Pretend that you don’t know a single thing about Steven Morrissey. Then play his recent single Notre-Dame. First you’ll hear a stutter of the kind of noirish, poptimised disco that might herald a new Harry Styles number, then a tremulous, faintly glitchy voice singing about the Paris cathedral.
You will probably be aware that Notre-Dame was partly destroyed in a fire in 2019. You will quickly glean that Morrissey and anonymous others believe it was no accident. “We know who tried to kill you,” he coos. “We will not be silent.” You may need to do some research to realise he is referring to the baseless claim that the fire was a deliberate act of arson covered up by the French government. You will soon be reading about conspiracy theories fuelled by rightwing commentators who suggested Islamist terrorism as a possible cause.
At best, then, you could dismiss this Morrissey figure as a boomer casualty of his social media algorithm, indignation mounting as a slew of grifters convince him he is being misled by governments and the media. Or you may reasonably conclude that he is one such influencer, who has recently discovered a musical outlet for his dog-whistle views.
You certainly wouldn’t suspect this to be the work of someone who once combined bookish wit, self-effacing melancholia and kitchen-sink comedy to create pop music so clever, idiosyncratic and beautiful that its very existence still beggars belief. Notre-Dame isn’t exactly a hairpin turn considering the opinions Morrissey has willingly and repeatedly shared over the past two decades, yet the song’s crude, dull fear-mongering still makes it a watershed moment. The 66-year-old will always be an icon. Now he’s also a depressing brainteaser (why has the man who did that done this?), a Rubik’s Cube you know you’ll never solve but can’t help fiddling with regardless.
Fortunately, the rest of Morrissey’s 14th solo album doesn’t stray into remotely similar territory. Unfortunately, it’s called Make-Up Is a Lie, a sub sixth-form poetry tautology that in real life would be greeted with a polite grimace and an attempt to back away from the person who said it (especially were it conveyed with the same maniacal conviction as on the title track, accompanied by a plodding breakbeat and flamenco flourishes). It arrives six years after his last record, I Am Not a Dog on a Chain, a period not without industry drama: an entire album, Bonfire of the Teenagers, remains in the vaults, after Capitol abandoned a planned release and Morrissey bought the recordings back off the label (at one stage, collaborator Miley Cyrus requested her backing vocals be removed). By early 2023, another album had been completed, but a distributor could not be found. Rewritten, rerecorded and retitled (twice), it eventually landed at Sire, the Smiths’ original US label.
The resulting 12 tracks never deviate far from Morrissey’s latter-day MO: ambling and grandiose, they veer between synth-pop, glam, chamber pop, indie and more. These backdrops are primarily utilitarian, designed to foreground Morrissey’s inimitable and still irresistibly maudlin vocals, strangled sighs that are nowadays mainly delivery systems for tart nostalgia and thin sentimentality. Kerching Kerching jeers at a man – once a “small boy” with a “shy smile” – ground down by a lover who appears to be the embodiment of modern capitalism’s relentless demands. Meanwhile, The Monsters of Pig Alley is addressed to an alienated pop star tempted to retreat into the arms of his pre-fame nearest and dearest, despite these uninspiring civilians being “drab … overweight and dated”. The song’s sonic loveliness is soured further by the repetition of that ludicrously disdainful title.
He isn’t insightful even when doing his specialist subjects. A musical great is mourned blandly over chunky funk on The Night Pop Dropped: “How empty life would be if we had never known …” What, exactly? On Lester Bangs, the late music critic is remembered as a dishevelled, basement-dwelling drunk who apparently watches football “wrapped in an American flag”. The refrain – “how does it feel to be you, Lester Bangs?” – is opaquely rhetorical, but we do at least hear how Morrissey himself felt, as a young “nerd” hanging on Bangs’ every word: “I lean and you are leaned upon / When all my life was so wrong.”
For the faithful, that nerd is still loved. A teenage shut-in unswayed by societal expectation, Morrissey inspired such devotion because he projected something exceedingly rare: uncompromised, undiluted selfhood. Yet, as he himself was well aware, his listeners never knew him.
In a 1984 interview, a 25-year-old Morrissey discusses the hysterical fanmail he receives, and how he believes it’s “not really addressed to me”. So they’re writing to someone else?, asks his interlocutor. “Yeah, I do feel that,” he replies. He was right, of course. And any substantial appeal Make-Up Is a Lie holds is just a hangover from the very same love letters: residual affection for the hallucinated stranger who wrote some songs you may have once leaned upon.
• Alexis Petridis is away
This week Rachel listened to
Dylan Brady – Needle Guy
One half of enjoyably facetious hyperpop duo 100 Gecs, Brady takes vocal fry to a new, nightmarish levels on this hypnotically inane EDM throwback.
