A Study in the Politics and
Aesthetics of English Misery
The first record I played after the December 2019 election was The Smiths. I’m not entirely sure why – something about the particular misery of that event, and the sense that we would now have to suffer through a long, deep slog without an obvious endpoint, and the feeling that England and Englishness had won some sort of decisive victory. It always seemed improbable, the notion that Britain – by now, with the non-participation of Scotland – was about to embark on an experiment in multicultural radical social democracy, and if you want to luxuriate in the awfulness of England, that’s what the entire sound and aesthetic of the Smiths was all about. Nostalgia, guilt, repression, a scab-pulling adolescence now dragged well into pension age.
The other reason was to try and understand something of what had just happened, because the political trajectory of Steven Morrissey seemed to mirror that of large swaths of the North of England – from a kind of anti-Thatcherite left to a proudly racist, little-Englander right. Here perhaps was the location of a key to the events, more useful than George Orwell or any ‘condition of England’ novel – an awful meeting of the pop culture of affluence, the refusal of maturity, legislated nostalgia, endemic racism and aestheticised bleakness.
It is conventional to use nostalgia for the Second World War as an explanation for the particular kind of nationalism that has gripped England and Wales in the last decade or more. And the tropes of that war, some of them wholly invented, have indeed been dominant in post-New Labour Britain-without-Scotland, from Boris Johnson’s conscious modelling of his persona on Winston Churchill – who now has an entire section of books to himself in the popular high street bookstore, Waterstone’s – to the recent revival of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, never actually distributed in wartime.
The generation that fought the Second World War – and subsequently built some kind of welfare state – is mostly dead. The overwhelming generational politics of the referendum and the 2017 and 2019 elections, with their supermajorities for the left among the under forties and hegemony for the right among the over sixties, demonstrates a profound political shift among people born between 1945 and 1965; as Susan Watkins points out, even Johnson is Churchill with a ‘Beatles mop’.*
The importation of the American term ‘Boomers’ removes the reference to the ‘baby boom’ from the original terminology and shortens it to imply those that were born into the boom – an era of full employment, abundant cheap housing and free education, in the war’s aftermath. But if you spend your time scouring the many Facebook groups where people of this cohort share their disdain for the young, there is no sense that they feel themselves to be the beneficiaries of historical good fortune, or to be in any way privileged. We had it shit, so should they. And who better to explain this scenario than Morrissey?
Morrissey is an extreme example of a common type from the period. Born into a working-class Manchester household of Irish immigrants in 1959, he was brought up in council housing in Hulme and Stretford, and failed his eleven-plus exam – but he then rather spectacularly rose out of the proletariat through the mass media, first as a jobbing music journalist, writing a book about the New York Dolls and another about James Dean, and then as a peculiar kind of pop idol, arguably the founding figure of English indie music. The Smiths, the band he formed in 1982 with Johnny Marr, mounted a deliberate stand against the contemporaneous modernism of British pop culture, particularly in Manchester, where their melodic, nostalgic approach was designed to stand out both from the Bauhaus-derived aesthetic and electronic sound of Factory records and from the abrasive neo-Vorticism of the Fall.*
After a lengthy and largely undistinguished solo career, Morrissey has recently been best known for becoming explicit about his far-right political sympathies, something which had long been suspected but came out in the open when he started wearing, at public appearances in 2018, a badge of the fascist group For Britain. This sect was founded a year earlier by a politician, Anne Marie Waters, who had been thrown out of UKIP for being too close to the street-fighting wing of fascism – this is niche nationalism.
Going back to The Smiths LP, what you can hear in it now is a total refusal to get over and move on from a series of childhood wounds. Sometimes these are Morrissey’s own – several songs are, or appear to be, about gay relationships, frequently with a stark power differential, as for instance in the brutal awakening described in ‘Reel Around the Fountain’. Sometimes they linger on murder, with vivid depictions that stand somewhere between a Tony Harrison poem and a News of the World headline. In the closing song ‘Suffer Little Children’, over chiming, pretty but eerily looping guitars, references to the victims of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, children of Morrissey’s generation murdered on the wild moors around Greater Manchester, are interspersed with the landscape:
fresh lilaced moorland fields
cannot hide the stolid stench of death.
