The BBC hand them stardom
Saturday, 12. July 2008, 12:56:41
Well, if I don't write this today, I probably never will. It's been over a week now since I saw, in company with Mr. Wu, Morrissey in concert at the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park.
I'm a little tired of live music reviews, as they seldom seem to convey more than the fact that the writer either enjoyed or didn't enjoy the event. I don't really want to write the usual live review, but I don't really know what else to write. Anyway, let's see what we can do.
There were a number of acts lined up for that day, but I think the only ones that Mr. Wu and myself were interested in were Beck and Morrissey. Besides which, I was coming up to London on the day, and Mr. Wu had to work, so we were bound to miss most of the line-up. I met Mr. Wu at his place of work, and we discussed what songs we thought Morrissey would do, and what songs we would like him to do, and whether we would catch much of Beck's set. Mr. Wu was particularly keen for Morrissey to do The Last of the Famous International Playboys. I made some jokes about the first song being National Front Disco, and so on. I also remarked that it would be interesting to see how he comes across now, since he's at an interesting stage in his career. It seems as if, with his 'comeback', he's more popular than he's ever been. At the same time, he has only recently been involved in another controversy, perhaps the most notable of his career so far, ending as it did in legal action being taken, by Morrissey.
I had a feeling that it was going to be a good show. Morrissey's recent statement somehow seemed to exude confidence and augur well.
When we arrived at Hyde Park, Beck was already onstage. We strode briskly in the direction of the music, stopped only by a girl giving away free samples of wine. Even that would not have stopped us, had not the girl shouted, "It's free!"
Soon we came to a place of comfortable distance and settled in. To be honest, I don't want to spend any longer writing this than is necessary, and writing about Beck's set, it seems to me, is not necessary. It was the first time I had seen him live. At one point, I remarked to Mr. Wu, "I think he's phoning his performance in." "Not even that," said Mr. Wu, "he's faxing it in." Mr. Wu assured me that he has seen Beck before and he has been brilliant. I wondered if perhaps he resented being second billing. Whatever the reason, Beck's set was the dullest kind of rock'n'roll set, and not something I would have expected from someone who can do this.
There was about half an hour or so of this, then, mercifully, there came the interval. Mr. Wu complained that it was better in the old days when there was some compilation tape put on before the main act, usually put together by the headliners themselves. Then we noticed something strange as we watched the video clips being played on the video screens either side of the stage. They were brilliantly chosen and hilarious. It was obvious, after all, that this was the work of Morrissey. I still want to track some of those clips down, but they included footage of Brigitte Bardot, some camp old hoofer singing to a girl in a tutu that he is the one she should confess to, some clips from an episode of The Untouchables in which there featured lots of dialogue about a villain, or victim, called Morrissey ("It's settled then. Tonight, we take Morrissey", etc.), an interview with Shelagh Delany, and probably more that I've forgotten.
After a pleasingly brief interval (sometimes these things do drag on), the drum intro track to The Operation started up, and the band and Morrissey entered the stage. All were wearing Playboy T-shirts, and the first number was, by great serendipity, The Last of the Famous International Playboys. It was obvious that it was going to be a great gig. Somehow, Morrissey had known when he had written his statement that it would be. Towards the end of the first song, Morrissey did one of his famous live lyric changes. "In our lifetime those who kill/The news world hands them stardom", became, "In our lifetime those who kill/The BBC hand them stardom". We both laughed at this, Mr. Wu and I.
The second song was a Smiths song, Ask, which was a very pleasant surprise. In fact, the setlist was full of great surprises, including The Death of a Disco Dancer, Vicar in a Tutu, Stretch Out and Wait, Sister, I'm a Poet and Billy Budd. With the occasional lapse into hohummery here and there (All You Need is Me), the gig just seemed to get better and better. When The Death of a Disco Dancer started, I had the feeling that this was going to be the best song of the evening. The interesting thing about a Morrissey gig is that, even in the midst of all the physical confusion of a live performance, the words still seem to matter. This song felt, to me, incredibly zeitgeisty. "Love, peace and harmony/Love, peace and harmony/Oh, very nice, very nice, very nice/But maybe in the next world." The ironic bitterness of that repeated "very nice" came across quite chillingly. Surely we're at a point in history where that really is the decision facing us - love, peace and harmony, or "the next world", in other words, the end of this one.
Maybe it was just me, but APOCALYPSE seemed very much in the air. I mean, perhaps that should not be a surprise. Still, some of the lyrics struck me afresh: "Will the world end in the nighttime/I really don't know/Or will the world end in the daytime/I don't know", from Stretch Out and Wait. Perhaps tellingly, there was another lyric change here. The following line is usually, "And is there any point ever having children?/Oh, I don't know." This time the answer to the question was a single, emphatic, "No!" There was also the slight lyric change in Ask: "If it's not love, then it's the bomb/The nuclear bomb that will bring us together."
