Vauxhall And I

ABIDING
Morrissey: farewell then, crap rockabilly
Morrissey's never been the problem. It was the other people. His audience, his adoring fans, whose devotion is at best, touching; at worst, unquestioning. Then there's the yes-people at Camp Moz: the adoring record company who know a "prestige" artist when they see one, the wayside-bound managers and mates, dumped like Tony Hancock shed his collaborators. Collectively, these people have, face it, placed a low quality threshold on Morrissey's work since Viva Hate, in 1988. But out of this circus, Vauxhall And I rises effortlessly to the top. It could be Morrissey's best album.
The crap rockabilly's gone. In fact, much-maligned mucker, ex-Polecat Boz Boorer has been promoted to co-co-writer along with Alain Whyte, whose work elevated Your Arsenal. If Morrissey's hairline or stomach had altered since Hand In Glove, you might even be tempted to say he's aged.
Ignore the single, The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get. He did this last time around: put out the album's weakest track as a taster. With Your Arsenal in '92, it was the thin and weedy You're The One For Me, Fatty; now it's this tune-shy meanderer.
Morrissey fans will buy anything. Right? Well, fourth track Hold On To Your Friends has something to say on this matter: "Why waste good time fighting the people you like?/Don't feel so ashamed to have friends". Indeed. The lyrical tone of Vauxhall And I (he's still in love with London; the album is enjoyably peppered with the sampled voices of Cockney urchins) is, while predictably melodramatic and self-pitying, more resigned and even peaceful.
The sign-off Speedway - a meaty, percussive finale - is presumably coded against the press ("When you try to break my spirit, it won't work, because there's nothing left to break... You won't rest until the hearse that becomes me finally takes me"), but ends on a dedication, "In my own sick way, I'll always stay true to you". This acceptance of his own fate is mirrored in the breezy easygoing pace of the music: Used To Be A Sweet Boy's distant cooing and brushular drumming, the stunning Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning's hypnotic clarinet and whispered vocal.
While Mick Ronson's sterling boot-up-arse production job on Your Arsenal bore some much-needed rock'n'roll dirt, Steve Lillywhite's more conventional midwifery herein leaves Moz sounding utterly at one with himself (and his cohorts); the voice is less mannered, the words are less of a ready-meal controversy, the relationships less strained (a new bassist, Jonny Bridgewood, and drummer Woodie Taylor haven't weakened the team spirit).
References to Brighton Rock in the cracking opener Now My Heart Is Full, and a song named after Billy Budd, the Herman Melville novel and Terence Stamp film, confirm that, for all the deceleration and forgiveness, this is still Morrissey at the rudder; good old Morrissey.
A xerox of his hand-typed lyrics bears a single footnote in the fair Mozzer hand: "Yellow=italics". Right you are. This attention to detail, this unself-conscious fussiness, this love of the English language, was always a key to Morrissey's abiding appeal in these isles (still no idea why the Americans bought into it). Thank heavens he's come round to making exceptional, unique music again. What was his old band called? *****
- Andrew Collins, Q, April 1994

Vauxhall And I was produced by Steve Lillywhite and features the guitar work of Boz Boorer and Alain Whyte, the young suedeheads who co-wrote and played on Your Arsenal and who made Morrissey's '93 [sic] live performances so extraordinary - the U.S. shows were sold out. The two guitarists have settled in as Morrissey's musical foil. They dispense a darker more distorted guitar sound than Johnny Marr but are no less pop-hook artists.
Vauxhall isn't an anxious work. The songs all have a very low, grinding sonic base that doesn't give up the goods with the first pass -like a good strip-tease, the layers come away slowly.
Morrissey's offbeat sense is most apparent on the first single "The More You Ignore Me The Closer I Get," but there is a subtler irony at work in songs like "The Lazy Sunbathers," in which two sun worshippers are impervious to war: "Children shelled? That's all very well, but would you please keep the noise down low?" And the beach motif continues on the sly "Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning".
Real Morrissey fans, however, will be drawn to "Now My Heart Is Full," a big fat ballad of lost friendship and despair.
The disc ends with the chugging "Speedway," and has Morrissey coming as clean as he ever has ("All of the rumors keeping me grounded/I never said they were completely unfounded") to a racing car engine - the associations are endless.
Vauxhall And I has a little dose of cathartic sadness all those weepy teens are jonesin' for, but there's plenty there for us fully grown adolescents. Whether it will bring more Morrissey fans out of the closet remains to be seen. Meanwhile I'll be lip-syncing to "The Last Of The Famous International Playboys" in solitude, while my roommate flees to the grocery.
- Dan O'Kane, CD Review, April 1994

