E-Paper
Mozza: Best singer alive
Morrissey tends to package self-deprecation and disaffection in arrogance and spitefulness.
Joan of Arc, I’m told, had her moment of epiphany when she heard the voice of God one bright’n’sunny day. Well, I had my moment of truth at Glastonbury during the three-day music festival. I heard the Gallagher Brothers pump out their classics. I recovered my hormones when P.J. Harvey did her set. I enjoyed Sir Paul McCartney to the point that I am now willing to forgive him for O-bla-di, O-bla-da. But at the end of the three days, it was me and Morrissey – and a fieldful of people who played kebab mey haddi. This was Morrissey at his ironic, self-deprecating poet-mobster best, playing a set that was well… about love and hate and that word that never made it to the dictionary, ‘lovehate’.
For most people, the ex-Smiths frontman has been a McCartney without his Lennon ever since he parted ways with guitarist Johnny Marr. Now, I’ve never really bought that. Gems like Sonny, The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get and You’re The One For Me, Fatty have come out of the post-Smiths Morrissey cabinet. And if the Glastonbury gig didn’t convince me of that (where Morrissey sang two Smiths classics, the bone-rattling Shakespeare’s Sister and the romantic-suicidal There Is A Light That Never Goes Out), Mozza’s latest album after a gap of seven years, You Are The Quarry (yet to be available in this country), gently rams the message home. The cover of the album says the story: a Morrissey in a pin-striped suit holding a ’20s-machinegun that marries Al Capone with Oscar Wilde.
America Is Not The World is the quiet laconic song about Morrissey’s new home. Then comes the bone-whirring song of disappointment about his England. Now, if one doesn’t know Morrissey, Irish Blood, English Heart may sound like one of those patriotic football chant-songs. But it isn’t. He packages self-deprecation and disaffection in arrogance and spitefulness. (“Thank you. At least, some of you. Or most of you,” he said to his audience at Glastonbury. “I have friends here,” adding with a non-smile that could be chewed, “Twelve.”) There is a tremendous sadness in the spittle, especially when he sings, I’ve been dreaming of a time when/ the English are sick to death of Labour/ and Tories/ and spit upon the name of Oliver Cromwell.
In I Have Forgiven Jesus, Mozza is tired of life and mocks the Superstar from Nazareth. I’m Not Sorry, The World Is Full of Crashing Bores and First of The Gang To Die can all be in a Smiths Best of… But the high point for me in the album comes in How Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel? “I’ve had my face dragged in/ fifteen miles of shit/ and I do not/ and I do not/ and I do not like it./ So how can anybody say/ they know how I feel?/ The only one around here who is me is me”. This is violent sadness. When Morrissey sang out these words at Glastonbury in the pouring evening, I realised what my grandmother should have said to me but hadn’t: never invest your heart in something; you will be hurt. And wet. And muddy.
