Wolverhampton (Morrissey’s debut solo concert at Wolverhampton Civic Hall, 22 December 1988), The sudden and secretive nature of The Smiths’ break-up during the summer of 1987 denied them the opportunity of staging an official farewell concert. Morrissey, in particular, was aggrieved by this circumstance and tried, in vain, to coerce Marr into returning for a final Smiths show at London’s Royal Albert Hall that autumn to coincide with the release of STRANGEWAYS, HERE WE COME. Marr, still stinging from the split and Morrissey’s futile attempts to continue The Smiths without him, was vehement in his refusal. ‘It was obviously a no-no.’
One year later, and following the solo success of VIVA HATE, Morrissey reunited with Andy Rourke, Mike Joyce and Smiths second guitarist Craig GANNON, his new backing band for the recording of the singles ‘THE LAST OF THE FAMOUS INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOYS’ and ‘INTERESTING DRUG’. Other than the gaping void of Marr’s absence, this gathering of four-fifths was a Smiths reunion in all but name, rekindling Morrissey’s hope of a ‘farewell’ gig.
It was while recording those singles at The Wool Hall near Bath in December 1988 that Morrissey made his decision. According to producer and co-writer Stephen STREET, after a promising start the session was beginning to fall apart. Unhappy with some of the works-in-progress, on Friday 9 December Morrissey ‘snapped and walked out of the studio’, says Street. After spending the weekend in Manchester, the singer returned on the Monday in noticeably higher spirits, breaking the news to Street that he intended to announce a surprise gig a few days before Christmas. The chosen location was the West Midlands town of Wolverhampton (later to be granted city status). As Morrissey later explained, ‘It wasn’t London and it wasn’t Manchester which I thought was an important gesture … it was dear old, sweet dumpy Wolverhampton.’
As Morrissey’s co-writer, Street automatically assumed that he’d be joining the group on stage in some capacity, only to be told ‘in no uncertain terms’ that he wouldn’t. ‘Morrissey took me aside and told me he wanted it to be a Smiths gig,’ he recalls. ‘He felt it was time to move on and exorcise The Smiths so he saw it as a farewell. He even said he wasn’t sure if he’d work with Mike and Andy again after this. But I was really pissed off.’
Morrissey’s caution towards Rourke and Joyce was understandable, given that both had already started legal proceedings contesting their share of income from The Smiths, as had Craig Gannon. Consequently, the imminent Wolverhampton gig created the farcical scenario of a band whose guitarist, bassist and drummer were all involved in separate legal writs against their frontman. ‘It’s something that just wasn’t discussed,’ says Joyce, ‘or if the subject was brought up the conversation was quickly changed. Morrissey didn’t seem bothered about it, put it that way.’
The concert was announced on Radio 1 on Monday 19 December, four days prior to the show itself on Thursday 22nd. Despite Morrissey’s belief that it should be ‘a Smiths gig’, the event was officially promoted as his debut solo concert. Discounting his impromptu cameo reading Marcel PROUST with Howard DEVOTO’s Luxuria at London’s Town & Country Club earlier that year, it marked Morrissey’s first live appearance since The Smiths played London’s Brixton Academy in December 1986. Entry was free – ‘which, for someone of my status, is unheard of’, noted Morrissey – to anybody who turned up in a Smiths or Morrissey T-shirt. ‘I thought above all people would see a free concert as a very welcome gesture,’ he added, ‘regardless of who got their sandals stolen or dropped their crisps in a puddle.’
The news instigated an immediate fan pilgrimage to Wolverhampton, with the pluckiest camping outside the
venue three nights before to assure their place at the front of the queue. Come the morning of the concert, with several hundred fans now gathered, those who’d spent the past few nights shivering on the pavement suddenly found themselves trampled underfoot by eleventh-hour queue jumpers. ‘They didn’t have to come if they didn’t want to,’ argued Morrissey. ‘They must have been aware of a certain element of risk. It isn’t my fault if at the final minute someone came from the back with huge muscles and removed them. It’s symptomatic, I think, of life in general.’
Further scenes of mass hysteria greeted that afternoon’s arrival of Morrissey and the band who’d made the journey from The Wool Hall to Wolverhampton in a vintage 1940s ‘St Trinian’s’ bus. With the venue’s 7,000 capacity reduced by safety officials to 1,500, approximately 3,000 people turned up hoping to gain admittance. Chaos reigned while the Midlands police struggled to control the bitterly disappointed majority, eventually having to arrest the desperate hordes engaged in last-minute attempts to gain entry by breaking windows and smashing down fire doors. ‘It wasn’t window smashing as senseless aggro,’ mused Morrissey. ‘It was frothing admiration building to the brink and beyond … I felt in order to get in you had to make a slight effort, it wasn’t going to be that easy. So I knew that the people who made the effort were the important ones. It was like The Krypton Factor, it was a test of endurance. But nobody seemed to mind, apart, obviously, from the ones that didn’t get in. That was inevitable. The T-shirts were a simple way of getting over who could get in the venue because otherwise it would have had to be tickets.’
