There is a Smiths lyric for almost every moment. Whether it’s telling a friend that their jokes just aren’t funny anymore or being herded into the corner of a Northern pub-cum-club and contemplating hanging the DJ, every song that contains Morrissey’s melodramatic teenage misery becomes useful vocabulary for the most mundane scenarios. Including visiting troops in Ukraine, as the Prime Minister proved earlier this week.

Gen Z is proving rather less doctrinaire about culture than previous generations

Gen Z is proving rather less doctrinaire about culture than previous generations

Perhaps that is just one reason that helps explain why, more than 40 years after The Smiths first appeared, they are finding a new audience amongst those who were not even alive when the band split up, let alone released their first album. ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ has now been streamed more than a billion times, whilst Smiths T-shirts – deemed casual wear – still adorn teenagers up and down the nation.

It’s hard to quantify whether this is just the enduring interest of Gen Xers and Millennials, but gig audiences suggest there may be more to it. I have seen Moz twice in the past two years in Manchester and London. The audiences were similar in some ways, but surprising in others. There were plenty old enough to have bought The Smiths’ records when they were first released, with many donning........

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