THE GENIUS OF MORRISSEY
THE SMITHS YEARS
THE SMITHS YEARS
What happened over the last fortnight was that The Duke was on
vacation of sorts, and being burdened with a whole load of fuck-
all to be doing, I found myself not only watching dozens of
DVD's and stuff that I had never got round to, but also reading
a book I recently purchased, a tome by the name of Morrissey –
Scandal And Passion by David Bret. The book is hardly as in-
depth as Morrissey & Marr – The Severed Alliance, a publication
which hilariously led to Morrissey issuing a fatwa of sorts on
author Johnny Rogan, expressing sentiments along the lines of
hoping the author might die in a motorway pile-up. Neither is it
as definitive as The Smiths – Songs That Saved Your Life, an
exhaustive but far from exhausting track-by-track run-down
detailing the behind-the-scenes brouhaha that led to the
crafting of the finest motherfucking discography this side of
The Pogues.
What it did do, though, aside from being very entertaining and
rather enlightening, in a cut-and-paste kinda way (“As Morrissey
said to Select magazine…”, “As Morrissey said to NME…”, that
sorta shit), was cause The Duke to get out the old Mozza
collection once more, and bask in the glorious wonders, right
back from The Smiths self-titled debut until the recent You Are
The Quarry, and all the best-of’s and live albums in-between.
What a fucking stunning body of work it all is.
This, in turn, caused The Duke to get all literary with regards
The Motherfucking Music Of Morrissey, inspired also by a very
good, and highly knowledgeable acquaintance who nonetheless
insists on waffling noxious filth like “Morrissey isn’t very
good, really” and “Fuck Morrissey, is the gist of my thinking
regarding Morrissey.” (Possible paraphrase)
The Smiths 1984 debut album is curiously overlooked in so far as
the old Musical Press is concerned. It gets the plaudits, of
course, when anyone bothers to mention it, but most of the time
they wanna yack about The Queen Is Dead.
The Queen Is Dead is probably the best album The Smiths made,
but of the four proper studio albums, there really ain’t much of
a slide in quality on either side.
1984 was a memorable year for at least billions of reasons, most
important of which are the fact that A Nightmare On Elm Street
was released, and also George Orwell wrote a book all about it
or something. I think it was about the Reality TV. What the fuck
would I know?
Prevalent amongst these momentous moments, though, is the
release of this record what is called the band name.
The Smiths opens with Reel Around The Fountain, one of Johnny
Marr’s most beautiful compositions, coupled with some of the
most achingly wistful lyrics Morrissey ever wrote.
When was the last time someone wrote a song about blow jobs and
made it sound so divine? Nowadays the folks wanna yack about
“Suck on my ding-dong motherfuck Ho” and shit like that.
Morrissey didn’t take such a vulgar path for to talk about the
old oral fumbling.
“Reel around the fountain,
Shove me on the patio,
I’ll take it slow.”
"Reel Around The Fountain", y’see, is when you run your tongue
around the end of the sex-limb. Or at least that’s what I’ve
been told by filthy motherfuckers in trench coats standing
outside off-licences, offering The Duke sex education lectures
in exchange for the price of a “fix” or a “snort of beer”.
Reel Around The Fountain also concerns itself with another of
Morrissey’s long-standing fixations, being the old age-gap sex,
a point made by Bret in that book what was mentioned yonder ago.
“It’s time the tale were told,
Of how you took a child, and made him old.”
This isn’t paedophilia being discussed here, rather the yackings
of a young fella being taught the ways of the sex by a slightly
older, more experienced gentleman.
Reel Around The Fountain is followed on the album by the
wickedly funny You’ve Got Everything Now, about a young fella
has a relation who’s loaded, but a narky bastard all the same,
and our narrator is far happier in his bedroom existence than
this flash git with the money and the suit and the expensive
porn, most likely.
“No I’ve never had a job, because I never wanted one,
I’ve seen you smile, but I’ve never really heard you laugh.”
“Who is rich and who is poor I cannot say”, he shrugs.
Obviously, the rich one is the fella with the shitloads of
money, but far be it from The Duke to be a pedantic son of a
bitch.
