Music

10 reasons Morrissey has canceled almost as many shows as he's played

by Dave Hodgson

You’ve likely heard by now that Morrissey has characteristically canceled the remainder of his US tour, leaving in his wake a continent of depressed fans. (Okay—more depressed.) At this point, Morrissey’s predilection for aborting shows has become a comic runner, as over the last couple of decades he’s managed to quash almost as many shows as he successfully performs. Is it bad health? Bad luck? Our Lord becoming wrathful and jealous of the godlike sway Morrissey holds over his fan base? Well, as it turns out, there are a lot of reasons he’s canceled shows.

A bleeding ulcer

Morrissey ditched six early 2013 dates because of this painful-sounding ailment. But at least it provided the inspiration for one of his newest tracks, “At Least This Bleeding Ulcer Makes Me Feel Something.”

Double pneumonia

Double pneumonia killed the remainder of his 2013 dates. It’s also, apparently, a thing. Jesus. Has the time come to install Morrissey in a hermetically-sealed bubble?

Barrett’s esophagus

Morrissey, do you have Barrett’s esophagus? Then you’d better give it back to him! Ahhh, we have fun here. But for real, if you contracted a condition “in which the tissue lining the esophagus is replaced by tissue that is similar to the intestinal lining,” you probably wouldn’t feel like doing 75 minutes in Anaheim either. What is with these 19th-century-sounding ailments? Did Morrissey time travel? We’ll know for sure if he cancels his next tour because of typhus.

Poor communication

Back in 1994, after releasing his bust-out solo effort Vauxhall and I, Morrissey was slotted in for hotly-anticipated engagements in Los Angeles and New York. They were canceled before tickets were even printed as Morrissey claimed no one had told him about the dates. I can see how that would be a problem.

Funding difficulties

A massive 2013 South American tour was “euthanised” (in his words) when Morrissey announced that he and his management couldn’t reconcile the financial side of the excursion, despite having already sold 80 per cent of tickets. “My apologies are now so frequent as to be somewhat ridiculous,” he wrote to fans. The man isn’t wrong.

A ruptured water pipe

Morrissey was scheduled to be the last act to perform at the Hollywood Palladium before it closed with a ten-night run in 2007, but ended up having two of those dates canceled due to a broken water pipe. Are you telling me that place didn’t have a temperature-controlled thermal convection recirculation valve? What a dump!

The smell of delicious burgers

At a rare festival appearance, Morrissey managed to make it to the stage but didn’t last long. He cut his Coachella set short when the smell of barbecued burgers wafted up-stage. Before splitting, the staunch vegetarian quipped “I can smell burning flesh… and I hope to God it’s human.” Even when Morrissey is intolerable, he’s charming.

Someone misspelling his name

This one’s to be taken with a grain of salt, since it comes third-hand via a former host of The Man Show, but in a discussion with Morrissey’s road manager, podcaster Adam Carolla heard about Morrissey rolling into a Michigan gig, seeing his name misspelled on the marquee, and telling the driver to turn his bus around. How do you screw that up, marquee guy? His name is one word!

A deep hate of Atlantans

Almost every tour destination has felt the sting of Morrissey’s cancellations, but Atlanta has had it particularly tough; he’s now cancelled four shows in 18 months, proving indisputably that he has a vendetta against Hotlanta. Maybe he hates that they call themselves Hotlanta. I know I do.

He also recently bowed out of his third straight engagement in Flint, Michigan, but when a city has a higher murder rate than Baghdad with only 1/72 of their population, you can’t really blame him for passing on the chance to get knifed on-stage.

His opening act giving him an infection, maybe

Morrissey just struck down the final ten dates of his already-truncated US tour, citing a persistent respiratory infection he contracted in Miami. But this time, he fingered a culprit, long-time opening act Kristeen Young, who his management says “confessed to ‘a horrendous cold,’ the symptoms of which were passed on to Morrissey.” Not so, says Young, who says she only suffered from a brief allergy attack, was never ill and had the doctor’s note to prove it. “This is really too much and bizarre,” she concluded. Yeah. Yeah, it is.