HIS ASTRA'S VOICE
It starts with an assertion of life's mad, high-frothing possibilities and finally it staggers home, beat-up and beatific, promising that "In my own sick way, I will always stay true to you". In between, we witness the bombing of children, a skull gets hammered in, a sailor dies, there's a bizarre swimming fatality, a sprinkling of skin cancer plus innumerable brickbats and back-stabbings. Morrissey's ways are still amazingly, luridly sick, alright.
There's a pervading sweet smell off 'Vauxhall And I', but it's cut with a strange aroma - something a bit deathly. Essence of abattoir, maybe? Nah, worse than that. Morrissey's new record smells like... human flesh at the stake.
Moz Meditation Number One: we met Morrissey's mate in a hotel bar one night, filled him with liquor and then hit him for juicy revelations. All he'd say was that as soon as you're on Moz's payroll, you're immediately slammed by tons of hellish, personal criticism from outside.
Morrissey's musician pal once asked the singer if all the accusations and bitching hurt him much. "Yes, it hurts," Morrissey answered. "But only when it's true."
Of course Steven has revealed his Joan Of Arc complex before, but now it's like he's passed right through the flames into this fascinating ascension trip. His trail to sainthood is hindered with the usual devils - unreliable friends, lost love, liars, innocence-abusers, stupid folk - but it's the critics above all that currently trouble him, so deeply hurt the fellow.
That's why 'Speedway' is such a wild ending for a record - a passionate exposition of Moz's ways and style of working. Just as the Manic Street Preachers closed their last LP with 'Gold Against The Soul' - an apocalyptic rationale of their Michael Stipe comments (their view that cancer is just as deathly a plague as AIDS), so Morrissey gets to the nub of his personal controversy with this swooning finale.
"So when you slam down the hammer," he asks. "can you see it in your heart, can you delve so low?" It's Morrissey on a Christ tip, demanding if you're sinless enough to cast the first stone. He admits to his own faults, but suggests that the disease is endemic. That idea is up for argument, of course, but to hear him sing "All of the rumours keeping me grounded/I never said, never said/That they were completely unfounded," is honestly shocking.
To get specific: two years ago, we spent an NME issue examining some of Morrissey's more unsettling songs. We felt that the likes of 'Asian Rut' and 'The National Front Disco' were dangerously ambiguous - especially in the sometimes uncontrollable climate (sieg heiling skinheads at Finsbury Park) in which they were aired. We never suggested he was an outright racist, but our misgivings were emotional and proper: we wanted a debate. No we have 'Vauxhall And I', the singer's first artistic response to that issue.
And without wanting to get awfully pompous about the outcome, it seems like Morrissey has cut the reckless element out of his act. There's nothing here that might offend a blameless citizen of any origin - though thankfully, silly individuals are still targeted, like the sorts in 'The Lazy Sunbathers' who roast on the beach while Sarajevo kids are mortar-bombed. More power to Steven's armoury there.
Morrissey's not looking for controversy this time, it's umbrage he's after. Instead of lashing out, he's looking for love, like the funny, unsnubbable advances of 'The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get'. Or like the sentiments of 'Billy Budd', a repair job on a friendship gone wrong. To hear him mourn the "12 years on since I took up with you", while the guitar choogles and swings will surely get everybody thinking that the kiss-and-forgive words are meant for Johnny Marr.
Moz Meditation Number Two: 'Billy Budd' is a reference to the Herman Melville story about a naval officer who becomes infatuated with a handsome seaman. The excitable Master-At-Arms actually spills his soup (ooer!) at the sight of Billy, but because of his cruel, repressed ways, the officer eventally gets offed by the young tar. Terence Stamp stars in the movie version, natch.
The other shocker about this record is that Morrissey's music has gone kind of mellow. He's a rockabilly traitor! Gone is the feasting-with-panthers twang and shimmy of 'Your Arsenal' - so it's back to those 'Stomping At The Klub Foot' compilations for the Moz-enamoured rocking set.
Likewise with the glam touches - sadly expired along with the demise of Mick Ronson, perhaps, but also not so fitting with the themes of remorse and rebuilding that carry the record. 'Hold On To Your Friends' was never going to be a thrash; instead he plays it like Noel Coward with a harpsichord and the coolest, quietest feedback you've ever heard.
On 'Now My Heart Is Full', Morrissey literally lifts us above the debris, recognising that the old house is history now, but better things can be done when the spirit is up to the job. From the doomy noise at the opening, the song widens and whirls into this bizarre roll call of Brighton Rock characters, ascending scarves-at-Wembley chords and a determination to take life far beyond the detractors. It's just a classic.
Moz Meditation Number Three: Vauxhall is the London manor of Smiths biographer Johnny Rogan. There's also a notorious drag bar in the area and Morrissey has already intimated that he's familiar with the place. Coincidence or not?
Bar a few polite stretches, you can't fault the music much; the nightmarish dub woodwind and spooky conversations on 'Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning' are up to anything The Smiths did when they were pushing their art into weird places and an uncanny equal to 'Seasick, Yet Still Docked'. The ballad, 'Used To Be A Sweet Boy', is like Andy Stewart's 'Nobody's Child' - the flaming weepie of the new deck. And then there's that part in 'The More You Ignore Me...' when Boz strums a seventh chord and Moz squeezes out a lusty "yeaaah"... It's like The Beatles when they were young, cute and fantastically, knowingly corny.
And so it ends with this bizarre address to the critics and what Moz views as an unrelenting witch-hunt. But what exact breed of critic might these people be? The fawning monthly writers? The carefully-vetted interviewees from elsewhere? The enraptured Americans? The indifferent Brit tabloids?
No, 'Speedway' is surely a personal address to this very cage-rattling journal - the best back-hand compliment we've had since Johnny Rotten snarled "I use the NME". What we wrote about Morrissey two years ago clearly hurt, and that's significant.
And as the song see-saws between contrition and anger, pathos and paranoia, life and death, you realise you're party to a fiery, special moment in rock'n'roll history - a showdown, a climb-down and a hoedown all in one stunning delivery.
Shall we forgive him? Will he forgive us? Isn't he the oddest, richest, more royally messed-up fish in the pond? The debate continues. (8)
- Stuart Bailie, NME, 1994

