Morrissey admirers reach for their hero at Echostage on Wednesday.
“We were supposed to be here previously, and we couldn’t make it,” Morrissey said at Echostage Wednesday night. After a dramatic pause, he added, “The suicide rate in this band is very high.”
Speaking in reference to several cancelled shows in the DC area over the past several years, the latter part of that statement was offered as sardonic consolation to the audience via a bit of typically morbid humor from the Poet of Manchester, who actually then proceeded to put on a damn fine show.
The very very full Echostage was held rapturous as Morrissey and his longtime band (all of whom are hale and hearty despite his witty offering) dove into a robust set of 19 songs and one encore. The set focused heavily on rather good new material by Morrissey from the album World Peace Is None of Your Business — an odd album to be certain as it is not widely commercially available at the time of this writing due to a fallout last year between Morrissey and his label.
Regardless, Morrissey’s concert performance was entertaining in its own right, and what better way to get to know new songs than to enjoy them live? And more than enough people knew the lyrics to numbers like the title track “World Peace Is None of Your Business,” which revisits typical Morrissey themes of economic inequality and government suppression.
