If you believe for one second that Morrissey didn't know those comments would be YouTubed, bootlegged, message boarded and media reported, you must be very naive. Has he never done anything like this before? Do you think public figures make controversial public statements because they want their opinions kept on the down-low? Do you think Bradford was the location for the f*** Morrissey-Solo t-shirts for any special reason, or do you think he knew everyone would find out about it regardless of what city he was in? Come on now, let's be real.
If you really think the F*** Morrissey t-shirts incident and the Norwegian comments were in any way comparable events, you must be an absolute berk.
The decision to wear the t-shirts was obviously completely pre-meditated. He had to have them made, for f***'s sake, and he clearly meant and stood behind the sentiments they expressed. Not only did he
not issue a clarification statement, but he went on to reinforce the sentiment by booting David T out of the concert and issuing a lifetime ban.
The Norwegian comment was an off-the-cuff remark (and it also seems the actual words he spoke were misreported), a sentence or two used to introduce a song. Thankfully, Morrissey (or at least his manager) realised how appalling/insensitive his comments sounded, and issued a clarification expressing his horror of the Norway mass murders, and the repulsiveness of the media response.
Morrissey is not the hugely calculating, super-intelligent media manipulator many people seem to believe. Sometimes he makes masssive mistakes but thankfully he is not too big to apologise or clarify from time to time.
And the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity is nonsense. The PR car-crash of the last 2 months has done his reputation a huge amount of damage, and probably frightened off any record companies who were vaguely thinking of offering him a deal. Vast amounts of media exposure do not equate to record sales.