Vox Album Of The Month
Last year's Beethoven Was Deaf was all rockabilly quiff and trousers. Although an exciting live spectacle, the wry musical references and the creative trickery brought about under the tutelage of producer Mick Ronson on 1992's Your Arsenal were given a good bruising on-stage and didn't translate particularly well on to the live album.
With Ronson sadly departed, and the ghost of glam rapidly losing its sequined glamour, Morrissey and crew have wisely opted to shed the elements of '70's pastiche for Vauxhall And I (a pun on Withnail And I and his solo debut album, Viva Hate, perhaps?). Steve Lillywhite now occupies the producer's chair and bolsters the mix with his trademark smooth, expansive sound. Gimmicks are kept to a minimum, although he does bring auto harp to the instrument list and even a chainsaw to 'Speedway', the finale that finds Morrissey, tortured and damned, decrying: "You won't rest until the hearse that becomes me finally takes me".
Maybe it's a feeling shared by Morrissey's old rhythm players Gary Day and Spencer Cobrin, who have been absorbed back into the North London rockabilly scene whence they came, only to be replaced by two figures with a similar pedigree: old Stingrays bass player Jonny Bridgewood, and ex-Johnson Family drummer Woodie Taylor. More important than the change in personnel, though, is the shift in songwriting emphasis. Virtually all the music for Your Arsenal was written by guitarist Alain Whyte, but Vauxhall's most dynamic tracks are scored by Boz Boorer.
Lyrically, Morrissey's themes still revolve around love and glamorous thugs, but he's retreated into the monochrone environs of mythical Ealing Britain, probably tired of the Spanish Inquisitions that greet any references to Asians, the NF and Union Jacks. For the opening 'Now My Heart Is Full', Morrissey calls up Graham Greene's Brighton Rock cronies: "Dallow, Spicer, Pinky, Cubbit... loafing oafs in all-night chemists." The following 'Spring Heeled Jim' finds him glorifying a gangster over some archive caper dialogue ("he'll do but he won't be done to"). 'Billy Budd', meanwhile, steals its title from the Herman Melville novel that provided Terence Stamp with his first film role and Academy Award nomination, although the song bears little resemblance to the 18th century maritime story from which it derives.
Morrissey struggles a bit when turning his hand to the more personal, emotive 'Hold On To Your Friends' - which may be intended to be ironic, but has all the pathos of Mud's 'Lean On Me'. Doubts, though, are quickly put aside with the almost joyful 'The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get', and 'Why Don't You Find Out For Yourself', reminiscent of 'Paint A Vulgar Picture' for its resigned cynicism about corporate villains: "Some men here, they have a special interest in your career/They want to help you to grow/And then syphon all your dough."
The finest collaboration between Morrissey and Boorer is 'Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning'. Boorer conjures gloomy seaside memories, while Morrissey, in his best quip since The Smiths' 'Girlfriend In A Coma', sings: "It was only a test but she swam too far against the tide/She deserves all she gets."
The tide is high, but Morrissey is holding on. All that remains to be said is: 'Boz, take it to the (Vauxhall) bridge." (8)
- Shaun Phillips, Vox, 1994

