London Lyceum

A PECULIAR mixture of factory and Motown ripped through the disco speaker grilles (Lyceum-goers 'in' joke) prior to the Smiths' appearance, An odd amalgam of, shall we say, ancient and modern? I'm a shade too jaded to finely pursue the full implications of that, but it was a suitably apt scene setter.

The Smiths, three of them, make an entrance to generous applause which is rapidly curtailed as the punting populace grasp that He isn’t there. Morrisey springs forth a few seconds later. Gets his own gaggle of whistles and screams. Definitely very front person. In appreciative response, he tosses some dead flowers at the crowd.

This was my first full facial with the Smiths. An event made necessary by the compelling intrigue of their latest record and the sheer boredom of reading about them (the fact of the act, not the content). I had to discover, to my own satisfaction, whether they were a) downtrodden chart fodder with a streak of hypeish pseudo sensitivity or b) something else. Perhaps not as good.

Even allowing for my... opia, the Smiths on the Lyceum stage looked smaller and less in focus than they should have. In an early song, Morrissey sang “I’m not the man you think I am” and it was clear even that soon that the Smiths were not the group I thought they might be.

Their awakening strengths, that gushing emotional froth and the air of quintessentially English asceticism which haunts them, is little realised in sweaty monuments to large scale dance gore such as here.

I watched from the middle of the hall, surrounded by all manner of common riff raff while the Smiths offered really nothing to get excited over. They let down the vaguest of gauntlets, I suppose, by their very refusal to be obviously more than cutely melodic tunesmiths (sic) who've graced the charts a bit.

Morrissey extracted a measure of gratuitous sympathy when he spluttered about being "ill". You could feel the unheard cries of the Affected Youth as they collectively squealed ‘I know, Morrissey. I've been ill too, I know what it's like, I SHARE YOUR PAIN.' And that was a pain.

A crystal spirit rages somewhere within the Smiths but in the strict context of Tonight, it was never visible. A school teacher's assessment of their wider abilities might curtly say 'above average'. But in the class of '83 (where unfortunately they still belong) that's not saying much.

I’ll grant though, it is saying something.