The way the song’s cadences recur and recur, murmured with grim pleasure, suggests not rage or empathy so much as a tasteful version of tabloid prurience, a fascination with horror. The best-known songs on the record are either depictions of miserable bedsit life (‘What do we get for our trouble and pain? Just a rented room in Whalley Range’), or statements of both identification and opposition to ‘England’, which is ‘mine’, and ‘it owes me a living – but ask me why and I’ll spit in your eye’. In this song, ‘Still Ill’, the poignant nostalgia – and its identification with the particular environment of a depressed, damp, formerly industrial city – is unrivalled, all the more for its vagueness, the indistinct object of its longing:
But we cannot cling
to the old dreams anymore
No we cannot cling
to those dreams
Under the iron bridge we kissed
and although I ended up with sore lips
it just wasn’t like the old days anymore
No it wasn’t like those days.
So sang a man of twenty-three. It would have seemed odd in 1983, when that record came out, to see it as an incipient statement of English nationalism, particularly given that the band seemed in some way identified, albeit in a complex fashion, with the left: playing benefit concerts for Liverpool Council; being proudly queer (although never ‘out’) in the repressive era that culminated in the passing of Section 28; and particularly in their strange but fervent republicanism, as outlined in the ‘The Queen Is Dead’, a kaleidoscopic fantasy narrating surreal imagined encounters with Prince Charles and culminating in regicide, though the dream of insurgency is tempered by the song’s citation of the wartime music hall number ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’.
The cruelty of Morrissey’s vision would become apparent only gradually. Indeed, many of the Smiths’ songs described the victimisation perpetrated by a Victorian industrial elite that somehow endured right into the secondary-modern schools of the 1960s. In ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, sung in the present tense but describing an experience unlikely to be found in any urban local authority school in the 1980s, we have:
Belligerent ghouls
run Manchester schools
spineless bastards all
Sir leads the troops
jealous of youth
same old jokes since 1902.
‘Barbarism Begins at Home’, from the same album, paints the same scenario, but in a domestic setting – pointless arbitrary violence, casual and random, again with a sense of endless repetition and inevitability:
And a crack on the head
is what you get for asking
And a crack on the head
is what you get for not asking.
These songs, Derek Jarman’s videos for them and the inextricably linked covers of the albums and singles, usually designed or directed by Morrissey himself, exist in an enclosed world that ends around 1964, at an undefined point just before the large-scale migration from the cotton-producing regions of south Asia into the textile-manufacturing districts of the North West of England: before Harold Wilson’s election victory, before the Beatles went weird, before inner-Manchester districts like Hulme were subjected to modernist ‘comprehensive redevelopment’, before the textile industry collapsed, and after the introduction of television but certainly before colour TV, with pop music defined by Joe Meek, Billy Fury and Lulu rather than psychedelia or soul.
The creation and evocation of this pickled environment are remarkably complete, and is achieved with such longing and lingering attention to detail that it can only be seen as an attempt at reconstructing it, in its entirety, in the mind. In this, the Smiths were remarkably successful – though I was born a year before the band was formed, if I hear ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ I immediately relate it to the casual violence and the wet red Victorian streets of the southern port where I grew up. The thoroughness of the evocation seems to make the pettiness and misery of the memories it calls forth forgivable.
In a 1988 Melody Maker interview/feature on Morrissey, timed to coincide with the release of Viva Hate, his first, and by far his best, solo record, Simon Reynolds refers to this bleak nostalgia: ‘Viva Hate … returns again and again to the Englishness which obsesses Morrissey … [he] seems to cherish the very constraints and despondency of a now disappearing England, [fetishising] the lost limits.’ Reynolds tries to corner the singer about this, asking him:
On ‘Late Night, Maudlin Street’, you say ‘I never stole a happy hour around here’ – but the whole effect of the song, the way your murmured reveries drift in and out of Vini [Reilly]’s entranced playing, just makes the whole time and place seem magical, otherworldly, and incredibly precious.
Admitting the charge, Morrissey replies, ‘it’s a trick of memory … looking back and thinking maybe things weren’t that bad but of course, they were’.*
It first became clear that this all had a certain vicious underside in 1986, when the Smiths released ‘Panic’, with its attack not so much on chart pop per se, but upon any and all kinds of black dance music. Around the time of its release, a New Musical Express questionnaire asked him to name his ‘favourite reggae record’; he replied, ‘reggae is vile’, and later attempted to justify this response by claiming that the genre is a form of ‘black nationalism’. In ‘Panic’, the detailed picture of miserable British (and in this case, also Irish) urbanism and the lack of consolation in the countryside is paired with the arrival of an inescapable alien force that poisons that environment.
