It could almost be the 90s: at a sold out O2 Arena, a pink-shirted Morrissey and his five-piece band rally the crowd with Suedehead, each oscillating “why” roared en masse. It is as if his past two decades of inflammatory political activism hasn’t hurt his reputation. What’s more, things will soon pick up, he assures us, because his morphine has just kicked in. A smatter of laughter. Probably joking?
Opiate allusions aside, the between-songs narrative is a classic tour-de-Moz. He stumbles from self-hype to castigating “jealous bitches” and his customary bete noire, the cancel culture that has so thoroughly deplatformed him that he has no choice but to stand on a big platform and tell 20,000 fans all about it. Though its insinuations appear lost on the crowd, his alignment with far-right talking points comes to the fore on recent single Notre-Dame, a repugnant synth-pop lament seemingly based on debunked (and broadly Islamophobic) conspiracies that arsonists started the 2019 fire at the Paris cathedral. “We know who tried to kill you,” he sings, addressing the cathedral itself. “Before investigations they said: there’s nothing to see here.”