I suppose the apocalypse theme - also emphasised in a peculiar way by Morrissey complaining about the smell of roasting meat wafting over the park, "Putting death into your body, death into your body," he repeated a number of times, ending with the peculiar quip, "Oh, I've gone too far" - chimed in with some things I had been thinking anyway. I believe the crowd there numbered about 30,000. I thought, and not for the first time, about the tremendous amount of resources that are needed for such an event, in terms of electricity, transport and so on. Obviously, it would be hypocritical of me to be damning of such a use of resources, since I enjoyed the event, and I wonder if such mass public celebrations are, to some extent, necessary. Still, I also wonder how much longer we can keep this sort of thing up. Maybe, if we get the right energy sources, for a much longer time. But we don't seem to have the right energy sources at the moment.
What it did lead me to reflect on is the nature of stardom, and what I have long believed to be the very unhealthy relationship that our society (Britain, and I'm sure other societies) has with art. There is really no system for nurturing the artist in our society, outside of a few elitist institutions. When, back in the early eighties, Morrissey sang lines like, "No, I've never had a job/Because I'm too shy", what he was really expressing, in both a very direct, and very roundabout way, was the difficulty of being an artist in a society that does its very best to destroy artists. The usual response to anyone trying to 'make it' in any artistic sphere, before they have made it, is, "Who the fuck are you?" People resent artists. People wish to lynch artists. A huge event like the Morrissey gig, resembles, in some peculiar way, a sacrificial bonfire, complete with the smell of roasting flesh wafting across the field. The difference being that the sacrifice now is only symbolically of the artist ("Tonight, we're going to take Morrissey"). It is a bonfire erected to the artist's success. The artist has become god. How did he do this? He overcame death - the death that society tried (and failed) by any means necessary, to inflict on the artist and the artist's dream.
What kind of a relationship is this to have with artists? On the one hand they are despised as vermin, and on the other, revered as gods. And then people are surprised when occasionally those artists are human and act like arseholes. If you had had a whole country lusting for your blood one minute, and then worshipping you the next, the chances are, I reckon, you'd act like an arsehole sometimes, too.
All this is summed up for me in the words of that opening song, The Last of the Famous International Playboys: "See, in our lifetime those who kill/The BBC hand them stardom/And these are the ways on which I was raised/These are the ways on which I was raised/I never wanted to kill/I am not naturally EVIL/Such things I do/Just to make myself more attractive to you/Have I failed?"
Well, on Friday night, in Hyde Park, at least, Morrissey did not fail.
The encore, and possibly the best song of the night, was another surprise, What She Said, from the album Meat is Murder.
"What she said/How come someone hasn't noticed that I'm dead/And decided to bury me/God knows I'm ready..."
Excellent stuff.
I'm a little tired of live music reviews, as they seldom seem to convey more than the fact that the writer either enjoyed or didn't enjoy the event. I don't really want to write the usual live review, but I don't really know what else to write. Anyway, let's see what we can do.
There were a number of acts lined up for that day, but I think the only ones that Mr. Wu and myself were interested in were Beck and Morrissey. Besides which, I was coming up to London on the day, and Mr. Wu had to work, so we were bound to miss most of the line-up. I met Mr. Wu at his place of work, and we discussed what songs we thought Morrissey would do, and what songs we would like him to do, and whether we would catch much of Beck's set. Mr. Wu was particularly keen for Morrissey to do The Last of the Famous International Playboys. I made some jokes about the first song being National Front Disco, and so on. I also remarked that it would be interesting to see how he comes across now, since he's at an interesting stage in his career. It seems as if, with his 'comeback', he's more popular than he's ever been. At the same time, he has only recently been involved in another controversy, perhaps the most notable of his career so far, ending as it did in legal action being taken, by Morrissey.
I had a feeling that it was going to be a good show. Morrissey's recent statement somehow seemed to exude confidence and augur well.
When we arrived at Hyde Park, Beck was already onstage. We strode briskly in the direction of the music, stopped only by a girl giving away free samples of wine. Even that would not have stopped us, had not the girl shouted, "It's free!"
Soon we came to a place of comfortable distance and settled in. To be honest, I don't want to spend any longer writing this than is necessary, and writing about Beck's set, it seems to me, is not necessary. It was the first time I had seen him live. At one point, I remarked to Mr. Wu, "I think he's phoning his performance in." "Not even that," said Mr. Wu, "he's faxing it in." Mr. Wu assured me that he has seen Beck before and he has been brilliant. I wondered if perhaps he resented being second billing. Whatever the reason, Beck's set was the dullest kind of rock'n'roll set, and not something I would have expected from someone who can do this.
There was about half an hour or so of this, then, mercifully, there came the interval. Mr. Wu complained that it was better in the old days when there was some compilation tape put on before the main act, usually put together by the headliners themselves. Then we noticed something strange as we watched the video clips being played on the video screens either side of the stage. They were brilliantly chosen and hilarious. It was obvious, after all, that this was the work of Morrissey. I still want to track some of those clips down, but they included footage of Brigitte Bardot, some camp old hoofer singing to a girl in a tutu that he is the one she should confess to, some clips from an episode of The Untouchables in which there featured lots of dialogue about a villain, or victim, called Morrissey ("It's settled then. Tonight, we take Morrissey", etc.), an interview with Shelagh Delany, and probably more that I've forgotten.