Hopes may rise on the Grasmere
But Honey Pie, you’re not safe here
So you run down
to the safety of the town
But there’s Panic on the streets of Carlisle
Dublin, Dundee, Humberside
I wonder to myself
Burn down the disco
hang the blessed DJ
Because the music that they constantly play
IT SAYS NOTHING TO ME ABOUT MY LIFE.
Viva Hate features the first of several solo Morrissey songs that include uncomfortable depictions of British Asians – ‘Bengali in Platforms’ patronisingly tells the out-of-place, eager-to-please protagonist, trying to fit in with Anglo-American pop culture, ‘life is hard enough when you belong here’. This becomes creepier still with ‘Asian Rut’, a dispassionate anecdote of a racist attack, and ‘National Front Disco’, an anthemic portrayal of 1970s English fascists that includes ‘England for the English!’ as a warbled refrain. When supporting Madness in 1992, Morrissey wrapped himself in a Union Jack at a time when public display of the flag was largely the preserve of the far right; this was seen, at least by the music press, as a gesture towards the group’s large skinhead fan base.
The singer’s support for the far right has passed well beyond the point of plausible deniability in the last couple of years. In a recent interview on his own website, Morrissey reaffirmed his support for Anne Marie Waters (elsewhere, he has declared his enthusiasm for ‘Tommy Robinson’), added that he’d like to see Nigel Farage become prime minister and reiterated his disdain for Islam. He has greeted accusations of racism with the comment ‘Everyone ultimately prefers their own race – does this make everyone racist?’ On his own Facebook fan page last year, Morrissey denounced ‘Soviet Britain’. These are all fairly standard statements of contemporary British conservatism, made strange only by the fact that they come from a queer 1980s pop star who hasn’t lived in the UK in decades, rather than a retired Trafford Park engineer.
The most extraordinary achievement of Morrissey’s career since 1988 has been getting his 2013 autobiography published by Penguin Classics from day one. The experience of reading it is equally bizarre. It begins with a hundred pages on 1960s Manchester, written with the same obsessive longing that pervades the songs of the Smiths, with the same flair and precision, the same apparent attempt to recreate a complete society in all its misery and violence, a world in microcosm – followed by three hundred interminable pages, tedious and self-important, about celebrities, record companies and court cases, notable only for an air of breathtaking self-pity.
It’s tempting simply to separate out these two phases, much as it is to separate the Smiths from the sixty-one-year-old suburban fascist who fronted them. But the two are intrinsically linked. It can be difficult to work out quite what it is about the past that so many in Morrissey’s generation long for. It certainly isn’t council housing, full employment, free education, public ownership or social mobility: if conservative over-sixties comment on such lost public goods, it’s to decry the Labour Party’s foolish utopianism in trying to resurrect them. Rather, it is a nostalgia for misery, a longing for boredom, a relocation of poverty from economics to aesthetics.*
The belligerent ghouls. The spineless bastards. The beatings. The ignorance. The pollution and the soot. The gay-bashing and the Paki-bashing. The murders on the Moors. The young are resented for not having suffered these miseries, obsessively recalled so as constantly to relive the experience of personal struggle and uprooting, an origin story for home ownership and bored affluence, whether that’s the pettier example of the paid-off mortgage or the purchased council house, or, in Morrissey’s case, the villa in the hills of LA. But the young are resented not only for their freedom from the past. Who stands in the way of this self-aggrandisement through re-enactment? The Asians, especially the Muslims. The young. The left. The ‘woke’. And here, Morrissey is truly the voice of a generation.
__________
* Susan Watkins, ‘Beyond Brexit’, New Left Review 121, January–February 2020. One could also point out that the Express and Mail’s ‘Big Ben Must Bong for Brexit’ campaign sounds like one of Marc Bolan’s gleeful nonsense lyrics.
* As a long-term enthusiast for modern music, a socialist and a patron of the Manchester Modernist Society, Marr is guiltless of most of Morrissey’s specific crimes.
* Simon Reynolds, ‘Miserablism’, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, London, 1990, pp. 16–17.
* For anyone who doubts this, I recommend browsing the Facebook group ‘Memory Lane UK’.