Morrissey, our love affair is over
Idon’t want to get hyperbolic about it, but the first Smiths song I heard was Sheila Take A Bow, and it changed my life. It started with a weird jangle and, by the time it was finished, I was a different person. It happens, especially when we’re young: some song or band or singer comes along and flips you right open, has a good old poke around in your innards and rearranges things in new and unexpected ways.
It’s happened to me on a few memorable occasions. The first time I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit, and one time in Tower Records when I heard The Black Parade.
But the first time was Sheila Take A Bow, played live by The Smiths on a show called
The Tube.
I’d bunked off school with an elaborate Ferris Bueller-esque scheme, and was just settling in for Days of Our Lives, when this awkward youth music show from the United Kingdom came on instead.
TVNZ used to chuck on whatever it had at hand to make up time back in the day.
On this occasion, it was some bloke dressed like my granddad, a bunch of gladiolis stuffed in his back pocket, dancing like he was having a fit, with Elvis hair and a voice like strangled cats.
‘‘I’m a girl and you’re a boy,’’ he sang, with a kind of sly nonchalance that (looking back) was perfectly calibrated to ping every teenage hormone, gland, and speck of pretentiousness in my body.
‘‘Throw your homework on to the fire! Come out and find the one that you love!’’
And that, dear reader, was that.
I spent the next three hours trying to style my hair into a quiff, and hand-stencilling my own Smiths T-shirt, until my mum came home from work and told me to quit it with the fake blockednose, I was going to school tomorrow whether I liked it or not.
I was furious about it. What if there was more of this Tube malarkey on the telly? What if I missed more of The Smiths?
That Saturday, I hit the high street and bought every Smiths thing I could afford.
For a long time, all I had was one crappy cassette tape of The Queen Is Dead and a seven-inch of How Soon Is Now – my personal anthem to this day – with a picture of David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up on it. I played it until the lyrics were imprinted on my soul.
‘‘You say it’s gonna happen now, but when exactly do you really mean?’’ Morrissey wailed. ‘‘See, I’ve already waited too long and all my hope is gone.’’
Every new Smiths song I uncovered confirmed I’d made the right choice to devote my entire life to this band.
Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before, The Boy With The Thorn In His Side, There Is a Light That Never Goes Out: the songs couldn’t have been more me if I’d written them myself.
I was a weird, awkward, lonely kid who had trouble relating to people. Morrissey spoke for me at a volume and with a clarity I could never hope to attain.
I tell you all this so that you’ll have some inkling of how much it hurts me to say this now: I’m through with Morrissey.
I have been through with him several times in the past: when he called the Chinese people a ‘‘subspecies’’ over their treatment of animals; when he ‘‘nearly’’ voted for UKIP and in a statement that defies all reason said it was ‘‘obvious that [Nigel Farage] would make a good Prime Minister’’; when he called Hitler ‘‘Left Wing’’ and later said ‘‘everyone prefers their own race’’, like it was a given and not blatantly racist to think in such myopic terms; and when he vocally supported Far-Right, white supremacist party For Britain, describing leader Anne Marie Waters, author of the ludicrously titled Beyond Terror: Islam’s Slow Erosion of Western Democracy, ‘‘extremely intelligent’’.
To be clear, Waters says Islam is ‘‘inherently violent’’, ran a group called Sharia Watch, and reckons ‘‘the establishment’’ protects the religion and deliberately stifles debate about it – an assertion that is demonstrably bollocks.
I even looked the other way when he gave a ridiculously bloated interview to his nephew in which he claimed The Guardian newspaper was out to get him.
Billy Bragg called him ‘‘the Oswald Mosley of pop’’, for crying out loud.
I ignored it all, rationalising that as long as I didn’t buy any of his new music, I could continue to carry the feeling I’d had that day when I first heard his music and imagined somewhere out in the world there was a clever, soulful, emotionally competent man who understood me.
But, as I was changed in the space of one threeminute pop song, I flicked open a story in The Guardian last week to find it was the last straw. At a time when the right to protest has never been more crucial, and the Far-Right seems determined to make free speech an ideological battleground, Morrissey ejected an anti-Far-Right protester from his concert in the United States.
That’s that.
‘‘For those of us whose difficult teenage years were only made tolerable by The Smiths, it’s hard not to feel cheated,’’ journalist Tim Jonze wrote of Morrissey’s slow, painful fall from grace.
But I don’t feel cheated. I just feel contempt and a deep shame that it took me this long to admit it.
The king is dead, boys. He’s been dead for years. Good riddance.