The man who murdered pop

Morrissey's sublime, unprecedented genius in the 80s was just as destructive as Margaret Thatcher's social policies - and we are reaping the results of both in this decade, argues Mark Simpson

Friday November 5, 1999

The two greatest post-punk performers of the 80s are still around - and still provoking more passion and outrage than anyone from the 90s. Both have recently been the subject of TV programmes where their former associates put the boot in. One has just finished a rapturously received week's tour of a seaside town, the other is just about to start a national tour. Come on down, pop-star anarchist Margaret Thatcher and former Prime Moaner of Great Britain, Stephen Morrissey.

Of course, at the time they were thought to be intractable enemies. Morrissey led his Smiths Party - with its manifesto of vegetarianism, lyricism and fanaticism - to landslide victories in the indie charts, garnering the votes of tens of thousands of unhappy young people who rejected the brash, flash, carnivorous 80s that Thatcher lorded over. He even penned a cheery song called Margaret on the Guillotine, complete with the sound of the blade falling.

However, it's now clear how much they had in common despite their denial, and how comparable and in fact complementary their greatness is. Both outsiders, both considered mad, both Little Englanders; acutely aspirational, out for revenge, and iconic - they both stamped their authority all over the 80s.

Yes, Morrissey, the son of modest Manchester Irish working folk, may have been avenging the working class while Thatcher, the petit bourgeois, was annihilating them as a political class, but they had something in common which sealed their greatness: hatred. Both Maggie and Morrissey were inspired destroyers, which is to say, lovers. Thatcher destroyed the British establishment and the Tory party. Morrissey destroyed pop music. Together they destroyed England. As Morrissey's mentor, the lover-destroyer of 19th-century polite society Oscar Wilde put it, each man kills the thing he loves.

If it has become something of a cliche that Morrissey is "the last pop star", no one seems to notice that the reason why the great tradition of English pop stardom ends with him is because he choked it off with his bare hands. After Morrissey there could be no more pop stars. He was an act that was impossible to follow. "The ashes of pop music are all around us if we will but see them," Morrissey pronounced back in 1987. And he was right. But he was the one holding the box of matches.

Morrissey's unrivalled knowledge of the pop canon, his unequalled imagination of what it might mean to be a pop star, and his breathtakingly perverse ambition to turn it into great art, could only exhaust the form forever. Moreover, Morrissey's mastery of Englishness was so self-conscious, so ironic, so devout, so evil and finally so played out that English pop and even Englishness itself could never hope to recover.

The unnatural, analysing, stripping heat of Morrissey's love of Englishness, the grainy black-and-white 60s iconography of the Smiths' sleeves, the lyrical world of iron bridges, humdrum towns, repression, frustration, and amorphous desire, could only end up separating Englishness from anything solid and turn it into a free-floating signifier.

When the Smiths finally expired in 1987, after guitarist Johnny Marr walked out of the group, Morrissey may well have risen again on the third day to pursue a successful (if uneven) solo career, but the body of English pop lay lifeless in the tomb, hopelessly extinct, wrapped in back issues of the NME. A large rock blocked the entrance, rolled there by Morrissey himself.

The so-called "Britpop" phenomenon of the 90s did not represent a resurrection of English pop, merely a galvanic motion induced by the application of large amounts of cash. Britpop was nothing but commercial footnotes to the Smiths, a belated and somewhat hysterical attempt by the record industry to cash in on the legacy of the original "indie" four-boys-and-guitars band whose money-making potential was never fully realised in their lifetime.

It may be impossible for a generation raised on a diet of hype to comprehend, but the Smiths were never played on daytime radio. Their singles barely grazed the Top 20. They never made it into the papers, except to be denounced (for risqué songs such as Handsome Devil - "a boy in the bush is worth two in the hand / I think I can help you get through your exams"). And they refused to make pop promos. In other words, by today's slaggy standards they were a bunch of losers.

Yet they had a large and fanatical following and are revered today by many as the greatest pop group ever. Their album The Queen is Dead has been officially ensconced as the 80s album by critics. By contrast, the media-PR-record biz conglomerate known as Britpop had the keys to the world handed to it on a plate - "indie" now merely means "mainstream niche marketing" - and yet it failed to inspire a single Kleenex's worth of the devotion that the Smiths did. Under the arc lamps they kissed, and although they ended up with sore lips, it just wasn't like the old days any more.

