Bigmouth strikes again and again: why Morrissey fans feel so betrayed
It was once a hearing aid, or a swinging bunch of gladioli. In the 80s Morrissey had a unique way with stage props – let’s face it, he had a unique way with everything – utilising them to upend the macho cliche of live performance while offering solidarity to the marginalised.
These days, however, Morrissey prefers a different kind of onstage provocation. During a recent performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (and at a number of live shows in New York), the former Smiths singer sported a For Britain badge. For those unfamiliar with it, For Britainis a farright political party. Even Nigel Farage believes it is made up of “Nazis and racists”.
To see Morrissey embrace the far right so openly was shocking. But was it surprising? Ever since the early 90s, he has flirted with the far right and fascist imagery – wrapping himself up in the union jack, writing a song called The National Front Disco, making inflammatory comments about immigration.
Yet in the last year there has been little doubt about his views. He has claimed Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, “cannot talk properly”, and declared “Even Tesco wouldn’t employ Diane Abbott,” – the Cambridgeeducated shadow home secretary and Britain’s most prominent black MP. He has described the media’s treatment of the racist Tommy Robinson as “shocking”. And he has explicitly promoted For Britain on his Morrissey Central website: “There is only one British political party that can safeguard our security.” The party’s leader, Anne Marie Waters, posted a video online thanking Morrissey for his support.
Last year, his thoughts on #MeToo were no less inflammatory. Of Anthony Rapp, who accused Kevin Spacey of making sexual advances towards him when Rapp was 14 years old, he said: “One wonders if the boy did not know what would happen … When you are in somebody’s bedroom, you have to be aware of where that can lead.” Of the many female accusers of Harvey Weinstein, he said: “They play along. Afterwards, they feel embarrassed or disliked.” In today’s culture wars, Morrissey has clearly chosen his side – and there have been consequences. Posters for his new album, California Son, have been taken down by the train network Merseyrail. A guest vocalist on the record, Broken Social Scene’s Ariel Engle, told the Guardian she felt like she’d “been had” by the singer. A record store in Cardiff decided not to stock the album, with its owner saying sales of his music had nosedived because “customers are saying they can no longer buy into his increasingly divisive politics, not even for ‘old times’ sake’”.
For those of us whose difficult teenage years were only made tolerable by the Smiths, who considered him a friend as he evoked our inner turmoil through Walkman headphones (“Last night I felt / real arms around me / No hope, no harm, / just another false alarm”) it’s hard not to feel cheated by his behaviour.
“It stinks,” says Billy Bragg, who worked with, and loved, the Smiths during the 80s. “They were the greatest band of my generation, with the greatest guitar player and the greatest lyricist. I think Johnny [Marr] was a constraint on him … back then he had to fit into the idea of the Smiths. But now he’s betraying those fans, betraying his legacy and empowering the very people Smiths fans were brought into being to oppose. He’s become the
Oswald Mosley of pop.”
So just how did we get here? Morrissey’s politics certainly seemed leftwing in the 1980s – he was anti-Thatcher (Margaret on the Guillotine), antimonarchy (The Queen Is Dead) with an uncompromising attitude towards animal rights (Meat Is Murder). The Smiths played at the Greater London Council’s Jobs for a Change festival in 1984 and appeared on the socialist Red Wedge tour in 1986. But it was the singer’s compassion that shone through – his songs were about loneliness, outsiderdom and empathy with the weak, excluded and the downtrodden.
Yet other aspects of his character were on display even in his heyday. In 1986, Morrissey gave an interview to Melody Maker in which he claimed that a “black pop conspiracy” was keeping his band down, describing reggae as “the most racist music in the entire world” and declaring that he “detests … black modern music”.
Waving the union jack during his show at Madness’s Madstock festival in Finsbury Park, London, in 1992, felt like a more aggressive move (this was before Britpop’s Cool Britanniaera reclamation of the flag, and its association with the far right was still strong). And it was done in the knowledge that the Madness crowd contained a significant fascist/skinhead element. When – according to Pat Long’s book The History of the NME – the paper’s sole black writer Dele Fadele persuaded NME’s editors to publish a critical cover story about it, Morrissey refused to speak to the magazine for 12 years.
