On Saturday night, I went to the Dublin Castle, a pub and music venue in Camden, north London, the fabled birthplace of Britpop. I definitely wasn’t there when Blur were born; I feel sure I would have remembered. But I was there the night a guy set his hair on fire because he was trying to make a girl smell his shampoo and he accidentally leaned over someone lighting a cigarette. So that’s going back a few years.
Covers band Viva Morrissey speak straight to the hearts of those of us with an unarguable passion for Morrissey the genre, but an inveterate dislike of Morrissey the man. It’s an ambivalence deeper than the standard question “can you love the art while finding the artist ‘problematic’?”.
Picasso, for instance, was of his time. He died before society figured out that locking women in studios was bad, actually. Who knows, if he hadn’t died, he might have apologised. Morrissey, by contrast, lives his life as a constant provocation, peddling tired far-right tropes (Hitler was leftwing, actually) and dumb, crotchety attacks on Sadiq Khan, which is just not-quite-deniable Islamophobia for the basic.
Want to say something racist, but don’t want to be challenged on it? Say something irrelevant and unkind about the mayor of London. It’s so simple even Donald Trump can do it.
I could never pay to see Morrissey; but I’d still always watch a guy who looks and sounds a bit like him, especially if he didn’t get into the choppier waters of ethno-nationalism, which it’s technically possible to avoid. But Viva Morrissey had elected to play You Are the Quarry in full, so Irish Blood, English Heart couldn’t be skirted. It’s nothing like as nasty as Bengali in Platforms, but listening to the lyrics, live – “I’ve been dreaming of a time when / To be English is not to be baneful / To be standing by the flag not feeling shameful / Racist or partial”, followed by a swipe at mainstream politics – it described, quite economically and, OK, also tunefully, the full political programme of the Reform party. All English politics is rubbish because it’s not proud enough to be English. You can imagine Lee Anderson singing it, with Farage and Tice on guitars, at the karaoke from hell.
Released in 2004, it was a massively leading indicator of how ugly politics would become. While it wouldn’t have been possible, then, for anyone to take Morrissey as seriously as he takes himself, we could have got a heads up for the future if we’d listened a fraction more closely.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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