![]() ![]() ![]() But in many respects this is an artfully framed album of cosmic protest songs, not so much an apology for his increasingly eccentric geopolitical turn as a contextualising of it. Once upon a time the young Morrissey crooned “I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar/Then it meant that you were/A protest singer/Oh I can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible”, and carefully positioned himself away from the mid-’80s Red Wedge agit-pop enragés he frequently shared stages with. You might expect a collection of songs to rival his Meltdown curation in its heterogeneity: some girl groups, some glam, some MOR (he should record his cover of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “I Didn’t Know What To Do” sometime), some bewildering transgender artsong.īut though it has plenty of light relief in loving renditions of turn-of-the-decade soft pop (the best of which is a giddy take on Laura Nyro’s “Wedding Bell Blues”, with backing vocals from Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong) California Son proves to be a more peculiar affair, a rum collection of American artfolk from the 1960s and ’70s. The straitlaced cover of “It’s Over”, the album’s first lead song, had hinted that he was going to play it safe in a Richard Hawley/torch song twang kind of way, aimed squarely at the heart of Radio 2, but “Morning Starship” suggested that California Son might be a more ambitious affair, a reckoning and refashioning of his own back pages that might add up to a more telling musical autobiography than his own Autobiography, and a pop art confection to place alongside Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things or Bowie’s Pin Ups. But here he transcends Jobriath’s original, with Joe Chiccarelli’s sumptuous, sci-fi baroque production framing an ardent, imperious vocal. Though it was glam rock that warped his adolescent brain, he’s not often been able to translate that freaky formative rapture into his own music – “Panic” and “Shoplifters” bought Bolan’s cosmic boogie down to provincial highstreets, while his live covers of Bowie and Roxy too evidently echoed the pale teenage boy singing along in his box bedroom. For those still keeping count, “Morning Starship” is his best single since “Something Is Squeezing My Skull”. On the face of it, it’s a strange success. As it is, in this context, California Son can’t help but feel like a fairly desperate attempt to reboot the career before he terminally alienates his fanbase. If he’d released a crowd-pleasing covers album in 2007, he might have finally ascended to the status of dotty, domesticated national treasure, alongside Alan Bennett, Elton and David Hockney. ![]()
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