Morrissey "Hulmerist" Feature

Eccentric in love with the past

ROCK: Sean O'Hagan sees a doubtful future for a mystical Morrissey

'THOUGH I dread the Nineties, I believe my position in this coming decade is perhaps one of the most challenging and interesting things that’s ever happened to pop music.” Morrissey speaking to Nick Kent, March 1990.

On current creative form, Morrissey’s dread of the Nineties is well founded. A new video compilation, entitled Hulmerist, traces the singer’s solo career across a brace of singles that, taken as a body of work, portray a man steadfastly out of step with the times.

If the Smiths were the last truly great English Indie/guitar band, Morrissey’s post-Smiths career could well be the protracted swan-song for that same tradition. There are musical moments on Hulmerist that approach the Smiths’ finest achievements, most notably the gloriously evocative Every Day Is Like Sunday, a forlorn celebration of seaside culture that is emblematic of Morrissey’s fascination with a mythical, lowbrow England of the past.

Elsewhere, however, he sounds like a man who has simply lost his bearings since the messy departure of his musical accomplice, Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr. Songs like Last of the Famous International Playboys and the utterly lacklustre Ouija Board give credence to Elvis Costello’s caustic comment that Morrissey “comes up with the best song titles in the world, only somewhere along the line he seems to forget to write the song”.

Morrissey’s creative status is given added irony by the current critical and crossover acclaim accorded all things Mancunian wherein ascendant groups like the Stone Roses seem to have inherited a huge portion of the Smiths’ audience.

All this raises the obvious question: is Morrissey the last great English eccentric pop star, a man who is so enamoured of the past that he has argued himself out of a successful pop future?

Hulmerist provides enough clues to his enduring love for a particularly camp sense of Englishness that reached its illogical conclusion in an endless stream of nudge-nudge-wink-wink Carry On films. On Hulmerist the Carry On legacy looms large: Joan Sims in the flesh, Charles Hawtrey on the TV and the particularly surreal scenario featuring public schoolboys in stilettos, which may, or may not, be oblique homage to the cross-dressing Alastair Sim, headmistress of St Trinian’s.

Throughout, this love of lowbrow humour is juxtaposed with an espousal of militant vegetarianism (one of the Smiths’ albums was called Meat Is Murder) and an enduringly adolescent romanticism that homes in on, and highlights, the disaffection of sensitive teenage loners. The latter fascination moves inexorably towards the monographic once again with film of a smitten Morrissey languishing on James Dean’s snow-covered grave.

Somehow, all these disparate threads have been woven together and, coupled with Morrissey’s own self-myth of the lonely, reclusive, celibate, Wilde-worshipping pop aesthete, have made him the most English pop star since Ray Davies of The Kinks. The latter’s finest songs mapped out an embryonic bedsitland of the late Sixties, reaching an apogee of sorts in the resolutely down-beat poetry of Dead End Street, a tale of domestic disharmony that could slip seamlessly into the Smiths’ canon, albeit with one major shift in emphasis.

Where Davies, in the throes of material despair, sang “What Are We Living For?” Morrissey might substitute the existential question “What Am I Living For?”, neatly encapsulating the recurring sense of personal dislocation that infects much of his work. It is this sense of terminal alienation that makes the live concert footage on Hulmerist so powerful and so pathetic. Filmed at 1988’s one-off show at Wolverhampton, it shows Morrisseymania in full bloom as hordes of horn-rimmed, bequiffed, pale-faced clones pay homage to their hero. Morrissey’s faithful are a particularly fawning bunch, bedecked in Smiths’ T-shirts and gladioli, arriving on stage one by one to embrace the obscure object of their collective desire.

It is a sight that is both abject and somehow unnecessary, as if all the ironies and allusions of his finest work have fallen on deaf ears. His hard-core audience, it seems, has missed the point. There is room for only one great English pop eccentric, and to ape his style in such a hand-me-down manner is wilfully to misunderstand his particular place above and beyond, not within, the vulgar market place of pop celebrity.

Hulmerist, then, presents a strained and imperfect portrait of Morrissey and, as you watch it, you can’t help wonder whether it signals his decline and fall. Morrissey’s challenge now is to see whether he can carry on regardless and avoid the trap of falling into self-parody, like so many of his celluloid heroes.

“My position in British pop, for better or worse, is unique and I’m not walking away from it,” he told Face magazine in March. “I’m going to stay around and make more records. That’s what excites me.”