The most notable track on The Smiths, in so far as the future
career and all that jazz is concerned, is undoubtedly This
Charming Man. Johnny Marr’s most immaculate guitar work is
complemented by Morrissey’s further musings on sex, flirting,
illicit encounters and what not.
“I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear,
This man said “It’s gruesome that someone so handsome should
care.”
Who the hell else writes lyrics like that? That melding of a
particularly Northern English sarcastic wit, influenced as much
by kitchen-sink melodramas like Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
as Carry On flicks, and that ability to be decidedly filthy and
yet do so in such a way as to seem perfectly innocent. Only
Billy Bragg shares this gift, is what The Duke has gone ahead
and decided for you all.
Every track on that debut is worthy of a dose of the old
elaboration, but due to the constraints such an article
presents, only one more receives a yack or two. Final track
Suffer Little Children is the most desolate, haunting,
disturbing thing Morrissey ever wrote. It deals with the Ian
Brady and Moira Hindley atrocities which occurred in Manchester
in the late 1960’s, when the pair abducted and murdered several
children, burying their bodies in the moors.
Morrissey’s lyrics attracted outrage from both the usual tabloid
hack motherfuckers, but also from the parents of the victims,
who understandably didn’t want to have wounds which were far
from healed being poked anew.
The piece is so tender, so haunting, that whilst it’s easy to
accept the worries of those directly involved in the case, it’s
hard to see from where the media’s fury stemmed. The song jumps
from character to character, at one point speaking as Hindley
herself, at another, especially disturbing moment, taking the
viewpoint of the dead, their ghosts still haunting the moors
and, indeed, haunting Hindley.
“Find me… find me, nothing more,
We’re on a sullen misty moor…
You may sleep, but you’ll never dream.”
The final track, and indeed the title-track, on the band’s 1985
follow-up is hardly any more comforting. Meat Is Murder would,
allegedly, go on to inspire thousands of teenage fans to abandon
meat-eating, and it would be far from a motherfucking act of
outlandish exaggeration to suggest that it’s best not to munch
on a sausage roll for the duration of the song’s 6 minute
running-time.
Beginning with the mournful, anguished groans of a group of
cattle, Morrissey makes an impassioned plea for humanity to see
sense and what not.
“This beautiful creature must die,
A death for no reason,
And death for no reason is murder.”
It’s enough to fling a load of the guilt on a fellas carnivorous
hide, is what.
“The flesh you so fancifully fry,
Is not succulent, tasty or nice,
It’s death for no reason,
And death for no reason is murder.”
To be honest as a motherfucker, though, whilst it’s certainly
commendable and highly effective, Meat Is Murder is far from
Morrissey’s finest lyrical composition. Thank the stench of
Satan’s arse-crack, then, that examples of such are hanging from
the grooves of the album, or from the shiny bits if maybe you’re
one of these folks what prefer the new-fangled Compact CD or
whatever the hell.
Rusholme Ruffians is a brilliant, almost Altman-esque series of
anecdotes and conversational asides revolving around an evening
spent at a fairground. It starts with a stabbing, which by all
accounts is something of an autobiographical account;
“The last night at the fair,
By the big wheel generator,
A boy is stabbed,
And his money is grabbed,
And the air hangs heavy like a dulling wine.”
The jaunty rockabilly musical antics ensure that this tale of
casual violence and the musings of a curious and perhaps
suicidal youngster (“She says how quickly would I die, if I
jumped from the top of the Ferris Wheel”), never becomes
depressing, the accompaniment going someway towards accentuating
the wit at the heart of Morrissey’s writing, and dispelling for
a time the rather peculiar notion that Morrissey is some sort of
miserable bastard writing music for other miserable bastards to
listen to. Miserably.
Fuck the hell off with that assumption, is what The Duke
suggests. Morrissey’s lyrics are among the funniest a fella or
lass could hope to uncover. There’s a gallows humour running
through most of it, and at other times it’s straight ahead
farce, as in the title track to 1986’s The Queen Is Dead,
telling of how our hero and his accomplices “Broke into the
palace, with a sponge and a rusty spanner”, before meeting her
majesty herself, who sternly announces; “I know you and you
cannot sing”, to which Morrissey replies, “That’s nothing, you
should hear me play piano.”
