- William Shakespeare, As You Like It

How the Fifth Smith Came to Be

Before joining the Smiths, Andy Rourke began experimenting with heroin as a teenager growing up on a council estate. The habit followed him into the Smiths and, as the band’s success brought him increasing amounts of money, his heroin use spiraled into a full-blown addiction. As he later recalled, “You’re a young kid, and then overnight you’re in a successful band. You start getting a bunch of money and don’t know what to do. You start spending it on drugs.”1 By early 1986, that addiction had begun to exact more serious consequences. Rourke was arrested for possession of heroin, and was subsequently sacked from the group.2 The dismissal was largely, though certainly not wholly, motivated by the expectation that he would be unable to obtain the necessary work visas for the North American leg of The Queen Is Dead tour, scheduled to begin that summer.

While it is generally reported that Johnny Marr invited guitarist Craig Gannon3 to replace Rourke on bass, in fact it was Guy Pratt4 who was brought in to fill Andy’s shoes. Although Pratt’s brief involvement is somewhat tangential to an essay focused on Craig Gannon, it is nevertheless worth noting. Pratt reportedly assumed that his replacing Rourke was effectively a fait accompli. Given his impressive résumé, he apparently saw little reason to doubt that he could more than adequately match the contributions of the recently dismissed bassist. As Pratt later wrote of being asked to replace Rourke, “Let’s face it, how many people would be bothered?”5

According to author Tony Fletcher, Pratt spent nearly two weeks with both the band and Rourke, learning the bass lines and participating in rehearsals. He quickly realized, however, that filling Andy’s shoes would be a formidable task, perhaps one he could not effectively accomplish. In fact, Pratt marveled at the “sophistication” of what he was expected to learn.

According to Pratt, his proverbial sigh of relief was “almost palpable” when it was announced that Rourke would be rejoining the Smiths.

As for Gannon’s role in the Smiths. Marr invited him to play rhythm guitar in order to complement him on lead guitar:6

“I never touched the bass at all and I was never asked to. The first time I met Johnny he sounded me out to see if I’d be interested in replacing Andy on bass so it’s true that was the first offer but that’s as far as that went. I’ve said it many times and some people still don’t seem to want to believe it but I was asked to join The Smiths as a guitar player and I joined as a guitar player. It wasn’t an afterthought of Johnny to stick me over on guitar as some people want to believe, it was planned and there were definite reasons for it. Since then I usually play bass on my own music and sometimes other peoples but I was and am a guitar player.”7 - Craig Gannon

As fate would have it, Rourke’s drug charge resulted only in a two-year suspended sentence and a £1,000 fine. More importantly for the Smiths, despite expectations to the contrary, his applications for work visas in both Canada and the United States were approved, clearing the way for him to participate in the North American leg of the forthcoming tour. Within a couple of weeks, Morrissey and Marr reinstated Rourke as an active member of the Smiths.

Gannon’s role in the Smiths remained exclusively that of a second guitarist. As he later explained, “Me being there freed Johnny up a lot to embroider his guitar parts.”8 Rourke’s return, therefore, did not threaten Gannon’s position in the group; it simply rendered Pratt’s services unnecessary. With the Smiths now functioning, unusually, as a five-piece, Gannon soon acquired the affectionate moniker “The Fifth Smith.”

The Fifth Smith

Gannon participated as the second guitarist throughout all three legs of The Queen Is Dead tour, which took the band through the UK, North America, and then back to the UK between July and October 1986.

In the recording studio throughout 1986, Gannon contributed to several Smiths tracks:

• The singles “Panic” (recorded in May 1986) and “Ask” (recorded in June 1986). Gannon also appears (briefly) in their respective promotional films.

• An early, slower version of “Sweet and Tender Hooligan”, recorded in May during the sessions for “Panic”. This version was never released by the Smiths and was superseded by the version recorded for John Peel’s BBC radio program in December 1986.

• The instrumental “The Draize Train”, also recorded in May, which appeared on the B-side of the 12-inch edition of the “Panic” single, the Greek 12-inch edition of “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, and the Germany-only “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” single.

• “Golden Lights”, recorded in June 1986 and released as a B-side on the 12-inch edition of the “Ask” single.

• “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby,” “Half a Person,” and “London,” all recorded in October 1986. These tracks subsequently appeared on The World Won’t Listen, as well as on Louder Than Bombs.

Last but certainly not least, Gannon also appears on the Smiths’ Rank live album, recorded at the National Ballroom in Kilburn, London, on 23 October 1986 during the final leg of The Queen Is Dead tour.

Exit, Stage Left

Depending on whom one asks, either the Smiths dropped Gannon from the lineup at the conclusion of The Queen Is Dead tour or Gannon left of his own accord. Ultimately, however, the distinction may be irrelevant, since Gannon was a hired touring and session musician rather than a formal member of the Smiths. Nevertheless, Morrissey saw fit to offer his own account of Gannon’s departure in Autobiography:

“Once the US tour has ended [the North American leg of The Queen Is Dead tour], Johnny suggests that we do not make contact with Craig, in order to test whether he would actually bother to contact any of us. Unsurprisingly, Craig does not contact anyone […] It is not announced that Craig has departed, largely because his name is never again mentioned, and the press make no comment on Craig’s disappearance. Like mist, he evaporates, and it is confusing to think that he had ever been present.”9

Back in Morrissey’s Orbit

Post-Smiths, Gannon reunited with Morrissey in late 1988 to record the singles “The Last of the Famous International Playboys” and “Interesting Drug,” released in February and April 1989, respectively. Rourke and Joyce participated in the sessions as well, and all three appeared in the promotional video for “The Last of the Famous International Playboys.” Gannon also played on the accompanying B-sides: “Michael’s Bones” and “Lucky Lisp” for the former, and “Such a Little Thing Makes Such a Big Difference” for the latter.

Additionally, Gannon played on “The Bed Took Fire,” originally intended as a B-side to the “Interesting Drug” single. Morrissey was dissatisfied with the recording, however, and the track was shelved. During the winter of 1989 and 1990, while working on material that would eventually appear on Bona Drag, Morrissey asked producer Stephen Street to help remix the song. The resulting version met with Morrissey’s approval and was released as a B-side to the “Piccadilly Palare” single in October 1990, under the alternate title “At Amber.”

The original version of “The Bed Took Fire” remained unreleased for twenty-one years before finally appearing, under its original title and in its original form, on the remastered 20th-anniversary edition of Bona Drag in October 2010.

Gannon also participated in Morrissey’s first concert as a solo artist, held at Wolverhampton Civic Hall in Wolverhampton, England, on 22 December 1988. Thereafter, however, his involvement with Morrissey came to an end. Gannon has offered little explanation for the parting, remarking only, “There are reasons too long to go into as to why I didn’t carry on.”10

A Fascinating Bungle

As of early 2013, Gannon reported that he had not had any contact with Morrissey for well over a decade:

“I’ve not had any contact with Morrissey for years. I think the last time I saw him was at his flat in Altrincham around 1989 when we met to talk about writing together. At that point I’d also written a song he’d written lyrics to which he wanted to release as his next single.”11

In Autobiography, Morrissey makes a couple of decidedly impolite remarks about Gannon, describing his hiring as “a fascinating bungle” and adding that “Nothing useful vibrates in Craig’s upper storey.” What prompted such unflattering observations is unclear, particularly given that Gannon’s contributions to the Smiths were generally well received. While some might simply attribute the remarks to Morrissey’s longstanding reputation for being “difficult,” it is perhaps more likely that they reflect his characteristically candid, unfiltered recollection of working with Gannon.

The former Fifth Smith responded to Morrissey’s jibes on social media on 31 October 2013, describing them on his Facebook page as “blatant bitter lies, all will become clear very soon...” The post was deleted the following day.

Craig Gannon Reloaded

In January 2018, it was announced that Craig Gannon, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce would collaborate under the name Classically Smiths, in effect a partial Smiths reunion. The project was promoted as an opportunity to hear some of the Smiths’ most memorable songs performed by the trio in collaboration with the Manchester Camerata Orchestra, with unnamed guest singers providing the vocals.

Concerts were tentatively scheduled for the summer of 2018 in Manchester, London and Edinburgh. Almost immediately after the announcement, however, the project collapsed when Rourke denied that he had agreed to take part.

Uncredited and Unpaid

Craig Gannon claimed to have originated the opening chord sequence of “Ask,” a seemingly minor matter that would later have significant repercussions for Morrissey and Marr:

“Me and Johnny were sat in the library playing acoustic guitars… I just started playing the chord sequence which would later become ‘Ask’ in exactly the way it appears on the record… The only section… I didn’t come up with was the middle eight… Up until the release of ‘Ask’ I still thought I’d be given a writing credit.”12

While Gannon may well have arrived at something similar, Johnny Marr had already used the very same chord sequence in an earlier demo. Marr himself disputed Gannon’s claim, and Gannon ultimately received no writing credit.

Gannon was still touring with the Smiths at the time of the release of the “Ask” single (20 October 1986), so one surmises that he would have inquired on the omission of a songwriting credit on the song. Whether or not Gannon did so is not known.

In 1989, the matter moved from grievance to litigation when Craig Gannon sued Morrissey and Marr over songwriting contributions made during his time with the Smiths, particularly in relation to “Ask,” as well as over unpaid wages. The dispute was eventually settled out of court for £44,000, approximately £142,000 today, comprising £30,000 in back pay and £14,000 in legal costs.

The Records Remember

For all the ambiguity surrounding his place in the band, one fact remains stubbornly audible: Craig Gannon may have been the Fifth Smith only briefly, but he was there, and the records remember him even when people do not.

Sexual Ambiguity by Design

Few aspects of Morrissey’s public life have generated more speculation than his sexuality. Throughout his career, the press variously portrayed him as celibate, a closeted homosexual, a frustrated heterosexual, or a bisexual who simply refused to come out. The fascination was understandable. At a time when pop music reveled in overt sexuality, Morrissey presented himself as its antithesis: emotionally expressive yet sexually elusive, at least to a point.

The cover of the Smiths’ 1983 debut single, “Hand in Glove,” left little to the imagination. Its photograph showed a nude male reclining against a wall, his buttocks fully exposed. To say that Morrissey’s choice of cover art was a bold opening move for a largely unknown band would be an understatement, particularly because the image could reasonably be construed as homoerotic. This provocative approach continued with the band’s eponymous debut album, which featured a cropped photograph of a shirtless Joe Dallesandro1, a prominent sex symbol within gay subculture during the 1960s and 1970s. Although best known for his appearances in underground films associated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, Dallesandro had begun his career posing for homoerotic photographs.

Fans with more than a passing knowledge of the band are aware that Morrissey and Johnny Marr consciously sought to avoid presenting the Smiths as just another rock group, although the suggestion that they specifically intended to position themselves as a “gay” band stems primarily from former bassist Dale Hibbert, who later claimed that the pair discussed doing so. What is clear, however, is that the Smiths’ aesthetic deliberately drew upon elements of queer subculture, camp, and homoeroticism, creating an ambiguity that stood in conspicuous opposition to the rigid heterosexual conventions of much early 1980s rock.

Nor did these influences exist only within Morrissey’s songs and sleeve designs. His cultural affinities repeatedly drew him toward writers, performers, filmmakers, and actors associated with homosexual or queer culture. Oscar Wilde was a longstanding idol, while the influence of gay playwright Joe Orton2 has frequently been detected in Morrissey’s wit, language, and fascination with sexual outsiders. Indeed, one profile memorably described the young Morrissey as “channelling the spirits of Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton.”3

Actor and comedian Kenneth Williams4 was another object of admiration. Following Williams’s death, Morrissey praised his “touch-me-not wit” and described his persona as “stylishly non-sexual,” an interesting choice of words given Morrissey’s own public image.5 The Smiths also worked with openly gay filmmaker Derek Jarman6, whose visual sensibility proved particularly well suited to the band. None of these affinities establishes anything about Morrissey’s own sexuality. They do, however, demonstrate how comfortably he moved within a cultural universe populated by gay artists, queer iconography, sexual outsiders, and men whose lives challenged conventional definitions of masculinity and sexuality.

Before the Smiths, Morrissey was already cultivating a decidedly ambiguous persona. In a 1981 letter to a pen pal, he wrote, “I have a girlfriend called Annalisa. We’re both bisexual. Real hip, huh? I hate sex.” The contradiction is striking. Even while casually describing himself as bisexual, Morrissey immediately qualified the declaration with the far more emphatic “I hate sex.” The following year he teamed up with Johnny Marr and formed the Smiths, whose songs were soon laced with the language and sensibilities of gay subculture. As journalist Liz Hoggard later observed, “Only 15 years after homosexuality had been decriminalised,”7 Morrissey’s lyrics “flirted with every kind of gay subculture.”8 Even the Encyclopædia Britannica would later characterize the persona he cultivated as one of compellingly conflicted celibacy tempered by coy suggestions of homosexuality.9

A qualification is necessary before proceeding. The examples cited here are intentionally selective. Morrissey’s catalogue, interviews, sleeve imagery, literary references, public statements, and visual iconography contain far more material relevant to questions of sexuality than could reasonably be examined in a single essay. What follows should therefore not be mistaken for a comprehensive inventory. Instead, I have chosen a limited number of particularly revealing examples that illustrate patterns recurring throughout his career. There are many more that might reasonably have been included. The purpose here is not to prove the thesis through sheer accumulation, but to consider whether a smaller body of representative evidence points toward an interpretation that has largely escaped notice.

