1. Beethoven Was Deaf is my favourite Morrissey album. Is that so wrong?
2. As usual with pop music, you're prepared for the album's contents before you hear it. You see the cover and examine it for clues. The grainy photo of Moz sticking out his tongue becomes imprinted on your brain (and piques your curiosity - the image has clearly been blown up from a wider picture. It resembles the first Smiths lp cover, if the other part of the original Warhol movie picture had been used. So what else is going on that has prompted Moz's look of naughty, transgressive amusement?). You process the thought that, given its time of recording (late 1992) the contents are likely to comprise largely of songs from Your Arsenal plus some older tracks given a sonic kick up the bum by Moz's (then still fairly new) rag tag 'billy combo.
You may even have read the reviews, which, as only the best pop journalism can, served as a partial map to the location you would be due to visit when you pressed 'play'. Post-Madstock, it sung the album's praises in a decidedly anti-Moz climate. The one in Select particularly stood out. It printed a(nother) Linder Sterling photograph, Morrissey teasing a rabid mob, hopping like a DM'd lustbunny across a petal-strewn stage. Chaos and beauty, together in monochrome. "An album designed to be played too loud in a room too small," it said. You decided you want to hear this album. Now.
3. There are some live recordings that communicate nothing of the event itself other than the sound alone, which is why 'the live album' is seen so often as a purely cheap and cynical marketing exercise on the part of record companies. You don't feel or hear anything of the event's energy or significance (if it had any to begin with) and so it may as well be a band rehearsal (and who wants to see actors without their make-up?). They're rubbish. Mentioning no names, but Rank, I'm looking at you.
Beethoven Was Deaf is not such an album. It isn't a mere recording. It's thrillingly, absolutely ALIVE. If much of the source material springs from an album that veered slightly away from what was hitherto traditional for Moz, then this live jamboree careers off the road entirely, leaps daringly over a cliff edge, crashes onto the rocky rubble-strewn terrain below and then speeds off in flames. The absence of visuals (of physical immediacy) is made up for by the sheer amount of sensory data being crammed into it - the crowd noise, microphones clanging to the floor, the strangely sensual green-tinted photographs in the insert, its sense of aural space (especially in 'We'll Let You Know', where the "come on!" and the harsh sudden drum-roll seem to creep up at you from behind before jumping savagely into the foreground), and, of course, the grain. The feedback. The noise. To steal a phrase from Jon Savage, this album is informationally heavy. And if you come to the album with preconceptions about what a Morrissey album 'is' or is supposed to 'be', this information is all the more exciting, because it tramples all over those preconceptions completely. (yes, you could say the same for Your Arsenal, mostly, but even that feels reigned in compared to this, which metaphorically replaces the passive HMV canine with a slobbering wild child-ravager of a beast)
He wasn't just wearing those Doc Marten's because they were comfortable. Noise + Symbolism = Pop.
4. But the noise... dear God, the noise...
It's amazing to think all this is purely the result of the simple machinery so basic to pop's backbone. The rumour was that Moz discovered sex round about this point (persuasive - as if that new buff bod hadn't been specifically cultivated for reasons of naughtiness!). That same sense of realisation, of discovery - of realising just what you can do with what (ahem) tools you've got - applies to this live sound. A re-energised burst of passion, not content merely to add decoration behind the vocals, but to stand equal to them, threatening even to drown them out. Which Moz evidently wanted, even encouraged, what with no lyric sheet to Your Arsenal and all. Nothing illustrates this better than the gleeful feedback-fest that ends, nay, demolishes 'National Front Disco' here, a squalling, howling, Banshee-like rip through the P.A system. More akin to a sample from 'Metal Machine Music' or Atari Teenage Riot's 'Live in Brixton', it tears across the audio channels like Link Wray's pencil through his amplifier. It must have been hella strange, even frightening, to witness in the Paris venue. Its lack of vocal input also begs the question as to what Moz himself was doing while all this was going on, and the fan brain immediately conjures up sundry images to fill in the blanks. I personally like to think he was doing that 'balancing upside down against the monitors' thing he's so fond of in Kevin Cummins' photographs.
Every so often pop rediscovers just how much fun it can be to push a guitar right up against the speakers. Very, very big speakers. For this to happen on a Morrissey lp - wonderful!
5. Even better, this shocking burst of noise, so American in its rockist, Sonic Youth-y, Nirvana-ish horrendousness, leads into a slice of classic, and classically British, Morrissean comedy. "We might release that as a single," intones Moz hesitantly. "Do you think it would be a hit?" And the crowd, as one, scream out their reply: "NO!!"
It couldn't have been scripted better.
6. I do wonder, though, if he ever did learn to speak French.