Tjinder Singh from Cornershop says his band were admirers of the Smiths, but began to feel wary of Morrissey in the late 80s, thanks to the tone of his solo songs such as Bengali in Platforms (“Shelve your western plans / And understand / That life is hard enough when you belong here”).
In fact, by 1992, Singh was so incensed by the singer’s behaviour, Cornershop burned a picture of the singer outside the central London offices of EMI, Morrissey’s label. “We took action because we needed to. We expected other people to take action, but it never happened.”
It is hard not to agree that proper, forceful criticism of Morrissey is overdue. Yet perhaps it’s not surprising that many were hoping he was just, misguidedly, playing provocateur. In a piece for the Guardian in 2011, the author Sukhdev Sandhu wrote beautifully about how, as an “ordinary Asian” fan of the Smiths, the singer seemed to speak directly to him: “No one had ever come as close as Morrissey, the child of Irish Catholics, to expressing a poetics of second-generation migration. He sang about shame and unlovability; I had bloodied myself as a 12-yearold using a kitchen knife to scrape away what I saw as the tainting brownness of my skin – a brownness that made me only half a person, half the Englishman I wanted to be. He sang about loneliness and isolation; I was rarely invited to the homes of schoolfriends, and certainly never invited them to my mine, for fear that they would snigger at the photographs of turbaned relatives that lined its walls.”
Morrissey is a complex star, and it can be difficult – painful, even – to untangle the things you love about him from those you despise. Sandhu says he still listens to Morrissey, and can evenrationalise the singer’s support for Robinson: “Morrissey has a soft spot for martyrs, projecting himself as one for much of his career,” he says. “I suppose he sees [Robinson] as one, too.”
I was also a huge fan when I got the chance to interview Morrissey in 2007. NME had agreed to release a seven-inch record on the cover of the magazine, and I was to write the accompanying piece. I can still remember a line from my brief: “It’s basically a puff piece,” said the commissioning editor.
It didn’t quite turn out that way. Our hour-long chat was pleasant – Morrissey was witty and courteous – and put away an impressive amount of bottled beer. But when I asked him whether he would consider living in England again, his answer shocked me: “Britain’s a terribly negative place. And it hammers people down and it pulls you back and it prevents you. Also, with the issue of immigration, it’s very difficult because, although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England, the more the British identity disappears. So the price is enormous. If you travel to Germany, it’s still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity. But travel to England and you have no idea where you are.”
I asked about his own parents being Irish immigrants, and how that had allowed him to make his very British music, to which he replied: “Yes. But it’s different now. Because the gates are flooded. And anybody can have access to England and join in … You have to be sensible about everything in life. You can’t say: “Everybody come into my house, sit on the bed, have what you like, do what you like. It wouldn’t work.” Elsewhere, he claimed that: “It seems to me that England was thrown away,” and that: “You’ll hear every accent under the sun apart from the British accent,” in Knightsbridge.
Given the controversies that had threatened to derail Morrissey’s career in the past, I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. Up to this point, he had seemed sharp and eloquent. But when challenged on these points he became petulant and evasive – intellectually incapable of defending them.
The NME, keen to hang on to its vinyl exclusive, initially tried to discard the offending quotes, but after I threatened to publish them elsewhere – and with some pressure added from certain staffers at the time – they relented. A complete breakdown in trust between myself and the editors meant that when the piece eventually went to press, my byline had been removed from the piece – making an already messy situation far worse.
When the piece was published, all hell broke loose. Morrissey took action to sue the NME and its then editor, Conor McNicholas. Morrissey published his own account of our interview in the Guardian, a ludicrously inaccurate record of events that, admittedly, contained some brutally funny put-downs: “I do not mean to be rude to Tim Jonze, but when I first caught sight of him I assumed someone had brought their child along,” he recounted, words that the best man at my wedding gleefully stole for the opening line of his speech.
But Morrissey’s article didn’t really explain the fact that he had, indeed, said all of the things NME claimed. In a desperate attempt to keep the vinyl promotion alive, he had even been offered the opportunity to clarify and backtrack but failed to do so, instead whingeing about it all being a stitch-up (the “flooded” comment actually came from this second attempt to patch things up).