The Square Peg Interview

In a remarkably candid 1984 interview with Square Peg, Morrissey offered perhaps his clearest contemporary explanation of the sexual ambiguity surrounding the Smiths. He confirmed that the band’s use of male imagery was entirely deliberate, conceived partly as an inversion of the stylized female imagery employed by groups such as Roxy Music, among many others. “I wanted to do exactly the same thing with male images,” he explained, adding that he wanted to accomplish this in a manner that would “compliment rather than slur.”

The same intention extended to his songwriting. Morrissey described “This Charming Man” as deliberately “sexually advanced” and, more explicitly still, as being “about male relationships.” Yet rather than present those relationships through the flamboyant sexual imagery associated with supposedly adventurous or sexually ambiguous pop stars of the period, Morrissey wanted them to appear natural, frank, and unremarkable. In much the same way, the progression from the nude male figure on “Hand in Glove” to the image derived from Andy Warhol’s film Flesh on the debut album placed imagery associated with gay and homoerotic culture directly into the commercial mainstream, something Morrissey admitted gave him a “smug sense of satisfaction” when he saw the Smiths’ album displayed alongside conventional pop releases.

Crucially, however, Morrissey resisted interpreting any of this through the conventional categories of homosexuality or heterosexuality. He argued that terms such as heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual imposed artificial distinctions upon something fundamentally human, even suggesting that their use encouraged the very sexual segregation and oppression they purported to describe. His position therefore contained a distinction that would remain central to discussions of his sexuality for decades: Morrissey could deliberately celebrate male beauty, write about intimacy and attraction between men, and draw freely upon gay cultural imagery without regarding any of those things as declarations of a fixed homosexual identity.

Indeed, he told Square Peg that he scarcely recognized gender boundaries when dealing with people at all. The apparent contradiction, therefore, was no contradiction to Morrissey. The Smiths’ work could be unmistakably homoerotic while its author simultaneously rejected the labels by which audiences sought to define both the work and the man who created it.10

The Refusal to Be Defined

During the Smiths’ career, Morrissey repeatedly professed to be celibate. Johnny Marr remarked in a 1984 interview that Morrissey “doesn’t participate in sex at the moment and hasn’t done so for a while.”11 Such claims only intensified the media’s curiosity. Interview after interview attempted to determine whether he was gay, a suggestion Morrissey consistently resisted. When pressed on the matter in 1985, he offered one of his most revealing responses:

“I don’t recognise such terms as heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and I think it’s important that there’s someone in pop music who’s like that. These words do great damage, they confuse people and they make people feel unhappy, so I want to do away with them.”12

In January 1989, he again rejected the premise that he could be fitted neatly into one of the available categories:

“I don’t fit into any sexual category at all, so I don’t feel people see it as being sexual, but as being intimate.”13

That distinction between the sexual and the intimate is easily overlooked, but it may be among the most revealing things Morrissey has ever said about himself.

The following year, in a lengthy interview with Nick Kent for The Face, the subject arose yet again. When Kent suggested that Morrissey wrote frequently about homosexual “longing,” Morrissey replied, “I’ve always said I leave things very open and that I sing about people. Without limitation. And I don’t think that automatically makes me a homosexual.” Asked why he objected to the word itself, Morrissey answered simply: “Because it’s... limiting and restrictive.”

More revealing still was the discussion that followed. Morrissey said that he had no relationships and explained that he had “always [been] attracted to men or women who were never attracted to me,” while those who were attracted to him inspired no reciprocal response. “I’ve never met the right person,” he concluded. When Kent finally asked whether Morrissey ever felt like taking “one mad plunge,” his response was curious: “I’d like to, yeah, but not just with anybody. It... uh... just doesn’t come naturally to me.”14

The importance of that exchange may lie less in Morrissey’s admission of attraction to both men and women than in the peculiar absence surrounding it. Once again, intimacy, attraction, and the possibility of relationships are present, but sex itself seems strangely remote. Even when directly invited to describe sexual action or impulse, Morrissey retreats toward qualification: perhaps, with the right person, under the right circumstances, but it simply does not “come naturally.”

In Autobiography, Morrissey disclosed a relationship with a Cockney boxer named Jake Walters. The two were together from 1994 to circa 1996. He also recounts his relationship with a woman named Tina Dehghani, whom he described as his “first experience of uncluttered commitment” and with whom he contemplated having a child.15 He likewise refers to a younger Italian man known only as “Gelato,” with whom he spent considerable time while living in Rome.16

These relationships complicate any simplistic portrait of Morrissey as someone incapable of attachment. They demonstrate, at a minimum, his capacity for affection, intimacy, companionship, and commitment with both men and women. But none of those things necessarily resolves the question of sexual attraction. Romantic attachment and sexual attraction, although commonly assumed to travel together, need not be identical.

Then, in 2013, Morrissey once again declined to adopt a conventional label:

“Unfortunately, I am not homosexual. In technical fact, I am humasexual. I am attracted to humans. But, of course... not many.”17

This typical Morrisseyan joke is easy to appreciate, but the qualification is worth lingering over: “not many.” After three decades of being asked whether he preferred men or women, Morrissey once again answered by resisting the premise of the question itself.

The Question Beneath the Question

For decades, journalists approached Morrissey’s sexuality as a puzzle to be solved, assuming that the answer must lie somewhere between heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. Yet that assumption may itself have been the mistake. The more revealing question is not simply whether Morrissey was attracted to men or women, but whether sexual attraction occupied the same place in his inner life that others simply assumed it did.

His interviews, his public persona, and perhaps most strikingly his songs reveal a man deeply preoccupied with intimacy, companionship, longing, rejection, beauty, isolation, and emotional connection, while unequivocal expressions of physical sexual desire are remarkably scarce. This distinction may help explain an apparent contradiction running throughout his work. The male nude on the sleeve of “Hand in Glove,” the same-sex intimacy of “This Charming Man,” the homosexual underworld of “Piccadilly Palare,” and numerous other examples demonstrate a sustained fascination with homoerotic subjects. Yet these coexist with women, heterosexual relationships, celibacy, and Morrissey’s repeated refusal to identify himself as homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual.

Perhaps they were never contradictions at all.

The Major Reveal: A Different Possibility

This essay proposes a different possibility: that asexuality provides a more coherent framework through which to understand Morrissey’s seemingly contradictory history of sexual self-description. Asexuality is generally understood not as an inability to love, form relationships, experience arousal, appreciate physical beauty, or even engage in sexual activity, but as experiencing little or no sexual attraction to other people. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists recognizes asexuality as a sexual orientation and emphasizes that an asexual identity is not, in itself, a sexual or psychological disorder.18

Seen from this perspective, Morrissey’s professed celibacy assumes a different significance. Celebrity presumably provided him with opportunities for sexual relationships with either men or women that would have been unavailable to most people. Yet Morrissey repeatedly portrayed sex not as an overwhelming temptation heroically resisted, but as something curiously peripheral to his existence. His fascination with men, women, bodies, beauty, romance, desire, and rejection could therefore coexist with an absence, scarcity, or highly atypical experience of sexual attraction itself.

The homoeroticism of his art need no more prove homosexuality than his relationships with or attraction to women prove heterosexuality. A person may recognize beauty without wanting sexual possession of it; experience romantic or emotional attachment without experiencing corresponding sexual attraction; or find the cultural language of homosexuality compelling without personally inhabiting that sexual identity. What appears to fluctuate throughout Morrissey’s life and work is the object of his artistic, aesthetic, and emotional fascination, not necessarily the presence of sexual attraction itself.

Modern research provides a vocabulary that was largely unavailable when Morrissey first began attempting to explain himself. A widely cited national probability study of more than 18,000 British residents found that approximately one percent reported having experienced no sexual attraction toward either sex.19 Contemporary sexual-health authorities now explicitly distinguish asexuality from sexual dysfunction and recognize that little or no sexual attraction can represent a legitimate sexual orientation rather than a pathology requiring correction.

None of this can establish Morrissey’s orientation retrospectively, particularly when Morrissey himself has never publicly adopted the term asexual. Nor is it the purpose of this essay to diagnose him from afar or to replace one unwanted label with another. The evidence permits interpretation, not certainty. But asexuality does offer a framework in which many elements of Morrissey’s otherwise contradictory public record can coexist: homoerotic imagery without a homosexual identity; relationships with men and women without a settled bisexual identity; an intense fascination with beauty and intimacy alongside decades of professed celibacy; and a lifelong insistence that the conventional vocabulary of sexual orientation somehow failed to describe him.

The Question No One Asked

Morrissey’s career is filled with evidence of attraction, broadly understood, but surprisingly little unequivocal evidence of sexual attraction. He has written endlessly about longing, intimacy, loneliness, rejection, companionship, bodies, beauty, men, and women, yet spent decades resisting every conventional sexual category offered to him.

Perhaps the mistake was assuming that one of those categories had to fit.

For more than forty years, interviewers kept asking Morrissey essentially the same question: Which sex do you desire? The question no one asked was whether he experienced sexual desire for either sex in the conventional sense at all.

If asexuality does provide the missing piece, there is something almost cruelly ironic about Morrissey’s predicament. Few songwriters have written so obsessively about wanting and being wanted, about the agony of unreturned affection and the hope of finally finding another person, yet sexual attraction itself may have remained curiously beyond his reach. What others experienced instinctively, Morrissey may have encountered primarily as longing, fascination, intimacy, imagination, or abstraction. Nature, in other words, may have supplied him with an extraordinary capacity to contemplate desire while withholding some essential part of the experience everyone around him assumed he shared.

And perhaps that lends an unexpected resonance to a question Morrissey once put into song: “Will Nature make a man of me yet?” Read in this light, it becomes more than adolescent uncertainty about masculinity. It might almost stand as the unanswered question running beneath his entire public life. Not which man or woman would finally unlock the mystery, but whether the sexual impulse so effortlessly taken for granted by others would ever arrive at all.

From Riff to Ritual

During the Troy Tate sessions in London for the Smiths’ debut album, in the midst of 1983’s exceptionally hot summer, Johnny Marr began working on a tune that would eventually become “The Headmaster Ritual.” While still in its nebulous state, he periodically returned to it throughout the following year, refining and polishing it much like a lapidary patiently working a gemstone.

Marr later recalled, “I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote it, and I quite like that. I think it’s a handy device for cutting out the brain static that gets in the way of coming up with chord changes.”1

That sense of experimentation seems to have defined the song’s unusually long gestation. Marr later described how its disparate pieces gradually came together over the course of the following year:

“The nuts and bolts of The Headmaster Ritual came together during the first album, and I just carried on playing around with it. It started off as a very sublime sort of Joni Mitchell-esque chord figure; I played it to Morrissey but we never took it further. Then, as my life got more and more intense, so did the song. The bridge and the chorus part were originally for another song, but I put them together with the first part. That was unusual for me; normally I just hammer away at an idea until I've got a song. It's in open D turning, with a capo at the second fret. Again, it was heavily overdubbed."2

The song took on its final form some sixteen months after its initial conception, in October 1984, during the Meat Is Murder sessions, where the band rehearsed the arrangement and Morrissey added the lyrics.3

Marr noted that composing the song took him the longest ever for him to write any song:

“’The Headmaster Ritual’ was a favourite of mine for a long time just because I’m really pleased with the guitars on it and the strange tuning... For my part, ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ came together over the longest period of time I’ve ever spent on a song. I first played the riff to Morrissey when we were working on the demos for our first album with Troy Tate. I nailed the rest of it when we moved to Earls Court. That was around the time when we were being fabulous.”4

The song was mainly recorded in October 1984 at Amazon Studios in Liverpool, with the Smiths - mostly Marr - acting as producer and Stephen Street as recording engineer. Additional work was performed the following month at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, when overdubs were added to the track. The song's final mixing was completed in December 1984 at Island Record's Fallout Shelter in London.5

From Album Opener to Afterthought

“The Headmaster Ritual” was accorded a place of some distinction on Meat Is Murder, opening the Smiths’ second studio album when it was released on 11 February 1985. Its life as a single, however, was far more fragmented. In the United States, Sire Records tucked an edited version of the song away as a B-side on its 7-inch release of “How Soon Is Now?” in the spring of 1985.6

That summer, the song was granted a rare release of its own in the Netherlands, where it appeared as a 7-inch single. Britain, curiously, had to wait. “The Headmaster Ritual” would not receive a UK single release until late 1988, more than a year after the Smiths had dissolved, when it finally appeared in the comparatively modern guise of a CD single.

