Make-Up Is a Lie, out yesterday, is his 14th album. But it wasn’t supposed to be. Bonfire of Teenagers, originally slated for release in 2023, still remains on the shelf, following rows with his former record label. As does another unreleased album.
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He claims it’s cancellation. ‘Labels say that they are both fantastic high-quality pop albums, but they say that they can’t release them because they don’t want the wrath of the Guardian making their lives hell,’ he told an interviewer recently. ‘The harassment campaign against me by the Guardian is worldwide knowledge now.’
The Guardian, as if trying to prove his point, has just published a sneering review of that triumphant O2 set, decrying Morrissey’s ‘GB News-style talking points’ between songs and ‘proto-Reform politics’. Perish the thought.
No doubt, they would have also taken offence to Bonfire of Teenagers, were it ever released. The title track – available only via YouTube fan footage of his shows – is a stunning ode to the fallen of the Manchester Arena, where Salman Abedi blew up 22 Ariana Grande fans in 2017.
The chorus has Morrissey vowing to ‘look back in anger’, slamming the ‘morons’ of the Great and Good who implored Mancunians to simply mourn the dead and move on. It’s a blast against those who think it is ‘Islamophobic’ to get too upset when Islamists kill kids, and the best thing he’s written in 20 years.
There’s more where that came from. ‘Notre-Dame’, the standout single from the new album, sounds like a Depeche Mode tune made by Michel Houellebecq. ‘Notre-Dame, we know who tried to kill you,’ Morrissey broods over juddering synth-pop, heavily implying it was Islamic hotheads who set the cathedral ablaze in 2019. (The French authorities maintain it was an accident.)
Morrissey has been disappointing the music press since at least the 1990s. Those who once celebrated the anti-royal, anti-meat-eating agitprop of his Smiths days were horrified to find meditations on Englishness, mass immigration and nationalism peppering the solo records.
This wasn’t a departure, though. Alongside the gawky, box-bedroom heartache of Morrissey’s lyrics has always sat a gnawing sense of cultural loss. This working-class son of Irish immigrants longed for the England of Keats, music hall, Shelagh Delaney, vintage Coronation Street, the Manchester terraces of his childhood, ripped down to make way for tower blocks – an English culture, high and low, that he felt was slipping through his fingers.
Where he came unstuck was in his refusal to shy away from the darker corners of identity. On his glam-rocking 1992 album Your Arsenal, he gave us ‘National Front Disco’, the catchiest song about the fash ever written, about a boy becoming lost to far-right extremism, complete with a chorus of ‘England for the English!’.
‘Notre-Dame’ sounds like a Depeche Mode tune made by Michel Houellebecq
His dimmer critics naturally assumed he was endorsing this world, rather than just writing about it. In 1992, an explosive cover story in the NME dubbed Morrissey ‘This alarming man’, and said he had chosen to ‘fuel the fires of racism’, after he draped himself in the Union Jack on stage at Madstock Festival in Finsbury Park.
But what was once deemed reactionary now seems prophetic. ‘I’ve been dreaming of a time when/ To be English is not to be baneful/ To be standing by the flag not feeling shameful/ Racist or partial’, Morrissey sang on ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’, his 2004 comeback single after years of self-imposed exile in California.
It might just be the most prescient pop song ever written, anticipating not only the St George’s Crosses now fluttering on lampposts, but also the revolt against the political establishment, looking forward to a day when ‘the English are sick to death of Labour and Tories’. (You’ll be unsurprised to learn he’s a Farage fan.)
‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ brought down the house at the O2. ‘I’m very concerned about the safety of all communities, but the one that’s mostly at risk now is my own community,’ Morrissey told the crowd, before the chugging guitar riff let fly. Love him or loathe him, pop’s prophet of England has rarely felt more resonant. Whatever those jealous bitches say about him.
Morrissey is on tour until 16 March.
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