a third conversation piece...'now morrissey is a was'

Since when did Stephen Patrick Morrissey become like your horrible new step dad?  And where did the great man lose his muse?

These are burning questions!

Following an unmerited savaging at the mercy of intransigent UK music critics during the second half of the 1990s, as well as a brow-beating handed down to him from the Courts of Justice (who deemed Morrissey ‘devious and truculent’ when summing up The Smiths high profile legal dispute), Moz (as he is still referred to affectionately every now and again) fled to L.A, becoming something of a recluse

This state of self-imposed isolation, albeit broken by a World Tour in 2000/1, ended with his much feted comeback album ‘You Are The Quarry’, three years later.  All of a sudden Morrissey found himself on the Jonathan Ross show (where Ross, as is his wont, asked Moz to join him and his celebrity pals for a game of tennis), in addition to returning to Manchester for an emotional homecoming gig, and gracing the NME front cover.

Inevitably the very same critics, the very same publications that had ganged up on him previously, this time gathered round to proclaim our Stephen a national treasure. 

Sad to say, Morrissey’s ego was stoked, and this time his arch wit, and fiercely individual expression only seemed to surface in interviews - evidence of it on acetate was hard to find.  Sure, the tunes were catchy, if not up to repeat listening, but the words were blunted.

On several cuts from ‘You Are The Quarry’, and in a number from the following album, ‘Ringleader of The Tormentors’, Morrissey for once sounded as if he didn’t really understand what he was singing about.  So a generation of music fans that had grown up with The Smiths and Morrissey Mark I had to put up with songs as perplexing as ‘I Have Forgiven Jesus’, ‘America Is Not The World’, and ‘The Youngest Was The Most Loved’, and yet such was the loyalty to ole’ Moz they actually did.  This in spite of the fact that when Morrissey addressed more typical subject matter – unrequited love, loss, yearning etc – he did so with none of the candour and melodrama: he had either mellowed in his middle age, or descended into a mid-life stupor.

Therefore, when the same fans tuned into BBC Radio 2 in 2009 to watch the inaugural performance of Morrissey Mark II’s third studio album, ‘Years of Refusal’, it was with an air of trepidation.  Would they come out of the ordeal relieved at seeing, and hearing, a singer/song-writer who had indeed reconciled his past and moved on to the next day, or would they witness the desperate flails of a spoiled pseudo-American teen, trapped in a man’s body?

The proof was in the musical pudding, except the pudding turned out to be a dog’s dinner.  Morrissey, once the cat loving, bookish, NHS bespectacled subversive had seemingly become a boorish hound, with a turgid, self-conscious, altogether uninspired group of musicians behind him.

Now the poor boy is without a record deal, and can’t seem to find one for love or money.  The media still enjoys reporting his latest flippant, occasionally barbed remark, but Morrissey as a media personality does not sit comfortably, nor was it ever meant to be that one could simply take him or leave him.

In 1992, on his excellent Your Arsenal album, he sang ‘London is dead..we look to Los Angeles for the language we use’.  London may be dead (the UK music scene now a desert drained of all life blood by Simon Cowell et al) but Los Angeles is dead too, and perhaps it was shot of life even before Morrissey moved there in the late 90s - or perhaps Morrissey was just too far removed from Whalley Range; perhaps he would have done far better to move back up the M6 to the basin of his inspiration, where his intellectual pursuit had free reign.