It was a stressful time. I got messages of support from Paul Heaton from the Beautiful South, and Bragg called me up to offer solidarity (“Nobody ever expected to be a music journalist and liked”). But fellow music writers openly expressed doubt about my version of events. Love Music Hate Racism was initially supportive of NME, then announced it would be accepting a donation of £28,000 from Morrissey. After that it went rather quiet. Today, Zak Cochrane from the charity is open about the money: “We took [it] in good faith to continue the work we were doing,” he says. “It was at a time that the BNP were starting to make electoral gains, so the money was used to campaign.” But now he sees things differently. “Morrissey might have just been looking for some temporary credibility from Love Music Hate Racism. Certainly, the long history of support for racist and far-right organisations speaks to something else. We certainly wouldn’t be taking any further donations from Morrissey.”
A week or so away from a date in the high court, where I was to have been grilled by Morrissey’s lawyers, he agreed to accept a weak apology from the magazine: “We wish to make clear that we do not believe that [Morrissey] is a racist,” it read. “We didn’t think we were saying he was and we apologise to Morrissey if he or anyone else misunderstood our piece in that way.” No damages or legal fees were paid.
Around the time he sued NME, Morrissey forced the Word magazine into an apology over a review that said he was “paying lip service to anti-racism while talking like an old Tory immigration spokesman”, and threatened the Guardian over an article in which he told the poet Simon Armitage that the Chinese were a “sub-species”.
The implication was always that he had been misquoted, or his words taken out of context. At times, he would use his impressively dogged – and careerlong – support for animal rights as an excuse. For Britain’s opposition to halal killing seems to be his chief motivation for supporting it, although he could support other groups, including an actual animal rights party with similar policies.
At other times he would angrily denounce the thing he was accused of (“I abhor racism”) but without backing down from his actual comments. In response to his For Britain badge furore, for instance, he posted a meandering statement asking us to “ignore the cold eyes of fascism”.
Defenders are increasingly hard to come by. His press officer was unable to provide anyone to speak to us. As for his former band members, Mike Joyce preferred not to speak about another person’s politics, whereas Johnny Marr believed he had already commented on the matter (he has previously said: “The band was what it was, and the band stood for what it stood for. We were always very different people and I think most people know that. Those things are out of my control, so I tend not to worry about it”). Yet even those of us who have undergone considerable mental gymnastics to absolve Morrissey have now run out of plausible arguments (although there are those on his fan forums who seem happy to agree that Tommy Robinson is mistreated, and that For Britain does have something valid to say).
Should we boycott California Son? The decision would be harder if it wasn’t one of his worst records, which earned a one-star Guardian review. Sandhu thinks his music can survive: “I don’t think the Smiths’ back catalogue is ever going to be damaged. But I do wonder if he remembers his lyrics to I Know It’s Over: ‘It’s so easy to laugh / It’s so easy to hate / It takes guts to be gentle and kind.’”
I have to admit, not even a date in the high court, nor accusations of having a “schoolgirl giggle” have put me off listening to the Smiths. I just can’t picture the man who once sang: “I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar” as the same one rallying around Tommy Robinson (although his solo stuff feels too toxic for me to go near). But most of my own friends and colleagues have long since given up. The For Britain endorsement has been the tipping point. Cochrane says Morrissey “has a platform to spread a message of hate to his audience at a time when we’re seeing the far right across Europe looking to make serious electoral gains”. He believes labels should disown him in the same way Hospital records disowned drum’n’bass producer Mistabishi after he sent Islamophobic tweets.
As for Bragg, he still sounds devastated that “whenever a Smiths track comes up I flip on … I just can’t … I love Johnny Marr, he’s the nicest man I ever met in pop music. So I really feel for him that the great work that he’s done should be tainted in this way.”
What a tragedy it is that a man who once seemed so uniquely placed to offer solace to people during their loneliest and most difficult moments has turned into this – a supporter of those who seek to crush the very weaknesses and sensitivities he once identified with. As Bragg tweeted last year, summing up the singer’s depressing descent: “There was a light, but it has now gone out.”