When my 10-year-son asked my wife to play the Smiths song, There is a Light That Never Goes Out from the English band’s 1986 release, the Queen is Dead, I was assaulted by an overwhelming sense of parental pride.

Around the same age, I was listening to Disco Duck by Rick Dees and his Cast of Idiots.  

Given the Smiths’ lead singer Morrissey had inspired a generation of miserable misfits and outcasts I was oddly chuffed that my son actually knew the title of the song. Granted, Spotify has a habit of telling us what we should listen to.

I was never really a massive fan of the Smiths. There was a good chance even in my early 20s, I was too naive to grasp the wisdom of their misery. 

And I never understood the irony of dancing to their music like an axolotl trapped in a shallow puddle. 

But the feeling of pride was quickly interrupted by unrest and disquiet when my son inquired who the lead singer was. I had no desire to tell him the man quaintly singing about ‘dying in a double-decker bus accident’, was now at the top of the cancel culture charts because he was, well, a white supremacist.
So I simply told my son, that Morrissey wasn’t a very nice man and left it that. 

I didn’t feel right to interfere and deny my son a critical learning experience of discovering for himself that Morrissey is a wanker. 

But I was immediately filled with self-doubt, because surely one of the first rules of raising offspring is to educate them to be tolerant, loving, accepting and have an open disdain for the movies of Tom Hanks? 

For days after I felt conflicted and polarised by my directionless parenting. I had this ferocious, uncontrolled compulsion to tell him the truth about Morrissey. 

I know what you’re thinking. This is such an unproductive, redundant argument and if I did tell my son not to listen to the Smiths, I would be foisting my own prejudices and morality onto him, like a bicycle-riding, Mormon on the first day of spring.

I mean, parents wouldn’t dream of stifling their kids’ free will by thrusting their religious, spiritual or political views onto them now would they?

And the Smiths weren’t just Morrissey. You had the masterful guitar playing of Johnny Marr and the other two, which nobody remembers. 

Just in case you’re not aware of Morrissey’s political views here’s a bit of context.

In 2019 he appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, wearing a badge of the notorious anti-Islam political party “For Britain”. (Hey, Fallon should be cancelled but folk don’t seem to care about disingenuous, sycophantic, slobbering, idiots.) Founded by Anne Marie Waters in 2017, the party has taken a liking to the Great Replacement Theory – a far-right conspiracy which believes there is a plot to wipe out the white populations of Europe and North America through mass immigration and cultural warfare.

Charming. 

Morrissey had dropped the odd hint about his political views over the years but everyone thought he was being ironic when he sang, England for the English in the 1992 song National Front Disco.

So it brings us back to that old chestnut of can we separate the art from the artist? And what are the moral consequences, if we do?

Most of the folk I worship, like Miles Davis, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller and a few others could earn an unwanted membership to the cancel culture Hall of Fame because they are seen as misogynistic mongrels and wife beaters.

And no other filmmaker has brought me so much joy and laughter as Woody Allen but I’m aware of the acute ambivalence directed at the director because of the sexual accusations against him by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow.   

But despite Allen’s vociferous detractors I still watch his movies. 

Few things can make you feel more desolate and abandoned than finding out one of your heroes has committed a repugnant act in the past.

I also discovered the films of cancel culture’s first inductee, Roman Polanski after an English relief teacher that stunk of sherry and existential dread forced us to watch Macbeth.

After Lady Macbeth’s nude sleepwalking scene, I raised my arm as I was due for my weekly novena to the confessional, but I could see the teacher was too busy licking chalk.  

The film is so bleak, grim and violent that I slept with the light on for the next five years and flinched every time I heard a Scottish accent. But the movie has left a deeply profound and powerful impact on me. 

Before you come at me with, ‘it’s only the men that need to get cancelled’, you might want to cover your Frida Kahlo reprint of the Two Fridas with your Frida Kahlo tea towel because she had been accused of cultural appropriation. The Mexican artist often wore clothes associated with Indigenous cultures like the Zapotecs and the Juchitán, people actively oppressed by both white and nonwhite Latinxs who collaborate with colonisation. 

And then there is the anti-trans novelist J.K. Rowling. The English writer once tweeted that trans people should be defined by their biological sex, arguing that “if sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction”. But despite her transphobic views parents aren’t stopping their kids from dressing up as Harry Potter for Book Week. 

I don’t think I have to make this absolutely clear, that I’m not defending the actions of some of these artists. 

But what is the cut-off for membership into the cancel culture club and who decides entry? 

Maybe it should be left to other artists to decide? 

The haunting and visceral virtuoso that is Nick Cave said it’s better to let Morrissey have his political views.

“Those who claim that this has no relevance to his stature as an artist should ask themselves if, by demanding that we separate the singer from the song, they too are helping to propagate this racist creed.”

In the end, Cave says Morrissey’s political opinion becomes irrelevant. 

Just like me telling my son that Morrissey is a right-wing nut job. It’s irrelevant. 

At the moment he loves the song, There is a Light That Never Goes Out. And that is a great thing. He can work out the rest later.