In his 1995 book Morrissey: Landscapes of the Mind, author David Bret recounts the events of March 15, 1994, the day after Morrissey’s Vauxhall and I was released. Bret attended Morrissey’s first ever autograph-signing party in Great Britain to promote one of his solo albums, and for such an unprecedented event, the HMV on Oxford Street in London had planned for a crowd of five hundred. Three thousand people showed up. While tossing out his customary gladioli at the long queue of his followers, a badge pinned to his tweed jacket was visible. It read, “Famous when dead.”
The scene’s a tableau straight out of the collective mythological dream of Morrissey fandom. But Morrissey had actual death on his mind at the time, and not just the romantically morbid vision of it he’d been singing about since his time in the Smiths. Former David Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson—a hero of Morrissey’s who had produced his prior album, 1992’s Your Arsenal—had succumbed to cancer months earlier, and Morrissey’s manager and his video director both had died around the same time. The remastered 20th anniversary reissue of Vauxhall and I doesn’t reveal the album to be a work of spiritual reassessment in the face of loss, nor some rote meditation on mortality. But in hindsight, it’s clearer than ever that Morrissey—whose self-obsession has always worked hand in glove with a yearning for connection—infused Vauxhall and I with a bone-deep acceptance that aging and dying might be more than just dramatic devices.
To be clear, Vauxhall and I doesn't lack drama; its major fault is a surfeit of the stuff, which is saying something considering Morrissey’s threshold for thespianism. Never a stranger to literary references, he structures “Billy Budd” around the Herman Melville novella of the same name—hardly an obscure source, and purloined with brazen exactness—and “Now My Heart Is Full” isn’t any more coy about its debt to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, even going so far as to list by name the book’s main characters including its antihero Pinkie Brown, the archetype of Morrissey’s sexually conflicted, sensitive-bad-boy persona. The two songs are just as blatant in execution: Where “Billy Budd” is fast, forceful, and full of wah-pedal guitar hooks—a bracing break from the glam/rockabilly hybrid established on Your Arsenal—“Now My Heart Is Full” is a sweeping, nearly orchestral crescendo that builds and builds into infinity. “I just can’t explain/ So I won’t even try to”, Morrissey sings, aiming his voice at the angels. And then, as one does, he keeps explaining.
Morrissey’s emotional over-enunciation takes on new dimensions on Vauxhall and I, to mixed results. “The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get” became a hit single on both sides of the Atlantic, and for reasons that are still evident: it’s a sterling pop gem, jangling yet airy, with Morrissey going the extra mile to put the “play” in wordplay. “I will be in the bar/ With my head on the bar”, he croons, grinning at his own deceptive daftness. But he’s also toying with his own public image as a sexless recluse while neatly turning the tables on his hordes of obsessive fans by lampooning the way they might feel about Morrissey himself.
Acknowledging and then tinkering with the very mechanism of fame was something Morrissey had already been aiming at long before 1994 rolled around. His solo career had finally taken off, proving that his early success with his 1988 solo debut, Viva Hate, hadn’t been a fluke born of post-Smiths goodwill. If Viva Hate had tried desperately to sound like The Smiths, Vauxhall and I marked the point at which Morrissey became fixed on a forward trajectory that would occasionally falter but never change. Morrissey was indeed being ignored by the media, at least relative to his platinum-selling, alt-rock-vet contemporaries like R.E.M. and the Cure. Vauxhall and I went in at number-one on the British charts, a feat that made “The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get” a self-fulfilling prophecy in earworm form.
What imbalances Vauxhall and I is an overabundance of ballads that border on the bland. A full half of the album—“Hold on to Your Friends”, “I Am Hated for Loving”, “Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning”, “Used to Be a Sweet Boy”, and “The Lazy Sunbathers”—are musically unremarkable, scraps of patterned wallpaper that don’t stretch Morrissey’s range or imagination into new places the way Johnny Marr’s restless, unpredictable compositions once did in the Smiths. Morrissey’s voice itself is a gorgeous moan on these tracks, textured and resonant, and he explores a broad dynamic of themes, from decadent, morally negligent beachgoers during World War II to piercing pleas for the valuation of friendship—a topic that hit considerably closer to home in the wake of his recent grief.
