God bless Morrissey for spinning his comeback LP into a gift reissue (the same cover photo but on silver!), several singles, four EPs, a live CD, and a DVD-- and stopping there. After all, if the man so wished, he could compile a full-length tour video entirely from instances of people jumping onstage to hump him. Morrissey's 2004 post-You Are the Quarry victory lap unfolded in the atmosphere of ripe, obscenely pulsing global adulation; at least three people were ejected before my eyes from the Radio City Music Hall for attempting to mate with the star mid-song. Tempting as it is to approach Live at Earls Court as another cash-in, the moment it captures is indeed somewhat phenomenal. It certainly bears documenting.
Morrissey's moving into an interesting and barely explored territory here: throughout Live at Earls Court (in fact recorded piecemeal in London, Glasgow, Birmingham, Brighton, and Dublin), he is a pre-rock crooner commanding Beatle-level hysteria; a smooth, urbane party host backed onstage by anonymous young chord-bashers. He's grown distinctly comfy around the old hits-- or as comfy as one could possibly be in that jagged terrain (his Smiths-era vocal lines careen against the chord progressions in astonishingly counterintuitive ways)-- and the recent songs appear to have been written with a new vocal prowess in mind: Witness the huge Broadway highs of "I Have Forgiven Jesus" and "You Know I Couldn't Last".
Indeed, Morrissey's singing appears to have taken a giant leap over the past seven years or so. Listening to the newly velvety Moz tackle "How Soon Is Now" (a ballsy choice for the disc's opener) is a pleasure of an entirely confusing sort: the song is still a roaring, lurching Grendel, all rage and laser tremolo, but the listener can't help feeling luxuriously entertained. The frustration, the urgency, the hormonal madness of the original are politely disinvited; that stuff is, after all, a bit infantile. Morrissey may well be the world's first rock star to fashion a successful shtick out of enthusiastically embracing middle age.
For the record, middle age does become him. That face, oddly enough, is hitting the iconic stage just now, with the crow's feet and a bit of sag in the jowls, and the Yves Saint Laurent shirts feel a little more warranted. Mainly, the years allow Morrissey to sidestep direct sexuality in a whole new way: Hilarious as it is for me to type this, he's become emphatically paternal, in a flirty who's-yer-Daddy way. The uproarious chorus of the B-side "Don't Make Fun Of Daddy's Voice" ("....because he can't help it/ When he was a teenage boy/ Something got stuck in his throat") attests to this directly-- but a fatherly, bemused benevolence rears its head elsewhere ("First Of The Gang To Die," for instance, is full of it). At the same time, it is now harder than ever to imagine Morrissey settling into a Bacharachian loungy twilight-- not after the controlled squall of "Irish Blood, English Heart", the loudest, most pissed-off, and most direct song of his career. Plus, now it's Joan of Arc's iPod that melts in "Bigmouth Strikes Again", not a Walkman, so the kids will still know what Daddy's on about, at least for a while. And then, I guess we can just keep changing the device.
