Morissey’s back in Brighton? – a brief history of The Smiths-on-sea
Ex-The-Smiths member, solo singer-songwriter, outspoken vegan and infamously contentious individual Morrissey has announced a UK and Ireland tour starting this September, with his final show tacking place at the Brighton Centre.
Tickets are on sale now via www.gigsandtours.com for Morrissey’s entire tour, which includes shows in Birmingham, Blackpool and London. With Morrissey returning to the coast for his final show, a question pops into mind. Namely; why Brighton?
For Morrissey fans, the answer might be somewhat obvious. While Google’s auto-filled results for those looking up The Smiths (which include ‘is it ok to like The Smiths’ and ‘is Morrissey cancelled’) belies a long history of antagonism, Morrissey’s original controversy was one of sexuality.
While The Smiths’ subversive perspective has been part of their identity since the band’s conception, their tracks’ queer-coding suggest that sexuality ambiguity was far more than just a means of rocking the boat.
Some of the band’s most popular tracks like ‘Hand in Glove, ‘Charming Man’ and ‘What Difference Does it Make’ offer up blatant descriptions of gay relationships. Apart from the lyrical content of The Smiths tracks, their homosexual thematics have contributed to inter-band melodrama, contributing to the loss of their original bass player Dale Hibbot, who allegedly disagreed with band’s ‘gay’ aesthetic.
On his ambiguous sexuality, Morrissey himself has said that ‘in technical fact, I am humasexual. I am attracted to humans, but , of course . . . not many’. Perhaps ending his tour in the UK’s gay capitol, Brighton, is yet another part of Morrissey’s long wink-and-nudge history of sexuality.
Alternately, maybe the answer lies somewhere in his previous visits. Morrissey first visited the city during The Smiths’ first UK tour in 1984, the year the band signed with Rough Trade. Coinciding with the release of their debut album, ‘Hatful of Hollow’, the band’s first UK tour included a stop at Brighton’s Polytechnic University (which has since merged to become the University of Brighton).
Apart from showcasing the band’s debut, first hand sources suggest the gig was all a Smiths fan could’ve asked for. Late, Morrissey pushed through fans to enter via the front door and proceeded to quip one liners at a particularly enraptured crowd that he described as ‘hysterical animals’. Debuting unreleased ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ and ‘Girl Afraid’, the band received such a raucous reaction that they played a second encore.
Since the band’s dissolution in a 1987, and the beginning of Morrissey’s solo career, Mozza has repeatedly claimed his audience can make or break a performance. In Q&A session on True To You in June 2007, he said about being on stage that ‘I don’t have any function at all as a human being….which is unfortunate! I’m not sure if I even exist offstage’.
In a separate interview with The Hollywood reported in 2013, he said; ‘It’s the audience that make the night. At live concerts, people show themselves as they really are, which isn’t generally allowed in our constitutionally rigid societies. The love and intensity from the crowd is quite incredible for me to witness. It sets its own terms’. Given these comments, perhaps it’s not a stretch to say his choice to return to Brighton is an attempt to recreate the wildness he witnessed there almost four decades ago.
So, will you be attending Morrissey’s 2022 concert at the Brighton Centre?
Words by Kate Bowie