Some folks are baffled by the fact that Morrissey concerts
quickly ascend to some frenzied orgiastic display of affection
towards the chisel-jawed troubadour, young men flinging shirts
off their backs and hugging our flailing hero, flowers clenched
between their teeth. I would imagine that a good percentage of
this worship, at least 73% or maybe 76%, stems from the
conversational nature of so many of his lyrics, coupled with the
ability to precisely nail everyday emotions and situations which
have only very recently been attempted by anyone else to much
acclaim (Namely The Streets’ Mike Skinner).
Perhaps a record’s greatness can be judged by determining how
many songs one wants to fast-forward. The Queen Is Dead doesn’t
manage to get the whole way through without a blip, but the
relative shittiness of Never Had No One Ever is insignificant
when a fella takes a moment to marvel at how stunning, back-
breakingly brilliant the remaining nine tracks are.
So much has been written about the record, most notable being
the section in The Records What Changed The Duke’s Life, that it
feels superfluous to say anything much about it.
Perhaps a word on one of the more neglected numbers, the
wonderfully surreal Vicar In A Tutu, which of course raises all
sorts of questions, like, why is it so surreal? Why shouldn’t a
vicar be wearing a tutu, is he so desires? Like the lyrics say;
“Vicar in a tutu,
He’s not strange,
He just wants to live his life this way.”
It demonstrates also the compassion and understanding Morrissey
houses within his slender frame. Granted, that compassion has
recently taken a back-seat to impassioned ranting against the
“Northern Leeches” responsible for the ongoing court-case
debacle concerning royalty payments and all that jazz.
The other wit-drenched, laugh-out-loud funny track on The Queen
Is Dead is, of course, second number, Frankly Mr Shankly. Over
the years it has been debated left and right and all over the
motherfucking place who it might be about. Most presume it
refers to Rough Trade co-founder Geoff Travis, but it works
better still as a sarcastic comeuppance to those “Belligerent
ghouls” who “Run Manchester schools” from The Headmaster Ritual,
or, even better, every boss of every soul-crushing assembly line
poultry factory one might have ever encountered. Oddly, it has
yet to crop up on Pop Idol or American Idol, which, considering
it’s wickedly barbed put-downs, would surely be a perfect
response to Mr Cowell’s yacking about “Fuck off you talentless
fucking wretch” or his other catchphrases.
“Frankly Mr Shankly, this position I’ve held,
It pays my way but it corrodes my soul,
I want to leave, you will not miss me,
I want to go down in musical history.”
It also boasts one of the finest couplets Morrissey ever penned;
“I want to live and I want to love,
I want to catch something that I might be ashamed of.”
Mention has to go to There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, one
of the finest of all Smiths recordings, and therefore one of the
finest of all Morrissey’s lyrics. All that yacking about how shy
he is, how sexually backward, all of that waxing with regards
the psychology is beautifully encapsulated in three lines;
“In a darkened underpass, I thought Oh God, my chance has come
at last,
(But then a strange fear gripped me
And I just couldn’t ask)”
It also romanticises death in a manner which even his hero James
Dean couldn’t manage;
“And if a ten-ton truck,
Crashes into us,
To die by your side,
Is such a heavenly way to die.”
The James Dean thing is interesting, actually, since Morrissey
admits to having no particular fondness for the man’s filmic
work, but rather the idea of Dean as an Icon, a cipher for that
particular brand of late 1950’s rebellion the singer would so
obsess over for much of his career to date. Not only did
Morrissey publish a biography of Dean in his pre-Smiths days
(following his tome on The New York Dolls), but even sat by the
fella’s grave and wondered around his hometown in the wonderful
video for Suedehead.
Sadly, 1987’s Strangeways Here We Come was to be The Smiths
final album, released posthumously following a still-not-
entirely-clear falling-out between Morrissey and Johnny Marr.
It's a motherfucking masterpiece, is the fact of the matter, and
musically more experimental, and dare I say commercial, than
anything on the previous three records.
The marvellous Paint A Vulgar Picture, clocking in at five and a
half minutes, is a brilliant rant against the ethics of record
company executives, with particular emphasis on the rush of re-
releases and compilations following the death of an artiste.
