March of the Lemmings by Stewart Lee

Author:Stewart Lee [Stewart Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571357048
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

How to treat Morrissey? Stop listening to him

8 July 2018

Morrissey fans have for years equated his more unpalatable pronouncements with the babblings of a beloved but out-of-touch relative. Some of the things Uncle Steven says seem a bit racist, but he has seen a lot of changes in the area he lives in, he got food poisoning from a bad curry on the Bristol Road in 1978 and he says he couldn’t get on Top of the Pops in the ’80s because he wasn’t black.

But are Morrissey fans justified, in the light of Morrissey’s unambiguous support for both the violent tanning salon entrepreneur Tommy Robinson1 and the far-right For Britain party, in finally losing faith? Either way, it looks like I picked the wrong year to take an eighteen-month break from stand-up to work incognito as a Morrissey impersonator, fronting a Smiths and Morrissey covers band.2 I know it’s over. My Boz Boorer lookalike has been put to work in the garden, trapping jackdaws and building a gazebo.

Until last week, I had four Mexican musicians holed up in the spare room, working on a mash-up of ‘This Charming Man’ and a Paul Simon song, entitled ‘Here’s to You, Tommy Robinson’. ‘Why ponder the law’s complexities, when Robinson’s done for a breach of the peace?’

My deliberate Morrissey-style weight gain was all for nothing, it appears, and now I am just a fat fifty-year-old man, of whom passers-by remark, ‘Morrissey has let himself go. What with the weight gain and the Tommy Robinson stuff.’

The late Sean Hughes, a fellow stand-up comedian to whom Morrissey meant a lot, had insisted on being cremated last year to the sound of The Smiths’ ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’, and Morrissey’s calculated black-comic misery made even Sean’s actual immolation momentarily funny. Sean also had the perfect Morrissey joke: ‘Everyone grows out of their Morrissey phase. Except Morrissey.’3

But Morrissey’s controversial song lyrics should not be taken as evidence of their writer’s true feelings, any more than this column, by the Observer-reading columnist character of Stewart Lee, represents what the real Stewart Lee actually thinks.

Thus, in 1988, when Morrissey told the titular hero of ‘Bengali in Platforms’ to abandon his ‘western plans’ and understand that life in England was difficult enough even if you ‘belong here’, the bewildered immigrant was perhaps merely an ill-judged metaphor for loneliness; in 1992’s ‘The National Front Disco’, when Morrissey sang ‘England for the English!’ from the point of view of a disenchanted young man seduced by the far right, we accepted that exploring that point of view was not the same as endorsing it.

Just as, in 1967, when John Lennon said he was the walrus, goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob, goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob, we knew John Lennon was not the walrus goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob, goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob at all. John Lennon was in fact the eggman. The walrus was Paul.

The credibility problem would arise if John Lennon, having

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