★★★★★
A night of burning melancholy sees Morrissey at the Hammersmith Apollo deftly meld classics, new tracks, and powerful visuals for a thought-provoking performance. Read our Morrissey gig review.
There’s a peculiar atmosphere during a performance by British society’s long-standing persona non grata. ‘Morrissey, the Pretender’, ‘Morrissey, the Pariah’, and ‘Morrissey, the Unpersoned’ are all labels fit for a star who’s forever stalked the periphery of the Overton Window, topics deemed acceptable for mainstream discourse. Nobody’s quite sure how much controversy they might hear tonight.
As the opening helicopter scenes from Apocalypse Now play out on the screen behind the band, pre-empting Big Mouth’s stage entry, a London cabbie, Simon, sits next to me, wondering anxiously whether Morrissey will sing any Smiths songs at all, such is the unpredictability of the Manc singer.
It isn’t long until Simon’s doubt is relieved. Martin Sheen’s grimace fades into a twin-up projection of an obstinate James Baldwin, and Mozza strides on stage. He tells us he’s ours for the next 90 minutes, after which he’ll be “packed off forever”. Hopefully not.
Included in the playlist are Morrissey’s popular solo tracks (‘Suedehead’, ‘Everyday is Like Sunday’, and ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’), as well as a proper selection of The Smiths’ classics (‘Half a Person’, ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’, and ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’). The set also features some of Morrissey’s newer songs, like ‘Knockabout World’ and ‘The Night Pop Dropped’, from his forthcoming album Bonfire of the Teenagers, for the super-fans in the room.
The projections on the backdrop change with each song. There’s a prominent theme of tragic artists cut down in their prime or punished for subversion, whether by suicide or exile: the three-century-old Romantic archetype.
Visuals of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Oscar Wilde, Anne Sexton, and Ezra Pound complement Morrissey’s songwriting expertly, elevating the performance towards a revision of these figure’s lives and a greater understanding of what they mean to the musician; one who pulls no punches in reminding us he’s a well-read, cultured bloke from inner-city Manchester.
Morrissey has always been the chaste bedfellow of his own loneliness. An outlaw who has never really been in vogue nor coveted mass endorsement. Because of this, he can be proud of a loyal fanbase whose ears can discern between abject misery and Morrissey’s currency: burning melancholy. Two types of sadness most cannot draw a line between.
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He’ll continue as warden of that lonely plain and mentor of 21st-century sceptics seeking radical counsel. “When someone tells you to sit down, you tell them to shut up,” he instructs this audience, right after announcing defiantly, “Free speech and democracy are coming back to this country,” before launching into the dervish Smiths anthem ‘Sweet and Tender Hooligan’.
Sometime between then and leaving the stage, he rips off his t-shirt (featuring a striking print of Everton footballer Johnny Morrissey beneath the words ‘HAMMER SMITH’), embraces several roaring teenagers who have risked their necks to crawl on stage, and tells us to pat ourselves on the back, “For all the s*** you’ve had to put up with the last few years”.
