ben-david's Full Review: The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths
One April, 2001 night at the St. James Theatre in Auckland, New Zealand, something extraordinary happened. Neil Finn, one of the country’s best and most respected singer/songwriters, presented a denim-clad, mulleted Johnny Marr to the expectant audience. Neil introduced the next song as a tune Johnny wrote with his “ex-wife” Morrissey, and the band fired up a spirited rendition of “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”, with a respectable Morrissey impersonation from Finn. It was the first time Marr had played the song since his days as a Smith. Smithsmania reborn? The incident bore an uncanny resemblance to John Lennon’s last ever live performance at Elton John’s legendary 1974 Madison Square Garden gig, and his introduction of the Beatles standard “I Saw Her Standing There” as a tune written by his estranged fiancé, Paul McCartney. Strange, this all brings to mind Nick Kent’s 1987 “South Bank Show” prophesy: “In ten years’ time…”
Well, maybe. Anyway…
There is a common misconception among critics that the Smiths were primarily a “singles band”, that their albums were purely incidental. Nothing could be further from the truth. While it is a fact that the Smiths have seventeen brilliant A-sides to their name (as well as a wealth of excellent B-sides), it is unfair to dismiss their long-players as merely two or three singles and seven or eight choice fillers. In actuality, “filler” was not a word in Morrissey’s and Marr’s vocabulary. With a Smiths album, you really have to go searching for TRULY bad songs, and while they have released a clunker or two along the line, like “Meat Is Murder (the title track)” and “Miserable Lie”, they are a country mile better than any lesser band’s album fillers. Plus, to disregard the Smiths’ album material means to ignore such mini-masterpieces as “Reel Around The Fountain”, “Rusholme Ruffians” and “Well I Wonder” - terrific songs that are in every way equal to singles like “This Charming Man” and “How Soon Is Now?”. There is therefore little doubt that the Smiths were an albums band of terrific potency.
Widely regarded as the Smiths’ masterpiece is “The Queen Is Dead”. Released in 1986, hot on the heels of the single “The Boy With A Thorn In His Side” (also included here), it is probably the Smiths’ most coherent LP. Although the previous album, “Meat Is Murder” is every bit as good, it was let down by a dog of a title track. This time around, “The Queen Is Dead” flows beautifully from one track to the next, and although there are some obvious highlights, all the songs are top-drawer material and together form a fantastic album. Morrissey and Marr take the reins as far as production goes. Always the perfectionist, Marr spent a few more sleepless nights in the studio working on his guitar overdubs, and even found time to incorporate some adventurous instrumentation such as strings (performed by The Hated Salford Ensemble AKA Johnny Marr on a synthesiser) into the Smiths' sound.
A short sample of the song “Take Back To Dear Old Blighty” from the film “The L-shaped Room”, ushers the title track in. It’s a love letter to Merry Olde England, and thus makes for a powerful juxtaposition with the rest of the track. Disenchantment with Queen and Country has always been one of Morrissey’s recurring lyrical themes, and it comes full circle on this song. The song’s base premise is simple: Morrissey is shocked to discover he is a distant relative of the Queen. He breaks into Buckingham palace one night, only to be confronted by the Queen herself. They then engage in a discussion about Moz’s musicianship. More happens along the way of course. Permeating the piece is a liberal dose of scathing humour, as Morrissey attacks the decadence of the Royal Family:
“Her very lowness with her head in a sling
I’m truly sorry - but it sounds like a wonderful thing
Dear Charles, don’t you ever crave
To appear on the front of the Daily Mail
Dressed in your Mother’s bridal veil?”
The song is not just a satirical diatribe against the degenerate monarchy - it’s an indictment of 1980’s Britain as a whole - Thatcherism, Church greed and the moral bankruptcy of the English populous (nine year-olds peddle drugs, for pete’s sake!). “Has the world changed, or have I changed?” inquires the curious Morrissey. Yep, 80’s England was one sad place. His favourite Morrissey lyric, Marr knew exactly what a song entitled “The Queen Is Dead” should sound like - a menacing, quasi-tribal rhythm courtesy of bassist Rourke and drummer Joyce combined with frantic, post punk-inspired guitar and some strings thrown in for good measure. A live favourite, this song was recently included in Q magazine’s “50 Most Exciting Songs Of All Time”.
“I Know It’s Over” and “Never Had No One Ever” are Morrissey at his most miserable. Revisiting the same lyrical territory as “How Soon Is Now” and “Still Ill” , he likens sleeping in an empty bed to being slowly buried alive. He isn’t scoring any points with his manifold pretensions; he wants someone to love him, yet feels incapable of loving someone else in return. In the bleak “Never Had No One Ever” the painfully shy and ridiculed Morrissey believes that much of his life (“20 years, 7 months, and 27 days”) has been the equivalent of a really bad dream; he probably feels as if he hasn’t matured properly as an adult and is still very much an adolescent when it comes to understanding the nature of love and relationships. It is obvious that he has a particular someone on his mind, but can’t gather the courage to express his feelings toward that person. On both tracks, Marr provides almost funereal arrangements, employing eerie keyboard tinklings, ominous strings and skeletal guitars as the perfect backdrop for the lyricist’s miserablist saga.
