[46] Having left formal education, Morrissey proceeded through a series of jobs, as a clerk for the civil service and then the Inland Revenue,[47] as a salesperson in a record store, and as a hospital porter, before abandoning employment and claiming unemployment benefits.

[81] In the wake of their single, the band performed their first significant London gig, gained radio airplay with a John Peel session, and obtained their first interviews in music magazines NME and Sounds.

The times were personified in their frontman: rejecting all taints of rock n' roll machismo, he played up the social awkwardness of the misfit and the outsider, his gently haunting vocals whooping suddenly upward into a falsetto, clothed in outsize women's shirts, sporting National Health specs or a huge Johnny Ray-style hearing aid.

This charming young man was, in the vernacular of the time, the very antithesis of a "rockist"—always knowingly closer to the gentle ironicist Alan Bennett, or self-lacerating diarist Kenneth Williams, than a licentious Mick Jagger or drugged-out Jim Morrison.

[99] The album's final song, "Margaret on the Guillotine", featured descriptions of Thatcher being executed; in response, the Conservative Member of Parliament Geoffrey Dickens accused Morrissey of being involved in a terrorist network and police Special Branch conducted a search of his Manchester home.

[110] Two of the newly recorded Bona Drag tracks were released as singles: "November Spawned a Monster", a song about a woman who is a wheelchair user, reached number 12 in the charts but received criticism from some who believed that it mocked disabled people.

[117] Planning his first solo tour, Morrissey assembled several musicians with a background in rockabilly for his new backing group, including the guitarist Boz Boorer, Alain Whyte and Spencer Cobrin.

[123] In some cases, this involved the press spreading misinformation, such as the claim that he and Phranc were recording a cover of "Don't Go Breaking My Heart";[124] others, such as those of Barbara Ellen in NME, were closer to personal attack than musical review.

[135] From September to December, Morrissey embarked on a 53-date Your Arsenal tour in which he varyingly decorated the stage with backdrops of skinhead girls,[136] Diana Dors, Elvis Presley, and Charlie Richardson.

[147] Walters had introduced Morrissey to York Hall, a boxing venue in Bethnal Green, part of London's East End, with the singer spending an increasing amount of time there.

Among the acts he secured were Sparks, Loudon Wainwright III, Ennio Marchetto, Nancy Sinatra, the Cockney Rejects, Lypsinka, the Ordinary Boys, the Libertines, and playwright Alan Bennett.

[247] That same month, Morrissey attracted press attention and criticism for comments made in an interview with Der Spiegel: he stated that it was "quite sad" that distinct national identities in Europe were being undermined by politicians trying "to introduce a multicultural aspect to everything",[248][249][250] and that some individuals claiming victimhood as part of the Me Too movement were not genuine victims of sexual assault but were "simply disappointed".

[264] The album has eleven songs produced by Andrew Watt and features Red Hot Chili Peppers members Chad Smith and Flea alongside their former bandmate Josh Klinghoffer.

[287] Discussing the Smiths' lyrics in 1992, Stringer highlighted that they placed great emphasis on the concept of Englishness, but added that unlike the contemporary Two-Tone and acid house movements, they focused on white England rather than exploring its multi-cultural counterpart.

[288] His lyrics have expressed disdain for many elements of British society, including the government, church, education system, royal family, meat-eating, money, gender, discos, fame, and relationships.

[294] Simpson opined that Morrissey's lyrics "bleed and throb with violent imagery", citing the references to bus crashes and suicide pacts in "There is a Light that Never Goes Out", smashed teeth in "Bigmouth Strikes Again", and nuclear apocalypse in both "Ask" and "Everyday is Like Sunday".

[303] Rogan claimed that Morrissey exhibited "a power onstage which I have seldom seen from any other artiste of his generation", and that while performing he "oozes charisma, offering that peculiar combination of gauche vulnerability and athleticism".

[321] In 2006, Morrissey refused to include Canada in his world tour that year and supported a boycott of Canadian goods in protest against the country's annual seal hunt, which he described as a "barbaric and cruel slaughter".

"[349] In September 2015, he expressed his revulsion at the "Piggate" scandal, saying that if Prime Minister David Cameron had really inserted "a private part of his anatomy" into the mouth of a dead pig's severed head while at university, then it showed "a callousness and complete lack of empathy entirely unbefitting a man in his position, and he should resign".

[379] His seventh studio album, You Are the Quarry includes the track "Irish Blood, English Heart", described as "the most unambiguously political of his career to date",[380] with lyrics denouncing the Tories, the Labour party, royalism, and the prominent historical British politician Oliver Cromwell.

[417] Nick Cave wrote an open letter defending Morrissey's right to freedom of speech to voice his beliefs, as well as arguing that his musical legacy should be kept separate from his political opinions.

Only by hearing the opinions of others can we form truly rational views, and therefore we must never accept a beehive society that refuses to reflect a variety of views.At a Dublin concert in June 2004, Morrissey commented on the death of Ronald Reagan, saying that he would have preferred if George W. Bush had died instead.

[421] Morrissey openly criticised the war on terror and condemned Bush as "the world's most famous active terrorist, as he bizarrely bombs the innocent people of Iraq out of existence in the name of freedom and democracy" in his autobiography.

"[424] He endorsed Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election,[242] although he later criticised her as "the face and voice of pooled money" and praised Bernie Sanders as "sane and intelligent", accusing the US media of paying insufficient attention to his campaign.

[91] This development was influenced by the speculation around his own sexual orientation, his lyrics that dealt with such subjects as age-gap sex and rent boys, as well as the Smiths' heavy use of gay and camp imagery on their record covers.

[447] Bookish, reclusive-but-pugnacious—avowedly celibate—with an almost Puritan disdain for cheap glamour and armed with a deeply unhealthy interest in language, wit and ideas Morrissey succeeded in perverting pop music for a while and making it that most absurd of things, literary.

[449] Rolling Stone, naming him one of the greatest singers of all time in a 2014 poll, noted that his "rejection of convention" in his vocal style and lyrics is the reason "why he redefined the sound of British rock for the past quarter-century".

[301] Morrissey's enduring influence has been ascribed to his wit, the "infinite capacity for interpretation" in his lyrics,[283] and his appeal to the "constant navel gazing, reflection, solipsism" of generations of "disenfranchised youth", offering unusually intimate "companionship" to broad demographics.

[452] Journalist Mark Simpson calls Morrissey "one of the greatest pop lyricists—and probably the greatest-ever lyricist of desire—that has ever moaned" and observes that "he is fully present in his songs as few other artists are, in a way that fans of most other performers .

"[466] A Los Angeles Times critic wrote that Morrissey "patented the template for modern indie rock" and that many bands playing at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival "would not be there—or at least, would not sound the same—were it not for him".