Rather ironic, I suppose, considering the wealth of Smiths
reissues and compilations bearing down on shelves across the
land. Still, Morrissey doesn’t let the star in question get off
scott free;
“BPI, MTV, BBC,
Please them! Please them!
Sadly, this was your life.
But you could have said no
If you wanted to”
The song also goes on to discuss that peculiar sexual longing
that can be detected in fandom;
“I touched you at the soundcheck,
You had no real way of knowing,
In my heart I begged “Please take me with you…
I don’t care where you’re going…”
But to you I was faceless,
I was fawning, I was boring,
Just a child from those ugly new houses”
The adoration becomes more pronounced a couple verses later;
“In my bedroom in those ‘ugly new houses’
I danced my legs down to the knees,
But me and my ‘true love’,
We will never meet again’
“They cannot hurt you my darling”, he sighs at the finale. “They
cannot touch you now.”
The closing I Won’t Share You has a certain poignancy to it,
inviting comparisons with Morrissey’s relationship with musical
soulmate Johnny Marr. It is, after all, the final track on the
final Smiths L.P (barring rather wonderful live album, Rank).
“I won’t share you
With the drive,
And the dreams,
And the zeal I feel,
This is my time.”
Tellingly, the most pertinent line isn’t quoted on the lyric
sheet; “I want the freedom and I want the guy.”
Did Morrissey wanna fuck Marr? He has, of course, quipped that
maybe we should consider that it may have been the other way
around, but still, it’s easy to see more than a plutonic desire
in those sighing refrains.
The question of Morrissey’s sexuality will get a fair airing in
the next instalment, dealing in The Solo Years, on account of
this has gone on longer than I intended, to be perfectly
forthcoming. Homosexual? Heterosexual? Bisexual? Asexual? Who
the fuck but Morrissey knows?
Certainly, though, even if only The Smiths discography is taken
into account, the sexual longings voiced indicate a certain
fondness for the hairier of the species.
Till Part Two, folks. You can buy all the Smiths stuff up the
side of the page at Amazon.co.uk
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
vacation of sorts, and being burdened with a whole load of fuck-
all to be doing, I found myself not only watching dozens of
DVD's and stuff that I had never got round to, but also reading
a book I recently purchased, a tome by the name of Morrissey –
Scandal And Passion by David Bret. The book is hardly as in-
depth as Morrissey & Marr – The Severed Alliance, a publication
which hilariously led to Morrissey issuing a fatwa of sorts on
author Johnny Rogan, expressing sentiments along the lines of
hoping the author might die in a motorway pile-up. Neither is it
as definitive as The Smiths – Songs That Saved Your Life, an
exhaustive but far from exhausting track-by-track run-down
detailing the behind-the-scenes brouhaha that led to the
crafting of the finest motherfucking discography this side of
The Pogues.
What it did do, though, aside from being very entertaining and
rather enlightening, in a cut-and-paste kinda way (“As Morrissey
said to Select magazine…”, “As Morrissey said to NME…”, that
sorta shit), was cause The Duke to get out the old Mozza
collection once more, and bask in the glorious wonders, right
back from The Smiths self-titled debut until the recent You Are
The Quarry, and all the best-of’s and live albums in-between.
What a fucking stunning body of work it all is.
This, in turn, caused The Duke to get all literary with regards
The Motherfucking Music Of Morrissey, inspired also by a very
good, and highly knowledgeable acquaintance who nonetheless
insists on waffling noxious filth like “Morrissey isn’t very
good, really” and “Fuck Morrissey, is the gist of my thinking
regarding Morrissey.” (Possible paraphrase)
The Smiths 1984 debut album is curiously overlooked in so far as
the old Musical Press is concerned. It gets the plaudits, of
course, when anyone bothers to mention it, but most of the time
they wanna yack about The Queen Is Dead.
The Queen Is Dead is probably the best album The Smiths made,
but of the four proper studio albums, there really ain’t much of
a slide in quality on either side.