The album’s two singles rank among the finest pop songs of the 1980’s. Opening with a furiously strummed acoustic guitar and featuring some guest vocals from a Miss Ann Coates (AKA Morrissey on helium), the aggressive second single “Bigmouth Strikes Again” is Morrissey’s probable apology for his frequent and inappropriate public outbursts. “Bigmouth” is vintage Morrissey with its playfully dramatic vocal, and scrumptiously sardonic humour: “Sweetness, sweetness I was only joking/When I said I’d like to smash every tooth in your head”. The first single “The Boy With A Thorn In His Side”, cracked the British top 30, but by rights should’ve topped the charts (along with countless other Smiths singles, but I digress…). As with the proceeding single, its lyric is semi-autobiographical, with Morrissey once again donning the guise of the hapless romantic - “The boy with a thorn in his side/Behind the hatred there lies/A murderous desire for love”. Yet, this time around there is a glimmer of hope (betrayed by Marr’s bouncy pop arrangement) - that he finally feels sure that he has found love and is capable of loving someone in return. As such it provides a welcome antithesis to the “I Know It’s Over”/“Never Had No One Ever” duo.
It’s not all doom and gloom on “The Queen Is Dead”. A campy veiled account of the Smiths’ ongoing troubles with their record label comes in the form of “Frankly, Mr. Shankly”. It plods along beautifully like any good old British Music Hall pastiche; Marr’s acoustic and electric guitar overdubs more than making up for any horns or strings that would otherwise have mucked up Morrissey's lyrics. The “Mr. Shankly” in the title is in fact Rough Trade svengali Geoff Travis, a “flatulent pain in the @rse”, in Moz’s words. Johnny Marr never seems to forget his love for old Elvis singles, and “Vicar In A Tutu” is the album’s mandatory rockabilly romp. A quirky character song about a transvestite clergyman, the lyric bursts with a comedy that is wholly British, recalling a dozen or so Monty Python sketches and Carry On routines.
Then there's the notably light-hearted “Cemetry Gates”. Morrissey has a real field day with this cheery word of warning against plagiarism - he alludes to Keats, Yeats and Wilde, paraphrases the Bard (“‘ere thrice the sun hath done salutation to the dawn” - from “Richard III”) and ironically indulges in a bit of functional plagiarism himself, lifting some dialogue from the classic film “The Man Who Came To Dinner”:
“So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people all those lives Where are they now?
With loves, and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived
And then they died
Which seems so unfair
And I want to cry”
The classic “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” is more than just one of the Smiths’ greatest songs - it’s one of the greatest songs, period. First and foremost, it is a love song of the highest degree, set against majestic layers of acoustic guitars, keyboards and strings. Morrissey, ever the morbid romantic, begs to be taken away from the squalor of his dark, dingy house by a special someone. He doesn’t care where they go, as long as it will enable him to confirm his place in the land of the living. Quite ironic, given the song’s anthemic chorus:
“And if a double decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
The pleasure and the privilege is mine”
But being celibate as well as a shy boy, dying with his special someone would be Morrissey’s ideal consummation of love. A little on the melodramatic side, sure, but without the icky-drippy sentimentality of most other so-called “love songs”. It's a track you really won’t be likely to hear alongside a Mariah Carey power-ballad on those late nite request shows that easy listening radio stations go gaga over, and most deservedly so. Love is truly the light that never goes out.
The utterly hilarious “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” rounds the album off with a goodly helping of bathos and Carry Onesque boobies humour:
“As Anthony said to Cleopatra
As he opened a crate of ale - ‘Oh, I say…
Some girls are bigger than others
Some girls are bigger than others
Some girls’ mothers are bigger than
Other girls’ mothers”
Ha! Musically, the track harkens back to the lead guitar-based sound of the previous two albums, yet a lot smoother around the edges. It ends with a whispered reading of Johnny Tillotson's “Send Me The Pillow You Dream On” before fading out with some impeccable slide guitar from Marr.
“The Queen Is Dead” is the one Smiths album you’d be likely to see in the top 20 of all those top 100 albums of all time lists that music magazines trot out every few months. Whether or not it’s the best thing the Smiths ever released is the fan’s decision - the important thing is that it’s a bloody marvellous listen, and is right up there with “Meat As Murder” as one of the 80’s greatest musical achievements - “The Queen is dead, boys.”
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