Listen to the “The Headmaster Ritual” in the following link:

Cowboys, Canes and Viv Nicholson

The cover art for the Dutch single was originally intended to be a still of Sir Laurence Olivier with cane raised over Terence Stamp’s hand from the 1962 film Term of Trial.7 While Stamp gave his consent to use his image, Olivier was slow to respond in time for the release.

Consequently, Morrissey culled a black-and-white image of a child dressed as a cowboy from the 1965 film The Uncle8 for the single.

When the song was issued as a single in the UK in 1988, its sleeve featured a smiling Viv Nicholson (appearing for a third time on a Smiths release) sitting at an easel, painting.9

Live-Wire Spitfire

The song opens with an open-tuned chord that Marr has described as what Joni Mitchell10 “would have done had she been an MC5 fan or a punk rocker,” adding “I knew pretty much what every guitar track would be before we started.”11 The arrangement is more layered than it sounds. Alongside two Martin D-28 acoustic tracks, an Epiphone chorus part, and the trebly Epiphone Coronet heard at the end, Marr built the song’s signature riff from a doubled Rickenbacker figure. As he later explained:

“‘The Headmaster Ritual’ main riff is two tracks of Rickenbacker. I wasn’t specifically thinking of the Beatles’ ‘Day Tripper’ even though it sounds like it, but I did think of it as a George Harrison part.”12

For his part, Morrissey colorfully described Marr’s performance on the recording as “a live-wire spitfire guitar sound that takes on all-comers.”13

The result is nothing short of brilliance. Marr’s opening riff immediately announces the song’s intent, soon joined by Andy Rourke’s nimble, restless bass line and Mike Joyce’s adroit drumming, punctuated by oddly complementary cymbal splashes. Beneath and around them, the arrangement remains remarkably fluid, even as Morrissey steadily unleashes some of his most devastating lyrics.

Yet for all its force, “The Headmaster Ritual” also possesses an unexpected poignancy. There is an almost wistful momentum to the music that sits strangely against the harshness of the subject matter. Its chorus introduces a captivating wordless yodel that returns in the outro, where Morrissey sustains the vocalization for roughly one minute and twenty seconds as the song slowly fades away. The effect is dissonant and haunting, leaving an impression that lingers well after the music has ended. Morrissey himself sounds less defiant than wounded: earnest, anxious and at times almost pleading. His repeated desire simply to “go home” transforms what might otherwise have been a furious denunciation into something more vulnerable, the recollection of a frightened schoolboy trapped within an institution he has come to despise.

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How Barbarism Began

Although it was formally released in early 1985, the musical foundations of “Barbarism Begins at Home” stretch back to the summer of 1983. Its lyrics were written sometime between then and the song’s live debut in December of that year at London’s Electric Ballroom on 19 December 1983, where Morrissey introduced it with the wry remark, “Here’s one for the bootleg friends...” Over the course of 1984, as the Smiths took it on tour, the composition continued to evolve, both musically and lyrically, before finally assuming its definitive form.

According to Mike Joyce, the initial version of ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’ was about seventeen minutes long when the band first performed it:

“Mozzer had been knocking the red wine back and we got out there and it was about seventeen minutes long. Moz kept going into that middle bit - yodeling. Fuckin’ on and on. Johnny kept coming over and looking at me, and every time he did it I thought, ‘Thank God, he’s going to stop it.’ We were knackered.”2

In reality, the debut performance of the song was only 6:20 in duration and differed markedly from the recording that would appear slightly more than a year later on Meat Is Murder. Its structure was looser, and it contained several verses and lines that were ultimately discarded before the band entered the studio. Among the abandoned lyrics were, “I’ve always been such a decent lad” and “I am the man to keep you in place.” Despite its unfinished state, the new composition was greeted as enthusiastically as the band’s established material, prompting Morrissey, in mock disbelief, to ask, “Are you sure? Are you sure?”3

Listen to the Smiths’ debut performance of the song at the Electric Ballroom here:

The Smiths continued to perform “Barbarism Begins At Home” live throughout 1984, but the extra lyrics gradually disappeared, eventually becoming the familiar song heard on Meat Is Murder.

As an aside, from late 1984 to the end of the song’s live career (in June 1985), Morrissey would sometimes end the song with “...a crack on the head because of all the silly little things that you said, and you said the queen is dead...” Considering that “The Queen Is Dead” wasn’t written until late 1985 (about October or November 1985), it would seem that the genesis of the song occurred in this earlier time-frame when Morrissey began to include this extra lyric.

These Are the Good Times

Along with the other tracks that would appear on the Meat Is Murder studio album, "Barbarism Begins at Home" was recorded largely in October 1984 at Amazon Studios in Liverpool, with the Smiths - primarily Johnny Marr - overseeing production and Stephen Street serving as recording engineer. Additional overdubs were completed the following month at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey before the track received its final mix at Island Records’ Fallout Shelter studio in London in December 1984.4

The album version of the song can be heard in the following link:

In January 1985 a limited number of promotional 12-inch singles containing “Barbarism Begins At Home” were distributed to radio stations in the UK. Discogs.com shows two different versions, each numbered RTT171: one that featured the album version and another that contained both the album version and a 3:48 edited version. The runout groove on the A side of both versions of this promotional single was etched with “THESE ARE THE GOOD TIMES,”5 a seemingly upbeat message likely conceals something far darker: a mordant inversion of nostalgia, steeped in Morrissey’s characteristic gallows humor. The supposedly “good times” of childhood and domestic respectability are recast as something crueler and more sinister, exposing the home not as a sanctuary of innocence, but as the very place where “Barbarism Begins at Home.”

From Album Track to Single

The song was formally released 11 February 1985 as the penultimate track on Meat Is Murder, just before the album’s concluding titular track. Considering the normalization of mortal violence Morrissey explores in “Meat Is Murder,” “Barbarism Begins at Home” becomes the natural prelude to the gruesome detail contained in the the final track, where normalized cruelty reaches its most disturbing expression.

Two months after its initial release on Meat Is Murder, ‘Barbarism Begins at Home’ received a limited single release in Germany (both 7-inch and 12-inch editions) and Italy (only in 7-inch) in April 1985. In both countries, the 7-inch featured an edited 3:48 version of the title track, while the German 12-inch retained the full-length version. Listen to the edited version of the song in the following link:

“Barbarism Begins At Home” was not released as a single in the UK until 1988, when it was issued as a CD single featuring the edited version rather than the full album edition.

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Hang The Videographer

Among Smiths fans, it is no revelation that Morrissey was notoriously averse to the idea of the band participating in the making of promotional videos to market their music. Viewing the medium as shallow, he dismissed it as “pantomime” - little more than a marketing-driven distraction from the music itself. Notwithstanding this principled stance, the Smiths had appeared in two promotional films for “This Charming Man” in 1983. However, after Sire Records produced an unauthorized video for “How Soon Is Now?” the following year, his reluctance hardened. In late 1984, Morrissey told Melody Maker that the Smiths would “...never make a video as long as we lived.”1

This resistance created a clear tension for Rough Trade Records, which recognized the growing prominence of music videos as a means of promotion and exposure, yet had to find a way to expand the band’s reach without compromising its frontman’s sensibilities.

Given Morrissey’s public renunciation of the medium, it was rather surprising when the band returned to it in 1985 with a promotional film for “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” to coincide with the single's September release.

This reversal was born of necessity rather than enthusiasm. Eager to promote the new single in the United States, Sire Records pressed the band to produce a music video, while Rough Trade likewise viewed the medium as an opportunity to bolster the Smiths’ commercial prospects. Morrissey and Johnny Marr reportedly resisted but ultimately relented in the face of intense pressure, but only on the condition that the film crew come to the Studio where the band was working, with a case of wine in tow.

“We said, ‘Okay, if you want to film us you’ll have to come to the studio ‘cos we’re not leaving. And bring lots of red wine.’ It was horrible, so we just got drunk.”2 -Johnny Marr

The resultant music video did little to dispel the band's skepticism toward the medium. Johnny Marr later complained that it “managed to make us look like twats.”3

Fundamentally, the Smiths possessed a singular aesthetic that set them apart from nearly every other band of the era. They were unwilling to sacrifice their artistic vision for commercial gain, regarding such compromises as beneath them. Until this point, that conviction had been overlooked, ignored, or treated as an obstacle to be overcome through pressure and cajoling. What had been missing was a way to meet the band on its own terms while still navigating the commercial realities of the MTV era. As Mayo Thompson, the Smiths' label manager at Rough Trade, later recalled, “the only way we're going to pull this off is with someone they cannot refuse because of his reputation.”4 That someone was Derek Jarman, whose uncompromising artistic vision aligned so closely with the Smiths' own that the promotional music video could be reimagined not as a marketing obligation, but as a genuine artistic collaboration.

The Director They Never Met

What is perhaps most remarkable is that neither Morrissey nor the other members of the Smiths collaborated with Jarman in any meaningful sense during the production of the videos. Indeed, Morrissey agreed to the arrangement only on the condition that he and the band never meet the director - a stipulation that was the lynchpin of Jarman's involvement.

“We never actually met Jarman - he did them [the music videos] privately while we were in America, which was absolutely the only way we’d agree to do it.”5 - Morrissey

An Artistic Kindred Spirit

An English filmmaker, artist, stage designer, and writer, Derek Jarman was born in Northwood, Middlesex, in 1942, the son of a Royal Air Force officer from New Zealand. He studied English, history, and art history at King’s College London before attending the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, where he spent four years beginning in 1963.

Jarman first gained recognition as a production designer, working with director Ken Russell on The Devils (1971) and Savage Messiah (1972). He soon began producing his own experimental Super 8 films before making his feature-film debut with Sebastiane (1976). He followed this with Jubilee (1978), a provocative and anarchic vision of Britain inspired by the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II the previous year.

Throughout the following decade, Jarman established himself as one of Britain’s most original filmmakers. The Tempest (1979) reimagined Shakespeare’s play through a striking visual lens, while The Angelic Conversation (1985) explored themes of desire and identity through a series of dreamlike tableaux accompanied by Shakespeare’s sonnets. Caravaggio (1986) brought the Renaissance master’s paintings to life in richly composed cinematic images, and The Last of England (1987) and War Requiem (1989) confronted themes of war, death, and cultural decline. His final films, Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1993), and the poignant Blue (1993), secured his reputation as one of Britain’s most important independent filmmakers.

Jarman’s work in music promotion extended well beyond the Smiths. Jarman also directed films for artists including Marianne Faithfull, Bryan Ferry, the Pet Shop Boys, Patti Smith, and the Sex Pistols. Yet his collaborations with the Smiths remain among the most distinctive visual interpretations of popular music ever produced.

Derek Jarman died from an AIDS-related illness on 19 February 1994 at the age of fifty-two. In recognition of his extraordinary contribution to British cinema, Jarman was named a Fellow of the British Film Institute in 1990.

The Films

Derek Jarman directed four promotional films for the Smiths in 1986: “The Queen Is Dead,” “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” “Panic,” and “Ask.”

Jarman combined the footage from “The Queen Is Dead,” “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and “Panic” into a short film also titled The Queen Is Dead, suggesting that he regarded the individual works not merely as promotional videos but as interconnected parts of a larger artistic whole. That broader vision is evident throughout the four promotional films. The Queen Is Dead captures the song’s defiant anger and anti-establishment spirit through a collage of archival imagery. There Is a Light That Never Goes Out unfolds like a surreal dream, transforming longing into visual poetry. Panic juxtaposes performance footage with evocative imagery that heightens the song’s atmosphere of anxiety and social unrest. By contrast, Ask embraces warmth, optimism, and playful romance, perfectly complementing one of the Smiths’ most buoyant singles.

The Queen Is Dead

The film begins with a speeded-up black-and-white shot of the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, London, while an audio sample of “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty” from the 1962 film The L-Shaped Room plays in the background. The memorial’s spectral presence is emblematic of a majestic and powerful England long since past. Rather than celebrating monarchy, the image becomes a symbol of national decay, enhanced not only by the muted hue of the shot, but also by the camera speed, which shows clouds rapidly passing over the memorial: a metaphor for the passage of time. Jarman’s use of this image evokes a sense of faded nostalgia coupled with a hint of deeper cultural rot.

As the title track commences, the viewer is briefly confronted with a cluster of young children smiling innocently into the camera lens. This is quickly followed by a longer sequence featuring an androgynous young person entering a fenced-off, derelict industrial site and spray-painting THE QUEEN IS DEAD in stark block lettering across a wall. From there, the film unfolds as a kaleidoscope of black-and-white and color imagery: projected figures drift across backgrounds featuring roses, sunflowers, thistles, burning wreaths, a spinning guitar, and fleeting images of a xylophone and trumpet.

