Pop in the 80’s? Trivial, flighty, vulgar, meaningless. The decade that gave the world format radio and the CD also provided compatible music. Dumb intrusiveness clogged the charts and made immune to the good, true, beautiful. Resistance seemed futile, but he stirred, foremost in Manchester.
The Smiths’ arrival was a salvation, acclaimed and debated, not only in Rough Trade’s crowded indie cubbyhole in Notting Hill, but also at HMV’s legendary singles bar on Oxford Street. The Smiths transcended the mercantile, nonchalant yet thoughtful, they provided antitheses to everything that craved industrial exploitation. And no one before had ever sounded like the Smiths or soared to such provocative moralizing songs. In short, if this band hadn’t existed, the pop decade would have been much more miserable.
Working title: “Margaret On The Guillotine”
“The Queen Is Dead” was the third album of only four that the quartet left behind. Recorded in 1985 and released in June 1986, it looks in retrospect like the representative checksum of a band at the zenith of their creativity. At the time, however, in ignorance of the approaching end, the LP was recognized for the sovereign achievement of a milestone. The dandy and esthete on the mic came up with wonderfully mean and clever lyrics, the guitarist, a Stones fan and Byrds understander, played more authoritatively and inventively than ever, despite his stubborn handicap out of the bottle. As usual, the songs of the two torpedoed British authorities, mixed with bilious humor, and they met the prevailing conditions with deep-seated mistrust and literary finesse.
The political situation in the UK in the mid-1980s was beyond grim, with Margaret Thatcher’s government having crushed the miners’ strike, abolished the rebellious Greater London Council and slashed social benefits for almost four million unemployed. “Margaret On The Guillotine” was actually to be the name of Smith’s third LP, but the Windsor family’s inherited privileges were more tormenting Morrissey than Maggie’s misdeeds. In any case, “The Queen Is Dead” begins with a sarcastic call to return home to the motherland of the Empire, culminates in drums-bass banging and Johnny Marr’s hitherto rockiest guitar to Morrissey’s executioner fantasy: “Her very Lowness with her head in a sling/ I’ m truly sorry but it sounds like a wonderful thing.”
“Frankly, Mr. Shankly” follows, a pseudo-vaudeville number with an enlightening gesture, lamenting stupid work in stubborn processes, but also to be understood as a critique of capitalism. “I Know It’s Over” has a slight Big-O touch, although Roy Orbison would have failed at the lyrics, with the exception of the line “It takes strength to be gentle and kind”, vaguely related to the Dylan aphorism “To live outside the law, you must be honest”. The self-pity aria “Never Had No One Ever” is also wonderfully carried melodically, while “Cemetry Gates”, musically inspired by the Kinks, sounds self-ironic, but leaves no doubt that the audience is invited to a rendezvous between tombs. “A dreaded sunny day/ So I meet you at the cemetry gates,” promises Morrissey, who had cultivated such morbid pastimes since his youth, “Keats and Yeats are on your side/ While Wilde is on mine.”
Side 2 starts brilliantly, “Bigmouth Strikes Again” puts Andy Rourke’s sinewy bass alongside Marr’s wildly dynamic guitar, Mike Joyce’s snare rolls underneath, before Morrissey gives his entree, in an untypically high voice that was pitched up in the studio: “Sweetness, sweetness , I was only joking when I said I’d like to smash every tooth in your head.” Of course, the song is ambiguous, Morrissey means his reflection, just like in “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”. Here he suffers as shy and humiliated with “a murderous desire for love”. As is so often the case, love and hate go hand in hand and are mutually dependent. “Vicar In A Tutu” is a rockabilly gallop, musically consistent in the footsteps of the King, of course with associative lyrics that make an interpretation a matter of luck. The hymn to individualism? Definitely maybe.
More sacrifice is not possible
Not singing along to “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out,” at least the chorus, is an impossibility for the Smiths devotee. A love oath of disarming selflessness that leaves no dry eye. “And if a double-decker bus/ Crashes into us/ To die by your side/ Is such a heavenly way to die,” says Moz heroically. “Well, the pleasure – the privilege is mine.” Even the strings from the retort fail as an emotion killer. More sacrifice is simply not possible, an increase is impossible.
But there’s another track to come. The lightweight “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” pairs Marr’s lovely melody along with folk rock flair and homely arpeggios with one of Morrissey’s most frivolous nonsense lyrics. Marr was not amused, Morrissey explained the apparent throwaway character of his lines with downright phantasmagorical deficits in dealing with the female sex. “I don’t write about women. The whole idea of womanhood is something that to me is largely unexplored,” says the singer. “I’m realizing things about women that I never realized before.”
More favorite albums from the 80s
The contours of the female body, for example, constantly puzzled him. Incidentally, his own physicality is sometimes still a mystery to him. “I always thought my genitals were the result of some crude practical joke,” Morrissey, then 26, was quoted as saying in the NME. At the end of “Some Girls” you can hear him sigh “Send me the pillow/ The one that you dream on”, alienated, as if half asleep. The quote comes from a cuddly hit by Johnny Tillotson from 1962, but the reason is as profane as it is understandable: “It’s an old favourite.”