But guitarists Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer—not yet confident enough to push-and-pull with their boss, songwriting-wise—hang back for too much of the record, leaving Morrissey’s vocal melodies to do all the heavy lifting. Steve Lillywhite’s production is layered and immaculately atmospheric, which fits the ballads beautifully, while also making rockers like “Billy Budd” sound muddy rather than punchy, faults that don't improve even with the solid remastering job the reissue has been given. In that regard, “Spring-Heeled Jim” is the most successful song on Vauxhall and I: throbbing with menace and shrouded in stage fog, it’s a tough, tender, and erotically encrypted character study, perfectly suited to Lillywhite’s shimmer and the stalking riffs of Whyte and Boorer.
Morrissey’s bitterness ebbs and flows like the tides, and it’s rising on Vauxhall and I. His court battle over royalties with his former Smiths bandmate Mike Joyce was still on the horizon in 1994, but he was already sharpening his knives. “Why Don’t You Find Out For Yourself” is one of the album’s best tracks, and one of Morrissey’s most quietly magnificent solo songs: “I’ve been stabbed in the back/ So many, many times/ I don’t have any skin,” he sings, weariness overtaking defiance. It’s a monument to artful passive aggression—another Morrissey hallmark brought to a new level on Vauxhall and I—but the song’s strength lies in the stark contrast between medium and message. Too much of the album melts together into a shapelessly lovely mass of melancholy and reflection; on “Why Don’t You Find Out For Yourself”, rage and resignation are reconciled, or perhaps just deliciously confused, while Whyte and Boorer strum along, gentle yet jaunty, adding a bracing shot of ambiguity and tension. And on “Billy Budd”, the Melville homage is lowered just long enough for Morrissey to mount an attack against—or maybe just a wink toward—the band that made him famous. “Things have been bad/ But now it’s twelve years on," he laments, and it can’t be possible he was unaware that the Smiths had formed exactly twelve years before Vauxhall and I was made.
Only one Smiths song makes it onto the live album, recorded in 1995, that comprises the bonus tracks of the Vauxhall and I reissue: “London”, a speedy, stomping throwaway that feels like more of a snub to the audience than if he’d played no Smiths songs at all. The rest of the concert is performed obediently, with just a few tweaks of the studio arrangements here and there to add a little spice—plus a rendition of Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini’s “Moon River”, a chestnut he’d added to his repertoire that he’s never managed to pull off as anything other than a novelty.
The solid live set doesn’t add to the reissue, nor does it fill in any glaring gaps in what’s already available in Morrissey’s live-album catalog. At best, it gives a bit of extra context: In ’94 and ’95, Britpop was on the ascendant, and Morrissey found himself trying to keep up with Oasis, Blur, and Suede—three disparate, competing bands that, at the least, agreed on the greatness and influence of the Smiths. As a solo artist, though, Morrissey never settled comfortably into the Britpop paradigm, which adds that much more of a sense of estrangement to the stoic loneliness that permeates his work, even as he should have been embracing his role as a Britpop elder statesman.
Morrissey is a funny man, but there are few light moments in Vauxhall and I. “I am close to breakdown at life’s inevitably disgusting final summons,” he writes, a bit tactlessly, in last year’s Autobiography while recalling a funeral for a close colleague he attended in 1993, just as he was gearing up to record Vauxhall and I. Nothing like the death of a friend might unsettle one’s stomach. But that’s always been one of Morrissey’s most magnificent talents: not just turning a phrase, but twisting sentimentality itself until it’s sharp enough to sting. The barb jabs both ways, even when that joke isn’t funny anymore. “Fame, fame, fatal fame”, he sang while in the Smiths; by 1994, a “Famous when dead” badge was one small symbol of how he’d internalized the acclaim that he’d fought so long to get. Besides being one of Morrissey’s most vital solo albums, Vauxhall and I is also his first truly mature one, and flaws and all, it’s as essential—and as perversely alive—as ever.
