Andy Burnham’s Smiths fandom as a lens on British politics and cultural identity

As an origin story, Andy Burnham: Smiths Fan has a lot going for it. It’s plainly authentic: he can name the time he saw them live (Salford University, Queen Is Dead tour, 1986). A cynical young man in a hurry might fake that now, but not back when he first said it, in 2013. Asked by Labour Uncut for his desert island tracks during his 2010 leadership bid, three of the eight were sung by Morrissey (two Smiths singles and one off Viva Hate), which is superfan territory.

That’s a softball exercise to endear yourself to Labour members; you have eight chances to hit every base, and to blow three lives on an artist who had already, by then, been dabbling in nationalism for 18 years (we’ll come back to this) was dicey and brave. You’ll recall that Burnham did not win that election. If you were an enemy state, amassing this hinterland for an asset, you’d have basically done a really good job.

In the business of projecting a human being, through a miasma of talking points and half-answers, it’s more important that the passion be genuine than that it hit the right cultural and social touch points, but in the late 90s and early 00s, the Smiths hit those too. Bear in mind that they’d already been split for a full decade by the time Tony Blair came into power and Burnham first appeared in parliament, so they already signalled a bygone youth, rather than: “I am a cool dude who still goes clubbing to this day.”

But the Smiths’ body of work has a worldview and it’s explicitly political: the lyrics describe a nation in permanent decline, its justice a sham, its education a meat factory, its meat factories (obviously) murder, its subjects shot through with nihilism and exquisite despair. People who called the Smiths miserablist were wilfully ignoring what they actually sounded like, which was the opposite of despair, a kind of penetrating vivacity that obliterated the greyness its words described.

It was funny, ironic, complicated and even its counterculturalism was knowingly passé, declinist. There was so much in there about the queen – and who really cared about the royals by the mid-80s? It had a defiant intellectualism and prefigured the 90s spirit in which everything was infinitely interpretable, and to be contradictory was a sign you were alive.

In that sense, Burnham’s fandom encapsulated the long 90s pretty well. You didn’t have to be literally left behind to be alienated by modernity. You could just vibe left-behindness. When Burnham jammed Rusholme Ruffians on guitar in Kyiv on Monday, there was something plangently nostalgic about it – not for 1985, when the song was released, but for the turn of this century, when we could all be lonely yet not alone, where death wishes were routinely expressed but also a metaphor for whatever you liked, where fairgrounds were empty but also full. It was the era when history was over, when ideological differences had collapsed; and while that turned out not to be true, it did allow in a spirit of openness and intellectual experiment that was extremely rich.

It was the kind of attitude that would now be derided as “metropolitan elitist” and Burnham noticed that pretty early, caveating in an interview in 2015, during his second leadership bid, that he went off the Smiths in his mid-20s when he decided that they were “for people who almost want to make themselves slightly superior: ‘I’m into the Smiths and I look down on people who listen to Level 42’”. That, too, was a little risky, since this was the musical love of his life, and he was suddenly prepared to throw them under the bus just to gate off the possibility that Level 42 fans might vote for Liz Kendall. You’ll remember that he did not win that leadership election either, and nobody voted for Kendall, except, conceivably, Level 42 fans (she got 4.5%).

Two things complicated the picture further. First, Morrissey’s own politics. By 1992, he was lyrically and performatively flirting with a nativism that is now, unavoidably, Islamophobia (in 2017, he expressed support for Anne Marie Waters, a name now lost to public life, then a Tommy Robinson ally and proponent of Great Replacement theory). Burnham has addressed, in pretty weak terms, the fact that he and Morrissey no longer see eye to eye, but that probably does it.

Morrissey’s politics were ugly from the start of his solo career – the lyrics of Bengali in Platforms are honestly stomach-churning – but the Smiths were never just him (as a judge famously determined in 1996, ruling in favour of Mike Joyce on the matter of royalty-sharing, calling Morrissey “devious”). It seems unlikely to me that even Johnny Marr, (the late) Andy Rourke and Joyce could tell what Morrissey would later become, when they were making that work in the 80s, let alone any of the fans.

Second, in 2006, David Cameron just marched in and vandalised everything, choosing This Charming Man on Desert Island Discs, describing listening to the Smiths at Eton. It tested the proposition – we can all be as alienated as each other – to destruction, and with the most insulting imaginable song: “Why pamper life’s complexity / When the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?” can function as so much, but it cannot work as karaoke for the guy in the seat.

Marr and Morrissey both publicly forbade him from liking the Smiths, which I guess may have mollified true fans such as Burnham but did nothing to head off Cameron’s callow, low-affect, “I’d like to capture all the wealth but also join in your economic alienation, it looks meaningless and kinda fun” politics, and their ruinous effect on the nation.

At the age Burnham is now – 56 – there’s no going back. He’ll die a Smiths fan. He may as well enjoy it. Judging by his Kyiv jam and his July “I left the north again / I travelled south again” video on socials, quoting Is It Really So Strange?, it looks like he is.