Morrissey’s Global Misery Tour: How One Mancunian’s Malaise Became a Multinational Export

Morrissey Takes His Misery on a World Tour: Global Gloom, Local Whining

It’s official: the Pope of Mope has mapped his 2024 pilgrimage of pain. Steven Patrick Morrissey—still clinging to that single surname like a life raft of relevance—has announced a fresh itinerary that will drag his baritone lament from Mexico City to Manila, with strategic layovers in the sort of European capitals that have perfected existential despair since long before Brexit made it fashionable.

For the uninitiated (lucky you), a Morrissey tour is less a concert series and more a traveling seminar on how to weaponize melancholy for ticket sales. The venues are cathedrals of nostalgia, the set lists fossils of a Britain that never quite existed, and the audience a multinational coalition of the morbidly self-aware. One suspects Interpol keeps a file on us.

From the vantage point of an international press corps that has spent the past decade documenting coups, climate collapse, and crypto-billionaires cosplaying as astronauts, the prospect of thirty-odd dates devoted to the exquisite torture of being mildly misunderstood feels almost quaint—like watching a dodo perform Hamlet. Yet the tour’s routing is geopolitically telling. The Americas get four stops, a continent that still confuses Morrissey with “that guy from the Smiths” and therefore buys tickets in the same spirit it buys avocado toast—ironically. Asia receives two, because nothing says “efficient market penetration” like scheduling Singapore the same week Taylor Swift colonizes Tokyo. Europe, naturally, is saturated, the EU’s freedom of movement finally being used for something other than cheap Polish plumbers: namely, allowing every disaffected philosophy graduate from Lisbon to Ljubljana to gather in one place and sigh in four-part harmony.

Global supply-chain managers—those unsung poets of late capitalism—are already twitching at the thought of hauling a backdrop shaped like a butcher’s shop across customs borders that now require 47 forms and a blood oath. Meanwhile, carbon-offset startups are licking their chops, ready to sell guilt-ridden Moz fans the chance to plant a sapling in Burkina Faso every time he croons “Meat Is Murder.” (Spoiler: the sapling dies, the steakhouse next door thrives, and somewhere a marketing intern updates the PowerPoint.)

The broader significance? Morrissey’s misery has always been a mirror held up to whichever nation hosts him. In the United States, his laments about lost innocence feel prophetic beside a Supreme Court that treats the 1950s as a user manual. In Latin America, his melancholia dovetails neatly with the region’s talent for elegiac beauty amid institutional chaos—Peronist tango meets Mancunian moan. In East Asia, where public displays of emotion are generally outsourced to K-dramas, the tour offers a sanctioned space to weep communally without losing face. Call it soft-power catharsis: the U.K. exports angst the way France exports champagne, only flatter and with more reverb.

Of course, every stop will reopen the increasingly tedious referendum on the singer’s political opinions—those landmines of contrarianism he plants with the glee of a man who’s read too much Oscar Wilde and not enough about algorithmic outrage. Journalists will ask; Morrissey will pout; Twitter will detonate; ticket prices will rise. The cycle is as reliable as daylight saving time and twice as irritating.

Yet for all the eye-rolling, the tour remains a stubbornly human event. In an era when our phones curate happiness and governments monetize fear, there is something perversely honest about paying €90 to watch a 64-year-old man in a sequined shirt declare that life is rubbish. It’s a transaction stripped of pretense: we know the product is sadness, we know the packaging is vintage, and we queue anyway because shared sorrow still beats solitary doom-scrolling.

So as the lights dim from Buenos Aires to Budapest, take a moment to admire the sheer logistical audacity of ferrying one man’s weltschmerz across time zones and tariff lines. Somewhere in a hotel suite whose minibar is already half-empty, Morrissey is adjusting the angle of his quiff in the mirror, preparing to tell the planet—yet again—that it’s killing him. The planet, busy being killed by larger forces, will nod along in 7/4 time.

And for two encores, at least, we’ll all pretend the feeling is mutual.