A few times a week, I pass the UCKG (United Church of the Kingdom of God) building on Kilburn High Road, and I usually glance up at its plump dome and feel a teensy bit nostalgic. Before it was a church, it was the National Ballroom, a thriving music venue for decades (it closed in 1999). Nirvana played there in December 1991, but the gig to which I think back when I pass the building took place a few months earlier that year.
It was Morrissey—the second time I had seen him on his 1991 Kill Uncle tour—and my companion and I had arrived in Kilburn early enough to catch a glimpse of him being chauffeured away after soundcheck. It would be factually incorrect to say that we chased his car. It was a more a moderate hotfooting than an actual chase. We made it to the side street just as he was pulling away, and snapped frantically at the vehicle’s window with our cameras. The pictures came out well. You could see clearly it was Morrissey: aloof as a queen, smug as a cat. He was smirking, as he often is. Was it at the thought of the gold foil-effect shirt he would wear later that night on stage? How I loved that shirt.
And how I loved Morrissey. This confers on me no particular distinction. “I Was a Teenage Morrissey fan” is a revelation to file alongside other popular adolescent confessions such as “I was insufferably pretentious” and “I had acne.” But—and I’m sorry to break it to you so brutally if you had not already heard—Morrissey and I are over. Finished. I’m never going back. Not after what he did to me. What did he do? Well, his music went off and so did he.
It was nice while it lasted. And it lasted 20 years. I was a shade too young to be in on the Smiths from the start but by the time The Queen is Dead was released in June 1986, I was hanging out with some cool older kids who clued me in. Morrissey and I went all the way. All the way, that is, from 1986 to 2006, when the release of his eighth solo album, Ringleader of the Tormentors, coincided with a frosting of my affection for him. I can’t say whether the feeling was mutual; you’ll just have to contact him for his side of the story.
And it wasn’t so much that album that killed off our relationship—it’s at least half-brilliant, and far more nuanced than what followed. But what he was saying and doing away from the studio began to interfere with the music. There was always a prickly arrogance about him to offset the self-flagellation in his writing; that was part of the joy of his persona. But now there was an air of social and cultural intolerance in his proclamations which was no longer about defending the outsider—it seemed to involve lashing out pointlessly at anyone whose perspective deviated even mildly from his, or slighting entire races (“You can’t help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies,” he told the Guardian in 2010.) By the time he was ranting about Kate Middleton’s admission to hospital last year, insisting that she was swinging the lead, I found myself in the unusual position of feeling sympathy for a member of the Royal family. My 16-year-old self would have thrown up at that.
Then there were the pompous dispatches he had begun issuing through the uncritical portal of the fansite true-to-you.net; they were like a Private Eye pastiche of rock-star delusions. He had also become a strikingly poor writer. This, from a recent 1,500-word, single paragraphdiatribe against Thatcher, will make any sane person reach for the red pen: “The coverage by the British media of Thatcher’s death has been exclusively absorbed in Thatcher’s canonization to such a censorial degree that we suddenly see the modern British establishment as an uncivilized entity of delusion, giving the cold shoulder to truth, and offering indescribable disgust to anyone unimpressed by Thatcher.”(Not quite “Margaret on the Guillotine,” is it?)
I should probably confess that the blame for my cooling can’t be laid entirely at Morrissey’s feet. I think you know what I’m saying: yes, there was someone else. Another man, younger and livelier and so much more innovative than Morrissey. Ariel Pink is his name, and I realized when I heard his album Worn Copy in 2006 that he had the playfulness, wit and passion that had been missing from Morrissey for the longest time. What can I say? He’s good for me.
I didn’t leave Morrissey a goodbye note, a Dear John letter. I guess in some ways, this is that letter. But now he has left me one: his concert film Morrissey 25: Live (so named because it marks the quarter-century point in his solo career). It’s a terrible film, depressingly conservative as an example of the concert movie genre as well as a harsh indictment of its subject’s complacency and declining creativity. Helpfully, it only confirms to me how right it was that we went our separate ways. It was a hard decision. But, as he once put it, that’s how people grow up.
The film includes the full concert he played in March this year at the Hollywood High School. The set-list perversely scrapes the barrel of his solo career: the inclusion of “Alma Matters,” “Ouija Board, Ouija Board” and “You’re the One For Me, Fatty” suggest he was going in his contrarian way for a Greatest Misses effect. Any fine songs in his repertoire—from solo numbers like “Everyday is Like Sunday” to the Smiths’ “Still Ill” and “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”—tend to be massacred by his increasingly callous band. The low-point of the movie shows Morrissey handing the microphone to a selection of front-row fans who compete to give the best impressions of lobotomy patients (“Thank you for living,” says one).
We can’t blame them, though. It’s Morrissey who disgraces himself by fishing for their compliments using an industrial trawler. His egotism can only undermine the sincerity of a song like “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want,” released in 1984 but performed here in an overwrought new arrangement. To hear him sing “For once in my life, let me get what I want” after several fans have done everything short of offering themselves up to him for sacrifice is ungrateful at best, disingenuous at worst.
I’ve seen good Morrissey gigs and bad ones. I went to more than 20 shows—one for each year of my infatuation—and I cherish the great nights (Wembley Arena 1991, Battersea Power Station 1996, Royal Albert Hall 2002, Harlem’s Apollo Theatre 2004) as much as I wince at the lacklustre ones (Bournemouth 1991, Ilford, east London, 1996). Unless the transfer from stage to screen has been especially harsh, my Moz-memory tells me that the performance we see in Morrissey 25: Live is not one that merited conserving. But at least it has helped bring closure for me to this relationship. I know I will still gaze up at the old National Ballroom building and get goosebumps. But I know also that I can move on. I only hope the same is true of Morrissey.
Morrissey 25: Live is in cinemas from Saturday.
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