The distinguished Mr Smith
Morrissey is one of the few pop stars who suits middle age better than youth - in a physical sense, at least. He has grown into his craggy looks, and cuts a rather distinguished figure in his checked blazers, the beetle-browed gawkiness of his twenties all but expunged from memory. But his passage through his forties hasn't been serene - well, obviously not. He's still Morrissey after all. And now he seems to have hit a mid-life crisis, or what Damon Albarn (of whom, more in a moment) pungently refers to as "the male menopause."
If mid-life crisis is taken to mean a moment of reckoning, when someone realises that the clock is ticking, and it's now or never for that Porsche Boxster, then Moz is definitely showing the signs. He's moved to Rome, the better to kick up his heels in the sun. The preoccupation with sex on his new album, Ringleader of the Tormentors - graphic references, where previously there was arm's-length ambivalence - also sounds like a man making hay while the sun shines. He has even taken to reining in his acerbic tongue, publicly apologising to the Arctic Monkeys this week for saying that they didn't deserve their success. Morrissey apologising!
Albarn attributed this kind of mid-career shift to the aforesaid menopause, which he described as a feeling of discontent with a life that seems to others to be highly enviable. Apparently, he was struck by such a feeling a few years ago, when Blur were at their peak. It resulted in his broadening his musical interests, which in turn led to recording in Mali, forming Gorillaz and winning the praise of critics who had been a bit iffy about him when he was the pretty one in Blur.
Someone who could do with a mid-life crisis is Prince, who's making a significant comeback with the album 3121. Unlike Morrissey, he's always been vocal in his enthusiasm for the pleasures of the flesh. And he still is. His new single, Black Sweat, is (like the rest of the album) about his undiminished appetite for sex, which is all very commendable till you remember that he's been every bit as sweaty for 25 years. And he STILL wants more? It's not seemly. In the words of a music journalist who heard 3121 at a party recently, "It's all right, but he's getting a bit Uncle Disgusting, isn't he?"
