Come Back To Camden

A strange place to start I'll admit but such is the scope and audacity of the song I want it to be a clarion call of sorts. Here we are. Every last inch of us is his, to serenade us at his pleasure.

This song is everything that is great about latter day Morrissey. It feeds into what I have dubbed "the soap of Moz" which is a theme that I will continue to return to throughout this project. We have carried his persona with us so long as fans that we invest even the simplest turns of phrase with an epic event in the mans life. And ever the skillful performer Moz knows how to dramatise, the "me and my heart, we knew, we just knew.." takes on such huge proportions and is so heartbreaking even if the subject is, as usual obscured.

Not that the song is lazy with imagery, whether its drinking tea with the taste of the Thames, under a slate grey Victorian sky the whole thing is loaded with pitch perfect detail. It's the longing look of the exile, that although he mentions the colour grey the whole scene is still wonderfully rose tinted and aching with sadness. At this stage in his career Morrissey had been all but exiled, label-less to foreign shores which never made much sense for the quintessential English man.
It soars with such heart and grandeur, it can not be denied and any who are not swept up by the time it reaches its crescendo should just leave the song behind and busy themselves with never ending conversations with taxi drivers.

His voice has never sounded better, authoritative, emotive and tinged with a real regret here. His desire to return home is palpable and we can see with the fetishised detail present in the piece, this is a man who knows where he came from inside out. He doesn't celebrate a faux version of the land, his is the world of tire yards and lonely chairs on the pavement. When in the past and well, in the present too, Morrissey might have tackled this in a very tongue in cheek way, this has no subterfuge, only truth. He promises "he'll be good" and while he may falter in this, we know, we just know that at that moment he means it. Beautiful.