Two big pop events took place on Saturday. In Manchester, there was the Brit Awards. One by one the bourgeois brats who swell the ranks of popular culture blubbed like babies over the rise of Reform. ‘I’m genuinely terrified’, said someone called Self Esteem. Britain is becoming a ‘fascist state’, wailed Irish singer CMAT. ‘The rise of Reform is a really bad thing’, said the fella who plays bass in indie band Wolf Alice.
Saturday’s gig at the O2 felt like the revenge of Morrissey. It was one in the eye for cancel culture
Then there was the Morrissey show at The O2 in London. As those sons and daughters of privilege opined the rise of populism while picking up their golden gongs in Manchester, Manchester’s most sullen son was enthralling a crowd of 20,000 down south. He defended the waving of the British flag. He had a pop at cancel culture. He derided the ‘jealous bitches’ of the cultural elite who lust after the scalp of any mortal who dares to disagree with them.
What an extraordinary spectacle: the fresh-faced pop kids of the new millennium dutifully spouting every establishment talking point while a 66-year-old bruiser from the Eighties sounded a stirring note of dissent. As those indie youths gave voice to all the deathless platitudes of the centrist-dad caste, there was Moz bigging up England, bristling at censorship, and inviting his swooning fans to surrender to that most taboo of emotions: national pride.
Morrissey really is the last rock rebel. Being at The Brits must have felt like being whacked over the head with a rolled-up copy of the Guardian. It was a Zack Polanski lecture with guitars. Being at The O2 felt electrifying. We knew we were in the presence of a man frowned upon by the self-righteous. A man who through sheer bloody-mindedness managed to escape the clutches of that most ravenous of beasts: cancel culture.
‘The fact that I’m on this stage is an incredible accomplishment in itself’, Moz said, ‘because as you know the jealous bitches tried to get rid of me’. They really did. The former Smiths singer fell spectacularly out of favour in recent years. The ungrateful balding farts of priggish rock criticism tried to unperson the man who wrote the soundtrack to their youths. Why? Because his worldview differs from theirs. Wheel out the guillotine!
Morrissey’s crime was to deviate from the watery left-slop that passes for progressive thought these days. He expressed support for For Britain, a minor hard-right party. He lamented Britain’s broken borders – a view now widely shared by armies of angry voters. He celebrated Brexit. He called it ‘magnificent’. Which it was. But lining up with the 17.4 million ‘gammon’ who voted to leave the EU is blasphemy in the eyes of the boot-licking bores of pop, so Moz had to go.
He caused a storm with his pithy bitchiness. ‘Even Tesco wouldn’t employ Diane Abbott’, he said. He defended Germaine Greer from the social-justice morons who long to cancel her for her sin of understanding biological sex. Greer has been ‘banished from England’, he said, ‘because she said a man is male and a woman is female’. The genderfluids of 21st-century pop will have been gagging on their oat-milk lattes.
When the wet left came for him, he leaned into it. At a gig in LA in 2019 he wore a vest that said ‘Fuck the Guardian’. How fabulous. Many of the middle-class kids of today’s indie scene would likely have been Guardian scribes if they hadn’t learnt guitar – it takes a son of the Manchester-Irish working class to say something a little different.
The knives were out. Moz was mocked on The Simpsons. The world’s oldest record store, in Cardiff, banned his albums. Merseyrail took down posters for his 2019 album, California Son. His problematic beliefs have definitely dented his ‘stature as an artist’, said Billy Bragg. I don’t know, 20,000 swaying fans at The O2 would beg to differ. I’d love to see Bragg fill that cavernous space with his mockney warbling.
Saturday felt like the revenge of Morrissey. It was one in the eye for cancel culture. The unpersoned stirring back to glorious life. They’re still coming for him, of course. The Guardian slammed the O2 gig for mixing ‘classic Smiths songs’ with ‘GB News-style talking points’. His newest tune, Notre-Dame, has them frothing. It’s a fantastically incongruous track that mixes conspiratorial lyrics about Islamists starting the fire at Notre Dame in 2019 with swirling synths. There’s no proof that fire was started intentionally, moan the literalists and moralists. Oh so what? Can’t a pop star have eccentric beliefs anymore? Let the man cook.
It was Irish Blood, English Heart that really got the throng going at The O2. ‘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.’ He wrote that in 2004, yet it could be the anthem of the 2020s as more and more of us fly the flag and reclaim national pride. Long live Moz, the man who knows the nation far better than his prim persecutors.
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