The ephemeral figures twist, spin, and bounce erratically across the screen, creating a pervasive sense of dislocation and discordance. Crowns of the royal style sweep through the frame, while negative-film-stock imagery of streets, Buckingham Palace, and dancing children flickers into view. The androgynous figure reappears throughout the film and is eventually shown, clad in a dress, wearing, tearing, and finally flinging the Union Jack to the ground in a series of fragmented, seemingly unconnected shots.

As the song enters its outro, the figure, dressed in a long-skirted gown, lowers the garment from the shoulders to reveal herself as a woman. The song’s final notes are accompanied by a distant shot of Buckingham Palace viewed from across the lake in St James’s Park. This final shot, functioning as a visual coda, speaks volumes, exuding a sense of cold remoteness and fading glory.

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

The viewer is presented with ethereal images that fade in and out. A golden, shimmering screen superimposed over much of the video serves as a visual metaphor for the porous boundary between the conscious and subconscious. One initially sees a close-up of an androgynous figure lying at rest, though not quite asleep, as evidenced by occasional blinking. The image of this figure dominates much of the film, serving as a kind of gatekeeper between the realms of reality and dreams.

What follows is a rapid succession of fleeting images: a young couple embracing in a country field; brief shots from a moving vehicle passing through a busy city intersection; and then an oddly familiar residential street…perhaps Kings Road in Stretford? Grainy black and white images of a burning vehicle appear each time Morrissey sings, “Driving in your car,” sometimes accompanied by choppy footage of a fireman flitting around the flaming wreck.

Jarman’s use of imagery in “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is an especially adroit means of evoking a disconcerting moodiness and dreamlike experience that lingers long after the film has ended. One is initially befuddled by what one has seen, as the intellect attempts to analyze and make sense of the images. The exercise is largely self-defeating. Jarman’s use of light, camera speed, diverse imagery, washed-out colors, and snatches of black and white film, with many of the images seemingly tilting and shifting as they appear before fading away, appeals more to the soul than the mind, to the spirit rather than the flesh. Not unlike the song it accompanies, the video achieves a degree of transcendence that almost defies description.

Ask

The previously mentioned alignment between Morrissey’s artistic vision and Jarman’s visual aesthetic is especially evident in the video for “Ask,” whose underlying theme is the irrepressible need for human connection amid a fractured, indifferent world gripped by turmoil. As Morrissey sings, “If it’s not love, then it’s the bomb that will bring us together,” the video centers on an intensely shy, bespectacled young man presenting a bouquet of flowers to his love interest. Around them, a cast of vividly dressed figures leaps and dances, one even waltzing with a skeleton, so that the scene oscillates between innocence and absurdity, tenderness and collapse. Youthful exuberance does not ignore the world’s instability. It persists in spite of it.

Throughout the film, fleeting, ghostlike images of the band, primarily Morrissey, surface and dissolve as though emerging from, and retreating into, the ether. Each appearance is tinted differently, yellow, blue, purple, and green, so that Morrissey becomes less a fixed presence than a shifting emotional register. The result is dreamlike and elusive, rendering the band simultaneously present and intangible. Rather than documenting a performance, Jarman creates an emotional landscape that lingers in the viewer’s imagination long after the final frame.

Panic

The promotional film for "Panic" contrasts dissolving black and white imagery with the band, each member, including unofficial "Fifth Smith" Craig Gannon, bathed in vivid, saturated hues as they perform the song. Rather than illustrating Morrissey's lyrics literally, Jarman interweaves fleeting glimpses of graffitied walls and urban streetscapes with recurring images of a solitary young man and a hand that repeatedly enters the frame ahead of the moving camera, creating the impression that the viewer is being led through the city's fractured landscape. The contrast is deliberate. While "Panic" is one of the Smiths' most urgent and confrontational recordings, Jarman's imagery often conveys a quiet humanity, subtly suggesting that the song's anger is directed not at people themselves but at the cultural decay and mediocrity encroaching upon the world they inhabit. As with much of Jarman's work, the imagery functions as visual counterpoint rather than accompaniment, becoming an independent artistic statement that deepens the song's emotional resonance instead of merely illustrating its lyrics.

The Final Film

More than twenty years after the Smiths disbanded, and nearly fifteen years after Derek Jarman’s death, a previously unseen promotional film for “I Won’t Share You” surfaced online in late 2008. The film is a re-edited version of Jarman’s six-minute contribution to the 1987 anthology film Aria, in which he and nine other directors created visual interpretations of operatic works. Most accounts suggest that Jarman repurposed the footage in the early 1990s for a multimedia exhibition organized by Rough Trade to benefit the Terrence Higgins Trust.6 When Rough Trade entered liquidation,7 however, the exhibition was cancelled, and Jarman’s completed film was apparently shelved.

Jarman’s original Aria segment depicts an elderly opera singer giving her final performance, intercut with grainy 8 mm home movies of her youthful love affair, portrayed by Tilda Swinton8 as the singer’s younger self. It is believed that, had he completed the final edit, Jarman would have incorporated performance footage of the Smiths, much as he had in “Ask” and “Panic.”

Though unfinished, “I Won’t Share You” remains an evocative work of art. Produced during the waning years of MTV’s cultural dominance, when promotional videos remained largely disposable marketing tools, Jarman’s film once again demonstrates his remarkable ability to transcend the conventions of the medium. Rather than serving merely as visual accompaniment, it deepens the song’s quiet emotional resonance, providing a fitting epilogue to one of popular music’s most unlikely artistic collaborations. Though brief, the partnership between Derek Jarman and the Smiths demonstrated that the promotional music video could aspire to genuine art. In Jarman’s hands, even a film created to market a single became something timeless.

Watch Jarman’s film for “I Won’t Share You” here:

A Shared Vision

Derek Jarman’s fascination with outsider identity, Englishness, memory, and the decay of national mythology closely paralleled many of Morrissey’s own lyrical preoccupations. That connection helps explain why his films feel so inseparable from the Smiths’ artistic identity. Though they worked in different media, each treated marginality, emotional isolation, and cultural displacement not simply as suffering, but as a vantage point from which to see through the illusions of mainstream culture.

To describe Jarman's work for the Smiths as merely avant-garde does it a disservice. Rather than simply illustrating the songs, he interpreted them, creating films whose imagery became inseparable from the music itself. Like two vocal harmonies creating the illusion of a third voice, the union of Jarman's imagery and the Smiths' music produced something greater than either could have achieved alone. Nearly four decades later, those films remain the most enduring visual expression of the Smiths' music.

Beginnings

The song began taking shape in late September 1984 during rehearsal soundchecks on the Smiths’ British west country mini-tour (the final leg of the band’s debut album tour). It was completed and recorded the following month at Amazon Studios in Liverpool during the sessions for the Meat Is Murder studio album.

Although the album credits reflect the Smiths as producing the song, Johnny Marr largely fulfilled this role, while Stephen Street served as recording engineer. Additional overdubs on the track were completed the following month at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey before it received its final mix in December 1984 at Island Records’ Fallout Shelter studio in London.1

Between Confession and Decay

The fifth track on the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder album, issued on 11 February 1985, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” is nestled between the masked confession of “What She Said” and the cultural decay of “Nowhere Fast.” Read together, the three songs form a striking triptych of Morrissey’s Manchester youth…introspective, intellectually restless, emotionally isolated, and devastatingly blunt. Within that sequence, however, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” emerges as the album’s emotional centerpiece.

For many contemporary critics, as well as a great many Smiths fans, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” represents the artistic pinnacle of Meat Is Murder. While every track on the album possesses its own distinctive strengths, none combines Johnny Marr’s compositional ambition with Morrissey’s lyrical depth and vocal intensity quite so completely. Expansive yet intimate, tender yet imposing, the song unfolds with remarkable patience, its sweeping arrangement and emotional progression creating an experience that feels less like a conventional pop recording than a sustained meditation on empathy, isolation, and despair. It is a work of unreserved emotional beauty, one that captures the Smiths at the height of their creative powers. Among an album of exceptional songs, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” remains first among equals.

Listen to the album version of the song here:

Missed Opportunities

The release strategy of both the Smiths and their record label in the first months of 1985 is rather quixotic considering the timing of the release of the band’s second studio album. Despite having already been released the previous August as the B-side of the “William, It Was Really Nothing” single, as well as being included on the Hatful of Hollow compilation album (released November 1984), Rough Trade chose to capitalize on the unexpected popularity of “How Soon Is Now?” by reissuing it as a single on 28 January 1985 rather than leading with new material from the forthcoming album. The fact that “How Soon Is Now?” was omitted from the original UK edition of the Meat Is Murder album makes this decision even stranger, though to be fair the single did give fans their first preview of the new album by way of its B-side, which contained “Well I Wonder.”

The pattern continued after the album's February release, not to mention the onset of the band’s Meat Is Murder Tour that commenced later the same month, further obscuring any coherent promotional strategy. On 18 March, Rough Trade issued "Shakespeare's Sister,"2 backed by "What She Said," an album track from Meat Is Murder. Meanwhile, Germany and Italy received the album's penultimate track, "Barbarism Begins at Home," as an A-side single, while the Netherlands was given an exclusive summer release of the album's opening track, "The Headmaster Ritual." This patchwork of UK B-sides and territory-specific singles suggested a fragmented, almost improvised approach to promoting the Smiths' second studio album.

What never materialized was a conventional (and timely) UK single from the album to sustain momentum and extend the album's commercial life. Instead, nearly five months would pass before “That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" finally appeared as the official UK single from Meat Is Murder on 5 July 1985.

The decision was driven not by Rough Trade but by Morrissey himself. Geoff Travis saw little commercial potential in "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" and regarded it as an unsuitable single, attempting to persuade Morrissey to reconsider. Recalling the exchange years later, Travis remembered telling him, "That's not a good idea… It's a bad idea, it's not a single." Morrissey, however, would not be moved. "Being me," Travis recalled, "I said, 'Fine, you want it to come out, it'll come out.' ... That was the first moment I can remember of any friction."3 Morrissey's insistence ultimately prevailed, underscoring that, for him, the song's artistic importance outweighed conventional marketing logic.

Whatever the artistic merits of the decision, the timing ran counter to standard record industry practice and made little promotional sense. By July, most fans interested in Meat Is Murder already owned the album, leaving scant incentive to purchase a single built around one of its more familiar tracks.

A Commercial Misfire

While it is understandable that “Hand in Glove” failed to reach the UK Top 100 in the spring of 1983, given that the Smiths were still an unknown quantity, every subsequent single they released achieved a respectable chart position, with one notable exception. At number 49, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” became the band’s lowest-charting single after their debut, making it their poorest commercial performer of their recording career (a rather ironic outcome given that it came from the Smiths’ only studio album to reach number one on the UK Albums Chart, debuting with gold-certified shipments of over 100,000 copies on its first day). Even Johnny Marr of all people came to recognize that the choice for album single was something less than optimal:

"I'd secretly wanted it to do well because I thought it would be our big torch song, our Dusty single. For about two days I got excited thinking we might have a big 'All I See Is You'-type torch song in the chart. Then reality struck. Why would they play that continuously on Radio 1?"4

The Single Edit

While the single’s 12-inch edition retained the complete 4:57 album version of the song, the 7-inch edition was edited to a more radio-friendly 3:49 by excising most of Johnny Marr's atmospheric guitar coda and the song's distinctive false fade. The reduction came at a high price, sacrificing one of the composition's most haunting and emotionally resonant passages.

Listen to the edited 7-inch single version in the following link:

The 7-inch edition paired the single with a live version of "Meat Is Murder" on its B-side. The 12-inch expanded upon this by adding live performances of "Nowhere Fast," "Stretch Out and Wait," and "Shakespeare's Sister," all performed during the Smiths' 18 March 1985 concert at the Oxford Apollo.

The Face on the Sleeve

According to Jo Slee5 in Peepholism: Into the Art of Morrissey, Morrissey chose a photograph of an unknown Italian child actor from the 1960s that he found in an old issue of Film and Filmmaking magazine (the publication was actually titled Films and Filming) for the single's sleeve. This account is only partly correct. The image was in fact a cropped publicity still from the 1964 Soviet film The Enchanted Desna, depicting an uncredited child actor. The original photograph also included the child's on-screen mother, Odarka, portrayed by Russian actress Zinaida Kiriyenko. Morrissey later explained his attraction to the image: "If ever a human face portrayed such pained stainlessness – apart from my own – it would surely be this child's. The eyes are encrusted with hurt and premature wisdom, making the poor banished children of Eve seem like snotty simpletons in comparison."6

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Charles Hawtrey was an English actor, comedian, singer, pianist, and theater director best remembered for his appearances in the beloved Carry On films. The Carry On franchise - comprising feature films, Christmas television specials, a television series, and stage productions - was a fixture of British popular culture from 1958 through 1992. Hawtrey appeared in twenty-three of the films, as well as several television specials, becoming one of the series’ most recognizable faces.

