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| Financial Times - negative review of RFH |
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posted by davidt
on Thursday June 17 2004, @08:00AM
featherweight sends:
ARTS: Morrissey Meltdown Festival, Royal Festival Hall, London LUDOVIC HUNTER-TILNEY
By Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Financial Times; Jun 16, 2004
Recent Meltdowns have been forgettable but this year's guest curator Morrissey has given the two-week festival a fresh lease of life. Tasked with choosing a line-up of performers who interest or have influenced him, he's assembled an impressively quixotic cast ranging from the New York Dolls, whose UK fan club Moz headed as a boy, to Nancy Sinatra, his next-door neighbour in Los Angeles.
Unfortunately his opening night concert was less inspirational. The harbingers for it weren't good: his support act, the Libertines, had to pull out and one of his band members was absent through illness. Lonely defiance is a favourite theme of Morrissey's lyrics; a strong dose of it was needed this evening but instead the atmosphere was disappointingly flat.
One problem is his new material, which is losing its lustre fast as the novelty fades of seeing the ex-Smiths singer on stage again. His new album You Are the Quarry is his first in seven years and, although it's brought him greater chart success than ever, the truth is that it's not a terribly good piece of work.
He opened with one of its best tracks, "The First of the Gang to Die", but thereafter it was downhill. "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores" was peevish and puffed up by power chords. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" (dreadful hubristic title) contained the unedifying spectacle of perhaps the best rock lyricist ever, singing doggerel such as "I was a good kid, I wouldn't do you no harm/ I was a nice kid, with a nice paper round."
The contrast with his early work was striking. Most of the older material in his set was drawn from the more obscure corners of his back catalogue but even lesser-known songs such as "The Headmaster Ritual" (from the Smiths' Meat Is Murder) showed how much more interesting the phrasing and content of his vocals used to be and how much more lithe the music was, too.
Rare moments of brilliance aside, such as a wall of sound version of "Everyday Is Like Sunday", his performance lacked sparkle and character. Still, at least the same can't be said of the bill he's chosen for Meltdown. Tel 08703 800 400. Festival runs to June 27
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