At the recent Forever Now one-day festival at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes, I caught Johnny Marr’s solo set on the main stage. His presence perked my interest, as I was an enormous fan of The Smiths back in the day. Would Marr raise the ghost of great gigs gone by? Because, make no mistake, The Smiths’ gigs were great: sweaty and raucous celebrations of music and crowd fervour. The mosh-pit would be a tangle of limbs, lost shoes, and fresh faces gazing in awed adoration at a band thundering through their thrillingly odd odes to teenage insecurity, sexual ambivalence, vituperative outsider angst, and … vegetarianism. Morrissey would flail around the stage, wafting flowers and occasionally breaking into falsetto, with Marr’s novel jangly accompaniment and the sturdiest rhythm section in indie rock. The performances were vertiginous. Smiths concerts were special events. Unfortunately, Marr’s dreary Forever Now set failed to raise a murmur of that spirit.
I was vaguely aware that his solo albums were critically rated and that his sets were festival favourites, so I was somewhat confused by the blandness of Marr’s set. The performance rested heavily on versions of Smiths’ classics but without the spirit that I recall from those heady days at the Electric Ballroom and Lyceum. These versions were bland and plodding, sung in Marr’s monotonous drone, reduced to sing-along nostalgia. Why should Smiths nostalgics want Marr ruining their memories with these fuzzy reprints? Why, moreover, is he a critical darling? The answer is obvious. Johnny Marr is Not Morrissey.
For many earnest Smiths fans — and all overly earnest music critics — Morrissey is The Great Embarrassment. However high their regard for the eighties Manchester band, their horror at the former lead singer’s (supposedly) racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic public statements means he now sits lower than the low. He’s super low. He’s almost Rupert Lowe. Morrissey has approved of Brexit, admired Nigel Farage, complained about immigration, and composed a song suggesting that we probably shouldn’t stifle our anger when a terrorist kills 22 innocent young people and harms thousands of others, many with life-changing injuries or severe psychological trauma. Call him old-fashioned. And indeed they do — they also call him far right, fascistic and bigoted. Morrissey sullies their memories of The Smiths, turning fond remembrances of free GLC gigs at County Hall, with the band supported by left-leaning stalwarts like The Redskins and Billy Bragg, into soiled bygones.
Marr’s politics do not mean we should pretend his music is more than average
It is almost impossible to imagine Morrissey appearing at a UK music festival. Punk rappers chanting death to the IDF or avowing support for Hamas may well be, but the frontman who once encouraged us to “hang the DJ” and put “Margaret on the Guillotine” would probably cause yer actual white riot (Forever Now being, like Glastonbury, more Caucasian-skewed than a Rock Against Communism gig). Although he still sells out tours, putting him before a crowd who didn’t specifically make the immoral decision to damn their eternal soul by buying an unadulterated Morrissey ticket is unthinkable. There’s one significant problem with this. Morrissey is still capable of raising those Smiths ghosts, as well as plundering a solo catalogue with as many memorable songs as The Smiths delivered in their heyday. I’ve seen him a couple of times recently — his band is tight, his voice is mighty, his flailing is as crazed as ever. Backed by a VJ’d stream of cult TV and musical icons, you can witness utterly compelling versions of the likes of “How Soon Is Now” accompanied by jerky, oneirically repetitive Peter Falk clips. The crowd action may not be as intense, and our fan faces are not so fresh, but the spirit of The Smiths moves the hall in mysterious ways. The music is still urgent.
Yet this cuts no ice with critics or the music industry. Since 2020’s album I Am Not a Dog on a Chain (a strong number 3 on the UK chart), Morrissey has been unable to find a record label willing to release his music. The Manchester Arena bombing song, “Bonfire of Teenagers”, has become a live favourite with fans, even though it remains unreleased. A difficult personality may contribute to industry leeriness. But while the 2020 album received praise from some quarters for its electronic and synth-driven sounds, Morrissey’s strong vocals, and standout tracks “Bobby, Don’t You Think They Know?” and “My Hurling Days Are Done” — two of the most gorgeous pieces of music in any rock artist’s recent catalogue — many reviews focused instead on calls for boycotts and outrage over his political views. Soundboard claimed, oddly, that Morrissey shouldn’t have released an album with his face on the cover “so soon after the UK has left the European Union.” The Independent declared that “whether fans can dissociate the man from the music has become the most pressing matter surrounding his work.” Laut.de wrote that whatever admitted qualities his music has, they “disappear under the burden of his public statements.” When Louder Than War dared to rave about Morrissey’s recent sold-out concert at the Co-op Live — Britain’s biggest indoor arena and the third largest in the world, with a 23,000-plus capacity — one reader complained:
Why are you glossing over the elephant in the arena … Great art can transcend the artist’s shortcomings but in the current political climate — Mozzer — that joke isn’t funny anymore.
Artistic output can indeed be separated from an artist’s personal “shortcomings,” albeit in the case of Marr, his music’s shortcomings are overlooked because he is the age’s version of a “decent bloke.” The Guardian almost let the cat out of the bag when its critic reviewed a Marr album with the following admission:
The dismay Morrissey has caused appears to have led some people to take the view of Marr — whose every public utterance displays a man of empathy and grace — as “the good one” in the Smiths, and concentrated attention on his music in its own right, music that is now substantially more interesting than Morrissey’s.
But is it? Wading through those albums for this piece, I was struck by the sameness of Marr’s material, his frankly risible lyrics, his flat singing (he rarely does emphasis and cannot do phrasing). A Marr solo might pass as a pleasant(ish) soundtrack for half an hour in a Free Trade coffee shop, but no one could seriously mistake it for vital music. Likewise, the live gigs — festooned with mild Smiths covers — pass time rather than recapture it. Reviews are full of praise for what his official Ticketmaster puff piece calls his “hypnotic tremolo riffs,” which is true, I suppose, if “hypnotic” translates as likely to send you into a thoughtless sleep.
Not only is Marr the epitome of a progressive vision of decency, his songs and statements show that he’s on the correct side of the culture war. His lyrics for “European Me” present a vision of European solidarity, “Easy Money” slates greed, and “Spirit Power and Soul” and “Human” offer generalised calls for empowerment and universal betterment. When push comes to shove, Marr is willing to sign up to a fashionable good cause, as demonstrated by his boilerplate statement in solidarity with Kneecap, ticking the various expected boxes — support for “free expression and political activism,” a statement that “Oppression fears artistic freedom,” clichés about giving “voice to the voiceless,” and a “call for an immediate end to the atrocities and a free Palestine.” It may as well have been written by AI, with a prompt to carefully avoid anything too unsettling, such as the “genocide” word. Morrissey, meanwhile, has performed in Israel and written a paean to the country.
My point here is not to suggest that Morrissey is right (as in correct), or that Marr is wrong or not a swell chap. My point is that none of this matters. Marr’s politics do not mean we should pretend his music is more than average. Morrissey’s politics should not mean we cannot accept that he still has flair. Unfortunately, the stultifying tendency to elevate politics above all other considerations leads many to exalt mediocrity above inspiration. If this were just about The Smiths, it would matter only to those of us still holding a flame for a highlight of our vanished youth. But the elevation of Marr over Morrissey for reasons that are mostly non-artistic is emblematic of a much wider cultural trend. A shame, because last night I dreamt that we used to love music.