The Britpop bands themselves seemed strangely deathly - much more slavishly retro than the Smiths, who were denounced at the time for their nostalgia. Blur were the Kinks for students and confused teenage girls who mistook Damon Albarn for someone sexy. Suede were David Bowie before he went all Let's Dance, with some Marc Bolan licks thrown in for good measure. Oasis were a Beatles tribute band for car thieves and New Labour MPs who by only their third album, Be Here Now, managed to become their own tribute band.

This gang of Manchester working-class boys with Irish antecedents were seen as the Smiths minus the troublesome, effeminate, evil genius - which is to say, Marr without Morrissey. And indeed Marr, the scally Beatles fan fond of partying, could perhaps have trodden the same football-crowd-pleasing path if he hadn't had the Sandie-Shaw-worshipping introvert to nag and pervert him down a much more creative one. According to legend, Noel Gallagher even decided to become a pop star after seeing Johnny Marr on Top of the Pops playing with the Smiths - typically, Blur's Damon Albarn decided to form a band after watching a South Bank Show profile of them.

So Morrissey was burnt at the stake by the NME in 1992 for appearing on stage with a Union Jack. Banner headlines accused him of "racism". Of course, this was, like Maggie's poll tax faux pas, merely a pretext for a coup against him by his former supporters. Just a few years later the Union Jack would become an official part of the NME-sponsored Britpop merchandise.

After all, Oasis were an ethnically cleansed version of the Beatles, with pasty-faced Noddy Holder in place of John and Paul's admiration of Chuck Berry. The infamous court case - in which the Smiths' former drummer Mike Joyce was awarded equal royalties with Morrissey and Marr by a judge who had to have Top of the Pops explained to him - was an opportunity for unlimited and, given the implications, somewhat reckless schadenfreude.

Morrissey had to become an unperson in order for the 90s to happen. Put any of the Britpop "stars" alongside him and you can see why. Pop stars (like politicians) have turned into mere celebrities. Even their fans don't pay much attention to what Damon and Brett have to say, which is probably just as well. Jarvis Cocker promised a great deal but threw it away with that embarrassing Michael Jackson tantrum at the Brits and a general post-Different Class shabbiness. Skinny Richey Manic had the good sense to disappear before his band became famous, fat and fatuous.

The actual wake for English pop was kindly laid on by Oasis fan (and ropey Margaret Thatcher impersonator) Tony Blair in 1997. Having decided to "rebrand" Britain as Cool Britannia, he invited the celebrity executives of Britpop round to No 10 for a drink and a finger buffet provided by Meg Mathews. The new apparatchiks of the English political establishment and English pop finally met in a schmoozing embrace for the cameras, and it was rather more difficult to tell them apart than it should have been.

It was left to that old 70s pop-rocker-turned-panto-dame Elton John to sing the music at the actual funeral of English pop, in the form of the Diana tribute Farewell England's Rose. To the hundreds and thousands lining the streets, and the hundreds of millions watching the funeral live around the world on what amounted to the last ever Top of the Pops, Diana was the nearest thing to an English pop star the 90s produced. Which is of course the greatest indictment of that decade. Morrissey's laughter still echoed through Westminster Abbey on that September morning in 1997, unnoticed by the assembled feudal dignitaries and their heirs and successors the celebs, but mightily frightening the pigeons nesting in the gargoyles.

The last laugh really was Morrissey's. Not only did Britpop fail to achieve the only thing that would have justified it - to halt or even just tread on the toes of the advance of dance - it failed miserably in its main, material ambition: America. Britpop faltered in the US and then promptly imploded over here, because America already had the genuine article in the form of Morrissey, thank you very much, and didn't see what it was supposed to do with all these third-raters. Like his doppelganger Maggie, Morrissey's solo career has been much better received in the US than here, where it has continued to grow throughout the 90s, far exceeding the popularity of the Smiths.

It is probably too much to expect that what's left of England will embrace Morrissey again, even though the 90s and Britpop are over. After all, to invoke another Wildism, society often forgives the criminal, but never the dreamer. And Morrissey is both. However, anyone with an interest in this outmoded artform should take advantage of the opportunity during his UK tour, and catch live the man who killed pop. With his genius.

• Morrissey starts his tour at Rock City, Nottingham, on November 9. Mark Simpson's Saint Morrissey is published early next year by Little, Brown.