Morrissey blames poor chart figures on actions of "haters" in eight-minute vlog

Moz has had a tough ol' time of it lately, hasn't he? He's tripping over himself left, right, and centre (more right than left or centre, mind), and has been royally humbled this month already by German newspaper Der Spiegel.

Now, to try an re-clear the air, he's made a video (obviously published on the YouTube account of Sam Esty Rayner, his photographer nephew) basically blaming the British press for the chart struggles of his latest album Low In High School.

"Suddenly, I was sympathising with sexual harassment," he tells the camera while The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Sammlung Verbund Vienna stands conspicuously in the background. "I was apparently sympathising with paedophilia, I was sympathising with rape, I was sympathising with everything that would persuade anybody on the planet to stop listening to me. Of course, none of those assumptions are true. I do not sympathise with anything like that."

"However, this is the world we now live in with the print media," he continues. "It seems to me that, in the first place, they get very angry or very excited if you stop to say something that people are listening to or that reflect the will of the people. They get very nervous. They won’t allow it. They shut it down and so forth... but also, it seems to me that, in England at the moment, the right wing has adopted a left wing stance, and the left wing has adopted a right wing stance, so everybody’s confused, and nobody seems to know what people mean. This shuts down free speech. This shuts down any open debate about anything. And consequently, we’re all in a mess, and we don’t know where we stand."

"So I fear that the campaign for Low In High School and for the surrounding singles was derailed and damaged purposely by the haters. They’re not listening to the music. They’re not listening to anything, really. They see my name, and they want to get rid of it as quickly as possible. And as I said, in many ways, they do succeed. There’s not really that much you can do about it. You have to live with it…"

Morrissey also says that recent comments about US President Donald Trump led the Secret Service to cast a few eyes in his direction.

"As a further resort of Der Spiegel," he laments, "I was cross-examined by the American Secret Service, who were very, very nice. And I do understand their position. So that went very, very well, and they assured me that they have no cause for concern. But it was a direct result of Der Spiegel that I was cross-examined, which is very, very sad. So congratulations, Der Spiegel. You achieved everything that you set out to do. Whether again I’m allowed free access to America, I really don’t know. I have to wait and see if I can enter the country again."

If you want to watch the full video, you can see it below.