The Disillusion of the Morrisseys

The Smiths are "trending" on Twitter. A chap, who has derived his name from both Morrissey and Holden Caulfield so you know his views are likely to be both mature and reasonable, is sneering at people who don't like the thing that Morrissey has turned into but love the songs of The Smiths. "Johnny Marr is a great guitarist" he scoffs, "but people who think he was the major creative force in the band are delusional."

He's right, of course. Johnny Marr was a minor player in The Smiths. I mean he wrote all the music, that's a given. He demoed the songs. He arranged them. Eventually he produced the records too while he was also the de facto manager of the band, as Morrissey was as unmanageable as his hair even then. He would gift the singer with a song of shimmering, melancholic beauty and Morrissey would elect to call it "Some Girls are Bigger Than Others". He would leave the band because the quixotic front-man was determined to record a Cilla Black cover. A sentimental Morrissey immediately replaced him with the bloke from Easterhouse.   

I listened to The Smiths recently. I made a list of the songs I still liked. There were 23 of them. That's significantly less than half of their recorded output. I made a Spotify playlist so you can hear my top picks if you're bothered. But when they were good they were excellent - even the troublesome bloke standing at the front had his moments. 

But he is trouble. And his current awfulness does colour his past, to used a pointed expression. I'm not sure you can separate the artist from the art in every case and the Smiths especially were often a cult of personality as much as they were a band. One person who would like to separate the art from the artist is Morrissey himself, who now appears to view his early career with disdain, with the Smiths a shabby apprenticeship before the imperial maturity his solo career. He even prefers Maladjusted. He has assumed his ultimate form. 

Morrissey now is a king in exile: rich, isolated, curdled and far removed from the slap in the face of the everyday. He views his wealth and success as proof of his genius, though there are far wealthier pop stars. His fans are a further justification but he retains the right to pick and choose which fans are true fans. Generally speaking the ones that agree with everything he says are his favourites. He's not a man who likes to be cross-examined. You will end up disappointing him. 

He is given to paranoia and playing the (millionaire) victim, insisting that that press are out to get him. There are dark mutterings of conspiracy and collusion. Actually I think he is right. I think that the press - for reasons best known to themselves - have come together and agreed a blanket opinion regarding the singer. They have refused to listen to what he says and engage with it intelligently, unravelling the sometimes difficult ideas he espouses and have decided instead to report a simplification with a clearly skewed ideological prejudice. I agree with Morrissey that this has happened, the only difference between us being a question of timescale. He thinks its happening now and I think it happened in the 80s. 

In the 80s music journalism was an actual thing. It meant something. It had agency. And it decided that Morrissey was a good pop thing. He stood for wit and style and elegance. The Smiths were simultaneously knock-kneed jangle-pop milquetoasts and old school rockers who wrote real songs on real instruments, unlike the nu-pop synth botherers, with their asymmetrical hair and lip-gloss. And Morrissey had read books (two of them) and never had sex and was miserable and monochrome in a way that suited the 80's, which was not actually how it appeared in "I remember the 80's" clip-shows, increasingly featuring 22 year old comedians who clearly didn't. The 80's was grey and narrow. We lived in the shadow of the cold war, the miner's strike and Aids. Deely-boppers and ra ra skirts were fairly incidental. Not even George Michael lived in the Club Tropicana video. And Morrissey with his film still record sleeves and his lines nicked off Victoria Wood and Shelagh Delaney was the true face of 80's rock. Pale fucker wasn't he? And oh so witty. 

Or is he? He's not that funny is he? He's got comic inversion down, sure, and he trots out the occasional practised line. But when you see him having to be himself  he's mannered, stiff and acutely self-conscious. Look at him on Jukebox Jury with George Michael and George is charming, open and interested. And Morrissey's a twat. He's like a politician who has practised his lines but hasn't realised that the context has changed so the words fall flat. And he's always like that: awkward, gnomic, guarded, ungenerous. And yet for a decade the press pretended he was the greatest wit of his generation. Now that is press collusion. That is editorial cynicism. That is a failing of the freedom of the press. And the biggest victim turns out to be Morrissey. Because it looks as if he never knew. He bought it. He thought it would last forever, this extended honeymoon, a honeymoon that lasted longer than most marriages. And now he can't deal with it. He feels betrayed, buried by the press. And he gets worse and worse, because he wont listen to anyone. Silly Morrissey. But they are all out to get you.