'For this tender Mancunian gob-shite is always there for us when we need him most.' Brian Rasic/Getty Images
It’s been 20 years since I first set eyes on a Smiths LP. The LP in question — Meat is Murder — was released 40 years ago this week. I loved that cover. It made me ponder an alternative universe, one where the US army solely recruited vegans to go and fight Vietnam. The mid-Eighties seemed as far away to me in the mid-2000s as they do to me now, like they’re following me around. That might just be my sense of time warping with age, or maybe it’s because, in so many ways, the cultural clocks had stopped turning by the end of the Eighties.
The triumph of neoliberal ideology — obliterating any hope for the proletarian Bohemia espoused by Morrissey and co. — left in its wake a world of obligatory positivity, of mandatory self-promotion, of endless canned laughter. By the time I was old and depressed enough to want to listen to the band, their stature had only grown. With no one around quite able to fill their boots, they’d become even more of a lifeline to those in search of personality in a world on the bore.
In 2005, I moved from student accommodation into a houseshare in Archway, North London. In halls, there were enough of you to avoid one another. It’s only once six of you shack up in the same building that you find your people. I realised pretty quickly that a guy named Gregg was my people. Picture a Smiths obsessive starting his second year at uni in your head, and there he is: thick-rimmed specs, cardigan, delicate yet cumbersome, literate, pale, ultra-sensitive, achingly mystified by sex and wandering around Sainsbury’s on a sullen Tuesday afternoon defacing the avocados in the name of Palestinian justice. He played the band constantly. They didn’t make sense to me at first. Morrissey’s voice felt monochromatic, overwrought, lacking in subtlety. It was too much, this incessant melodramatic moan. They didn’t make sense to me until I needed them to. Until the mud and murk of animal desire had reduced me to a kind of whimpering paste.
My friendship with Gregg took a turn for the worse when I became aware of my superior value in the sexual marketplace. When both of us were total no-hopers, we couldn’t have been closer. Then I met Millie. I lost interest in Gregg. I had cocaine to snort and parties to attend with my beautiful new hipster girlfriend. I used to think about Gregg downstairs in his Smiths dungeon, while Millie and I canoodled in the room above his head. He used to roll his TV up close enough to his bed so that he could watch it with headphones attached. This way he could enjoy fully sound-tracked porn without the rest of the house clocking on. I used to think of him down there, plugged into that box, while Millie and I plugged into one another. I knew his suffering: it had up until moments ago been my own. Still, somehow, I found his pain added to my pleasure.
Then Millie left me for another boy. I’d grown lazy, entitled, bored — a lifelong pattern asserting itself for the first time. My mentality was a long way from catching up with my biology, to paraphrase Mozza on Meat is Murder. The boredom was supplanted by raging, bitter desire once I knew I’d been replaced. I was suddenly beneath where Gregg had been. Gregg’s world looked idyllic from the fresh hell of jealousy I’d stumbled into. I wanted no more part in this sordid, bloodthirsty competition. In that moment, I wished I could obliterate sex from the world. What was left of my innocence was gone. At moments such as these only The Smiths suffice. Somehow only Morrissey seems to understand.
I was asked during an interview last year what I made of his politics, clearly a reference to recent provocations. I didn’t care about his politics, I responded. I don’t go to pop stars for politics, I go to them with heartbreak, and no one has done more for the broken-hearted than Morrissey. In retrospect, though, that response seems insufficient. For it’s only by dint of Morrissey’s political sensitivities that he was able to relieve so much heartache in the first place. Splicing the wit of Oscar Wilde with droll proletarian kitchen sink drama, the long-term loners and unemployables of his songs are suddenly able to seal themselves off from their lack of prospects in aristocratic futility: No, I never had a job because I never wanted one. Through humour and wordplay, disenchantment is made regal: Shoplifters of the world, unite and take over…
The Smiths nailed that dread, so familiar to youth, at submitting yourself to this grey machine which longs to turn you into itself. I think for a lot of young men getting into The Smiths is like being given permission to finally feel too much — Why do you sleep alone tonight? Because tonight is just like any other night. It’s not just pathetic to stew in your woundedness. It’s also human. It’s also hard proof you’re actually here. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Quite the contrary: your ineptitude might well be something to celebrate, might well be a form of insurrection.
