As an origin story, Andy Burnham: Smiths Fan has a lot going for it. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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\u2019ll come back to this) was dicey and brave. You\u2019ll recall that Burnham did not win that election. If you were an enemy state, amassing this hinterland for an asset, you\u2019d have basically done a really good job.<\/p>\n
\u2018Put me on the train for London Town\u2019 \u2026 Burnham outside the Salford Lads Club, made famous by the Smiths\u2019 Queen Is Dead album, after launching his mayoral re-election campaign in 2024. Photograph: Christopher Furlong\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
In the business of projecting a human being, through a miasma of talking points and half-answers, it\u2019s 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\u2019d 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: \u201cI am a cool dude who still goes clubbing to this day.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the Smiths\u2019 body of work has a worldview and it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
It was funny, ironic, complicated and even its counterculturalism was knowingly pass\u00e9, declinist. There was so much in there about the queen \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
In that sense, Burnham\u2019s fandom encapsulated the long 90s pretty well. You didn\u2019t 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<\/a>, there was something plangently nostalgic about it \u2013 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.<\/p>\n It was the kind of attitude that would now be derided as \u201cmetropolitan elitist\u201d 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<\/a> that they were \u201cfor people who almost want to make themselves slightly superior: \u2018I\u2019m into the Smiths and I look down on people who listen to Level 42\u2019\u201d. 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\u2019ll remember that he did not win that leadership election either, and nobody voted for Kendall, except, conceivably, Level 42 fans (she got 4.5%).<\/p>\n Two things complicated the picture further. First, Morrissey\u2019s 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<\/a>). Burnham has addressed, in pretty weak terms, the fact that he and Morrissey no longer see eye to eye, but that probably does it.<\/p>\n \u2018He\u2019ll die a Smiths fan. He may as well enjoy it\u2019 \u2026 Burnham going up to 11. Photograph: WPA\/Getty Images<\/p>\n