If the caustic title track that opens his tenth solo album – the first since 2009’s Years of Refusal - is any indication of his true feelings, Steven Patrick Morrissey is unlikely ever to be asked to participate in one of those MTV ‘Rock The Vote’ campaigns. “World peace is none of your business,” the 55-year-old Mancunian croons. “You must not tamper with arrangements/ Work hard and sweetly pay your taxes/ Never asking what for/ Oh, you poor little fool.”
Moz’s utter disdain for the likes of, say, the Royal Family will come as no surprise to anybody (he even penned a memorably scathing article in these very pages when the Queen visited Ireland), but here he’s seemingly displaying contempt for the entire western democratic process. “Police will stun you with their stun guns/ Or they’ll disable you with tasers/ That’s what government’s for... The rich must profit and get richer/ And the poor must stay poor/ Oh, you poor little fool- oh, you fool.”
The song ends with a clarion call to lay down your voting pens: “Each time you vote you support the process/ Brazil and Bahrain/ Oh, Egypt, Ukraine/ So many people in pain/ No more, you poor little fool/ No more, you fool.”
All very sick and bad, and looking at the current state of the democratised world it’s very hard to disagree with him, but this most curmudgeonly of contemporary musical icons doesn’t appear to be offering any alternatives. Then again, why should he? As Chekhov once declared, “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” Besides which, as his bestselling Autobiography so brilliantly demonstrated, Morrissey enjoys stirring the shit. Or maybe he’s genuinely just tired of it all. On album closer ‘Oboe Concerto’, he laments, “The older generation have tried, sighed and died.”
Produced by Joe Chiccarelli (White Stripes, The Strokes, Beck) and recorded at La Fabrique in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence – the same French residential studio where Nick Cave made his last album – World Peace is not attempting to reinvent the wheel: some truly great lyrics are set to familiar Morrissey-esquue melodies.
The central musicians here are his current touring band - Boz Boorer (guitar), Jesse Tobias (guitar), Solomon Walker (bass), Matthew Walker (drums), and Gustavo Manzur (keyboards). Their playing is tight and sometimes inventive, with menacing flourishes when required. The riffs on Beat Generation inspired ‘Neal Cassady Drops Dead’ have lots of bite: “Neal Cassady drops dead/ and Allen Ginsberg’s tears shampoo his beard.”
The most musically inventive track by far is ‘Istanbul’. According to Chiccarelli, “Morrissey wanted to evoke the feeling of the hectic and chaotic streets of the city of Istanbul, so he used a cigar box guitar, a lap steel guitar and a complicated and busy drum rhythm, plus an actual gong as percussion, as well as vocal samples from a field recording taken in the streets of Istanbul by guitarist Jesse Tobias.”
It’s an appropriately surreal sonic backdrop to a song about a father’s search for his missing son through that ancient city’s back streets: “On secret streets in disbelief/ Little shadow shows the lead/ Prostitutes, stylish and glam/ In amongst them you are one.”
Most of these 12 songs could be identified as Morrissey’s by their titles alone – ‘Earth is the Loneliest Planet’, ‘The Bullfighter Dies’, ‘Kick The Bride Down The Aisle’, etc. The lyrical topics vary widely. ‘I’m Not A Man’ deals with gender issues. ‘Staircase at the University’ is about a female student who commits suicide because of exam pressure, “If you don’t get three As/ her sweet daddy said/ You’re no child of mine/ and as far as I’m concerned, you’re dead.”
Having previously sung about Strangeways, here he turns his attention to Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison (doubtless inspired by some of his conversations with our own Damien Dempsey). “The Joy brings many things/ It cannot bring you joy,” he declares, before condensing the history of Ireland’s most notorious prison into a few sharp verses. “Brendan Behan’s laughter rings for what he had or hadn’t done/ for he knew then as I know now/ We all lose, rich or poor/ We all lose.” Proceedings close with ‘Oboe Concerto’: “And there’s a song I can’t stand/ and it’s stuck in my head.”
World Peace,/i> is probably Morrissey’s best solo effort since 1994’s masterful Vauxhall And I,.
OUT NOW.