Melody Maker (Oct. 4, 1997)
review by Jennifer Nine

submitted by Naomi Colvin

CENTRAL PARK SUMMERSTAGE, NEW YORK CITY

I daren't look. But there's a voice in my left ear bellowing in a wounded shriek. It belongs to the boy who's the roar in my side. Probably a big, broad-shouldered boy, like so many of Moz's American crowd, although you'll never believe how many until you see for yourself. And he's bellowing, bewildered, tearful, and it's all about Morrissey. "I love f***in' Morrissey" he gasps, "Looove - f***in' - Morrissey!!!" It's adjectival and desperate, and it's hardly Wilde, but it sounds almost as heartbreaking, in a funny kind of way, as it feels.

Improbably, however, it's "Reader Meet Author" - halfway through a brisk 55 minutes' worth of Morrissey's first US tour in half a decade - eliciting these pangs, so I snicker. Sure, it's stacatto and feisty and Morrissey's giving it some serious arm-swinging and heel-kicking stick. But I'm a big girl with a notebook instead of a big boy with a broken heart, so I smile slyly to myself instead.

Meanwhile, Our Devious Leader is doing his version of the same thing, slyly pretending he's not sure we're having fun. "Are you bearing up?" he asks, as though he's about to call several thousand Americans "chook". "You don't know? Never mind." Never mind the roar that's just greeted him, he must mean. Never mind "Maladjusted" and the savage suburban horrors of "Ambitious Outsiders" looming like a dense black thundercloud of guitar. Never mind that the ever-circumspect Boz 'n' Alain 'n' co are now able to paint sonic backdrops as big as "The Queen Is Dead".

That's a bit long to shout back compared to "F***in' *Morrissey*". But I'm hardly going to have pangs like that when "Nobody Loves Us" hasn't done it, or even a velvety "Wide To Receive", which Morrissey says is about Net geeks and whose ecstatically falsettoed "I'm waiting here wide to receive" says it's about different hardware entirely. It's all very good, and we even spot Michael Stipe wearing a cloth on his head, but maybe I'm all out of pangs.

Until Morrissey plays a Smiths song.

Yes, I know. And either I'm fibbing (but I'm not, and we also get a triumphant "Shoplifters Of The World Unite" encore), or I've abandoned new pangs for the safety of the old in a way that Morrissey (who hasn't played enough Smiths songs to fill a C30 in 10 years) refuses to.

Or neither. Because the Smiths' song, out of everything, that Morrissey chooses to sing is "Paint A Vulgar Picture". It's not their most musically ravishing or gloriously singalong, but it's the one I'd choose every time, because it understands pop music as much as most of pop music put together. A pitilessly accurate summation of the music biz and a defiant hymn to the pop fan's helpless, passionate, unrequited "true love". Done with such intimate sympathy that you almost forget that pop stars, other than this one, are people who understand bellowing boys the least.

I'd like to tell you how well Morrissey sang it, but there was a loud pang-stricken voice in my ear.

It might have been mine.