Morrissey "He Did it Strangeways"

HE DID IT STRANGEWAYS

THERE were tears that night in Whalley Grange when the news came over the wireless that The Smiths had finally split. The end had been in sight, of course, ever since diminutive guitarist Johnny Marr had announced his decision to quit the group to become the new Chris Spedding, hiring out his axe to the highest bidders on pop’s celebrity circuit. It was still a shock, though, when Morrissey, one of pop’s most ubiquitously public recluses, finally declared that the game was up and The Smiths would be no more.

The Smiths, by the autumn of 1987, had become a British Institution, the Carry On team of UK indie pop, part of our culture. A light went out in England when Morrissey threw in the sponge and a nation mourned.

The group left behind them, however, a body of work, including a final, unreleased album, “Frank Owen Is A Bastard”, that for many summed up this woebegone nation in the grim, unsettled Eighties.

The Smiths’ records are fully of cheery reflections on life's most abject circumstances; they addressed themselves to the lonely, the depressed, the disenchanted, and they reminded the disconsolate souls that bought them that, yes, life is a shit sandwich, though it tastes less gruesome with an allegedly six figure advance from EMI in the local Co-op savings account. Listening now to The Smiths, we hear the sound of an older, more graceful England: the sound of wooden clogs on northern cobblestones, the flap of washing on the clothes line, the creaking of cemetery gates, the digging of shallow graves on bleak Lancashire moors.

After The Smiths broke up, many thought they would hear no more of the much-venerated tortured genius that was Morrissey in his heyday. But following a period of reassessment, he re-emerged as the chuckling comic host of television’s popular “Wheeltappers And Shunters Club”. He was an instant hit, and had at last found his true element. Cheeky, controversial, the mum's delight, he became the nation’s favourite with his unforgettable catchphrase, “Bloody hell, I’m miserable now, mother”.

STOP ME IF YOU’VE SEEN THIS ONE BEFORE

BEFORE he left The Smiths for a career in television comedy, this Morrissey chap everyone keeps going on about was briefly famous for waving flowers at his audience. “How amazing,” everyone thought. “What an original bloke!” Well, blow us down if we haven’t seen it all before. Here’s that Mick Jagger chap from The Rolling Stones, sometime back in the Sixties, and what a lovely bunch of daffs he’s waving. If history teaches us anything, it’s that it’s all been done before...