Morrissey’s affection for Hawtrey was rooted not only in the actor himself but also in the wider world of the Carry On films. In a June 1986 interview with NME, reflecting on the series, Morrissey remarked: “When you think of Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques, Barbara Windsor, Joan Sims, Sid James... the wealth of talent!”1 Hawtrey, however, occupied a particularly special place among those performers, emerging over time as one of Morrissey’s most enduring cultural touchstones.

Morrissey’s admiration for Hawtrey was unusually personal. When Hawtrey died in October 1988, Morrissey wrote his obituary for NME, describing him as:

“The very last comic genius... Charles Hawtrey’s death ties in with the advance chill of 1992, the slaughter of the British passport, and the last death wheeze of the real England... By all accounts being unfriendly and friendless, Hawtrey’s mystique surpasses Garbo. I personally loved him.”

The tribute reveals that Morrissey saw Hawtrey as far more than a comic actor. To him, Hawtrey represented a disappearing England - eccentric, defiantly individual, and increasingly out of step with the modern world. It is therefore unsurprising that Hawtrey would come to occupy a recurring place in Morrissey’s artistic world, appearing not only in his writing but also in his visual imagery.

A Cameo in "Everyday Is Like Sunday"

In the promotional video for "Everyday Is Like Sunday," released in May 1988, Morrissey includes two brief clips of Hawtrey (at approximately 2:44 and 3:04), both taken from the 1972 film Carry On Abroad, reportedly one of Morrissey's favorite entries in the series.

See the video here:

Hawtrey's presence extends beyond the film extracts themselves. Morrissey's promotional imagery for the period repeatedly evokes the actor, suggesting that Hawtrey functioned not merely as a favorite performer but as a recurring visual motif within Morrissey's own artistic vocabulary.

Hawtrey as Morrissey Iconography

Morrissey also appears to pay visual tribute to Hawtrey in the sleeve artwork for the “Everyday Is Like Sunday” single. His pose closely mirrors a now-famous newspaper photograph taken after a fire at Hawtrey’s home in August 1984, in which the actor - disheveled, emotional, and without his trademark toupee - is led to safety by firefighters.

Charles Hawtrey also appears on the sleeve of The Very Best of The Smiths, the 2001 compilation album released by WEA. Unlike the record sleeves that Morrissey carefully curated throughout his career, however, neither he nor the other members of the Smiths had any involvement in the album's conception or artwork, as the release was issued without the band's consent. Nevertheless, the label's decision to feature Hawtrey is telling. By 2001, the actor had become so closely associated with Morrissey's artistic ethos that his appearance on the sleeve felt entirely consistent with the visual language Morrissey had cultivated over the preceding two decades. Not everyone was impressed with the result. Mojo magazine memorably dismissed the sleeve as "an adman's approximation of a Smiths cover."

The visual references did not end there. Morrissey again appears to channel Hawtrey in the cover artwork for 25 Live, the 2013 concert film documenting his March 2, 2013 performance at Hollywood High School in Los Angeles, celebrating twenty-five years of his solo career following the dissolution of the Smiths. Once again, Morrissey’s pose evokes Hawtrey’s familiar screen persona and photographic imagery.

Hawtrey's influence surfaced elsewhere throughout Morrissey's solo career. The promotional video for "Interesting Drug" is set at the fictional "Hawtrey High School For Boys," while Hawtrey's image appeared on backstage passes for Morrissey's December 1988 concert in Wolverhampton

.

In her book Peepholism: Into the Art of Morrissey, former Rough Trade production manager Jo Slee notes that several stills of Charles Hawtrey from the Carry On films were considered for sleeve artwork over the years, including one depicting Hawtrey alongside fellow Carry On star Kenneth Williams2 in drag from Carry On Constable.3

The Man Behind the Persona

Born George Frederick Joffre Hartree in 1914, Charles Hawtrey lived a life that was often as unconventional as the characters he portrayed. Much of his private life remains obscure, owing in part to the fact that he carefully guarded his relationships during a period when homosexual acts between men were criminal offenses in Britain.

By most accounts, Hawtrey was a difficult man. His heavy drinking, promiscuity, and increasingly eccentric behavior alienated many of those around him. He could be openly hostile to admirers, reportedly tearing autograph requests in half while swearing at fans. Fellow Carry On star Kenneth Williams described visiting Hawtrey’s home in Deal, Kent, where the actor had accumulated dozens of antique brass bedsteads in the conviction that they would someday make him wealthy.

Hawtrey spent much of his adult life living with his mother, who later developed Alzheimer’s disease. Williams recounted one extraordinary incident during the filming of Carry On Teacher: when Joan Sims shouted that Hawtrey’s mother’s handbag had caught fire after being singed by cigarette ash, Hawtrey calmly poured a cup of tea into the bag, snapped it shut, and resumed his conversation as though nothing had happened. He also regularly brought his mother to film sets, locking her in his dressing room while scenes were being filmed.

Williams, himself a closeted gay man, envied Hawtrey’s comparative fearlessness despite the legal and social risks of the era. He once remarked:

“He can sit in a bar and pick up sailors and have a wonderful time. I couldn’t do it.”

On June 6, 1981, Hawtrey suffered a heart attack. Three years later, he again made headlines after a fire destroyed much of his home. The blaze began after he reportedly fell asleep with a lit cigarette while sharing his bed with a fifteen-year-old rent boy. Newspaper photographs from the incident showed a shaken, partially clothed, and toupee-less Hawtrey being led from the burning house by firefighters. Afterwards, he told reporters:

“The smell of smoke woke me up and there were flames coming up the stairway. I’ve lost a lot of valuable antiques and sentimental keepsakes, but I am all right. It was all very frightening.”

His final months were equally tragic. On October 24, 1988, Hawtrey collapsed outside the Royal Hotel in Deal, shattering his femur. Doctors discovered severe peripheral vascular disease caused by decades of heavy smoking and advised that both legs be amputated to save his life. Hawtrey refused, reportedly declaring that he would rather “die with his boots on.”

He died three days later, on October 27, 1988, at Windthorpe Lodge Nursing Home in Walmer, Kent. According to one oft-repeated story, he threw a vase at a nurse who asked him for an autograph while he lay dying. On November 2, he was cremated at Mortlake Crematorium, where his ashes were scattered. Only nine mourners attended the service, and none were close friends or family.

Kindred Spirits

It is perhaps not difficult to understand why Morrissey found Hawtrey such a compelling figure. Beneath the comic performances lay a man who was deeply solitary, defiantly eccentric, and profoundly misunderstood - a gifted entertainer whose private life was marked by loneliness, contradiction, and decline. Those themes recur throughout Morrissey’s own work, though fortunately not the decline, making his enduring affection for Charles Hawtrey seem less surprising than inevitable.

Whether by consciously paying tribute through his own imagery or by becoming a visual reference point adopted, even imperfectly, by others seeking to evoke the Smiths’ aesthetic, Hawtrey’s presence runs quietly but unmistakably through Morrissey’s artistic universe. It is one of the more revealing examples of how Morrissey’s cultural heroes were not simply admired from afar but woven into the fabric of his own identity as an artist.

Origins of a Controversy

Beginning in the late 1980s, Morrissey found himself the subject of recurring accusations of racism, many of them centering on his treatment of English identity and immigration. Songs such as “Bengali in Platforms” prompted journalists to question whether his lyrics reflected social observation or something altogether different. Morrissey consistently rejected such interpretations, insisting that his remarks were being misconstrued. Nevertheless, the controversy established a pattern that would persist for decades: statements and songs that he regarded as social commentary were increasingly interpreted through the lens of race.

That pattern reached its first major flashpoint in 1992, when Morrissey appeared at the Madstock Festival in Finsbury Park, London, as a supporting act for the recently reunited English band Madness.1

The Madstock Performance

On 8 August 1992, Morrissey performed before an audience of more than 75,000 people attending the weekend-long festival celebrating Madness’s reunion following their breakup several years earlier. Unfortunately, relatively few Morrissey fans were present, as he had been added to the bill only after tickets had already gone on sale. Consequently, the crowd consisted largely of Madness fans who either had little interest in Morrissey or, more likely, were simply impatient to see the band they had come to watch.

According to those who attended, the atmosphere throughout the day was, appropriately enough, one of “madness” (no pun intended). Many concertgoers had been drinking heavily, and the crowd grew increasingly rowdy. Hardcore Madness fans, in particular, brought the energy of a football terrace to what was ostensibly a music festival. Those familiar with concerts at Finsbury Park have observed that such events often attracted not only music fans but also a hard-core North London element that included more than its share of hooligans looking for trouble.

After only a few songs, Morrissey’s set began to unravel. Heckling quickly escalated into a barrage of coins, bottles, and other debris hurled onto the stage.

Madness enjoyed a substantial following among skinheads and similar subcultures, despite the band’s long-established reputation for cultural inclusiveness. The hostility directed at Morrissey came from various quarters within the audience. Compounding matters, he performed before a backdrop featuring a photograph, ironically taken by a New Musical Express photographer in 1980, depicting two skinhead girls.2

During his performance of "Glamorous Glue," Morrissey unfurled a Union Jack, at times wrapping himself in the flag. Far from being an arbitrary or provocative gesture, it served as a visual accompaniment to the song's central theme. "Glamorous Glue" laments what Morrissey saw as the erosion of British identity, mourning a nation where "everything of worth on Earth" has been diminished, repeatedly declaring that "London is dead," and lamenting Britain's growing cultural deference to America with the observation, "We look to Los Angeles / For the language we use." In that context, the Union Jack represented the Britain whose traditions and distinctiveness the song suggests were slipping away, making it an entirely fitting theatrical prop rather than an expression of political ideology.

Morrissey's decision to display his country's flag inflamed both sections of the audience and elements of the music press. At the time, there appeared to be an unwritten prohibition against overt expressions of patriotism, at least within certain cultural circles. As the hostility intensified, with missiles continuing to rain onto the stage, Morrissey was ultimately forced to abandon his set after performing only nine songs.

The Aftermath

Morrissey subsequently withdrew from the festival’s second day, condemning “the abysmal behavior of a small group of loathsome yobbos.” He later softened this description, referring instead to “a small selection of rather dull North Londoners.” Given that “Glamorous Glue” is, in part, a lament for a disappearing British identity, it is ironic that fans of what was arguably London’s quintessential band responded by pelting Morrissey with objects and drowning him in abuse.

The incident was widely reported in the British music press, though seldom in a sympathetic light. New Musical Express led the charge in its 22 August 1992 issue, suggesting that Morrissey was “flirting with disaster.”

The juxtaposition of the Union Jack and the backdrop depicting two skinhead girls prompted NME to devote its front cover and nearly 6,000 words to asking whether Morrissey had gone too far at Finsbury Park. By 1992, the Union Jack had become politically contentious in many left-leaning cultural circles, where it was increasingly viewed as a symbol burdened by Britain’s imperial past and, by some, associated with the country’s far right. Against that backdrop, Morrissey’s use of the flag, even if intended merely as theatrical stagecraft, proved the equivalent of waving a bullfighter’s cape: it was almost certain to provoke a hostile reaction.

NME argued that Morrissey had long been “toying with far-right and fascist imagery, and even with racism itself,” relying upon a conveniently curated selection of lyrics and interview excerpts to support its case. Although the magazine stopped short of explicitly labeling him a racist, it nevertheless concluded that Morrissey had “continued to pick away at the scab of race relations,” leaving readers in little doubt about the conclusion they were expected to draw.

As is often the case, timing and perception proved critical. Barely a month after the festival, Q magazine published Morrissey as saying, “I don’t really think, for instance, black people and white people will ever really get on or like each other. I don’t really think they ever will.” Whatever one makes of the remark, it was widely interpreted as inflammatory and served to reinforce a public perception that was already taking shape in the aftermath of Madstock. From that point forward, subsequent interviews, lyrics, and public statements were increasingly viewed through the interpretive lens established that gray, damp Saturday in August 1992.

The Long Shadow of Madstock

Whereas many artists might have responded to the NME controversy with a carefully orchestrated apology tour, Morrissey refused to bow to the criticism. Instead, he boycotted the magazine - until then one of his staunchest supporters - for the next twelve years. Nor did he publicly address the controversy until many years later, choosing to do so through a different publication.

That opportunity came in April 2019, when Morrissey published a substantive interview on his website, Morrissey Central, conducted by his nephew, Sam Esty Rayner. Looking back nearly three decades after Madstock, he reflected at length on both the controversy and its aftermath:

Morrissey: “...if you call someone racist in modern Britain you are telling them that you have run out of words. You are shutting the debate down and running off. The word is meaningless now.”

Sam: “The Guardian want to destroy you because you said you were not a member of the ‘Loony Left’. At this stage, anything you say they will turn into a global threat to humanity.”

