It never refrains but it pours
With Morrissey's studio album on release in September, Barry Egan reflects on his ambivalent messages
Sunday June 08 2008
LET'S not mince words. Leonard Cohen is SpongeBob SquarePants compared to Steven Patrick Morrissey. The self-anointed prophet of the fourth sex -- "the third sex has been tried and failed" says Morrissey -- would have the younger guests at a children's party weeping openly into their Fantas and asking their parents what existentialism is.
He is holding court at Royal Kilmainham Hospital on June 28 (after playing The Marquee in Cork on the 26 and 10 days after Mr Cohen performs three sold-out nights at Kilmainham.) "The ashes of pop music are all around us if we will but see them," Morrissey told the Times of London in 1997, before adding that he "was literally inches from the monastery." (Doubtless Leonard would have enjoyed the monastery reference having spent a great deal of time in one himself -- a Zen retreat in Mount Baldy, California -- regrettably albeit while his manager robbed him of his millions). Before we forget, this is the self same insufferably melodramatic malcontent who once announced that he thinks about life and death -- "and neither one particularly appeals."
You would be forgiven for likening Steven Patrick Morrissey's sepulchral baritone voice to that of Alan Bennett singing or WH Auden yodelling. The poet would surely have appreciated much of Morrissey's lyrical outpourings .
As homo-erotic couplets aimed at the heir to the throne go, "Charles don't you ever crave/To appear on the front of the Daily Mail/Dressed in your mother's bridal veil?" from The Queen is Dead album has rarely been bettered.
You could say much the same for the risque and ambiguous Handsome Devil -- "a boy in the bush is worth two in the hand/I think I can help you get through your exams"? Sexual indistinctness has long been a central part of Morrissey's best work.
The Smiths' second single This Charming Man in 1983 featured Jean Cocteau's youthful lover, Jean Marais, gazing into an Orphean pool on its front cover -- and Morrissey waxing moonily about a bit of rural rumpy pumpy: "Punctured bicycle/On a hillside desolate/Will nature make a man of me yet?" He pauses for breath: "When in this charming car/This charming man/Why pamper life's complexities/When the leather runs smooth/On the passenger seat?" Morrissey's new studio album, Years of Refusal, is now complete, and is set for a September release.
The title seems to go against the new apparently lascivious Moz that emerged with his last album, The Ringleader of the Tormentors, where the Manchester singer of Irish parentage appeared to have finally found the pleasures of the flesh in middle age.
On Dear God, Please Help Me, he sang: "He motions with his hand on my knee/And now I'm spreading your legs/ There are explosive kegs between my legs". Asked directly by Mojo magazine whether the famously and avowedly celibate icon has discovered physical love, he replied: "Yes, I have, yes I have. I mean it's completely false, of course."
Does that mean Morrissey had finally met that someone special he'd wait outside the shops for? There was a Pinter-like pause before Morrissey answered,"Yes... Santa." Maybe Morrissey's -- and Leonard Cohen's -- promoter John Reynolds can arrange to have Father Christmas on the guest list for both artist's shows at Kilmainham.
- Barry Egan
