I don't think I've posted about Morrissey and The Smiths before, have I? I'm too lazy to go back and troll through my own archives :-p
I recently purchased Morrisey - Live at Earl's Court. A recording of a live concert he did last year on his birthday, and it just blew me away.
I was introduced to The Smiths by my philosophy advisor. Well, not really introduced..she mentioned one day in class that as a teenage girl she would spend hours locked in her room listening to The Smiths and wading in existential angst. As she was teaching an upper level Existential Philosophy class at the time, it made perfect sense to bring them up at the time...Since I was rather enamoured of existentialism by this point (and of her, I must admit, but in a totally non-hetero way) I decided to download a few tracks and hear what they sounded like for myself.
Half an hour later, I had a representative sample. I queued them up in Winamp and hit play. The result was instant flashback.
Denmark, 2001.
I'm sitting in my host cucu's (grandmother, to you non-Kikuyu types) living room, watching Danish TV and struggling to follow along, when Top of the Pops comes on MTV Europe. It's early on a Saturday night and I don't feel like going out (no money, yechh), so MTV Europe will be about it for the night's excitement, unless my annoying roomie Kip comes home in a state of drunken nerdy spazz frenzy (silly boy). Two unremarkable performances later, they play a "classic" Top of the Pops moment.
Oh great, I'm thinking, 80's snyth, bad hair and skinny waifs singing in falsetto, when's the Top 20 countdown on? It takes me a couple of seconds to realize that it's a guitar I'm hearing and not a synthesizer...by then the singer had started the first verse and his voice just grabbed me by the nads... "I am the son and heir/Of nothing in particular"..His voice curls, sways and swaggers its way around the lyrics, contemptuous and venomous...and when he gets to this verse, no force on earth could have moved me from that couch
There's a club, if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go, and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home, and you cry
And you want to die
When you say it's gonna happen "now"
Well, when exactly do you mean ?
See I've already waited too long
And all my hope is gone
When he got to the last line, he ripped his shirt open, and to this day, I'm sure I gasped, because I felt that he was singing my life at that point. Boyfriend less, sex-less, alone in a strange city, desperately trying to find someone to be with in Copenhagen, going out to bars alone, coming back alone. All the heartache and drama I had gone through before I left for Denmark came rushing back as he was singing. I felt like my heart would explode with the intensity of the sorrow and anguish that slight waif had made me feel, but it felt good all at the same time. I felt as if he knew exactly what I was feeling, he'd been there, done that and made it through, and for that I loved him. In the rush of that moment, I didn't catch the name of the band, but I knew that I would track them down if it was the last thing that I did.
New York, 2002.
I hit play, and hear that characteristic wail, and my heart leaps in my chest.
I had found them.
posted by WM @ 10:39
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