Click on date for concert information:

After a 10-day break, Morrissey and his band returned on the road to promote "Your Arsenal" in Southern and Eastern America.

The mayhem of the Southern California dates took place for the first third of this leg, from California to Texas. It then abated gradually, except perhaps in the bigger cities like New York. At the end Morrissey and the band were starting to show signs of exhaustion.

Personnel: Boz Boorer (guitars), Alain Whyte (guitars), Gary Day (bass) and Spencer Cobrin (drums).

 


Support for most of this leg were Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys, a band on Boz's record label. No one opened for the New York Limelight show, and Jet Black Machine opened for the last three shows, New York Roseland and The Ritz, and Philadelphia.

 


- Black t-shirt showing the "Your Arsenal" album artwork on the front and the words "We Look At Danger And We Laugh Our Heads Off" on the back (view).
- White t-shirt showing the "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful" single artwork (view).
- White t-shirt showing an image of skinhead girls in reddish tint, backed by North American tour itinerary, dates 12 September to 11 October (view front, back). However, this may have only been sold on the first American leg of this tour.
- White t-shirt showing gangster Charles Richardson, same tourdates as above on the back (view front, back). However, this may have only been sold on the first American leg.
- White t-shirt showing a Vespa scooter was also possibly sold on this leg of the tour (view front, back).
-Poster showing the artwork of the "Tomorrow" single (photo/scan needed).
- Tour programme showing skinhead girls (view).
- Square "Your Arsenal" button (photo/scan needed).

 


Morrissey and his bandmates entered stage to Klaus Nomi's "Wayward Sisters". Information is needed about what was played before that. Shirley Bassey's "Ave Maria" was played as the fans exited the venue.

 


The image of gangster Charlie Richardson was used for most gigs. On the first New York date at the Limelight, because the venue was a club, the stage was too small to accommodate a backdrop. At the third New York gig at the Ritz, the Derek Ridgers skinhead girls photo (cropped to heads and shoulders only) was used as backdrop (view full original or in situ). In Orlando, both the Charlie Richardson and skinhead girls backdrops were used. It might have been the same for other dates.

 


For the second leg of the North American Your Arsenal tour, the average setlist length started at 18 songs (or planned at 18 before the encore fell through on quite a few occasions), then gradually fell to 14, 15 or 16 songs towards the end. The rowdiness of fans was responsible for the shortening of a few sets, while towards the end, some planned tracks were simply skipped because Morrissey was starting to show signs of exhaustion.

The backbone of the setlist for this leg consisted of "You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side", "Glamorous Glue", "Certain People I Know", "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday", "You're The One For Me, Fatty", "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful" and "We'll Let You Know" representing "Your Arsenal", as well as earlier tracks "The Loop", "Such A Little Thing Makes Such A Big Difference", "Alsatian Cousin", "Suedehead", "He Knows I'd Love To See Him" and "November Spawned A Monster".

"Seasick, Yet Still Docked" was played on most dates, but it was dropped for about a week near the end. "Sister I'm A Poet", "Girl Least Likely To", the new and yet unreleased "Jack The Ripper", the oft-closer "The National Front Disco", "Everyday Is Like Sunday" and "Tomorrow" were included on and off. 1991 live staples "The Last Of The Famous International Playboys" and "Interesting Drug" were reinstated near the end of the tour. They had been dropped from the set after the release of "Your Arsenal".

Finally, the only new live addition on this leg of the tour was "Let The Right One Slip In", performed as an encore on 25 November at New York's Roseland Ballroom. To this date, that was the song's only ever live performance.

Here is the number of times each song was performed on this leg, in descending order of frequency. This is based on 18 concerts.

Certain People I Know - 18
Glamorous Glue - 18
The Loop - 18
We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful - 18
You're The One For Me, Fatty - 18
I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday - 17
November Spawned A Monster - 17
Such A Little Thing Makes Such A Big Difference - 17
Suedehead - 17
We'll Let You Know - 17
You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side - 16
Alsatian Cousin - 15
He Knows I'd Love To See Him - 15
Seasick, Yet Still Docked - 14
Sister I'm A Poet - 12
The National Front Disco - 12
Jack The Ripper - 8
Tomorrow - 8
Girl Least Likely To - 7
The Last Of The Famous International Playboys - 5
Everyday Is Like Sunday - 3
Interesting Drug - 3
Let The Right One Slip In - 1

Click here for more tour statistics.

