Morrissey - Bootlegs
A few words on Morrissey bootlegs taking in: The Smiths, Wolverhampton Civic Hall, Dublin’s National Stadium, The Stone Roses at Spike Island, FM broadcasts, cassette bootlegs, New Order, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Lollapalooza 1992, vinyl bootlegs, DVDs, and “art vs. the artist”.
Morrissey - Wolverhampton Civic Hall (22, December 1988). Photograph by Paul McDermott.
Today is the 33rd anniversary of Morrissey’s second solo gig. His 27 April 1991 National Stadium show was his first solo outing since the December 1988 Wolverhampton Civic debut gig and the opening night of the European leg of his Kill Uncle tour. It was also the first time that guitarists Boz Boorer and Alain Whyte, bassist Gary Day and drummer Spencer Cobrin played as part of his backing band.
Scan by Paul McDermott.
I was at the gig. It was an incredible night. The atmosphere was super-charged. The Would Be’s were the support band and during their set the seated crowd rushed the stage. Bouncers and security staff had to pull some injured fans and hundreds of wreaked chairs from the carnage - all this before Moz took to the stage. It was nuts, I had never seen anything like it.
Morrissey - Dublin, 27 April 1991. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
I purchased a live bootleg of the gig the following day in a record shop in Temple Bar. I can’t remember the name of the shop but it was up a narrow stairs and the tape was copied via high-speed dubbing on a fancy ghettoblaster behind the counter while I waited. Service with a smile.
The sound quality was pretty bad and it was obviously a recording made by someone in the audience, but of course that never mattered. Sound quality wasn’t really the point. The point was to simply try and relive the magic. Back then I had a very simple quality control grading for live bootlegs: “does it sound better or worse than my shit 1990 Stone Roses’ Spike Island bootleg tape?” I bought the Spike Island bootleg because I wanted part of the Roses’ myth but instead I got the worst live recording ever committed to tape. I still question if the bootlegger was even on Spike Island when he hit record.
The National Stadium tape meant that I could replay Moz’s covers of The Jam’s ‘That’s Entertainment’ and the New York Dolls’ ‘Trash’. Johnny Thunders had died a few days before the Dublin gig and ‘Trash’ was dedicated to him. Morrissey also debuted his next single introducing it with the message: “in case anybody’s bootlegging, this is a new song, for your benefit, the bootleggers, it’s called ‘Pregnant For the Last Time’.”
In 1991 the experience of hearing that introduction on an actual bootleg tape was quite strange, today I suppose we’d call the experience “meta”.
Morrissey - Paris, 29 April 1991. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
Two nights after Dublin, Morrissey played Elysée Montmartre in Paris. This gig was broadcast on the French public radio station, France Inter, and from there bootlegged extensively. Bernard Lenoir, the renowned French DJ, can be heard between songs and Morrissey played T’Rex’s ‘Cosmic Dancer’ for the first time.
Morrissey - Posing in Paris. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
Because the gig was recorded for FM broadcast it’s not surprising that it ended up being pressed onto vinyl. Posing in Paris features a still from Tim Broad’s video for The Smiths’ ‘Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before’ on the cover - a group of Morrissey lookalikes cycling around Manchester and Salford. Due to time constraints a few songs from the Paris setlist don’t make the vinyl and Lenoir can still be heard in small snippets. I can’t remember where I got this LP, but it was probably at a record fair sometime in the late 90s. Given the recording’s providence it’s not surprising that this gig has reappeared over the years bootlegged on vinyl multiple times.
Posing in Paris was the third vinyl LP bootleg that I had in my collection. In the early 90s a friend came back from a Dublin trip and gifted me a New Order vinyl bootleg: SECCstasy. This was a bootleg of New Order’s gig at Glasgow’s SECC arena in March 1989. It was a good recording and featured five tracks from Technique, which had been out a few months, but there was nothing particularly special about the Glasgow show from a performance point of view.
