Morrissey Explains Why He Refuses To Play Brisbane

Indie legend Morrissey recently announced a string of Australian tour dates, but a couple of cities were conspicuously left off his agenda, namely Brisbane and Sydney, which haven’t got Moz tour dates and aren’t getting any.

Sydney is fair enough. After all, the former Smiths frontman did several Sydney-only performances just last year as part of the city’s annual Vivid LIVE festival. But the omission of Brisbane is apparently because of an ongoing beef.

Speaking to the Courier Mail, Morrissey claimed that he refuses to visit the Queensland capital because he’s been heckled both times he’s been there recently and he simply won’t suffer such indignity any longer.

“I didn’t want to return to Brisbane because I’ve played there twice and on both nights I was heckled, which doesn’t bother me that much, but even if I reply with something snazzy, the heckler always wins because the night has been soured and we no longer feel welcome. That’s life,” he said.

However, Moz insisted he tried to make his October tour more than the usual East Coast run lots of bands typically do. “I suppose there are people who think of Australia only in terms of Sydney and Melbourne, but I’m not one of them,” he said.

Naturally, all the venues Morrissey will be playing on his upcoming Australian tour have agreed to go meat-free, as per his contract. “I wish more artists would adopt this,” he told the Courier Mail.

“But we go to China this year and it’s such a flesh-eaters paradise that we feel certain there will be skewered dog for sale somewhere. The halls in Taiwan and Iceland would not go flesh-free, so we refused to book the dates. It’s a matter of humanitarian progress.”