The sensitivity required to concoct such a body of work and at so young an age is breathtaking. That obvious sensitivity also renders it difficult to work out the level of seriousness with which to take Morrissey’s constant thumb-in-eye public aggravations. He’s too intelligent not to know what he’s doing. Claiming Richard Madeley married his own mother, calling for the head of Elton John, suggesting Jamie Oliver eat his own kids — you’d have to have a heart of stone to read this stuff and not laugh. His vegan fundamentalism sometimes leads him into more complex waters, however. In particular, his endorsement of For Britain — a party alluded to even by Farage as “Nazi”.
It’s weird that the anti-establishment post-punk icon of Irish immigrant stock should move to LA forever, then become obsessed with how many Muslims there are in Bradford. Is he genuinely so concerned for the welfare of animals that he’ll lay down with dogs? It is possible. Or has he just become a bit of a curmudgeon? Nostalgia was always a key element with The Smiths, from the album covers of old film stars to the elaborate croon to the high romantic lyrical stylings. Is this unchecked nostalgia turning into regression perhaps? What kind of England is he advocating for anyway? Suet puddings? Vicars on bicycles? Whistling bobbies on the beat?
I think it was Shaun Ryder who once summed up his acerbic inclinations best: “it’s just Morrissey being Morrissey.” Morrissey is the ultimate fan. He always has been. Having written literature on James Dean, and set up the unofficial New York Dolls fan club before fame, to this day he can still be found penning elegant tributes to his favourite artists. Everyone begins as a fan. Everyone in art supplicates themselves before other art, before going on to make it themselves. In a sense, artists are just psychotically dedicated fans.
The ultimate goal is a kind of closed-circuit fandom. A self-replenishing, self-sustaining vortex of adulation, with you at the core. Ideally, you become a fan of yourself. A ritualised, masochistic enslavement to one’s idols — if you have what it takes, you might eventually be able to convert into a ritualised, masochistic enslavement to one’s own image. Morrissey strayed beyond this singularity some time ago. He’s started looking at Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace, thinking: “I want me some of that action.” Like all great egotists (see “Ye” for the mentally ill variety), only crucifixion will suffice when it comes to bringing the curtain down. Martyrdom or bust. It’s not enough that we love him, he wants all of our feelings, he wants our loathing too. Spare a thought for what it must be like to live like that. We can simply switch Morrissey off when we’re sick of him. He can never leave his creation.
Morrissey could go as far as calling for the removal of all Muslims and peoples of Muslim descent from the British Isles — he could go as far as to single out the polluting effects of me and the rest of the Algerian diaspora specifically — I would still have love for him. That last bit might actually increase my love for him — I’ve been trying to suss out how to get my dad deported for years. I dare say within our sanitised media landscape having someone around that’s willing to “play the villain” is far from a bad thing.
No, he’d have to inflict serious personal wounds for me to turn my back on him; he’d have to run my own mother down in his car then lie about it. For this tender Mancunian gob-shite is always there for us when we need him most. When the storm clouds of betrayal, self-hate and prolapsed pride begin brewing, he’s there waiting for us, the exact bon mot to hand. People forget that in a hurry it seems. That they can help themselves to the tonic of Mozza as and when it suits them, then calmly place him back on the shelf until the next time we think we know it’s over.
Lias Saoudi is the frontman of Fat White Family and the Moonlandingz, and the co-author of Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure
FatWhiteFamily 
Interesting column. In some ways a billet-doux considering some of its sentiments. Unfortunately, Mr. Saoudi makes some assumptions as to the subject’s motivations that are not necessarily substantiated.
The author takes it as a given that there is a range of proscribed opinion that is, generally speaking, well delineated and which the subject’s utterances fall afoul. One cannot help but wonder as to the identity of these arbiters who believe themselves to possess a monopoly on both virtue and truth?
