Earlier this year, a journalist friend excitedly informed me that, in a frantic internet scramble, he had managed to get two tickets to see David Cameron’s favourite artist, the ex-Smiths front man Morrissey. (I’ve always been slightly bemused by Cameron’s love affair with Morrissey, especially considering the singer’s famous comment, ‘The sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Thatcher escaped unscathed’.) Did I fancy going?
I did. Except that the gig was in Bradford, and on a school night to boot. To gee me up, my friend sent an email saying, ‘The sheer madness of going to Bradford for a concert appeals to me.’ I thought, ‘Yes — that makes no sense at all. Let’s do it.’
Gunning up the motorway, the conversation flowed easily across the latest plot twists on Coalition Street, to hot bands and cool movies, and the sat nav delivered us to St George’s Hall in Bradford just in time for this time slip to my twenties.
The Smiths form a very important part of my personal history, and I was uneasy about opening the low door into my past, and breathing too deeply the dangerous narcotic of nostalgia. I worried, too, that I’d be taking a sad trip through the back catalogue of a hackneyed star I hadn’t seen live for over two decades.
Morrissey has always understood power of nostalgia and, as we took our place, in the steep-sided Victorian music hall we were entertained with a grainy projected montage of 1960s boy bands and Morrissey’s beloved New York Dolls intercut with interviews with James Baldwin, Edith Sitwell and a delightfully obtuse Lou Reed.
The middle-aged crowd was humming expectantly, revved up on shared enthusiasm and lager. My neighbour (wearing a T-shirt showing The Smiths lyric ‘England is mine, it owes me a living’) broke into a chant of ‘Morrissey! Morrissey! Morrissey!’ And, suddenly, there he was on stage: hard-bodied, rough trade and still magnificent. No chat. No ‘Hello, Bradford!’ Just straight into The Smiths classic ‘I Want the One I Can’t Have’.
And, gloriously, I lost myself to the moment, jumping in the air and screaming out those lyrics of angst, longing and lust — all doubts purged by that first, perfect, jangly Johnny Marr guitar riff. Accompanied by Morrissey’s competent but not showy band, the set arched across crowd-pleasing numbers from his solo career and The Smiths, alongside a couple of new tracks from his recent Radio 2 session.
Bouncing off the recent 25th anniversary of The Smiths masterpiece The Queen Is Dead, Morrissey launched into versions of ‘There is a Light that Never Goes Out’ and ‘I Know it’s Over’ that clouded my eyes. Later, a camp nightclub cover of Lou Reed’s ‘Satellite of Love’ reminded us that Moz still has a sense of humour.
The mood darkened as the projector snapped back on for the compulsory performance of ‘Meat is Murder’. I stared at my Converse as Morrissey sang, ‘Do you know how animals die?’ to pixelated images of the horror of the slaughterhouse.
The gig crashed to an abrupt halt, with the power going out during the anti-politics sing-along ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’. Electricity restored by frantic roadies, the short encore started with Moz making a joke about Jamie Oliver pulling the plug, before launching into the brittle poignancy of his greatest solo song, ‘The First of the Gang to Die’. The show ended perfectly, back where it had all begun, with The Smiths’ first single, ‘This Charming Man’.
As we left the North in the dark and the rain to travel south to our version of England, I couldn’t get The Smiths lyric ‘we cannot cling to the old dreams anymore’ out of my mind — but, for that one Monday night in a grim Northern city, it felt so right to do just that.
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