The Smiths
The Queen Is Dead
Rough Trade/Sire, Released 1986
A journalist once asked Johnny Marr what it was like to write songs with Morrissey. Marr offered an anecdote by way of explanation. "I remember finishing this beautiful, sublime, roaming piece of guitar-led music. Two days later it was called ‘Some Girls Are Bigger than Others.’"
Anyone looking for help understanding why Marr allowed his genius to suffer Moz’s absurdity need look no further than The Queen Is Dead. Ridiculous as it is, "Some Girls … " is a perfect coda to an album that captured the unholy Morrissey-Marr union on its most vicious form: blazing with ideas, ambition, wit and a self-awareness that no-one had really made music like this before.
For openers "The Queen Is Dead" tears brazenly out of the gate, the band indulging in a rare bit of noisy rock (with the bass turned down, mind you) and Mozzer plotting to kill the Queen and get Charles cross-dressing on the tabloids’ front pages. At six-plus minutes it’s by far the longest thing this economy-conscious band ever released, evidence of their confidence in the material.
And confident is how The Smiths sound here: confident enough to follow that opening salvo with "Frankly, Mr. Shankly’s" jaunty piss-take of Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis; confident enough to backload the album’s strongest tracks in a sprint to the end of the record; confident enough to let the Other Two actually play a little throughout; confident enough to record the same song twice ("Never Had No One Ever" and "I Know It’s Over") and put them right next to each other on the album. The Queen Is Dead isn’t the most essential Smiths purchase (rival single comps Hatful of Hollow and Louder Than Bombs can both make that claim), but it is the high water mark of The Smiths’ confidence in their own sound, the place where they felt most comfortable taking risks and succeeded most often.
"Cemetry Gates" is almost weightless: Marr chording and arpeggiating and inventing The Sundays’ career while Moz waxes literary and self-critical. It’s also comically concise, its 2:39 whizzing by in what seems like 14 seconds, and its effortless perfection stands in stark contrast to the difficult end that would come to the band within a year. "Bigmouth Strikes Again" is the minor-key flipside to that piece of sunshine, and Morrissey rises to the occasion, turning up the self-hate and burning himself at the stake (with his Walkman on, of course).
Somewhere between those two pieces of perfect pop you’ll find both "The Boy With the Thorn In His Side" and "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out." If you’ve only heard a handful of Smiths songs, it’s likely that these two are among them, and for good reason. If not the best they’re probably the most quintessential Smiths songs: complex, many-hued instrumental tracks topped by Morrissey’s wordy, sexually disorented poetry for struggling adolescents. It’s difficult to imagine intense young students making it through university without these songs. Hopefully they’ll never have to.
Posted to Inkblot by Jesse Fahnestock