Smiths Anti Apartheid Benefit

THE SMITHS’ANTI-APARTHEID BENEFIT

LONDON BRIXTON ACADEMY

IN A crammed Academy, heaving with sweaty adoration, the theoretical trappings of a Brixton Anti-Apartheid benefit are swallowed whole by The Smiths’ avowedly Anglo-Saxon stock folk rituals. But the most cogent point surviving this near-definitive cultural clash is that The Smiths probably made more money for the A-A, in a sole swoop, than any mythical amount dreamed up by liberal brows furrowed with perpetual heart-bleeding concern.

Despite the almost excessive claustrophobia of these Smiths’ Events, Morrissey and his flock’s concerns are still sufficiently broad and communicative for this music to deserve a freshly relevant “folk” tag. The Smiths' celebratory angst might seem to ignore the existence of any life outside white England but from such insularity comes a heightened bond of shared feeling. Even to the outsider, the Academy’s massed refrain of line after line of “England is mine and it owes me a living" type lyricism emerges with the resonance that can only swell out of some emotively communal experience.

Of course The Smiths’ folk seems to have as little in common with the trad ’60s Dylan/Baez stream as it has with the more acerbic mid-’80s variations created by the disparate likes of, say, Test Dept, and Misty In Roots. Those two groups are far closer to “real folk”/“ordinary people” than The Smiths can ever be but somehow Morrissey still transcends the gulf between stage and audience to elicit a folkish footballing atmosphere.

Consequently almost every song only needs to sound its opening bar before it’s engulged by a two thousand voiced recognition; so newer material like ‘Shoplifters Of The World Unite’ and ‘London’ assume a slightly different tone to the more familiar pieces of which 'This Night Has Opened My Eyes’, ‘Panic’, ‘Ask’ and ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ are easily the most incisive. Johnny Marr still plays like a dream, often with an almost sublime African feel, but attention keeps being diverted away from this remarkable skill by Morrissey’s camp attempt at some modern music-hall drama which encourages him to brandish a banner marked with a dull “two light ales please” mockery. But it’s this mix of rare ability and mass-moving stage antics which means that The Smiths will always retain a purity and pertinence which prevents them from being just another common pop phenomenon.

DONALD McRAE