1984 was a memorable year for at least billions of reasons, most
important of which are the fact that A Nightmare On Elm Street
was released, and also George Orwell wrote a book all about it
or something. I think it was about the Reality TV. What the fuck
would I know?
Prevalent amongst these momentous moments, though, is the
release of this record what is called the band name.
The Smiths opens with Reel Around The Fountain, one of Johnny
Marr’s most beautiful compositions, coupled with some of the
most achingly wistful lyrics Morrissey ever wrote.
When was the last time someone wrote a song about blow jobs and
made it sound so divine? Nowadays the folks wanna yack about
“Suck on my ding-dong motherfuck Ho” and shit like that.
Morrissey didn’t take such a vulgar path for to talk about the
old oral fumbling.
“Reel around the fountain,
Shove me on the patio,
I’ll take it slow.”
"Reel Around The Fountain", y’see, is when you run your tongue
around the end of the sex-limb. Or at least that’s what I’ve
been told by filthy motherfuckers in trench coats standing
outside off-licences, offering The Duke sex education lectures
in exchange for the price of a “fix” or a “snort of beer”.
Reel Around The Fountain also concerns itself with another of
Morrissey’s long-standing fixations, being the old age-gap sex,
a point made by Bret in that book what was mentioned yonder ago.
“It’s time the tale were told,
Of how you took a child, and made him old.”
This isn’t paedophilia being discussed here, rather the yackings
of a young fella being taught the ways of the sex by a slightly
older, more experienced gentleman.
Reel Around The Fountain is followed on the album by the
wickedly funny You’ve Got Everything Now, about a young fella
has a relation who’s loaded, but a narky bastard all the same,
and our narrator is far happier in his bedroom existence than
this flash git with the money and the suit and the expensive
porn, most likely.
“No I’ve never had a job, because I never wanted one,
I’ve seen you smile, but I’ve never really heard you laugh.”
“Who is rich and who is poor I cannot say”, he shrugs.
Obviously, the rich one is the fella with the shitloads of
money, but far be it from The Duke to be a pedantic son of a
bitch.
The most notable track on The Smiths, in so far as the future
career and all that jazz is concerned, is undoubtedly This
Charming Man. Johnny Marr’s most immaculate guitar work is
complemented by Morrissey’s further musings on sex, flirting,
illicit encounters and what not.
“I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear,
This man said “It’s gruesome that someone so handsome should
care.”
Who the hell else writes lyrics like that? That melding of a
particularly Northern English sarcastic wit, influenced as much
by kitchen-sink melodramas like Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
as Carry On flicks, and that ability to be decidedly filthy and
yet do so in such a way as to seem perfectly innocent. Only
Billy Bragg shares this gift, is what The Duke has gone ahead
and decided for you all.
Every track on that debut is worthy of a dose of the old
elaboration, but due to the constraints such an article
presents, only one more receives a yack or two. Final track
Suffer Little Children is the most desolate, haunting,
disturbing thing Morrissey ever wrote. It deals with the Ian
Brady and Moira Hindley atrocities which occurred in Manchester
in the late 1960’s, when the pair abducted and murdered several
children, burying their bodies in the moors.
Morrissey’s lyrics attracted outrage from both the usual tabloid
hack motherfuckers, but also from the parents of the victims,
who understandably didn’t want to have wounds which were far
from healed being poked anew.
The piece is so tender, so haunting, that whilst it’s easy to
accept the worries of those directly involved in the case, it’s
hard to see from where the media’s fury stemmed. The song jumps
from character to character, at one point speaking as Hindley
herself, at another, especially disturbing moment, taking the
viewpoint of the dead, their ghosts still haunting the moors
and, indeed, haunting Hindley.
“Find me… find me, nothing more,
We’re on a sullen misty moor…
You may sleep, but you’ll never dream.”
The final track, and indeed the title-track, on the band’s 1985
follow-up is hardly any more comforting. Meat Is Murder would,
allegedly, go on to inspire thousands of teenage fans to abandon
meat-eating, and it would be far from a motherfucking act of
outlandish exaggeration to suggest that it’s best not to munch
on a sausage roll for the duration of the song’s 6 minute
running-time.
Beginning with the mournful, anguished groans of a group of
cattle, Morrissey makes an impassioned plea for humanity to see
sense and what not.
