Morrissey, Glasgow O2 Academy, review: He is human, he needs to be loved

Telegraph

2 days ago

At barely nine pm on Wednesday evening, at Glasgow's tastefully decrepit O2 Academy, Morrissey came close to bringing down the house in more than a figurative sense. As his fat-free five-piece band struck down How Is Soon Is Now?, that most precious of gems by The Smiths, the sound of the applause and acclaim of two-and-a-half-thousand people was louder than bombs. As the hullabaloo at last subsided, down at the front, one lady demanded the 66-year-old take off his clothes. 'Don't you know I'm old enough to be your milkman?' came the reply.
If Morrissey wanted to treat his audience to heights of delight that might well have killed them, all he needed to do was carry on like this. With no new album to promote, to have divided the evening squarely between popular solo singles and anything by The Smiths would have done the trick nicely.
Instead, though, the band with which he first made his name was represented by just three songs – Shoplifters Of The World Unite and Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me completed the trio – while the hits bearing his mononym were sparse on the ground. Unlike other artists of a certain age, evidently, Morrissey has yet to develop a taste for nostalgia.
Whereas in the past this appetite for obscurantism has come close to driving me nuts, at the Academy, I reckon he got the balance just about right. And, anyway, if any audience can be relied upon to have paid attention over the decades, it's this one. Never mind that Best Friend On The Payroll, from the feloniously undervalued Southpaw Grammar album, is a cut so deep you'd need a Davy lamp to find it, down at the barrier, the crowd were singing along as if it were as familiar as Rockin' All Over The World. The same went for other unearthed gems such as Scandinavia and Istanbul, too.
As with his dress sense, the lyrics remain scimitar sharp. But whereas Morrissey once sang of breaking into Buckingham Palace 'with a sponge and a rusty spanner', and of the 'wonderful dream' of seeing Margaret Thatcher on the guillotine, today, the gleaming edge of moral disgust is reserved for less predictable targets. With its withering refrain of 'go easy on the killer', in Bonfire Of The Teenagers, his contempt was aimed at those he believes have sought to minimise the trauma and outrage of the Manchester Arena bombing. Fine. At least he hasn't forgotten that making true political music involves saying things that nice people don't want to hear.
Certainly, setting his stall out in song in this way is a lot better, and a good deal more artful, than the berserk iconoclasm that has at times threatened to drown out even his best music. In Glasgow, though, Morrissey was able straighten out the record somewhat; in an uncommonly intimate setting, he deftly recast himself in his best and truest light. 'I am human and I need to be loved,' he sang, 'just like everybody else does.'