Choosing Smiths-influenced northern indie band Bradford as his support (see ‘SKIN STORM’), Morrissey’s performance on the night lasted barely half an hour, an eight-song set mixing known and yet-to-be-released solo material with three late Smiths tracks: ‘STOP ME IF YOU THINK YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE’, ‘DISAPPOINTED’, ‘Interesting Drug’, ‘SUEDEHEAD’ (preceded by Joyce teasing the crowd with the drum intro of ‘THE QUEEN IS DEAD’), ‘The Last Of The Famous International Playboys’, ‘SISTER I’M A POET’, ‘DEATH AT ONE’S ELBOW’ and a final encore of ‘SWEET AND TENDER HOOLIGAN’.
‘One of the conditions that we agreed upon,’ explains Joyce, ‘was that we weren’t going to do any Smiths songs that we’d played live with Johnny. We were kind of mulling it over because we didn’t want to pretend “this is The Smiths” because it wasn’t without Johnny. So we thought if we don’t play any song we played live before, some things off Strangeways, for instance, coupled with his solo stuff, then what’s wrong with that?’ Morrissey was even more philosophical about the choice of songs. ‘That concert at Wolverhampton was me saying goodbye,’ he’d reflect. ‘I felt that just because The Smiths had ended … those songs really were me also. I didn’t feel like walking away saying
“Oh no, no more of that. Let’s move on and be massively creative.” I still feel that all of those songs are me, I had the right to play them.’
As it turned out, the setlist took second place to the historic visual spectacle of Morrissey in the flesh, marked by the kind of fanatical stage invasions that would later come to typify Morrissey’s solo performances. ‘It was nice to be kissed repeatedly,’ he surmised. ‘In the hall that night there was a great aura of love and gentleness, and all the people who came on stage treated me in a very gentle way. I wasn’t kicked or punched or dragged, although they were very emotionally charged. I came away with no bruises.’
‘The amount of fans getting on stage was ridiculous,’ admits Joyce. ‘It had never been that bad with The Smiths. At one point all you could hear was drums and vocals because Andy had his pedals stood on and his leads had come out, Craig was mobbed so his strap had come off and Moz was cramped down with his mike feeding back next to the monitor with people diving on him. It was actually dangerous with all the electrics. OK, it was a free gig and all, but I felt bad about how it must have sounded out front.’ Gannon agrees: ‘It was chaos. As soon as we hit the first note it was just people constantly diving on stage, leads constantly being pulled out, amps wobbling, me quiff falling. I mean, it was a good laugh but musically it was frustrating.’
The occasion was even more frustrating for Stephen Street, not only barred from the stage but symbolically confined to an outside broadcast radio van. ‘So, no, I wasn’t even able to watch it,’ he mourns. Ironically, Morrissey would later tell the press that Wolverhampton ‘must have been a joy’ for Street, ‘to hear his music performed, which obviously he’s never experienced before’.
The day after the gig, while Rourke and Joyce recovered in Wolverhampton, Gannon and Morrissey attempted to
head back to Manchester in the same antiquated transport in which they’d arrived. ‘It was just me and Morrissey in this St Trinian’s bus with the driver,’ laughs Gannon. ‘It seemed a good idea but as soon as we got to the outskirts of Wolverhampton it broke down. We were stranded.’
‘The bus was the wrong choice because it broke down, twice,’ confirmed Morrissey. ‘I had a driver, he also broke down. It was very typical of Old England to let me down.’ According to Gannon, he and Morrissey had no choice but to set off on foot to telephone for help. ‘We eventually found this pub in the middle of nowhere,’ recalls Gannon. ‘It was mid-morning, so it wasn’t even open. The landlord heard us knocking so came down and opened the door. He was met with Morrissey stood there, me behind him, asking, “Have you got 10p for the phone?” We managed to get hold of the tour manager who said he’d drive over and pick us up so we just waited for ages back in this bus by ourselves. This was two days before Christmas. We were freezing!’
The drama and excitement of Wolverhampton, both inside and outside the venue, was brilliantly captured by director Tim Broad on the HULMERIST video, though its footage of ‘Sister I’m A Poet’ neatly illustrates Morrissey’s subsequent verdict that it ‘was not really a concert, it was an event at which I didn’t really sing’. The same applies to the breathless encore of ‘Sweet And Tender Hooligan’, released as a live B-side of ‘Interesting Drug’. In the months following Wolverhampton, Morrissey’s troupe of ex-Smiths would fracture due to their separate legal grievances, negating any hope of his permanent return to the concert stage in 1989. Indeed, it would be another two years before Morrissey finally did so in April 1991, with an entirely new band to promote KILL UNCLE.