The Jesus and Mary Chain at Great Woods, Lollapalooza 1992. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
The second vinyl bootleg I had was a recording of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ULU, London gig in April 1988. I missed the Mary Chain when they played Cork’s Connolly Hall in 1989 so my main motivation for buying the ULU LP was to hear what the band sounded like in the late 80s. They sounded pretty shambolic.
I eventually got to see the Mary Chain play live at Lollapalooza at Great Woods, 40 miles south of Boston, in August 1992. They played in broad daylight shrouded in dry ice, sandwiched on a bill between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. These weren’t ideal conditions for the brothers Reid. An hour earlier Eddie Vedder had to work hard to calm a crowd who were intent on burning down the perimeter fence of the amphitheatre, so to describe the Mary Chain’s gig as an anti-climax is a bit of an understatement.
I only ever played the New Order and Mary Chain bootlegs a handful of times so I was happy to let them go for stupid money. I bought more records.
Morrissey - Brighton, 22 June 1991. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
In June 1991 Morrissey returned from the US dates of his Kill Uncle tour to begin seven gigs around the UK. The Brighton gig came midway through these UK dates and the live bootleg is an audience recording. The quality’s not brilliant but this tape is a great representation of just how insanely crazy those early Morrissey gigs could get.
Morrissey - Take a Bow. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
Take a Bow comes from the early 00s and compiles various early 90s US TV appearances (The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Late Show, Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno) along with a few Top of the Pops performances. passionsjustlikemine details that all of these recordings had previously been compiled on the Angelic Upstart bootleg CD.
Revelation is a late 00s bootleg that compiles nine studio out-takes from the Viva Hate, Kill Uncle and Your Arsenal sessions. Both of these LPs were picked up at record fairs. These are beautiful LPs and were made available in multiple colour vinyl variants.
Morrissey - Revelation. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
In a pre-YouTube world, bootleg DVDs (and VHS tapes before them) were the only place to view TV appearances that artists had performed in other jurisdictions. The two DVDs pictured below were picked up in the late 00s at a record fair. Pasolini is Me compiles festival gigs (Pinkpop and Rock am Ring), that would have been broadcast on TV in the Netherlands and Germany respectively, and a number of UK TV performances. Life Has Found Me compiles TV performances from 1990 to 2007. These are mere curios now as all of this material is available online.
Morrissey - Pasolini is Me and Life Has Found Me. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
My favourite Morrissey bootleg is without doubt a blue vinyl LP of his very first gig, the legendary Wolverhampton Civic Hall show from December 1988.
This gig featured Mike Joyce, Andy Rourke and Craig Gannon backing Morrissey for eight songs - five solo tracks and three Smiths’ tracks. Audience recordings of this gig circulated for years but the gig had been filmed professionally by Tim Broad and a soundboard recording was also made. Two songs from this gig had been released officially: ‘Sweet and Tender Hooligan’ was used as a B-Side to the ‘Interesting Drug’ 12” and a live clip of ‘Sister I’m a Poet’ was added to Morrissey’s video compilation Hulmerist.
Morrissey - Wolverhampton Civic Hall (22, December 1988). Photograph by Paul McDermott.
But the full audio and video had never been released until 2013 when a bootleg vinyl LP of the full gig, sourced from the original soundboard recording, appeared. The LP has no title, on the front it simply says “Morrissey” and on the reverse it says “Morrissey, Live at the Civic Hall Wolverhampton, England December 22, 1988”.
Harvey Keitel in Who’s That Knocking at My Door.
The LP uses a still from Scorsese’s 1967 debut feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door (originally titled I Call First) featuring Harvey Keitel for its cover. Confusingly this still of Keitel was used for the backdrop on the Kill Uncle gigs mentioned earlier but not in Wolverhampton. The backdrop at the Civic Hall gig was the cover of the ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ single.
Kill Uncle tour programme featuring Cecil Beaton’s Edith Sitwell photograph on the cover. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
While writing this blog post I did go back and listen to the Posing in Paris and Wolverhampton bootlegs but I don’t play any of these live bootlegs. I very rarely listen to Morrissey’s records these days. I find it really difficult to separate “art from the artist”.