MORRISSEY - THE ROUNDHOUSE, LONDON - 21ST JANUARY 2008
The Sunday Times

Camden’s historic counter-cultural hotbed The Roundhouse reopened in 2006, with a concrete stack of bars, holding areas and walkways appended to its tubby body, like those glaringly modern visitor centres attached to prehistoric remains at World Heritage Sites. Crossing the metal bridge from the brightly lit 21st century annexe into the darkness of the 19th century engine house proper we leave our humdrum modern lives behind, as we prepare to view another ancient monument of a distant age, the exiled king of the fabled land of ‘80s Indie Rock, Morrissey.

Morrissey is codemned to live in the shadow of The Smiths, the band that saved the lives of thousands of bedsit depressives, but 2004’s You Are The Quarry surpasses any Smiths album, and the one Smiths show I ever saw was an oddly underwhelming Midland stop on the Meat Is Murder tour, where sausages were thrown at Morrissey’s unhappy face by loutish wags forearmed with offall. But tonight, middle aged men and a healthy smattering of new fans chant Morrissey’s name, football crowd style, without a sausage in sight. And at 9pm exactly, a screen drops to reveal their idol and his five piece band, styled in tight blue denim suits like the capering prisoners of Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock. In the predictably slack world of rock and roll even Morrissey’s punctuality seems subversive.

Last month, after waxing nostalgically about the England he grew up in, Morrissey was again accused of racism by the NME, and subsequently claimed by The Telegraph’s pop critic as a right wing genius alongside Ezra Pound. But Morrissey, by artistic necessity the eternal outsider, at least has some new tormentors to kick against. “Apparenly” he says, “my name is trouble.” The group launch into the first of four Smiths numbers, How Soon Is Now, a bequiffed, slow-motion throb, that ends with Morrissey prostate to the clattering of a ludicrous Spinal Tap dinner gong. Morrissey is one of the few performers left who radiate the old-fashioned aloof star quality that entitles him to indulge in such theatrics. The love in the room is infectious and almost overwhelming, yet Morrissey’s between song banter, as usual, becomes more apologetic and less confident as the evening progresses.

The back-catalogue is trawled, in anticipation of a forthcoming greatest hits album, but surprises include an incredibly obscure, and rather wonderful, Smiths 12” single b-side, Stretch Out And Wait, and a defiant National Front Disco, a stomping depiction of a family losing their son to the far right. Its uncomfortable refrain of ‘England for the English’ reminds us, provocatively, that writing about an unsavoury view is not the same as endorsing it. New songs - That's How People Grow Up, Something Is Squeezing My Skull, I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris, and Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed, with its martial snare drums, - draw on glam rock power chords and skiffle beats, familiar stylistic platforms for Morrissey’s bitterly defeated romanticism. Long term lieutenant Boz Borer and the band move into forestage phalanxes of flailing guitars that seem self-consciously choreographed to echo classic rock iconography, and the multi-instrumentalist Chris Pooley adds textures to the songs that sometimes seem perilously experimental.

Morrissey works the room, at one point shamelessly crouched in a spotlight with his back to us while Pooley extends the descending riff of an extended fade into a cinematic moment of melodrama that still manages to tug the heart strings, for all its forced theatricality. If Morrissey’s self-absorbed sadness is really an act, then it’s an act that works brilliantly. He closes, bare chested, with a knowing and valedictory Last Of The Famous International Playboys, like a battered prize-fighter holding aloft a hard-won trophy that he has no intention whatsoever of surrendering.