After a pleasingly brief interval (sometimes these things do drag on), the drum intro track to The Operation started up, and the band and Morrissey entered the stage. All were wearing Playboy T-shirts, and the first number was, by great serendipity, The Last of the Famous International Playboys. It was obvious that it was going to be a great gig. Somehow, Morrissey had known when he had written his statement that it would be. Towards the end of the first song, Morrissey did one of his famous live lyric changes. "In our lifetime those who kill/The news world hands them stardom", became, "In our lifetime those who kill/The BBC hand them stardom". We both laughed at this, Mr. Wu and I.
The second song was a Smiths song, Ask, which was a very pleasant surprise. In fact, the setlist was full of great surprises, including The Death of a Disco Dancer, Vicar in a Tutu, Stretch Out and Wait, Sister, I'm a Poet and Billy Budd. With the occasional lapse into hohummery here and there (All You Need is Me), the gig just seemed to get better and better. When The Death of a Disco Dancer started, I had the feeling that this was going to be the best song of the evening. The interesting thing about a Morrissey gig is that, even in the midst of all the physical confusion of a live performance, the words still seem to matter. This song felt, to me, incredibly zeitgeisty. "Love, peace and harmony/Love, peace and harmony/Oh, very nice, very nice, very nice/But maybe in the next world." The ironic bitterness of that repeated "very nice" came across quite chillingly. Surely we're at a point in history where that really is the decision facing us - love, peace and harmony, or "the next world", in other words, the end of this one.
Maybe it was just me, but APOCALYPSE seemed very much in the air. I mean, perhaps that should not be a surprise. Still, some of the lyrics struck me afresh: "Will the world end in the nighttime/I really don't know/Or will the world end in the daytime/I don't know", from Stretch Out and Wait. Perhaps tellingly, there was another lyric change here. The following line is usually, "And is there any point ever having children?/Oh, I don't know." This time the answer to the question was a single, emphatic, "No!" There was also the slight lyric change in Ask: "If it's not love, then it's the bomb/The nuclear bomb that will bring us together."
I suppose the apocalypse theme - also emphasised in a peculiar way by Morrissey complaining about the smell of roasting meat wafting over the park, "Putting death into your body, death into your body," he repeated a number of times, ending with the peculiar quip, "Oh, I've gone too far" - chimed in with some things I had been thinking anyway. I believe the crowd there numbered about 30,000. I thought, and not for the first time, about the tremendous amount of resources that are needed for such an event, in terms of electricity, transport and so on. Obviously, it would be hypocritical of me to be damning of such a use of resources, since I enjoyed the event, and I wonder if such mass public celebrations are, to some extent, necessary. Still, I also wonder how much longer we can keep this sort of thing up. Maybe, if we get the right energy sources, for a much longer time. But we don't seem to have the right energy sources at the moment.
What it did lead me to reflect on is the nature of stardom, and what I have long believed to be the very unhealthy relationship that our society (Britain, and I'm sure other societies) has with art. There is really no system for nurturing the artist in our society, outside of a few elitist institutions. When, back in the early eighties, Morrissey sang lines like, "No, I've never had a job/Because I'm too shy", what he was really expressing, in both a very direct, and very roundabout way, was the difficulty of being an artist in a society that does its very best to destroy artists. The usual response to anyone trying to 'make it' in any artistic sphere, before they have made it, is, "Who the fuck are you?" People resent artists. People wish to lynch artists. A huge event like the Morrissey gig, resembles, in some peculiar way, a sacrificial bonfire, complete with the smell of roasting flesh wafting across the field. The difference being that the sacrifice now is only symbolically of the artist ("Tonight, we're going to take Morrissey"). It is a bonfire erected to the artist's success. The artist has become god. How did he do this? He overcame death - the death that society tried (and failed) by any means necessary, to inflict on the artist and the artist's dream.
What kind of a relationship is this to have with artists? On the one hand they are despised as vermin, and on the other, revered as gods. And then people are surprised when occasionally those artists are human and act like arseholes. If you had had a whole country lusting for your blood one minute, and then worshipping you the next, the chances are, I reckon, you'd act like an arsehole sometimes, too.
All this is summed up for me in the words of that opening song, The Last of the Famous International Playboys: "See, in our lifetime those who kill/The BBC hand them stardom/And these are the ways on which I was raised/These are the ways on which I was raised/I never wanted to kill/I am not naturally EVIL/Such things I do/Just to make myself more attractive to you/Have I failed?"
Well, on Friday night, in Hyde Park, at least, Morrissey did not fail.
The encore, and possibly the best song of the night, was another surprise, What She Said, from the album Meat is Murder.
"What she said/How come someone hasn't noticed that I'm dead/And decided to bury me/God knows I'm ready..."
Excellent stuff.
