Was Morrissey’s solo career always doomed from the start?
Leaving a wildly successful band at the peak of its journey can never be easy. Some have done it with tremendous success, say Phil Collins with Genesis or John Lennon and Paul McCartney having respectable solo careers post-Beatles. However, it’s not certain that Morrissey has shared the same success as The Smiths boasted after their dissolution.
That’s not to say that Morrissey hasn’t had a respectable solo career in his own right. He’s still going, which shows the staying power Moz holds when several of his contemporaries have called it a day, slippers on and feet up on the settee. Even Johnny Marr has had nowhere near the solo career that Morrissey has enjoyed.
Morrissey’s following in the Mexican communities in the Americas is also something to behold. He is revered as a quiffed God out there for whatever reason. In fact, the Los Angeles city council (Los Angeles has a vast population of Mexican immigrants) declared November 10th ‘Morrissey Day’, and when Moz headlined the Tropicalia Music and Taco Festival in 2018, he announced, “Estoy en casa!” (“I’m home!”).
Following The Smiths breakup just before the release of Strangeways, Here We Come, Morrissey released a quite brilliant debut solo record Viva Hate and followed up with an equally impressive compilation album Bona Drag. Moz’s first live performance was at the Wolverhampton Civic Hall in December 1988, and it proved to be wildly popular, as several diehard Smiths fans were desperate to relive anything remotely related to one of the most influential British bands of the 20th Century.
However, things would ultimately decline from there. The subsequent albums receded in both commercial and critical success until 1998, when Morrissey took a break from the music industry and relocated to Los Angeles, probably the last place you could have imagined the pale, bouffanted, flower bearer ever heading to.
So while the title of this article may suggest that Morrissey’s solo career was a failure, in many ways, that is not necessarily the case. However, the fact remains that his solo output pales in critical insignificance when held next to the mostly flawless sound of The Smiths.
Perhaps this is in part due to the outspoken and overly-opinionated persona that old Steve created for himself. He has frequently provided journalists with ample scope for endless articles with his questionable words, adopting a nationalistic character critical of immigration, black music, the political left and the Guardian newspaper; the former of which is all the more surprising given Morrissey’s wild popularity in Mexico and its surrounding nations.
Morrissey has seemingly had a free ride in some respects, getting away with his foul diatribe just “because it’s Morrissey, you know, he’s just like that”. Yet, thankfully Morrissey has been rightfully criticised, and the ever-spiky and controversial former frontman of The Smiths has become a sullen caricature of himself without being unable to hide being Marr’s wonderous talents and the tight-as-anything rhythm section of Rourke and Joyce.
So yes, given the fact that Morrissey always loved nothing more than his own art, his own beliefs and his own self, then perhaps his solo career always was doomed. Doomed to expose himself as a rightful object of derision once he could no longer sit atop the mighty throne at the head of The Smiths. Having said that, ‘Break Up The Family’ is a tune.
