“The year 2000 won’t change anyone here” – Reader Meet Author

I’m a loser, baby, why don’t you kill me. I’m the firestarter. I am stronger than Mensa. I’m feeling supersonic. The Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nuthin’ to fuck wit’. Check it out now, the funk soul brother. Sorted for E’s and whiz. Oh well, whatever, never mind.

Right. You won’t be needing those anymore. It’s not that everything you know is wrong, exactly, just kind of nonexistent as you step through the doors of Nottingham’s Rock City and into a world where there’s only one battle cry, one call to arms. In the parallel universe that’s opened here tonight, where the ‘90s have been postponed in favour of a permanent 1987, the song’s remained the same all decade. It’s so much easier to remember. You already know the tune, so here we go, here we go: “Morrissey! Morrissey! Morr-iss-Morrissey! Morr-iss-eeeeeeeee!”

Onstage, the 40-year-old man with the boxer’s physique, the improbably paint-spattered jeans and the geometric quiff looks into the crowd of chanting hysterics, gives a slight inscrutable smile and enquires with infinite politeness, “Don’t you know any other songs?”

Of course they don’t. He knows they don’t. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“JOHNNY Marr! Johnny Marr! Johnny MARR-RR!” Ah, but there’s always one. Breaking with tonight’s code of behaviour is a lone brave and drunken man, 28-year-old Craig Fox, Mission fan, wearer of a customized Smiths vest, and one of the few people at the opening night of the Morrissey’s first UK tour or three years courageous enough to voice a lurking truth behind tonight’s gig.

“I’m here because hopefully he’ll sing a Smiths song,” he bellows. “Oh yeah. The last concert I saw him at, Marion backed him and they were a lot better. Without Johnny Marr, he’s absolute shite.”

But you still paid 17 quid to come here?

“Oh yeah. He’s gonna do ‘Meat is Murder’.”

This is undoubtedly the attitude that is assumed to be fuelling all those ticket sales. For a long time now Morrissey has lived in self-imposed exile: hiding out in LA sneering at Britian for being a “dead” country; refusing to talk to he press because they dared to level criticism at him in the past; isolated from anything like musical progress and excised from the hearts of many, horrified by the messy “flirtation” with racist imagery. For anyone taking even a passing interest in these new shows, it seemed that the only benefits could be nostalgic, a chance to relive a time when DMs walked the earth, to revisit a world of student union cider and impending nuclear Armageddon. Everyone else would probably feel justified in expecting a once-great talent going through the motions like a bored beast in an Eastern European zoo. Only a fool or a man with a preposterous quiff would go expecting to be, like, touched. Everyone secretly craves the old days. With one exception.

“It’s funny you should mention ‘This Charming Man,’ declares Morrissey, as the crowd howl delightedly. He pauses. “Because I’m never going to sing it again.”

Yet the fact that this…man generates any interest at all this far down the line of lackluster albums and gallingly ambiguous behaviour is a mystery. You could put it down as some kind of testament to his enduring allure, an image that is still predicated on the idea of the outsider, the enigma. Sure, we know he lives in LA, occupying a beautiful house designed by Clark Gable, stepping in the footsteps of his screen idols – but even on the other side of the world he has never been seen to assimilate. Unlike, say, Michael Stipe, he’s not frittered away his mystique, hanging on the arm of Cindy Crawford or from the web of Courtney Love. It’s that mystique that’s paying dividends now.

One thing you hear repeatedly outside the venue tonight is the idea that Morrissey’s decision to tour Britian now – without record label, press, management or even ‘product’ – is somehow an act of altruism towards his British fans. The moment he appears onstage though, it’s clear there’s nothing noble here. Morrissey is an adoration junkie, plain and simple.

While other rock stars check into Swiss sanatoria to have their blood changed, he clambers onstage to keep the unconditional love pumping through his veins. Yes, the US loves him and his quaint English ways. Yes, he’s developed a fixation with Mexico (this tour is called ‘Oye Esteban!’ and new T-shirts feature him with the national flag painted over one eyebrow). But much as he professes to hate us, nobody wants to go unvindicated in their homeland. He’s rewarded abundantly. The audience are, to put it bluntly, easy, but it doesn’t matter. The atmosphere in Rock City is at a pitch more commonly associated with charismatic healings, and he feeds off it with guile, delivering himself like a letter bomb, kicking off the set with a manipulative ‘You’re Gonna Need Someone On Your Side.”

“I can understand why you whistle like that,” he quips, as he slips off his jacket.

