And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week Live Business

CMU Beef Of The Week #242: Morrissey v Iceland

By | Published on Friday 6 February 2015

This week, Morrissey announced that he was cancelling a show in Iceland because the venue had refused to serve only vegetarian food. This was news not only because of the cancellation, but also because it was the first anyone had mentioned of an upcoming Morrissey show in the country.

Morrissey

To be honest, it seems almost embarrassingly obvious to make this the Beef Of The Week. Because, as you may know, as well as being a commonly used term to mean ‘disagreement’, beef is also a type of meat. A meat people eat. And this disagreement is over meat. It’s not the first time we’ve made this connection. It’s not even the first time we’ve made it in relation to Morrissey. Or the second. Though given that his whole life is pretty much a beef against beef, I suppose it’s amazing it’s not happened more often.

Anyway, let’s get on with this. “I love Iceland and I have waited a long time to return”, shouted Moz in a statement issued to his True To You fansite this week. “But I shall leave the Harpa Concert Hall [in Reykjavík] to their cannibalistic flesh-eating bloodlust”.

As we said, no one actually thought Morrissey was playing a show in Iceland in the first place, so you could say there was no need to announce that plans for such a gig had now been called off. But then, Morrissey is never one to shy away from an opportunity to tell people his views on those who choose to eat meat. He called a Smiths album ‘Meat Is Murder’, for starters. And there have been numerous stands made since then too.

He walked off stage at Coachella in 2009 because he could smell meat being cooked. He had fans’ bags searched for meat products at a gig in Middlesborough. He said that the 2011 massacre of children in Norway was not as bad as the fast food industry. He’s pulled out of a US TV appearance when he learned that the stars of duck-hunting show ‘Duck Dynasty’ were also booked to appear. Plus, let’s have a special mention for the actually unrelated headline in this story here.

He’s also made quite a habit of cancelling gigs generally, and indeed entire tours – as this blog post attests. Though last year it turned out that his most recent tour cancellation was so that he could receive treatment for cancer, so you should probably stop moaning and/or laughing, you heartless bastard.

Though, this latest ‘cancellation’ seemed unusual, even for Morrissey. The website for Reykjavík’s Harpa Concert Hall made no mention of the singer. Nor did any Morrissey website, official or otherwise, reference plans for him to play there. Indeed there was no mention of the planned Icelandic gig on the internet in its entirety, as far as we could tell.

So we asked a rep for Harpa what was going on. The planned show clearly hadn’t been announced, but was it confirmed and on what date would it have taken place?

“There had only been some negotiations between Morrissey’s people and an Icelandic promoter (not Harpa, the venue), and they were aiming for the end of March”, said the spokesperson.

Still, if Morrissey is to be believed, there must have been some contact with the venue? “It never got so far that we here in Harpa were asked to fulfil any demands”, the spokesperson continued. “The answer is therefore that the concert had never been booked, confirmed or announced”.

So this just gets more and more curious. Perhaps a promoter said that they didn’t think the venue would be up for removing meat from the premises, and through Chinese whispers it became an out and out refusal. Perhaps Morrissey believed that negotiations were further along than they actually were. Perhaps he thinks that standing up for his principles is more important than actually booking shows before announcing he’s not playing them.

Or perhaps, given his tendency to cancel shows, someone has convinced him to satisfy his urges to do so by cancelling shows that don’t exist, rather than those he’s committed to already.

Actually, that sounds like fun. I’d like to announce that I will not be performing at the O2 Arena because the venue refuses to dress all staff as elves. I’m sorry to my many fans in the Greenwich area, but this is a deal-breaker for me.



READ MORE ABOUT: |