Morrissey: “My political stance is simple: I oppose barbarism ... from the left, from the right, or from the centre. You must finally wonder why The Guardian considers it their job to destroy ANYONE. It isn’t their job.”

Later in the interview, Morrissey argued that the press had applied a double standard to him, contrasting the reaction to his own remarks with David Bowie’s widely reported flirtations with fascist imagery and rhetoric during the 1970s:

Morrissey: “Someone made the point the other day about David Bowie’s famous ‘England would benefit from a fascist government’ comment... Could you imagine if I’d said THAT!... the press choose their targets, and ignore what it suits them to ignore.”

Beyond the Caricature

It is difficult to reconcile the caricature of Morrissey advanced by sections of the British music press - a portrayal that has largely metastasized to the point where he has become a cultural bogeyman - with the causes he has consistently championed throughout his career. During the 1980s, he was fiercely anti-Thatcher, as evidenced by “Margaret on the Guillotine.” His deeply critical views of the monarchy found their most famous expression in “The Queen Is Dead,” while his unwavering advocacy for animal rights remains best exemplified by “Meat Is Murder.” These were not passing convictions that faded with time. Indeed, as of this writing, Morrissey - who also penned “The Bullfighter Dies” in 2014 - is reported to have written to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez urging an end to bullfighting and the running of the bulls, underscoring the consistency of his commitment to animal welfare.

Such positions sit uneasily alongside the politically reactionary caricature his critics have often advanced. If anything, they suggest a worldview that has remained broadly progressive on many issues.

This raises a broader question: has Morrissey’s willingness to express views that diverged from prevailing cultural orthodoxies ultimately proven more objectionable to some commentators than the views themselves? As his opinions increasingly departed from what many regarded as acceptable discourse, criticism of his politics frequently eclipsed discussion of his music.

At what point did sections of the media, academia, and even portions of the listening public assume the role of arbiters of acceptable opinion? When did disagreement become grounds for moral condemnation rather than reasoned debate? These are questions worth asking, for ad hominem attacks and unsubstantiated accusations of racism contribute little to any serious examination of Morrissey's words or actions.

If one conclusion may reasonably be drawn from Morrissey’s public statements over the years, it is that his outlook has remained broadly progressive, albeit increasingly heterodox. The alternative - that he spent the 1980s cynically embracing those same principles only to undergo a sudden and profound ideological conversion - seems considerably less persuasive.

The Tyranny of Orthodoxy

What seems to unsettle many observers is not simply what Morrissey says, but that he insists on thinking independently. He observes, evaluates, and speaks with little regard for whether his conclusions conform to prevailing opinion. Whether expressed in interviews or through his lyrics, his views are delivered with the same uncompromising directness that has characterized his career from the beginning.

More than 160 years ago, John Stuart Mill3 warned of what he called “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling,”4 arguing that social orthodoxy can exert a more pervasive form of coercion than law itself, punishing those who refuse to conform. Morrissey’s career illustrates precisely this phenomenon. Whatever one makes of his opinions, his willingness to arrive at conclusions without regard to ideological fashion has often proven more provocative than the conclusions themselves.

The tendency to interpret every statement through an established narrative is hardly unique to Morrissey. Friedrich Nietzsche observed that “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies,”5 suggesting that deeply held assumptions can become obstacles to objective judgment. Once an individual has been assigned a particular identity, subsequent words and actions are often filtered through that preexisting conviction rather than evaluated on their own merits.

This dynamic helps explain why Morrissey has remained such a polarizing figure. To admirers, he is an independent-minded artist unwilling to subordinate his convictions to the shifting demands of public opinion. To detractors, that same independence has often been treated not as intellectual autonomy but as evidence of something more sinister. The result has been a public discourse in which disagreement is frequently interpreted as transgression, and nonconformity itself becomes a source of suspicion.

The Limits of Tolerance

Inclusiveness, tolerance, and diversity are admirable ideals. Yet those ideals lose much of their meaning when they are extended only to those whose views conform to prevailing orthodoxy. A society that celebrates diversity of identity while discouraging diversity of thought practices a tolerance that is necessarily conditional.

Genuine pluralism requires more than accepting viewpoints with which we already agree; it demands a willingness to engage with ideas that challenge, provoke, or even offend us. That does not mean suspending criticism or abandoning moral judgment. It means applying those judgments fairly, consistently, and on the basis of evidence rather than assumption.

Whether one admires Morrissey or finds him objectionable is ultimately beside the point. The more important question is whether he has been judged for what he has demonstrably said and done, or for what many have come to assume he must mean. The reaction to "Notre-Dame" is instructive. The song never identifies who supposedly "tried to kill" the cathedral, yet many critics immediately assumed it referred to Muslim extremists and condemned Morrissey accordingly. Even had the song explicitly questioned whether Islamist terrorism was responsible, asking whether investigators had too quickly discounted a particular possibility would not, in itself, constitute evidence of racial animus. To treat the mere posing of a controversial hypothesis as proof of racism is to abandon evidence in favor of inference. If accusations as serious as racism are to retain their moral force, they must rest on demonstrable evidence rather than assumption. Otherwise, the label ceases to illuminate the truth and instead becomes a substitute for engaging with what was actually said.

Perhaps the enduring significance of Madstock lies less in the performance itself than in the way it came to define Morrissey’s public reputation. More than three decades later, the controversy surrounding that afternoon in Finsbury Park continues to shape how his subsequent lyrics, interviews, performances, and public gestures are interpreted. The question, then, is not whether Morrissey has said or done things with which reasonable people may disagree (he undoubtedly has), but whether his critics have always been as willing to re-examine the assumptions that crystallized in the aftermath of Madstock as they have been to condemn the man himself.

2

Genesis and Evolution

Written during the summer of 1984, when Morrissey suggested to Johnny Marr that they should "do a song about the fair," "Rusholme Ruffians" first took shape at Jam Studios in London that July, where the Smiths recorded an early version of the song with producer John Porter. This initial attempt at the song ran for nearly seven minutes. The track emerged from a remarkably productive series of sessions that also yielded the songs later released on the William, It Was Really Nothing single ("How Soon Is Now?" and "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want"), together with "This Night Has Opened My Eyes" and an early version of "Nowhere Fast." For a brief time, "Nowhere Fast" was earmarked as the band's next single, with "Rusholme Ruffians" and "This Night Has Opened My Eyes" slated as its B-sides before those plans were quietly abandoned.1

This initial recording, since dubbed the ‘Electric Version’, was leaked in late 2010, taken from a record company CD-R created for a reissue project that was ultimately shelved. It subsequently appeared on the bootleg rarities LP The Smiths.2 Listen to the track in the following link:

Another version of the song was recorded on 1 August 1984 for the band's third session on John Peel's BBC Radio 1 program. Produced once again by Porter, it was broadcast on 9 August.

Listen to the Peel Session version here:

The definitive version of “Rusholme Ruffians” followed something of a peripatetic journey to completion. Recording began in October 1984 at Amazon Studios in Liverpool, with the Smiths - principally Johnny Marr - serving as producers and Stephen Street in the role of recording engineer. Overdubs were added the following month at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey before the final mix was completed in December 1984 at Island Records’ Fallout Shelter studio in London.

For added atmosphere, the song’s intro was dubbed with a pastiche of fairground noises taken from a BBC sound effects LP. In the final seconds of the track, after the music comes to an abrupt halt, the unmistakable sound of a cash register is heard. It is an apt coda to a song in which money, as well as “brass” - Northern slang for money - figures prominently in the lyrics:

a boy is stabbed
and his money is grabbed

an engagement ring
doesn’t mean a thing
to a mind consumed by brass

The definitive album version of “Rusholme Ruffians” is contained in the following link:

Why Rusholme?

The song's title derives from Rusholme, a working-class district of Greater Manchester located approximately two miles south of the city centre.3 During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the area expanded rapidly as rows of modest terraced houses and later large council estates were built to accommodate Manchester's growing industrial workforce. Although Morrissey was raised in nearby Stretford, Rusholme's reputation as a distinctly working-class neighborhood, and the site of the annual fair that inspired the song, made it a fitting choice for the title.

Why A Fair?

During an appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test (BBC Two), recorded in December 1984 and broadcast on 12 February 1985, a mildly animated Morrissey told presenter Mark Ellen:

“There’s a song called ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ is about going to a fair and being stabbed. Fun fairs in Manchester are very violent things. These things where communities get together for fun and frolics, etcetera, and someone always ends up being stabbed, which adds to the excitement.”

Although his matter-of-fact description of stabbings at local fairs may strike the listener as more than a little flippant, it is perhaps better understood in the context of his formative years in working-class Manchester during the 1960s and 1970s, where street violence, petty crime, and public disorder were familiar features of urban life. Long before the organized gang culture that would later define parts of south Manchester, local fairs themselves had acquired a reputation as places where drunkenness, theft, and violence often accompanied the festivities.

Yet for Morrissey, the annual fair was also one of childhood’s defining rituals. Looking back years later, he reflected, “As a child I was literally educated at fairgrounds... It was the big event. It was why everybody was alive. On threadbare Manchester council estates once a year fairs would come around. It was a period of tremendous violence, hate, distress, high romance and all the truly vital things of life.”4 The fair was more than an amusement; it was a concentrated expression of working-class life, where exhilaration and danger, romance and brutality, all unfolded within a single evening.

Recalling the Rusholme fair in particular, Morrissey explained, “In Rusholme, it was the only thing people had... It was the only pleasurable distraction and they turned it into a total horror. You couldn’t keep me away from them! I quite liked the idea of seeing people living on the emotional edge. Fascinating.”5

That observation goes to the heart of “Rusholme Ruffians.” Rather than simply recounting a violent night at the fair, the song captures the peculiar allure of a place where ordinary people briefly escaped the routines of everyday life, only to find themselves, in Morrissey's words, "living on the emotional edge" - a world where excitement and violence, romance and despair, exhilaration and disappointment existed side by side.

Rockabilly Reimagined

Musically, "Rusholme Ruffians" is propelled by a distinctly rockabilly-inspired rhythm that immediately distinguishes it from much of the Smiths' catalogue. Johnny Marr has explained that the song's distinctive sound grew out of his affection for Elvis Presley's 1961 hit "(Marie's the Name) His Latest Flame."6 Like many great songwriters, Marr treated an earlier work not as something to imitate, but as a creative springboard, transforming its rhythmic impulse into something entirely his own. According to Marr, his parents frequently played Elvis's recording when he was a child, and he became fascinated by its chord changes.

As Marr later recalled:

“That was blatantly done [copying the chord changes]. Morrissey said to me, ‘Let’s do a song about the fair,’ and for some reason my association with the fair was to pull out that Elvis riff. We tried, but we couldn’t get away from it.”7

Listen to Elvis’s recording here to hear the remarkable similarity between the two songs:

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The Song Takes Shape

The music that would eventually become “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” originated during the spring 1985 Meat Is Murder tour, when Johnny Marr composed its instrumental framework. In its embryonic form, the piece could already be heard during several of the band’s soundchecks throughout the latter stages of the tour.

The song assumed its recognizable identity in July 1985, when Morrissey supplied the lyrics. Recording commenced the following month at Drone Studios in Manchester before the track was mixed later in August at RAK Studios in London, where an accompanying promotional music video was also shot. The session was produced by Morrissey and Marr, with Stephen Street serving as recording engineer.1

Release History and Physical Presentation

The Smiths' 11th single, "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side," was released in 7-inch and 12-inch vinyl editions on 16 September 1985. The 7-inch single was backed by "Asleep," while the 12-inch edition also included "Rubber Ring." The single reached number 23 on the UK Singles Chart.

Listen to the single version of the song here:

The single’s front and reverse sleeves feature a 1949 photograph of an exuberant Truman Capote2 taken by photographer Cecil Beaton.3 Far more than an arbitrary cultural reference, Morrissey’s choice of a youthful portrait of the twenty-four-year-old Capote was almost certainly rooted in his longstanding admiration for the author, whom he frequently cited among his favorite writers.

The pairing also resonates thematically with the song itself. Morrissey later explained that the song’s “thorn” represented the music industry and, by extension, the music press - those who dismissed, misrepresented, or simply refused to believe him. Capote likewise spent much of his career struggling against a public persona that often overshadowed his literary achievements, with critics frequently focusing on his flamboyance rather than the substance of his work. Whether intentional or intuitive, the parallel is difficult to ignore. By choosing Capote’s youthful image, Morrissey presents him not merely as a literary hero but as a kindred artist whose sincerity and talent were often eclipsed by public perception. The sleeve thus functions as a visual counterpart to the song’s central theme: the frustration of an artist who longs to be understood yet finds himself persistently misunderstood.