Perhaps some, or even most, of what Morrissey has expressed over the years offends the sensibilities of some people. Perhaps many people. Fair enough. Rather than debate the matter, to deliberate and consider an opposing view, dialogue is concluded with the offending party being publicly pilloried and villainized. Some would call this exercise a shortcut to any actual thinking. Others would describe it as some sort of warped form of intolerance. And it should hardly be necessary to point out – to actually explain – that the genesis of an unpopular opinion isn’t necessarily rooted in hate, as seems to be the case when it involves Morrissey.
If one were to arrive at any conclusions as to Morrissey’s mindset, it appears to be a safe assumption that it is a fairly progressive one. Otherwise, Morrissey must have been a fraud throughout the 1980’s or he somehow went through some manner of profound intellectual metamorphosis (perhaps some manner of mental breakdown?) since his time with the Smiths. Neither appears even remotely possible.
What seems to irk many people is Morrissey’s propensity to think independently – to observe, apprise, and then speak unapologetically, regardless of whether his opinion, be it in the form of answers to interview questions or the wording of a song lyric, is in line with “correct” thought. In this regard, Morrissey is who he is – guileless and wholly uncompromising in terms of expressing himself. Respectfully, to write that “He’s too intelligent not to know what he’s doing.” belies a certain arrogance. Indeed, Morrissey knows all too well what he is doing as there is no end to the castigation he must suffer for being his own person.
Far from seeking symbolic crucifixion, martyrdom, or a final denouement à la Oscar Wilde, Morrissey is busy with more mundane objectives, such as looking for a record label to get his music released. And he continues to move forward artistically. Always forward. Perhaps it is time for his naysayers to move on.
Talking of post-Christian religion, Moz is an icon of Queer too. But he’ll appear more to the veterans of 80s gender-bending. By the 90s, he was too right-wing for everyone else. I can’t think to whom he’s appealed since apart from south Californian Hispanics.
Morrissey is no villain:
‘And the silly people sing: “Don’t Look Back in Anger”
And the morons sing and sway: “Don’t Look Back in Anger”
I can assure you I will look back in anger ’till the day I die’
Morrissey is no villain: ‘And the silly people sing: “Don’t Look Back in Anger”
And the morons sing and sway: “Don’t Look Back in Anger”
I can assure you I will look back in anger ’till the day I die’
Enjoyed that. Morrissey has just announced a Britain/Ireland tour this summer
I get the articles sentiments but Morriseys voice leaves me cold barring the odd song such as ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’
“I’m dreaming of a time when the English/Are sick to death of Labour, and Tories…”
Morrissey is still the only man brave enough and with enough morality to write a song about the Manchester bombing. That horror should have woken us up. The leftists who question his politics seem to believe in nothing.
One other thing, I’ve seen FWF quite a few times. I have all your records too. Brilliant live band. My 17 year old daughter also loves your music, but she and many of her pals look to our past to find meaning. She adores the smiths, the cure, David Bowie, John Lennon, elvis and bob dylan. Where are our protest songs? Where is the working class honesty of the 1980s.
Contemporary culture is nihilistic, empty and entirely without meaning. The youth have noticed.
Morrissey’s is and always has been absolutely right. Look at our country! It’s an Afro/Islamic kip.
Why are the comments to this in ‘special measures’?
Four comments! What a waste of rations!
I was never a Smiths fan. Good though Johnny Marr’s guitar playing was, I never had that much misery in my heart. The Meat is Murder album did make my second wife become a vegetarian though.
Great article. Just the fact that people moan about him (the arch-moaner) makes me appreciate him more. As we all become the embodiment of the great corporate/vanilla personality, the antidote (perhaps poisonous In large quantities) is a stubbornly unconventional character like Morrissey,
Morrissey has enormous courage and integrity and I agree with everything I hear him say or write. He speaks honestly and thank goodness we don’t all have the same ideas. And his music and singing are sublimely beautiful.