The Very Best of Morrissey…According to Morrissey
He’s at it again.
This week Morrissey shared with the world his personal top ten albums from across the entirety of his career, The Smiths and solo. A certain type of person would respond to this with a list precision tooled to meet with the approval of the herd. It would look a little like this…
- The Queen is Dead
- Strangeways Here We Come
- Meat is Murder
- The Smiths
- The Best of The Smiths Vol. 1
- The Best of The Smiths Vol. 2
You see, for some people Morrissey is “problematic”. He is a bad person. He is no longer welcome in polite society. They want him to be more like that nice young John Maher lad. Why does he have to keep saying…things. And he’s always cancelling concerts. Oh, somebody at The Guardian told them he was racist too.
Jaysus.
Wept.
The world, as He told us all back in 2004, is full of crashing, crushing, bores. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Morrissey’s own reflections on his four decades long career is going to make those people very cross.
“Why can’t he just give us what WE want?”
Because, you poor thing, Morrissey has NEVER given an audience what THEY want. He has spent forty years giving people what they don’t want…or what they didn’t know they wanted… pleasing himself, and happily accepting anyone else who happens to enjoy it too. He is the anti Ed Sheeran. If you go and see him in concert expecting him to deliver a greatest hits set…save yourself the money now. If you buy his new album hoping for “Still Charming Man” you are going to be beyond disappointed. He is Morrissey. He is not your friend. He isn’t your therapist. He is that rarest of things…an artist.
Top spot in his top ten goes to an album that hasn’t been released…how very Morrissey.
2021’s “Bonfire of Teenagers” includes 11 tracks, only about half of which have ever been heard outside of the Los Angeles studio in which they were recorded. “I Am Veronica”, “I Ex-Love You”, “Sure Enough the Telephone Rings”, “I Live in Oblivion”, “Saint in a Stained Glass Window”, and the officially released “Rebels Without Applause”.
Oh…and the title track, “Bonfire of Teenagers” which is his furious hymn for those who lost their lives at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in May 2017. “And the silly people sing: Don’t Look Back in Anger”, and the morons sing and sway "Don't Look Back in Anger”, I can assure I will look back in anger ’til the day I die”. Ooooft. I don’t know how it is possible to look back on that night and not feel anger. Maybe I am also a problematic person? I do hope so.
The rest of the list is a testament to how he views his own work, only one Smiths album makes the cut, the live album “Rank” which was released after the band had split. God I love him so much for this kind of thing. You can just see certain podcasters and journalists gnawing at their re-issued copies of “The Queen is Dead”, tears streaming down their chubby cheeks. He also includes a collection of b-sides (“Swords”). Can you imagine the balls it takes to include a collection of late period b-sides over something like “Strangeways Here We Come”?
The much maligned nineties album, “Southpaw Grammar” also features, which made me very happy. Lost in the ugly fog of the post-Oasis “Britpop” scene where people, genuinely, thought there was something worth parting with their money with in Cast, Dodgy, Northern Uproar, and Ocean Colour Scene, it contains more melody, more creativity, and more inspired lyric writing, than Spotify’s servers can cope with. A triumph I tells ya. And it doesn’t even include his best single released at the same time…”Boxers”. What a lad.
Of course “You are the Quarry”, “Your Arsenal” and “Vauxhall and I” are there. But they all play second fiddle to this year's “Make-Up is a Lie”. Can I let you in on a secret? I happen to agree with him. It might not be the album I would recommend to a Mozzer virgin…that would be “Vauxhall and I”…but to my cloth-ears it is his best album.
More interesting is the fact that he includes both 2006’s “Ringleader of the Tormentors” and 2009’s “Years of Refusal” in his list. Like “Maladjusted” and “Southpaw Grammar” these are albums that didn’t garner much love from critics…or from some sections of his audience. My gut tells me that when and where they were recorded, and who was in the producers chair, have as much to do with their inclusion as the music.
His full list is…
- Bonfire of Teenagers (2021)
- Make-Up is a Lie (2026)
- You Are the Quarry (2004)
- Vauxhall and I (1994)
- Years of Refusal (2009)
- Ringleader of the Tormentors (2006)
- Your Arsenal (1992)
- Swords (2009)
- Rank (1988)
- Southpaw Grammar (1995)
To Hell and back to the haters.
My list is different in some choices…and it doesn’t feature a single Smiths album. I’m not trying to be difficult. I love The Smiths. They were my first love. I return again, and again, to those records. But, honestly, if you ask me to look back over the career of Morrissey and pick out the albums that mean the most to me, that say the most about who he is as an artist, then those albums wouldn’t make the cut.
Sue me.
My ten is…
- Maladjusted (1998)
- Low in High School (2017)
- Kill Uncle (1991)
- Viva Hate (1989)
- You Are the Quarry (2004)
- World Peace is None of Your Business (2014)
- I Am Not a Dog on a Chain (2020)
- Vauxhall and I (1994)
- Your Arsenal (1992)
- Make-Up is a Lie (2026)
My mum had a crush on Ringo Starr in the sixties. I don’t think she actually fancied him. I think she was cross about the attention the other Beatles received from the girls (and it was girls who were listening to The Beatles). I feel the same way about “Maladjusted”. It gets a lot of hate…but it contains “Alma Matters”, “Satan Rejected my Soul”, “Wide to Receive”, and “Trouble Loves Me”.
2014’s “World Peace is None of Your Business” has now been locked away in some secret vault following on from a falling out between Morrissey and…somebody. But it is a magnificent album. In “Staircase at the University” you have a song more infectious than Covid…remember that? God that was a weird old time, right. Oh well, we have to move on…don’t look back in anger, right?
As promised I have plumped for “Make-Up is a Lie” in the top spot. You go off and listen before you start telling me how wrong I am. “Lester Bangs”, “Kerching-Kerching”, “The Monsters of Pig Alley”, “The Night Pop Dropped”, “Zoom Zoom the Little Boy”, “Many Icebergs Ago”, and the title track are all better than anything on your favourite Smiths album.
Come at me.
I’m waiting.
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