 


"You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side" was the near-standard set opener, in it Morrissey always changed the line "Someone kindly told me that you wasted eight of nine lives" to "Someone kindly told me you've collected very sharp bread knives". The song was often followed in the set by "Glamorous Glue", just like on the album being promoted. Except for a few dates near the end, when performed, "The National Front Disco" was scheduled as set closer. In it, Morrissey usually changed a line to "Ah, have we lost our boy" and skipped the title, the "Ah, then you might do" and the "When you've settled the score" lines. The song ended in extended noisy jam of feedback and occasionally instrument destruction, as it would always when played live, even when not as set closer.

As on the previous leg of this tour, Boz added clarinet during the bridge in "November Spawned A Monster". In "We'll Let You Know", Morrissey constantly sang "Is it London?" in a falsetto voice over the bridge, as he usually did live in 1992 (he would stop doing it in 1995). He also changed "we sadly know" to "of course we know" on very few occasions. In "Such A Little Thing Makes Such A Big Difference", he always changed a line to "How I love all of the complicated things of life". At the end of the song, instead of going into the "Leave me alone I was only singing" part, the band systematically switched to the slow and powerful "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday". Just like he did most of the time on the 1991 Kill Uncle tour, Morrissey sang "just to make myself attracted to you" in "The Last Of The Famous International Playboys" on most of the few performances of this song on this leg.

There were many other lyrical changes. In "Sister I'm A Poet", Morrissey sang "A plastic bag stranded at the lights, this once was me" instead of the studio version's "Oh no, no, no-no, waiting at the lights, but not this time". In "Tomorrow" he often changed a few lines to "I will tell everyone" and the self-depreciatory "through my useless body". In "Certain People I Know", he sometimes sang "Don't you find life('s) absurd?" instead of "Don't you find this absurd?". As he always did in "He Knows I'd Love To See Him", Morrissey skipped the first two lines and started the song with "I have lived in the Arse of the word". He also dropped the final line "He doesn't know" and occasionally made a few other minor changes. In "Everyday Is Like Sunday", he changed a line to "scratch on a postcard". In "Girl Least Likely To", Morrissey made a few lyric changes, singing "We live for the written word" and "I do think this but I can never say to the girl least likely to". He also rearranged some of the verses, dropping six lines in the process.

 


At this point in time, nothing from these dates has been made available on official releases.

 


An audience recording of the first New York gig is, to this date, the only visual souvenir of this second American leg of the Your Arsenal tour. The footage is of the full aborted concert minus the end of final song "Glamorous Glue". The filming was done from the center balcony. The camera is shaky at times and the recording has a few skips and glitches, but there are good closeups of Morrissey and the band, all crammed on a small club stage.

 


Quite a few manufactured bootleg cds are commonly found for gigs of this period in time, and they are all of good to excellent quality. They were probably produced by the same people because they all feature bonus material from one another. They are "Love To See Him" from the Orlando FL gig, "Pillow Talk (Poet's Cradle)" from Charlottesville VA and "New York New York" from the second New York date.

Out of those three, "Love To See Him" has the longest and best set. It includes "Jack The Ripper", "Girl Least Likely To" and "Tomorrow" which were not played on the two other dates (although the bootlegs made from those two dates have some of these tracks tagged on as bonus). "New York New York" features a full set that included the only ever performance of "Let The Right One Slip In". "Pillow Talk" has the latter only as a bonus track but includes both late setlist additions "The Last Of The Famous International Playboys" and "Interesting Drug".

Fans who don't collect video bootlegs on DVD might be interested in "Famous International Playboy" which features a surprisingly good audience recording of the complete, albeit aborted, first New York date. Actually the great sounding latter bootleg could make a good companion to the video recording which has, understandably, inferior sound quality.

The other gigs in circulation at this point in time have nothing of interest for fans who own the three bootlegs mentioned above, except perhaps "Everyday Is Like Sunday". Of that song's three performances on this leg, it is only available on poor audience recordings from Nashville and Gainesville. Most fans might prefer searching for bootlegs from the previous leg (like Boulder or Milwaukee) for a better recording of the 1992 arrangement of that song.

Fans who want more will be interested in fair audience recordings of Del Mar, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston and New Orleans. Completists who are ready to settle for poor, very poor and even unlistenable recordings should track down the remaining circulated dates of this leg: Nashville, Gainesville, Atlanta, Charlotte, Norfolk, New York (3) and Philadelphia.