Little Man, What Now?

Let's take a moment from our busy day to spare a thought for Morrissey. If you've always hated Morrissey then, as well as being a fucking idiot, you're very lucky. If you've always hated Morrissey then you probably wake up and "hit" the gym and then Brompton your way to work and let spreadsheets eat away at you and pick up that £4.25 bottle of WHITE WINE from Marks & Spencer on your way home and drink your way through Fat Disabled Poor Cunts on Channel 4 and go to bed and masturbate and then pray to a god you don't believe in that this is the night that you finally just slip away and I am so jealous of you having that amount of freedom. If I always hated Morrissey then I'd be able to do all that but instead I spend so much of my time worrying about this man who I don't even know.

I think there hasn't been a day since about 1992 that I haven't worried about Morrissey but normally that feeling of helplessness only lasts a minute. These days I seem to spend hours and hours thinking of ways to try and get this man to see that he's clearly turned into a handsome, charismatic nothing.

Of course there was a time when I did really hate Morrissey. I was 15 and I just didn't get The Smiths at all. They looked too much like me for me to see any good in them (that's pretty much Morrissey's career in one sentence there) and when I was offered tickets to see them in 1984 I turned them down. That would have been my first ever gig. Right now, in 2013, I could be saying "Oh, yeah, the first gig I ever went to was The Smiths at the Ulster Hall in Belfast in 1984" and people would want to buy me a drink and blowjob my skeleton out of me. I'd be so sexy now if I'd only just said yes to those tickets. No matter how old and wrinkly I'd be, everyone would want to touch me because I could say "The first gig I ever went to was The Smiths". My first gig was Nik Kershaw.

Why has Morrissey let his genius slip? He used to be the greatest thing on this planet. Never the biggest thing on the planet of course but the biggest things on the planet (Bono, Prince, Paul McCartney, whoever) couldn't sleep at night because they knew they were shit in comparison. No one could ever come close to being as lyrically witty and beautiful as Morrissey could. And it seemed handsomely effortless. "I would go out tonight but I haven't got a stitch to wear" is still joyous in defeat and "I crashed down on the crossbar and the pain was enough to make a shy, bald buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder" might be the greatest line written in the English language. "To die by your side. Well, the pleasure - the priviledge is mine", "If you think peace is a common goal, that goes to show how little you know", "Leather elbows on a tweed coat. Oh, is that best you can do?", "Here I am. Well, you don't need to look so pleased". So many great lyrics and songs and then... nowt.

The best thing that can be said of Morrissey's last album, Years of Refusal, is that it had a nice front cover. A photo of Morrissey holding a baby. Now, THAT'S funny. There's also a great recent(ish) photo of Morrissey with a cat on his head. There is no doubting that Morrissey's career of being photographed is still going strong, it's just everything else he does has fallen to bits. 

His band are terrible, all his songs sound pretty much exactly the same and his lyrics are as teenage as ever. Sadly, he's not. He's in his 50's, somehow still hasn't got a girlfriend and he's been thinking of voting UKIP. To be fair, voting UKIP is quite liberal if you compare it to some of the things he's said over the last few years. I really was expecting a record called Beautiful BNP Brian from him at any time. Also, when David Cameron keeps going on about how much he respects and admires Morrissey...well, it's like getting the seal of approval from Satan's evil twin brother himself. Maybe it's my fault, not Morrissey's. He always looked to the past while I saw him as the future. But when he opens his desperate mouth these days it ruins even his very best work. We live in the age of digital watches and electrical computers and it's hard to get noticed because the world is online shouting at once so when Morrissey speaks you'd think he'd choose his words a bit more carefully. That's why his outrageous comments seem like begging. Not to mention redundant. Everybody's lost but they're pretending they're not and I just wish Morrissey could pretend a bit better like the rest of us. 2013 must frighten the hell out of him. Face it, he changed a million teenagers entire lives. With one song he made people think about where their food came from and animal rights became as important as haircuts and kissing. But does that mean anything anymore? No. I mean he sang this beautiful anthem that actually made people THINK but he was still saying things like "I find shoes difficult to be ethical about - one just can't seem to avoid leather". One could if one really gave a fuck. Does he still wear leather? He's still only a crappy vegetarian, I know that. Sorry but milk is murder too, you know. That's how redundant Morrissey has become now. He used to make the youth of Britain...no, the world...say no to the meat industry. Who's doing Morrissey's job for him these days? The meat industry. Morrissey has actually been replaced by a butcher.

I just watched Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe and laughed a lot at the footage of Chris Moyles on a Sky TV dating show called Love Machine. Not only is Chris Moyles the host, and therefore you have every reason to never watch it, but he has a glamorous assistant too: Stacy Solomon, a woman who somehow has a deaf accent. I was laughing a lot at the fantastically funny jokes all aimed at Moyles and then...I stopped. Why are we laughing at Chris Moyles? He hasn't let himself down. He can't ever let himself down. Love Machine, Chris Moyles's Quiz Night, The Parody Album. None of these things are bad enough for him. I'm not sure Operation Yewtree is low enough for him. So, I stopped laughing and I thought about Morrissey.

Turns out, he's written new songs. And the first thing he did when he got out of hospital is reschedule his tour and made the Staples Centre in Los Angeles go 100% vegetarian for his upcoming gig. This is the first time this has happened. OK, it's only crappy vegetarian but it's the step in the right direction that counts. Also, he's being funny again. His post-hospital statement was "Rumours of my death have been greatly understated". Oh, he's coming home, isn't he?

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