Everything’s just fine and dandy with Mr. Moz
Who put the “M” in Manchester? Nine red flashing letters towering on the stage behind our culprit offer a subtle indication.
On his 45th birthday it had been 12 years since Morrissey had last crooned in the city of his birth. “Why did the years go?” the foppish singer asks his audience in that same wryly self-aware style between songs. While seven of those years were spent in self-imposed exile in Beverly Hills, Morrissey hasn’t turned plastic or leather-tough.
On this DVD featuring the nostalgia-satisfying full concert from the Manchester stop on last year’s You Are The Quarry tour and three new music videos among the DVD extras, we see he’s still willing to give and be gotten. As he belts current tunes, Smiths standards and solo classics alike, he’s still a cool, grandiose Wilde-meets-Sinatra—but with a resonance reformed. Jowls complete him. His grasp on complexity and longing—his lyrics teetering between maudlin and comical—are only fully realized now with middle age.
Celebratory misery is always in if you do it right. Ask Moz’s fans, who, from the rapt looks of them, aren’t about to forget his songs that made them cry when they lay “in awe on the bedroom floor.” Celibacy has got to be a powerful prison.