The deadwax in the UK single’s A-side was hand-etched with “GD ARTY BLOODY FARTY,” which appears to appropriate the familiar British epithet “arty-farty.” Read alongside Morrissey’s contemporary explanation that the “thorn” represented the music industry and those who refused to believe him, the inscription is plausibly interpreted as a sardonic swipe at the critics and industry figures who dismissed both him and the Smiths.4 The opening initials “GD” remain unexplained, though they may simply intensify the insult, perhaps as an abbreviation for “Goddamned.” In the absence of any contemporary explanation from the band, however, their precise meaning remains speculative.

Because "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side" was intended for inclusion on the forthcoming The Queen Is Dead studio album, the Smiths revisited the track during the album sessions at Jacobs Studios in Farnham, Surrey, in the autumn of 1985. Rather than simply reusing the September single mix, the band reshaped the recording so that it would sit more naturally alongside the album's overall musical aesthetic. The revised version features additional guitar overdubs and a string arrangement performed by Marr on an Emulator. The principal distinction between the two versions is the expanded use of synthesized strings, which are largely absent from the original single mix, appearing only briefly during the song's coda. The recordings are readily distinguished at 0:07: on the album version, a symphonic harp anticipates Morrissey's opening vocal, whereas the original single mix features only a simple three-note marimba figure.5

Listen to the album version of the song at the following link:

More than three decades after its original recording, the demo version of “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” was released as a 7-inch single for Record Store Day on 22 April 2017. It was backed with an early Drone Studios version of “Rubber Ring” on the B-side. The sleeve artwork, credited to “Esteban” - one of Morrissey’s several aliases - features a Cecil Beaton photograph of British actor Albert Finney. The overtly political message “TRUMP WILL KILL AMERICA” was etched into the deadwax of Side A. Limited to 12,000 copies, the release became a sought-after collector’s item.

The demo version of the song was later included on the deluxe edition of The Queen Is Dead, reissued in October 2017.

Listen to the demo version of the song here:

Live History

The Smiths performed “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” 48 times in concert. It made its live debut on 22 September 1985 at the Magnum Leisure Centre in Irvine, Scotland, during the Scottish leg of the Meat Is Murder Tour. Introducing the song, Morrissey told the audience, “This is our new single...” The band continued to perform it throughout the remainder of its career, with its final Smiths performance taking place on 12 December 1986 at the Brixton Academy in London.

As a solo artist, Morrissey has performed the song 63 times to date. It entered his live repertoire on 27 April 2007 during the Greatest Hits Tour at the Bob Hope Theatre in Stockton, California.

A Video by Necessity

Despite their professed aversion to promotional music videos, the Smiths had appeared in two promotional films for "This Charming Man" in 1983. However, after Sire Records produced an unauthorized video for "How Soon Is Now?" the following year, that reluctance hardened into outright disillusionment. In late 1984, Morrissey told Melody Maker that the Smiths would "...never make a video as long as we lived."6 It was therefore something of a surprise when the band returned to the medium in 1985 with a promotional film for "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side," directed by British television filmmaker Ken O'Neill to coincide with the single's September release.

Their volte-face, however, was born of necessity rather than enthusiasm. Keen to promote the new single in the United States, Sire Records lobbied the band to produce a music video. Rough Trade was equally invested in encouraging music videos as a means of enhancing the Smiths' chart success. Morrissey and Johnny Marr reportedly resisted but eventually agreed on the condition that the film crew come to RAK Studios in London, where the Smiths were mixing “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” while simultaneously working on material that would later appear on The Queen Is Dead. According to Marr:

“We said, ‘Okay, if you want to film us you'll have to come to the studio 'cos we're not leaving. And bring lots of red wine.' It was horrible, so we just got drunk.”7

The resulting film was less an expression of the Smiths' own visual ambitions than a pragmatic compromise. Rather than constructing an elaborate concept, O'Neill captured the band in the familiar surroundings of RAK Studios, producing a restrained performance piece that reflected both the circumstances of its creation and the Smiths' lingering ambivalence toward the promotional video format.

Left largely to his own devices, O’Neill adopted an understated approach reminiscent of Tim Broad’s earlier promotional films for “This Charming Man,” placing the band in a white-walled room illuminated by soft lighting and candles. The camera focuses almost exclusively on the band’s performance, lingering over Morrissey’s expressive movements and enigmatic gaze while avoiding elaborate staging or narrative embellishment.

Not everyone was impressed, most especially the band. Marr later complained that O’Neill had “managed to make us look like twats,”8 while other critics and fans dismissed it as awkward or even embarrassing. Yet viewed today, its restraint possesses a quiet elegance. Rather than overwhelming the song with the visual spectacle and gimmickry that was standard fare on MTV at the time, O’Neill’s craftmanship allowed the tracks emotional vulnerability to remain at the forefront, complementing rather than competing with one of the Smiths’ most intimate recordings.

The promotional music video can be seen here

The Sound of the Song

Musically, “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” soars on a bed of uplifting, melodic chords that perfectly complement Morrissey’s warm, resonant baritone. Although the lyrics recount rejection and misunderstanding, his delivery, while certainly plaintive, is imbued with an unmistakable sense of hope and warmth. Throughout the song, he lingers over key words - most notably “thorn,” “side,” and “believe” - employing subtle phrasing that allows them to resonate without disrupting the track’s forward momentum. Eschewing dramatic changes in volume, Morrissey builds emotional intensity through delicate shifts in emphasis and inflection. The verses are delivered with an almost conversational intimacy, while the choruses expand into something approaching exultation.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his vocal performance, however, comes in the song’s coda. Here, Morrissey abandons words altogether in a series of non-lexical vocables that resemble a restrained form of yodeling, moving lightly between registers as the music fades. Though not yodeling in the traditional sense, the effect lends the song’s closing moments an almost ecstatic quality, reinforcing the recording’s prevailing sense of buoyancy and emotional release.

The instrumental arrangement proves every bit as compelling as Morrissey's vocal performance. Marr weaves shimmering arpeggios together with subtly syncopated rhythm figures that lend the song an almost transcendent quality. Yet the track is more musically adventurous than its reputation sometimes suggests. In later years, Marr acknowledged the influence of Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers,9 observing that “if you listen to The Smiths’ The Boy With The Thorn In His Side, the rhythm part from verse two onwards - that chick-a-chick part - it’s pure Nile Rodgers.”10 Equally significant was his decision to use a Fender Stratocaster for the first time on a Smiths recording. Although he initially sought “a twangy Hank Marvin11 sound,” the instrument ultimately produced what he described as a “quite highlify” tone.12

Collectively, the arrangement possesses a remarkable sense of lightness and movement, allowing the melody to float effortlessly even as the lyrics grapple with rejection and misunderstanding. Beneath Marr's chiming guitar, Andy Rourke's characteristically melodic bass lines and Mike Joyce's crisp, understated drumming provide a rhythmic foundation that is both gently propulsive and graceful. Indeed, it is a startling example of restraint that rather than matching the emotional wounds of the lyrics with melancholy or anger, the music instead elevates them, transforming personal grievance into something closer to affirmation.

Stylistically, “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” feels simultaneously rooted in the past and unmistakably contemporary, whether heard in 1985 or today. Blending elements of American funk, British guitar pop, and the crystalline tones of early rock and roll, the song belongs to no single era. Like the finest pop records, it sounds both old and new at once - a hallmark of truly timeless music.

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The Sound of Reinvention

Recorded at Wool Hall Studio in the village of Beckington, Somerset, England in the spring of 1987, “A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours” was produced by Johnny Marr, Morrissey, and Stephen Street. The song represents one of the most adventurous moments in the Morrissey/Marr songwriting partnership, marking a conscious departure from familiar formulas in favor of a richer, more sophisticated sound. According to Johnny Marr, the song was the result of his desire to step away from his usual ‘jangle’ style guitar. Indeed, there is no guitar at all on the track, which Andy Rourke mistakenly noted as being a “first”2 for the Smiths (in actuality, “Asleep” was the band’s first track not to contain guitar).

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Morrissey in Context: An Uncommon Voice

Morrissey is by no means the only secular popular musician to have written songs engaging with Christianity. Throughout the history of rock and popular music, artists as diverse as the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and U2 have, at one time or another, addressed subjects such as God, Jesus, prayer, redemption, and salvation. The Rolling Stones' gospel-infused "I Just Want to See His Face" expresses a yearning to behold Christ; Prince's "The Cross" meditates explicitly upon the Crucifixion; and Nick Cave has spent much of his career returning to biblical imagery and Christian themes. Perhaps the best-known example, however, is former Beatle George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," which, while primarily a hymn of devotion to the Hindu deity Krishna, deliberately blends Hindu mantras with the Christian invocations "Lord" and "Hallelujah."1

Yet examples such as these remain the exception rather than the rule. Among secular rock and pop artists, sustained engagement with Christianity is remarkably uncommon. Religious imagery certainly abounds, but it is usually employed symbolically, serving to amplify broader themes of love, alienation, suffering, rebellion, or mortality. References to God, Jesus, Heaven, or Hell more often function as literary devices than as the principal subject of a song. Works that sincerely grapple with Christian belief or doctrine remain comparatively rare outside gospel and explicitly Christian music.

It is within this context that Morrissey's body of work becomes especially distinctive. Although his years with the Smiths offered occasional glimpses of the subject, notably in songs such as The Queen Is Dead and Vicar in a Tutu, together with interviews in which he spoke candidly about his Catholic upbringing, it was only after embarking upon his solo career that Christianity emerged as one of the defining themes of his songwriting. Over the ensuing four decades, Morrissey returned repeatedly to its language, imagery, central figures, and moral framework with a consistency unmatched by virtually any of his mainstream contemporaries. While these themes are broadly Christian in character, they frequently bear the unmistakable imprint of the Catholic tradition in which he was raised. They function not merely as biblical allusions or rhetorical flourishes, but as expressions of an imaginative and moral framework that Morrissey has never fully embraced, yet from which he has never entirely escaped.

The songs examined below demonstrate that Christianity is not an incidental motif in Morrissey's writing but one of its defining intellectual and emotional currents. Whether expressed through longing, resentment, guilt, irony, doubt, or the persistent hope of redemption, the Christian imagination, often refracted through the lens of Morrissey's Catholic upbringing, remains woven into the fabric of his work, distinguishing his catalogue from that of almost every other major figure in popular music.

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Of the myriad subjects that recur throughout Morrissey's work, perhaps none is as intriguing or as deeply personal as his persistent engagement with Christianity. Although it is well known that Morrissey was raised Catholic, it is equally important to recognize that he was raised by Irish Catholic parents. The Catholicism of his childhood was therefore not merely a religious inheritance, but one filtered through the distinctive cultural traditions, sensibilities, and moral imagination of mid-twentieth-century Irish Catholicism. Appreciating this distinction is essential to understanding the lens through which Morrissey's references to God, Jesus, and Christianity should be interpreted.

Irish Blood, English Heart: The Catholic World of Morrissey's Childhood

Well into the twentieth century, Catholicism was not just the faith tradition of the vast majority of the Irish, but the bedrock of Irish national identity, social order, and moral imagination. Although never constitutionally established as the state church, Roman Catholicism functioned as Ireland's de facto national church as evidenced by Ireland’s 1937 Constitution, which declared that “The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.” This provision stood until it was removed by referendum in late 1972.

For Peter Aloysius Morrissey and Elizabeth Ann “Betty” Dwyer (Morrissey’s parents, each of whom were born and raised in Ireland before they emigrated to England in the mid-1950’s), their Catholicism was both synonymous with, and (more saliently) inseparable from what it meant to be Irish. Thus, while Morrissey is English by birth and therefore a British citizen1, his familial roots were, and are, wholly Irish.2

Young Steven Patrick Morrissey received all the primary sacraments prescribed by the Catholic faith. For readers unfamiliar with Catholicism, this involved progressing through the Church's sacramental order of initiation: Baptism, First Confession, First Holy Communion, and ultimately Confirmation.

It is therefore little surprise that Morrissey's childhood education was conducted entirely within the Catholic school system, beginning at St. Wilfrid's Roman Catholic Primary School, the equivalent of an American elementary school, situated beside St. Wilfrid's Catholic Church on Birchvale Close in Hulme. It was in that church, almost certainly, that he attended Mass and received the sacraments that marked his early religious formation.

