As an origin story, Andy Burnham: Smiths Fan has a lot going for it. It’s plainly authentic: he can name the time he saw them live (Salford University, Queen Is Dead tour, 1986). A cynical young man in a hurry might fake that now, but not back when he first said it, in 2013.
Asked by Labour Uncut for his desert island tracks during his 2010 leadership bid, three of the eight were sung by Morrissey (two Smiths singles and one off Viva Hate), which is superfan territory. That’s a softball exercise to endear yourself to Labour members; you have eight chances to hit every base, and to blow three lives on an artist who had already, by then, been dabbling in nationalism for 18 years (we’ll come back to this) was dicey and brave. You’ll recall that Burnham did not win that election.
If you were an enemy state, amassing this hinterland for an asset, you’d have basically done a really good job. In the business of projecting a human being, through a miasma of talking points and half-answers, it’s more important that the passion be genuine than that it hit the right cultural and social touch points, but in the late 90s and early 00s, the Smiths hit those too. Bear in mind that they’d already been split for a full decade by the time Tony Blair came into power and Burnham first appeared in parliament, so they already signalled a bygone youth, rather than: “I am a cool dude who still goes clubbing to this day.” But the Smiths’ body of work has a worldview and it’s explicitly political: the lyrics describe a nation in permanent decline, its justice a sham, its education a meat factory, its meat factories (obviously) murder, its subjects shot through with nihilism and exquisite despair.
People who called the Smiths miserablist were wilfully ignoring what they actually sounded like, which was the opposite of despair, a kind of penetrating vivacity that obliterated the greyness its words described. It was funny, ironic, complicated and even its counterculturalism was knowingly passé, declinist. There was so much in there about the queen – and who really cared about the royals by the mid-80s?
It had a defiant intellectualism and prefigured the 90s spirit in which everything was infinitely interpretable, and to be contradictory was a sign you were alive. In that sense, Burnham’s fandom encapsulated the long 90s pretty well. You didn’t have to be literally left behind to be alienated by modernity.
You could just vibe left-behindness. When Burnham jammed Rusholme Ruffians on guitar in Kyiv on Monday, there was something plangently nostalgic about it – not for 1985, when the song was released, but for the turn of this century, when we could all be lonely yet not alone, where death wishes were routinely expressed but also a metaphor for whatever you liked, where fairgrounds were empty but also full. It was the era when history was over, when ideological differences had collapsed; and while that turned out not to be true, it did allow in a spirit of openness and intellectual experiment that was extremely rich.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
