TIM DE LISLE MUSIC
Morrissey
INEC Arena, Killarney
Touring until October 14
★★★☆☆
Courtney Marie Andrews
Loose Future
Out Friday
★★★★★
Meat is murder, he once told us. And Morrissey is Marmite. He has enough fans to have come second in a 2006 BBC poll naming Britain’s greatest living icon, just behind David Attenborough (and ahead of David Bowie). But he also drives a lot of people mad.
The last of his umpteen record companies dropped him in 2020. Since then he’s finished what he says is ‘the best album of my life’. He has yet to find a label willing to release it.
Warming up for his UK tour in a cosy Irish arena, Morrissey walks on stage wearing wide-leg jeans, holding a packet of crisps, exuding charisma. At
63, he still sings with stentorian intensity and writes songs bursting with elegant bitterness.
The first line he sings is ‘We hate it when our friends become successful’. On Bonfire Of Teenagers, the title track of the unreleased album, he dismisses fellow Mancunians who sang Don’t Look Back In Anger after the arena bombing as ‘morons’.
His solo stuff could be The Smiths, if only it had Johnny Marr’s jangling eloquence.
This five-man band has two guitarists, sometimes three, but they never break free like Marr.
Their sound, halfway from punk to Britpop, can be powerful (Irish Blood English Heart) or plodding (Rebels Without Applause).
The five Smiths tracks include two rarities in Frankly, Mr Shankly and Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want, but the band’s greatest hit, Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, only appears as a slogan on a tote bag. Morrissey is famous for being outrageous, but maybe he is tiring of that. He doesn’t sing The Queen Is Dead, or embark on a rant: he’s so well behaved, it’s almost disappointing. Courtney Marie Andrews is a singer-songwriter from Arizona with a crystalline voice and a pinpoint pen. Since her last album, the exquisite Old Flowers (2020), she has fallen in love. It turns out she’s so good, she can even write happy songs.