As old rock cliché would have it, it’s a muscular show, not least because of Morrissey himself, not so much a ‘bit’ as a ‘substantial hunk’ of rough. The old rockabilly crew are still in place and the songs sound as good as they can, stylish beefcake standing in for cosmic marvels. Still, ‘Boy Racer’ is as tense as a flexed tendon, ‘Tomorrow’ hits the self-pity hard, and ‘Now My Heart is Full’ manages to tap some of that lost delicacy. There are Smiths songs, too – a vehement ‘Meat is Murder’, a closing encore of ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ – making sure that the likes of Craig can go home happy. And yes, it’s often pure showbiz: the velvet backdrop; the ‘My Way’ intro tape; the music hall way, that, during ‘Billy Budd’, he removes a banana from his jacket and coyly waves it before the front row. He even tells us he loves us. The next night at the Leeds Town and Country Club, this most notoriously ‘80s of towns throwing up an even harder-core audience, and he’s in even sharper form, although the banana does reappear. He tells a story about some heroes of his, linking those old obsessions: “I’m really interested in local history,” he says. “In 1973 the New York Dolls stayed at the Leeds Dragohara Hotel – that’s much more interesting than Elizabeth The Second.” He then leaves the audience with possibly his least characteristic remark to date: “My face is leaving town in ten minutes. Be on it.” Clearly, the LA sun has ripened his morals as well as his mind.

Mainly, however, Morrissey can’t help being Morrissey. It’s his job. His vocation. It’s him. However, his devoted audience has no such excuse. It’s far too easy to stereotype his fans as sad introverts in bad shirts, but talking to them before the show, one conversation recurs with alarming, depressing frequency:

“What other bands do you like?”

“None.”

Or better still:

“(Long, long pause) Gene.”

OK, there’s a few Belle and Sebastien T-shirts. There’s one mention of Stereolab. George, aged 25, admits that he likes reggae, even though Morrissey famously announced it “vile”. Much of the audience, though, appears to consist of the quiffed faithful who, even if they’ve never been joyful in their lives, are certainly triumphant tonight. These are people for whom every musical development since 1987 has been “vile”; for whom Ibiza has never been uncovered, who haven’t even yet made it to Generation E in the lexicon of modern life, let alone Generation X. These are the boys – and these are predominantly male audiences – with the pale skin and dark denim who bear their hero’s grudges along with his style. Like the boy with the hair as tall as a small child and the Union Jack ill-advisedly stitched on the back of his jacket, who wouldn’t even talk to NME because it raised the alarm that the singer was employing some dubious imagery. Twenty-six-year-old Martin from Bolton is less alarming, but equally virulent.

“Morrissey’s a legend. There’s so few of them in music these days we should cherish them.”

Does that mean accepting everything they do without criticism?

He goes quiet.

“The racism issue is something that… I dunno… It’s a difficult one to counter.” He looks glum. Momentarily. “The music is the be all and end all. Look at Oasis – how many years did NME champion them and you know what kind of people they were because of what they said about Damon Albarn and AIDS. With Morrissey, it just seems like there’s been a witch-hunt.”

Untrue, but reiterated again and again. Richard Felton of Liverpool and his Elvis-jacketed friend seem like nice boys until they start berating NME for “crimes” against Morrissey.

“What brings you here? The NME hates Moz, they’ve tried to ruin his career for years and here we are again. It’s 1999 and Moz is back yet again defying the NME with fantastic songs and a fantastic live show and you’re going out of your way to kill him. Which is beyond belief!”

Well, yes…

“He will always be one of the best English artists of all time and it’s time that you…”

“JOHNNY MARR! JOHNNY MARR! JOHNNY MARR!”

Thank goodness for Craig.

It’s only after the Nottingham show that we stumble upon the youngest people in the building. Tom and Lauren are 19 and have been waiting for three years – the three years since they first heard his music – to see Morrissey in the flesh. Their friends Dion and Alexis are 20. Why are you here? Why aren’t you out listening to Fatboy Slim and wearing trainers?

“My uncle’s been playing me the records since 1983,” explains Dion. “Whenever I went round to his house he’d put me to bed with the latest Smiths album. Which was very nice of him but it’s kind of messed up my life – I tend to cry at songs I shouldn’t.”

For all their devotion, it’s not difficult to see why the younger music fan might choose to stay away. If you’re under 25, there’s a sense that attending a Morrissey show is akin to re-enacting battles with The Sealed Knot, a pointless retread when there’s real, vital, living and breathing art being made every day, something that belongs entirely to the here and now. Or at least the Manics, anyway. For the few kids that do filter through, it’s the iconography that draws them in. Like his idols – Oscar Wilde, James Dean, Edith Sitwell – Morrissey has reached a stage where he is almost as blankly iconic. Watching him flail around the stage, a caption constantly flashes in your eyes: You are watching MORRISSEY. And at this point in his career, it is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. These shows may well be little more than an excuse for lost youth to gather together, to celebrate the past. Yet if the murky waters surrounding Morrissey clear at all, it’s to show how low we are on heroes, how starved of real charisma, real event.

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