Smiths London Palladium NME Review

VANDALISM BEGINS AT HOME

THE SMITHS

LONDON PALLADIUM

IN THE footsteps of such music-hall and variety greats as Tommy Trinder, Ted Ray and Jimmy Tarbuck, tonight The Smiths tread these venerable boards to confront a frothing audience of boys and girls who forego the sedentary comfort of Edwardian plush in favour of a constant, hollering ovation.

Connoisseurs of the only mildly incongruous will also delight in the fact that the other six nights a week (plus matinees), the Palladium stages the musical La Cage Aux Folles. We are thus welcomed to our seats to the strains of George Formby’s little ukulele, followed by an appropriately heroic aria from, I do believe, Gluck's opera Orfeo, seguing into the haughty 'March Of The Capulets’ from Prokoviev's Romeo And Juliet. A capital 'E' Event beckoned.

The event, it turns out, is Business As Usual. Morrissey's no doubt prescription dark glasses and Marr's cock-height Gibson Les Paul alert me to what’s in store. If Johnny Marr is rowdily psyching himself up to crack the American Midwest, then Morrissey has learned how to growl. Not pretty. Meanwhile, Messrs Joyce, Rourke and Gannon huddle just outside the limelight and put in some overtime.

Militantly brandishing a placard a la Ramones proclaiming The Queen Is Dead’, Morrissey leads the
group through a revamp of the song of that title with an attack that cares little for finer points. And so it goes. Morrissey's camply rock-literate self-mockery shouldn’t double-bluff you from the fact that tonight Johnny Marr calls the shots, cheerfully vandalising The Smiths’ most distinctive. and precious qualities. A momentary perverse enjoyment of such wilful trashing ill-compensates for the pangs of nostalgia and what-might-have-been as Morrissey’s voice numbly surfs stadium-high waves of proficient, flashy, sometimes macho rock noise.

A taunting petulance now thrashes Morrissey's lily limbs, as if defying us to recall fond memories of the petal-strewn idiot dancer, the innocent rhapsodist who so brilliantly reclaimed a sensitive, intimate voice from rock's sweatstorm. Now he addresses the middle distance, no longer taking us into his confidence.

“It takes guts to be gentle and kind” he sings in I Know It’s Over’, words rarely heeded by those around, though oddly this song's swollen melodrama saves it. The fulsome, underrated 'The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ likewise survives, as do a beefed-up 'Meat Is Murder’ and 'How Soon Is Now’, still one of rock's most mysterious and exalted moments. Typical of the evening, however, is 'Ask', whose subtlety on vinyl only clicked with me after five plays. Live, all goes well until that breathtaking mood-change of reverie halfway-through, which is tonight trampled underhoof by the band's collective desire not to sound prissy.

On stage, music that at one time made no apologies for ringing melancholy - though its terseness always kept sentimentality at bay - has hardened with the rigours of the road and pressures of career into something slightly coarse, mannered and untrue to itself. I, for one, regret this 'progress’.

MAT SNOW