The Passion of Morrissey: When the State Threatens Artists
By PIPR
3 July, 2025
Key points: The singer-songwriter has been harassed by the state for decades.
…TRUTH TO POWER
“They who wish to hurt you/Work within the law.” Morrissey has been singing this since at least 2002, when he began premiering The World Is Full of Crashing Bores to live audiences.
At that time, the Anglo-Irish pop-rocker living in Los Angeles did not have a record deal. The song finally made it onto an album two years later. You Are the Quarry told listeners that America Is Not the World and that “No regime can buy or sell me.”
Last year, the Moz brought Crashing Bores back into his live sets; only this time projecting onto a screen a video of Anthony Fauci working a vaccine-wielding puppet of Bill Gates. Arch-villain Klaus Schwab also makes an appearance.
By funding dangerous gain-of-function research, various US agencies working with, and at times under, Fauci gave the world SARS-CoV-2. Their front-man then lied to Congress: that such research was not being funded.
Also in 2021, Bill Gates squirmed in his seat during a PBS interview exposing his connections to the CIA asset, Jeffrey Epstein. When asked if he had learned any lessons, Gates replied: “Well…he’s dead. So, in general, you always have to be careful.”
More recently, Schwab had to leave the very World Economic Forum that he founded in disgrace, supposedly due to corruption.
…AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Morrissey has been standing his ground for decades and has refused to bow to intimidation.
The first case appears to have been in 1988, when Margaret On the Guillotine was released on his album, Viva Hate. “Kind people/Do no shelter this dream/Make the dream real.” The lyrics evoke images of the peasants rising against the Thatcher government and lopping off the head, French Revolution style, of the Prime Minister.
Indeed, Morrissey often returns to revolutionary themes, projecting photos of France’s Gilets Jaune (Yellow Vest) protesters during live versions of I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris.
In response to Guillotine and an article in the Star newspaper alleging that Morrissey would welcome the demise of the PM, the songwriter was detained by a Special Branch Task Force for an hour. The officers grilled him in an effort to determine whether or not he posed a threat to the life of the politician.
The intimidation didn’t work. Follow-up songs, like Interesting Drug, spoke of “…a government scheme/Designed to kill your dream.”
Fast-forward to 11th September, 2001. The George W. Bush administration used the atrocity as a pretext to carry out existing plans for world domination.
After publicly wishing for Bush’s death in 2004, Morrissey was visited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which like Special Branch sought to determine if he was a threat to America’s “national security.”
Again, the threats didn’t work. The opening track on Ringleader of the Tormentors (2006) goes: “If your god bestows protection upon you/And if the USA doesn’t bomb you/I believe I will see you/Somewhere safe…”
For the live version, the songsmith now sings: “If thee E.U. doesn’t bomb you.”
MORE RECENTLY
In his most overtly political album, World Peace Is None of Your Business (2014), Morrissey reminds us to take charge of our own lives and not rely on politicians. “Police will stun you with their stun guns/Or they’ll disable you with tasers/That’s what government’s for.”
A year later, Morrissey says he was sexually molested by a TSA Officer when traveling in San Francisco. In Rome, a policeman reportedly unlocked his gun and harassed the artist for more than 30 minutes, demanding to see his “papers.”
In 2017, with the band sporting Fuck Trump t-shirts, Morrissey described the President as a “pest” whom he would kill for the sake of humanity.
Following the pattern, the Secret Service then interviewed the singer to establish if he posed a genuine menace to the life of the President.
Morrissey has stuck to his lyrical guns, making less-than-coded allusions to the animal-murdering Trump family in the song, Love Is On Its Way Out: “…The sad rich/Hunting down, shooting down/Elephants and lions.”
CONCLUSION
It is too easy to dismiss Morrissey as a privileged loudmouth backing far-right causes. But the man has spent four decades consistently speaking out against those abusers at the top of the hierarchy.
In Mountjoy, he laments: “What those in power do to you/Reminds us at a glance/How humans hate each other’s guts/And show it, given the chance.”
In addition to threats made by the state, the music industry has dropped him and the very media that should defend unpopular positions in the name of free speech have weaponized liberalism as a form of social control.
With his legacy immortalized in song, not even death can silence him now.