World Of Morrissey

MORRISSEY: “World Of Morrissey” (Parlophone)

HE IS Godlike, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything bearing His name is touched by greatness. When World Of Morrissey was conceived, greatness seems to have been sitting in a cafe a couple of miles away, firmly beyond touching distance, waiting for the next real Moz album to be released.

Individually, all these songs are at the very least pretty wonderful, but World Of Morrissey seems to have been strung together by someone who knows as much about efficient disposal of dead husbands as Mandy Jordache.

What you get is the current Boxers EP, a smattering of recent singles, and three live songs from Beethoven Was Deaf. And bits and pieces from both Vauxhall and I and Your Arsenal (‘We’ll Let You Know’, ‘Billy Budd’ and ‘Spring Heeled Jim’). And sumptuous packaging we’ve come to expect from the man. And the nagging feeling that this bargain price, flung-together-in-the-dark pick’n’mix mightn’t be seeing the light of day if Warners hadn’t just released a compilation of Smiths singles.

‘Boxers’ itself is one of Morrissey’s finest singles; an acutely distressing tale of failure and despair married to a fab tune: wahey! ‘My Love Life’, ‘Certain People I Know’ and ‘Last Of The Famous International Playboys’ are superb singles too, although the last is so familiar by now that it seems ridiculous to include it in favour of the more recent, and even more gorgeous, ‘The More You Ignore Me’.

‘Moonriver’ as sung by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At Tiffany’s, is a wistful hymn of innocent yearning; as sung by Steven Patrick on World Of Morrissey (taken from the ‘Hold On To Your Friends’ single) it’s seven minutes of bottled fatalism; again, wa-hey! See, the man really can do no wrong.

Except, of course, from sanctioning albums that could have been very simply improved by subtracting the tracks that even a half-hearted Morrissey fan already owns and replacing them with something a bit more obscure. Either that, or including a fold-out, life-size picture of the Moz . . .

• Lorraine Freeney