“This beautiful creature must die,
A death for no reason,
And death for no reason is murder.”
It’s enough to fling a load of the guilt on a fellas carnivorous
hide, is what.
“The flesh you so fancifully fry,
Is not succulent, tasty or nice,
It’s death for no reason,
And death for no reason is murder.”
To be honest as a motherfucker, though, whilst it’s certainly
commendable and highly effective, Meat Is Murder is far from
Morrissey’s finest lyrical composition. Thank the stench of
Satan’s arse-crack, then, that examples of such are hanging from
the grooves of the album, or from the shiny bits if maybe you’re
one of these folks what prefer the new-fangled Compact CD or
whatever the hell.
Rusholme Ruffians is a brilliant, almost Altman-esque series of
anecdotes and conversational asides revolving around an evening
spent at a fairground. It starts with a stabbing, which by all
accounts is something of an autobiographical account;
“The last night at the fair,
By the big wheel generator,
A boy is stabbed,
And his money is grabbed,
And the air hangs heavy like a dulling wine.”
The jaunty rockabilly musical antics ensure that this tale of
casual violence and the musings of a curious and perhaps
suicidal youngster (“She says how quickly would I die, if I
jumped from the top of the Ferris Wheel”), never becomes
depressing, the accompaniment going someway towards accentuating
the wit at the heart of Morrissey’s writing, and dispelling for
a time the rather peculiar notion that Morrissey is some sort of
miserable bastard writing music for other miserable bastards to
listen to. Miserably.
Fuck the hell off with that assumption, is what The Duke
suggests. Morrissey’s lyrics are among the funniest a fella or
lass could hope to uncover. There’s a gallows humour running
through most of it, and at other times it’s straight ahead
farce, as in the title track to 1986’s The Queen Is Dead,
telling of how our hero and his accomplices “Broke into the
palace, with a sponge and a rusty spanner”, before meeting her
majesty herself, who sternly announces; “I know you and you
cannot sing”, to which Morrissey replies, “That’s nothing, you
should hear me play piano.”
Some folks are baffled by the fact that Morrissey concerts
quickly ascend to some frenzied orgiastic display of affection
towards the chisel-jawed troubadour, young men flinging shirts
off their backs and hugging our flailing hero, flowers clenched
between their teeth. I would imagine that a good percentage of
this worship, at least 73% or maybe 76%, stems from the
conversational nature of so many of his lyrics, coupled with the
ability to precisely nail everyday emotions and situations which
have only very recently been attempted by anyone else to much
acclaim (Namely The Streets’ Mike Skinner).
Perhaps a record’s greatness can be judged by determining how
many songs one wants to fast-forward. The Queen Is Dead doesn’t
manage to get the whole way through without a blip, but the
relative shittiness of Never Had No One Ever is insignificant
when a fella takes a moment to marvel at how stunning, back-
breakingly brilliant the remaining nine tracks are.
So much has been written about the record, most notable being
the section in The Records What Changed The Duke’s Life, that it
feels superfluous to say anything much about it.
Perhaps a word on one of the more neglected numbers, the
wonderfully surreal Vicar In A Tutu, which of course raises all
sorts of questions, like, why is it so surreal? Why shouldn’t a
vicar be wearing a tutu, is he so desires? Like the lyrics say;
“Vicar in a tutu,
He’s not strange,
He just wants to live his life this way.”
It demonstrates also the compassion and understanding Morrissey
houses within his slender frame. Granted, that compassion has
recently taken a back-seat to impassioned ranting against the
“Northern Leeches” responsible for the ongoing court-case
debacle concerning royalty payments and all that jazz.
The other wit-drenched, laugh-out-loud funny track on The Queen
Is Dead is, of course, second number, Frankly Mr Shankly. Over
the years it has been debated left and right and all over the
motherfucking place who it might be about. Most presume it
refers to Rough Trade co-founder Geoff Travis, but it works
better still as a sarcastic comeuppance to those “Belligerent
ghouls” who “Run Manchester schools” from The Headmaster Ritual,
or, even better, every boss of every soul-crushing assembly line
poultry factory one might have ever encountered. Oddly, it has
yet to crop up on Pop Idol or American Idol, which, considering
it’s wickedly barbed put-downs, would surely be a perfect
response to Mr Cowell’s yacking about “Fuck off you talentless
fucking wretch” or his other catchphrases.
