Morrissey
3Arena
★★★★★
“This is not an hallucination,” Morrissey tells us, in case we were wondering, and yet tonight does seem strangely chimeric.
In modern music, Morrissey remains something of an anomaly, perhaps because he remains so firmly himself; “in my own strange way, I’ve always been true to you” he sings on the brilliant Speedway, backed by a band comprising Juan Galeano, Jesse Tobias, Camila Grey, Matthew Walker and Carmen Vandenberg.
While Morrissey doesn’t completely refuse the past (he folds in four Smiths songs), he is more interested in using it for inspiration and amplification, including visuals that survey some of his perennial obsessions: James Baldwin, Edna O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Dionne Warwick, David Bowie and Oscar Wilde.
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And obsession is the touchstone for Morrissey, something he partly details in Rebels Without Applause (“the gangs all gone, and I smoulder on”), recasting himself again and again as the outlier and last man standing.
His voice has always somehow belonged to another time. On One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell, he is the “savage beast” with “nothing to sell”, and yet his voice, still so majestic, manages to “sell” us, sweeping us up. On something like the stirring Life is a Pigsty, it is genuinely transporting, where he makes a song about “brand new broken fortunes” sound somewhat aspirational.
The reason Morrissey continues to intrigue is perhaps because he speaks to the disenchanted, tracing a thread from adolescence, with its heady sense of gilded possibilities to the often jarring realities of the world that is to come. And at the heart of his work is a sense of high idealism in conflict with crushing disappointment, from Best Friend on the Payroll to I Wish You Lonely.
Morrissey’s most affecting songs are steeped in a kind of faded romanticism, like the melancholy Everyday is like Sunday and the swooning I Know It’s Over, with an accompanying image of Morrissey’s late mother, deepening the impact.
There is wry humour too, when Morrissey sings “stab me in your own time” on Scandinavia, he tells us that “some of these songs are tongue-in-cheek, but that’s not one of them”, before rampaging through Sure Enough, the Telephone Rings and its transactional tales.
There is a swaggering menace to something like I Will See You in Far Off Places, which resembles a kind of warning bell. While many of his songs contain that sense of panic, he leavens with some that convey uneasy resignation. This happens with the first of his two encore songs: Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, which has evolved into a sort-of lullaby, or an alternative anthem for doomed youth (and beyond), to borrow from Wilfred Owen.
It leaves the audience bloodied, but unbowed, as Morrissey takes us into the visceral gut-punch that is Irish Blood, English Heart, reminding us that he will die “with both of my hands untied”, as if we didn’t know already.