A more tender and reflective collection than Your Arsenal, with a polished Steve Lillywhite production and a smatttering of almost-great songs. Familiar themes of martyrdom and childhood pain are balanced by witty affirmations of adult self-confidence, especially the stately single "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get". Once again, there are teasing echoes of past glories which now seem just out of reach. (***)
- Stephen Dalton, Uncut, 1998

"It's a reference to a certain person I know who was born and braised in Vauxhall."
- Morrissey on the title, Select, May 1994

"Yes, it is a beautiful record and I set out that it should be so. I thought it was time to put lots of things away in their boxes and their cupboards, and allow age to take its natural toll, for better or worse."
- Morrissey, Select, May 1994

'Now My Heart Is Full' has a sense of jubilant exhaustion with looking over one's shoulder all the time and draining one's reference points. I mean, even I - even I - went a little bit too far with A Taste Of Honey. I have perhaps overtapped my sources and now all that is over, basically. I have a vast record and video and tape collection, but I look at it now in a different light. It's no longer something I feel I need to be embroiled in night and day. I have realised that the past is actually over, and it is a great relief to me. It's like being told that you've been cured of chronic tuberculosis or housewife's knee or something."
- Morrissey, Select, May 1994

Q: Is Speedway as knotty and complicated a song as it appears. It seems to be about the gentlemen of my profession.
"It's even knottier than it appears to you! And I've never met any gentlemen of your profession."
Q: But are you saying that press rumours about your character and politics are not just rumours?
"Yes, partly, but if you're going to bring up the issue of racism, it simply gives too much credence to the bitty, scattered humourless rumours that abound. But I'm well aware that rumours are more important than the truth. I've been called many names in my time, not all of them ill-fitting. Rather than defend myself I simply feel beyond it all."
- Morrissey on "Speedway", Q, April 1994