Video: Morrissey - We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful (live on TOTP 1992)

Your Arsenal is definitely amongst the best of Mozza's solo albums. Released in 1992, it was his fourth solo album and a vast, VAST improvement after its predecessor, the awfully produced and arranged Kill Uncle. Note I don't say badly written, because the songs in themselves aren't that bad, which is proven by the tremendous live versions on the Live In Dallas video/DVD. Anyway there's hardly one crappy track on YA. Maybe his best album opener thus far, the obviously Bowie/Ronson influenced glam homage of You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side, is followed by the equally great Glamorous Glue. When it gets to the slower tracks, We'll Let You Know and The National Front Disco, Mozza manages to take topics that kneejerk reactions would tend to suggest wouldn't make good songs (Football hooliganism and the romance of neo-fascism) and somehow makes them both accurate and genuinely quite sad. After the first four tracks the album doesn't really let up, with only Seaside, Yet Still Docked being a little less than fantastic (and i'm sure many would disagree with me on that front).

This album would be stunningly revisited for 1993's excellent live album Beethoven Was Deaf, which also features some great versions of lesser known bsides like Sister, I'm A Poet and Jack The Ripper. Overall it's a far better live album than last year's Live At Earls Court, displaying the fact that Mozza really doesn't need to play Smiths songs anymore to get a crowd going (although obviously it's still fun to hear them). A year after Beethoven, the quiff master would release his greatest solo album to date, the stunning Vauxhall And I. I'm actually off to see Morrissey in Portsmouth in two weeks, so thought I would follow the trend of Morrissey mania thats been taking hold of some Britblogs, (like Let's Kiss and Make Up, here and here.) by doing a couple of Smiths/Morrissey related posts. For today I thought I would post a video of the Your Arsenal single We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful live on Top of the Pops. To this date it stands as Morrissey's second greatest chorus lyric to date, only surpassed by Roy's Keen.

Morrissey - We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful (TOTP) - AVI 21.4mb (rapidshare)