“Frankly Mr Shankly, this position I’ve held,
It pays my way but it corrodes my soul,
I want to leave, you will not miss me,
I want to go down in musical history.”
It also boasts one of the finest couplets Morrissey ever penned;
“I want to live and I want to love,
I want to catch something that I might be ashamed of.”
Mention has to go to There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, one
of the finest of all Smiths recordings, and therefore one of the
finest of all Morrissey’s lyrics. All that yacking about how shy
he is, how sexually backward, all of that waxing with regards
the psychology is beautifully encapsulated in three lines;
“In a darkened underpass, I thought Oh God, my chance has come
at last,
(But then a strange fear gripped me
And I just couldn’t ask)”
It also romanticises death in a manner which even his hero James
Dean couldn’t manage;
“And if a ten-ton truck,
Crashes into us,
To die by your side,
Is such a heavenly way to die.”
The James Dean thing is interesting, actually, since Morrissey
admits to having no particular fondness for the man’s filmic
work, but rather the idea of Dean as an Icon, a cipher for that
particular brand of late 1950’s rebellion the singer would so
obsess over for much of his career to date. Not only did
Morrissey publish a biography of Dean in his pre-Smiths days
(following his tome on The New York Dolls), but even sat by the
fella’s grave and wondered around his hometown in the wonderful
video for Suedehead.
Sadly, 1987’s Strangeways Here We Come was to be The Smiths
final album, released posthumously following a still-not-
entirely-clear falling-out between Morrissey and Johnny Marr.
It's a motherfucking masterpiece, is the fact of the matter, and
musically more experimental, and dare I say commercial, than
anything on the previous three records.
The marvellous Paint A Vulgar Picture, clocking in at five and a
half minutes, is a brilliant rant against the ethics of record
company executives, with particular emphasis on the rush of re-
releases and compilations following the death of an artiste.
Rather ironic, I suppose, considering the wealth of Smiths
reissues and compilations bearing down on shelves across the
land. Still, Morrissey doesn’t let the star in question get off
scott free;
“BPI, MTV, BBC,
Please them! Please them!
Sadly, this was your life.
But you could have said no
If you wanted to”
The song also goes on to discuss that peculiar sexual longing
that can be detected in fandom;
“I touched you at the soundcheck,
You had no real way of knowing,
In my heart I begged “Please take me with you…
I don’t care where you’re going…”
But to you I was faceless,
I was fawning, I was boring,
Just a child from those ugly new houses”
The adoration becomes more pronounced a couple verses later;
“In my bedroom in those ‘ugly new houses’
I danced my legs down to the knees,
But me and my ‘true love’,
We will never meet again’
“They cannot hurt you my darling”, he sighs at the finale. “They
cannot touch you now.”
The closing I Won’t Share You has a certain poignancy to it,
inviting comparisons with Morrissey’s relationship with musical
soulmate Johnny Marr. It is, after all, the final track on the
final Smiths L.P (barring rather wonderful live album, Rank).
“I won’t share you
With the drive,
And the dreams,
And the zeal I feel,
This is my time.”
Tellingly, the most pertinent line isn’t quoted on the lyric
sheet; “I want the freedom and I want the guy.”
Did Morrissey wanna fuck Marr? He has, of course, quipped that
maybe we should consider that it may have been the other way
around, but still, it’s easy to see more than a plutonic desire
in those sighing refrains.
The question of Morrissey’s sexuality will get a fair airing in
the next instalment, dealing in The Solo Years, on account of
this has gone on longer than I intended, to be perfectly
forthcoming. Homosexual? Heterosexual? Bisexual? Asexual? Who
the fuck but Morrissey knows?
Certainly, though, even if only The Smiths discography is taken
into account, the sexual longings voiced indicate a certain
fondness for the hairier of the species.
Till Part Two, folks. You can buy all the Smiths stuff up the
side of the page at Amazon.co.uk
Thanks folks.
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