Morrissey, London Troxy

Morrissey

It had been a long wait for Morrissey fans in London – over seven months since tickets were snapped up on the day of sale, six weeks since the show was postponed due to ill health, Morrissey finally took to the stage at The Troxy in East London. It certainly seemed like a fitting venue – a former boxing venue situated in the heart of the East end, an area that has been home to many of the characters in Morrissey’s songs since he went solo. Indeed, a photograph of Ronnie Kray formed an iconic backdrop for Morrissey and his band.

Following competent support from Doll and the Kicks, Morrissey took to the stage with the words, ‘Troxy! Music!’ and he and his band tore into the new, heavier version of ‘This Charming Man’ that has regularly opened their sets on the Refusal Tour. It lacks something of the subtlety of the original, but makes up for this with sheer power and Morrissey, after a few days break after some shows in Eastern Europe, was in fine voice. Many singers of his age wouldn’t be able to attack their old material with such precise venom, but his voice was faultless from the off and throughout.

It didn’t take long for the band to hit their stride, with a set that veered from old to new. The powerful ‘Black Cloud’ sat alongside ‘How Soon Is Now?’, a song that is now so familiar that it is easy to forget just how experimental a move it was, way back in the mid-1980s. New favourites such as ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ and ‘I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris’ were aired with ‘Ask’, ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ and, a nice surprise, ‘You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby’. ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’, meanwhile, was extended and augmented for a mass singalong.

While the old Smiths classic and the majority of the new material worked well together, Morrissey does have a tendency to make odd set list choices. From his new record, Years of Refusal, he ignored standouts such as ‘Something Is Squeezing My Skull’, ‘Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed’ and ‘All You Need Is Me’, in favour of the less immediate cuts from its second half. You Are The Quarry album tracks ‘How Can Anyone Possibly Know How I Feel?’ and ‘The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores’ were fine enough (particularly for the latter’s Michael Jackson-referencing intro), but you felt he’d have been better turning to the many, more obvious highlights from his back catalogue – ‘Now My Heart Is Full’ perhaps? ‘Hairdresser on Fire’? ‘Piccadilly Palare’?

Despite the set list gripes, Morrissey remains a unique, captivating performer, stalking the stage, accepting presents, handshakes, stage invasions with good humour and lapping up the attention from his fans. You get the sense that he thrives on this, that the continued energy of his performances is largely driven by the audience. Whether he was adopting some kind of weird, horizontal crucifixion pose at the end of ‘Life Is A Pigsty’ or chucking his shirt into the audience during the encore of ‘First Of The Gang To Die’, he has an idiosyncratic way of accepting adoration. Morrissey, after all, is and always will be an outsider, a curiousity, a ‘refuser’ in the largely polite, predictable world of popular music. Much like the outsiders that featured in the film that preceded his set – New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Jobriath – he can be as infuriating as he can effortlessly majestic.