  |
| Royal Albert Hall (17 & 18 Sept.) review - Hugo (Belgium, Sept. 24) |
|
 |
posted by davidt
on Friday September 27 2002, @08:00AM
Bart Proost writes:
This review is really new: I translated it from Dutch
(I hope my English is good enough). It's a really
great review from HUMO - Belgium's biggest, most
respected weekly magazine. This magazine almost never
covers concerts, but - to my shock - they found
Morrissey's London shows of great importance. A
must-read! The journalist re-hashes some of the old
clichés, but he seems genuinly touched by the
performance. And I found it impossible to read the
last few lines without smiling. Another one catches
the Moz-bug! :)
HUMO - the most successful and respected independent
Belgian magazine (Tuesday 24 Sept)
LIVE REVIEW : MORRISSEY, Royal Albert Hall, 17 & 18
September
by Serge Simonart (one of the few Belgian
rock-journalists with regular access to the biggest
international stars)
On Sept 17 & 18, Morrissey performed at the Royal
Albert Hall in London. Both concerts were real events,
particularly because Steven Patrick Morrissey is
slowly turning into a recluse. In a recent biography
Morrissey admitted to preferring the company of
animals to the company of man and he joked about
residing in Spain. With his typical preference for
'grandeur' from the past, he now lives in Hollywood,
in a house that once belonged to actress Carole
Lombard (the misantropic Norma Desmond in the movie
'Sunset Boulevard' was modelled after Lombard).
In and around the Hall, that great
gold-and-red-coloured building, one could cut the
tension with a knife. The audience is really 'wide to
recieve', to paraphrase one of Morrissey's songs. In
the audience I spotted countless Morrissey-clones:
some of them really look like extreme caricatures of
their idol (I recount seeing one who could've been
Morrissey's twin - if it wasn't for the 20 kilo's of
overweight that he was packing... Maybe he was just
trying to bring the song 'you're the one for me fatty'
to live, who knows.)
A couple of fans - out of Nerd Central - were drawing
applause for raising a banner which read 'There is a
light that never goes out' now and again. The famous
foortball-hymn 'Here we go...' is transformed in the
chanting of 'Mor-ris-sey...'. Countless of the
faithful at hand are carrying gladioli (a botanical
preference that Morrissey shares with good old Dame
Edna). One overheated fan even falls out of his loge -
a quite intriguing sense of foreplay -but he
miraculously gets away with nothing more then a broken
ankle.
Morrissey loves grand gestures, therefore his arrival
is anounced by ringing bells accompanied by the voice
of the late 'poet laureate' Sir John Betjeman reading
out his poem 'Portrait of a dead man'. Then, Morrissey
trudges onto the stage like a twenty-first century
hunchback while the audience goes mad. First
impressions: he's still sporting his trademark quiff,
his voice sounds phenomenal and his band sounds really
great - as if they've practicing and rehearsing for
twenty-five hours a day over a period of the last
years. Our always-likable sadomasochist Morrissey is
still more eloquent than anyone else in the world of
rock music, with his preference for sardonic
one-liners: 'Next time we'll bring an
applause-machine' he quips (after a hysterical
reaction from the audience to one of his new songs -
still to lukewarm according to Moz himself).
For 90 minutes Morrissey performs some of his best
Smiths- and solo-material: 'Everyday is like sunday',
'I want the one I can't have', 'Hairdresser on fire',
'Suedehead', 'Late Night, Maudlin Street'... Sometimes
Morrissey seems to be in very good mood, like a modern
Noel Coward, at other times he looks like a
combination of Dracula and Casanova, the night-time
mayor of Doomstown, a Mozferatu for these troubled
ages. He really indulges in his image : the
maladjusted living anachronism. He even introduces his
musicians in archaic English ('Hither, one perceives,
on lead guitar...'). When you hear him talking, it
seems impossible to comprehend that this man and those
cavemen in Oasis are coming from the same city,
Manchester.
All gossip that Morrissey would be 'dried up', 'a
bitter old man' or even 'over the top' gets swept of
the table, almost without effort, as he performs five
absolutely incredible new songs. They are just as good
as their titles, and in Mozzer's case that means that
they are extraordinary: 'The world is full of crashing
bores', 'The first of the gang to die', the cynical 'I
like you' and espacially the sinistre epic 'Mexico'
are top songs. One of his new compositions is called
'Irish blood, English Heart', even though he's been
living in the US for a couple of years now...
The concert had three climaxes: first of all, a
majestic rendition of 'Jack the ripper'. Secondly,
Morrissey anouncing 'If you're a good soul and a kind
person, one day, eventually, you will become a
vegetarian' and then starting a crushing performance
of 'Meat is murder'. The song's a showcase for the
enormously talented guitarists, Alain Whyte and Boz
Boorer, who produce a wall of sound that even proves
to be superior to the best of The Edge and Radiohead.
The last three minutes of this nine-minute
heartbreaker, we can see Morrissey writhing on his
back like an animal in pain while Boorer is dangling
his guitar over his head as if it were a chainsaw.
After a well deserved standing ovation, Morrissey
states - not hindered by any form of false modesty -
that: 'Burt Bacharach would have shat to be able to
write such a song'. Indeed. The third time that the
crowd goes berserk, is during the one and only encore,
the wonderful 'There is a light that never goes out'.
This hymn for martyrs all over the planet is sung -
word for word - by literally everyone in attendance.
All night long Morrissey-devotees try to climb onto
the stage to touch their Messiah. Morrissey acts as if
he doesn't notice any of their efforts and the
security seem to take their job quite seriously.
Still, Morrissey touches hundreds of hands in the
front rows, almost as if he's giving his fans a
blessing. One girl, seated right next to me, comes
back from the stage in trance. She's crying and
holding up her trembling hand to her friends,
triumphantly: 'He touched me!'. There's quite a high
percentage of 'professional homosexuals' in the crowd,
but there's also loads and loads of heterosexual girls
and women, close to fainting. Morrissey is so
'poofter' as one can be, yet he seems to get women all
hysterical. Hats off to the man!
During his last verse Morrissey rips his shirt from
his chest and throws it in to the masses. Then he runs
backstage, as if he's just a little embarrassed by the
fact that he seems at least 10 kilos heavier then all
those years ago (were those love-handles?). Curtains
close and the audience leaves the Hall on the sounds
of Sinatra's 'My way'...
Well, we all get older and wiser. I myself once had a
discussion with Marc Mijlemans (a legendary Belgian
rock journalist), about fifteen years ago: He was
thirty, I was nineteen. I thought Morrissey was a
poseur, a queer and a misantropic bore. Marc thought
he was a visionary with unlimited musical talent. I
was wrong. Marc was right. This, my dear friends, was
the best concert that I've seen in the past five
years.
Serge Simonart
|
|
|
|
|
|
Thanks for the translation.
xox