‘If I can barely speak, then I shall surely sing’

A few weeks ago, I was wandering with a friend around West London when our conversation turned to the reliable and inexhaustible topic of Morrissey. We were discussing his gestures, in particular when he augments the percussive spondee that opens ‘Sheila Take a Bow’ with two magnificent jabs of his right elbow. So back we went to my friend’s flat to study it again. In goes the DVD; bang go the drums; jab goes the elbow, and my dear friend gives a small cheer of delight, dancing his dance of Rumpelstiltskin glee. ‘Genius!,’ he declares. And he is right.

It is a small moment, one of those preposterously arcane details beloved of a devotee of the Smiths, but it somehow seems to say everything about our artistic hero. It is an example of what Morrissey means when he says that, when it comes to music, ‘All we want to see is the sculpted singer — alone, carrying all, sub-plot and sub-text, the physical autobiography.