This is sad news, but he should have packed up this dog and pony show after Quarry. He tours too much, and places too much strain on his body and mind. His band is pedestrian, his new material uninspiring.
We are just over a month away from the album release and the buzz and excitement is... Missing. I speak as someone who saw Bigmouth and Vicar on the Whistle Test and had to wait two months for The Queen Is Dead, and also saw First Of The Gang To Die on Kilborn and had to wait forever for You Are The Quarry. It even got to the point where a brief, wobbly handheld camera clip of the wonderful Paris thrilled me for some weeks. There's the problem right there. Bigmouth, Vicar, Gang, Paris. Four great songs, but the graph inexorably slopes downwards.
I still maintain the new songs we've heard are hardly thrilling, and have not set the world on fire. Even the best of them, Istanbul, would at one time been a decent b-side. Now it is held up in some quarters as a masterpiece. It doesn't bear multiple hearings. Put alongside the new material by James, for example, it is distinctly lacking. The first track on the new James album, Walk Like You, deals with the human condition and its collision with the modern world in a way 21st century Morrissey could only dream of. It is lyrically and musically superior to nearly every Morrissey song since Quarry and it isn't even the third best track on La Petite Mort.
Morrissey should retire, enjoy his money, look after his health and turn his efforts over entirely to animal rights, hopefully in a sensible and thoughtful manner that will engage people instead of driving them away. For a change.
He's been chipping away at his legacy for years in a misguided attempt to revive his heyday. Time to give himself, and us, a rest. Let's remember him in his pomp, not this rather pathetic caricature he has become.
