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It could almost be the 90s: at a sold out O2 Arena, a pink-shirted Morrissey and his five-piece band rally the crowd with Suedehead, each oscillating “why” roared en masse. It is as if his past two decades of inflammatory political activism hasn’t hurt his reputation. What’s more, things will soon pick up, he assures us, because his morphine has just kicked in. A smatter of laughter. Probably joking?
Opiate allusions aside, the between-songs narrative is a classic tour-de-Moz. He stumbles from self-hype to castigating “jealous bitches” and his customary bete noire, the cancel culture that has so thoroughly deplatformed him that he has no choice but to stand on a big platform and tell 20,000 fans all about it. Though its insinuations appear lost on the crowd, his alignment with far-right talking points comes to the fore on recent single Notre-Dame, a repugnant synth-pop lament seemingly based on debunked (and broadly Islamophobic) conspiracies that arsonists started the 2019 fire at the Paris cathedral. “We know who tried to kill you,” he sings, addressing the cathedral itself. “Before investigations they said: there’s nothing to see here.”
The Smiths songs seem beamed in from another timeline altogether. The night’s first, A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours, takes on a psychedelic grandeur, while the elegiac I Know It’s Over is accompanied by images of his late mother. But the moment is lost in the flat live arrangement, his mighty croon single-handedly dragging the band up the ballad’s emotional peaks.
Afterwards he holds court once more, coyly declaring that he is “concerned about the safety of all communities, but the one that’s at risk now is my own”. Uh oh. Sounds like the morphine is wearing off. He heralds the slashing guitars of Irish Blood, English Heart in a blaze of red lights, presenting the song as an infernal, stomach-turning spectacle. Nowhere is the cognitive disconnect from an old Morrissey staple more odiously apparent, its ambiguous nationalism unmasked by his proto-Reform politics.
The whiplash from such lows makes even the would-be highs – a mammoth How Soon Is Now? leaves him collapsed beside the drum kit – feel exhausting. Apparently the feeling is mutual. “You have been terribly nice but I have to go soon to take some more morphine,” he says. “Or else I die.” The encore is There Is a Light That Never Goes Out: a nostalgic burst of exquisite agonies and ecstasies. Then the lights go out, and the Smiths frontman strides off-stage, back to being Morrissey.