The Faith He Could Never Entirely Escape

Morrissey's break with the Catholic faith of his childhood was remarkably prosaic, echoing the experience of countless lapsed Catholics:

“I am a seriously lapsed Catholic. It was at the usual time, 10, 11, 12, after being forced to go to church and never understanding why and never enjoying it, seeing so many negative things, and realising it somehow wasn’t for me. I can only have faith in things I see.”3

In a later interview, Morrissey expanded upon these ideas, articulating a broader critique of Catholicism and institutional religion. Although he reaffirmed his disbelief, he simultaneously acknowledged the enduring psychological and cultural imprint of the faith, before questioning the legitimacy of a system that shapes lives without consent and whose moral authority he believed had largely collapsed:

“What is instilled in you during your youth never completely leaves you, even if you aren’t prepared for it. I’m genuinely not a practising Catholic. I don’t even believe in an afterlife. But I know I’ll never entirely escape it - at least not through my own will. Perhaps it’s another kind of prison. One of many in which we’ve been confined without ever committing a crime. There must be quite a few people there. The influence of the Church is certainly damaging - sometimes even frightening. Yet at the same time it seems to have failed completely, because people simply ignore its rules and live their own lives.”4

Despite his stated reasons for abandoning Catholicism, its vocabulary never abandoned him. References to God, Jesus, the saints, Heaven, Hell, sin, redemption, and judgment recur throughout Morrissey's work, revealing an enduring engagement with the faith he professed to leave behind. Yet these allusions rarely express conventional belief. Instead, they reflect a complex and often painful struggle with a religious tradition whose moral framework he seems unable either to fully embrace or entirely escape.

Morrissey himself acknowledges this enduring hold in Autobiography, offering a nuanced reflection on his relationship with the Church that requires a degree of reading between the lines to fully appreciate. Rather than expressing an outright rejection of Catholicism, he concedes that its influence remained inescapable, even after he had long ceased to practice the faith:

“I feel no pull towards the church, but I understand that there is nothing else. Catholicism has you tracked and trailed for life with an overwhelming sense of self-doubt, and every church churns with painful pews and mourner’s stalls.”5 (emphasis added.)

Morrissey's songs do not reject Christianity outright. Rather, they depict a speaker who feels fundamentally at odds with it, though there is an undercurrent that profoundly shapes this observation: Morrissey's conflict has never been with spirituality itself so much as with temporal institutions, dogma, and moral authority. Most, though certainly not all, of his criticism is directed less at Christianity itself than at the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of those who claim to represent it. This distinction is easy to miss if one reads Morrissey's lyrics simply as anti-religious rather than as part of a long-running engagement with Catholic culture and its moral claims.

To understand this undercurrent, one must examine Morrissey’s Catholic education, an experience that profoundly shaped his understanding of the Church. In Autobiography, he recounts his years at the parochial St. Mary’s Secondary School6 in striking detail, providing valuable insight into the experiences that contributed to his estrangement from Catholicism:

“As an educational establishment, St Mary’s contained only the traditional values of negativity […] In their God-fearing, chanting morality, the teachers of St Mary’s only managed to convey nihilism and limericks. Look for one boy who left the place feeling spiritual and complete. You will never find him.”7

In another passage, Morrissey describes how St Mary’s Headmaster would lead morning prayers each school day for the assembled student body, at the conclusion of which he would call out the names of students to be taken aside to be administered corporal punishment in the form of lashings from a “thick leather strap” (treatment he tellingly describes as being a “satanic attack”). With sardonic irony, Morrissey observes of the headmaster, “…such is the heart of a man of Christian forgiveness.”8

In yet another passage, Morrissey recounts being singled out and taunted by a priest in front of his classmates, an experience that understandably left a lasting impression on the young Steven Patrick Morrissey:

“Occasionally we suffer the disdainful presence of a local priest, young and patronizing, with a name never to be recalled. Oddly, he seems to fix his curiosity upon me, possibly because I sit aloof, possibly because I do not contribute to polite laughter, possibly because of the newly tended weave in my hair.

‘And what do YOU like in life?’ he asks me, ready to play the patronizing game at my expense in order to raise a giggle from the rest of the class, thus rendering him popular for a few perverse minutes.

‘Mott the Hoople,’ I answer truthfully.

‘Oh, I see,’ he smirks, greater and grander than us all, ‘most boys like girls - he likes Mott the Hoople.’

The Catholic priest looks to the rest of the class, having given them their cue for courteous laughter. But no laughter comes, and the priest looks back at me with his face of hate, as if to warn me that there will come another time when he shall score.”9

Taken collectively, these recollections provide remarkable insight into a formative relationship with Catholicism marked less by spiritual nurture than by humiliation, fear, and disillusionment. For a young person capable of grasping the ethical ideals of the New Testament, the gulf between Christ’s teachings and the conduct of those charged with proclaiming them can be profoundly unsettling. When priests, teachers, religious figures, and even parents who preach compassion, humility, forgiveness, and charity instead exhibit cruelty, vindictiveness, or self-righteousness, the resulting dissonance is often directed not merely toward those individuals, but toward the institution they represent. For many, it is this perceived contradiction between Christian doctrine and Christian practice that becomes the catalyst for abandoning the Church, even while the moral and imaginative framework of the faith continues to exert a lasting influence.

The Christianity that recurs throughout Morrissey’s songwriting is not an abstract theology, but the lived Irish Catholic world of his childhood, with its particular preoccupation with guilt, judgment, redemption, and moral obligation.

An Enduring Dialogue

What emerges from Morrissey's work is neither a profession of faith nor a simple rejection of Christianity, but an enduring dialogue with it. Love, sexuality, longing, guilt, alienation, forgiveness, and redemption are repeatedly examined through a distinctly Christian vocabulary, even as the doctrines traditionally associated with those ideas are questioned or resisted. In this sense, Morrissey never truly leaves Catholicism behind. Rather, he continues to wrestle with it, transforming its imagery, language, and moral claims into the dramatic landscape of his songwriting. The songs examined in the second part of this essay are best understood not as attacks upon Christianity, but as chapters in that enduring dialogue with the faith that shaped his imagination and from which, by his own admission, he could never entirely escape.

Part II of this essay moves from the man to the music, examining how the faith Morrissey could never entirely escape became one of the defining themes of his songwriting.

From Soundcheck to Studio

It is believed that Johnny Marr composed the music for what would become "London" during the summer of 1986, as the song was rehearsed during a pre-show soundcheck at Centennial Hall in London, Ontario, on 30 July 1986. The Smiths, together with "fifth Smith" Craig Gannon,1 recorded it at Mayfair Studios in London in October 1986 alongside "You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby" and "Half a Person." Although produced by Morrissey and Marr, engineer Stephen Street's contribution was significant enough that he received a formal co-production credit.2

The Peel Session

Just ten days before what would prove to be their final concert at London’s Brixton Academy, the Smiths entered west London’s Maida Vale Studios with producer John Porter to record “London” along with “Is It Really So Strange?,” “Half a Person,” and “Sweet and Tender Hooligan” for their fourth and final session for John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 program, which was broadcast on 17 December 1986.

Listening to this performance today, there is little to suggest that the Smiths were nearing the end. On the contrary, the band sounds energized and fully engaged, delivering some of the most forceful and spirited performances of its final year. Rather than a group in decline, the session captures a band still operating at a remarkably high level, making its imminent dissolution all the more surprising.

The Peel version of the song can be heard in the following link:

Life Beyond the B-Side

"London" was released on 26 January 1987 as one of two B-side tracks on the 12-inch edition of "Shoplifters of the World Unite," sharing the reverse with "Half a Person." The single, the Smiths' eighteenth overall and eighth to feature a non-album A-side, reached number 12 on the UK Singles Chart.

Subsequent releases of "London" include The World Won't Listen (February 1987) and Louder Than Bombs (March 1987) compilation albums, as well as the German edition of the "Sheila Take a Bow" single (October 1987). The song later appeared on the live album Rank (September 1988), which featured the Smiths' performance at the National Ballroom in London on 23 October 1986. It was subsequently issued as a live recording on Morrissey's "The Boy Racer" single (November 1995), captured at London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 26 February 1995. The same performance was later included on the 20th Anniversary Edition of Vauxhall and I (2014). The live Rank version was subsequently featured on the compilations The Sound of The Smiths (2008) and Complete (2011), the latter of which also included the original studio recording.

Listen to the studio version of “London” in the following link:

Concert Performances

The Smiths performed “London” live 11 times, beginning on 13 October 1986 at the Sands Centre in Carlisle, England, during the fourth leg of The Queen Is Dead Tour. The song was also performed at the band’s final concert, at Brixton Academy in London on 12 December 1986, where it formed part of a one-off medley with Miserable Lie. This unique medley can be seen in the following link:

As a solo artist, Morrissey has performed “London” 41 times, beginning in February 1995 on the Boxers Tour. He most recently performed the song in March 2020 during the Live in Concert 2020 Tour.

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A Difficult Birth

Although “Sheila Take a Bow” emerged during the closing months of 1986, elements of its musical DNA can be traced back to an instrumental passage the band had been experimenting with during soundchecks as early as February of that year.1

The first attempt to record the song was scheduled for 13 December 1986 (the very next day after what would prove to be the Smiths’ final concert at Brixton Academy) with producer John Porter at Solid Bond Studios in London. English singer Sandie Shaw was invited to contribute backing vocals. The session proved fruitless as Morrissey failed to appear, reportedly due to illness, though more likely from exhaustion given the rigors of the preceding evening’s concert performance. Mike Joyce later recalled. “Sandie was getting a bit frantic. In the end she phoned up Morrissey and managed to get hold of him. She was saying, ‘Just hum me the tune down the phone that you want me to do!’ I think she took it all personally.”2

The band regrouped again in early January at Matrix Studios in London, again with both producer John Porter and Sandie Shaw. Two takes of the song were recorded: one featuring Sandie Shaw’s vocals and another incorporating what sounded like a sitar - in fact an Emulator3 played by Porter. The latter version remains in circulation among collectors.4 Listen to it here:

According to Shaw, “Morrissey had written the melody around the fifth harmony of Johnny’s tune, and because of the key and my range all I could sing was the third below. This put Morrissey and me in a two-part harmony…”5 In other words, the song's arrangement and Shaw's vocal range left her singing a lower harmony beneath Morrissey's lead vocal, creating a two-part vocal blend that ultimately failed to achieve the desired effect. Unsurprisingly, her contribution was judged unsuitable for the song. A chagrined Shaw later spoke dismissively of the track, describing it as “a horrid song,” and was reportedly disappointed that her role had been limited to backing vocals.6

Ultimately, the band was dissatisfied with Porter's production of the song. In fact, the Matrix Studios session for "Sheila Take a Bow" proved to be the last time the Smiths ever worked with him. The sitar-flavored version was shelved,7 and rather than attempt to salvage the recording, the band started again with a clean slate later that month at Good Earth Studios in London. This time, Stephen Street was enlisted to produce the recording, with Marr and Morrissey assisting him.

False Starts to Final Form

The sitar-like embellishments were discarded in favor of a far more distinctive introduction: a brief brass-band excerpt of "Shall We Gather at the River?"8 from the 1954 film Hobson’s Choice,910 which heralds the track.

For Marr, the sample exemplified the band’s desire to blur the boundaries between pop music and experimentation. Reflecting on the recording years later, he described opening a pop single with a brass-band passage as both “a subversive act” and an example of the Smiths’ ongoing effort to fuse the familiar with the unexpected.

Arguably one of the Smiths' most musically exuberant tracks (along with "Panic"), "Sheila Take a Bow" departs from the band's signature jangle-pop aesthetic. Marr abandoned the intricate arpeggios that had characterized much of his earlier work in favor of a more muscular sound infused with the swagger of glam rock. Driven by Mike Joyce's relentless backbeat, Andy Rourke's driving bass line, and Marr's punchy, tightly compressed rhythm guitar, the song projects an almost outsized energy, seeming to burst from the speakers even at low volume.

Marr later confirmed that this stylistic shift was deliberate. Hoping to recapture the glam rock energy of "Panic," he recalled, "I was going for a Mott the Hoople sound, but it ended up like Mott the Hoople as performed by the Salvation Army Band. Which is very Smiths.11

It was during these sessions that “Sheila Take a Bow” finally assumed its definitive form, transforming a troubled and repeatedly abandoned work-in-progress into one of the Smiths’ most distinctive late-period singles.12

Listen to the definitive version of the song here:

From Compilation Debut to Chart Success

The song was initially released in North America by Sire Records on 30 March 1987 on the Louder Than Bombs compilation album, a counterpart to The World Won’t Listen compilation that had been issued in the UK the prior month.

The Smiths released "Sheila Take a Bow" as a single on 13 April 1987 in the UK and Europe. Reaching No. 10, it tied 1984’s"Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" as the band's highest-charting UK single.

Following the Smiths' dissolution later that year, "Sheila Take a Bow" appeared on a number of compilation releases, including Best... I (1992), The Complete Picture (released on VHS in 1992 and later on DVD in 2000), Singles (1995), The Very Best of The Smiths (2001), The Sound of The Smiths (2008), and Complete (2011).

Candy Darling and the Secret in the Deadwax

The artwork for the single features a striking close-up profile photograph of Candy Darling,13 one of Andy Warhol's most celebrated "superstars." The image was taken from the 1971 film Women in Revolt,14 directed by Paul Morrissey and produced by Andy Warhol. As with many Smiths sleeves, the choice of imagery reflected Morrissey's eclectic taste in film, literature, and popular culture, drawing upon a wide range of visual ephemera whose origins were often unfamiliar to listeners. Rather than mirror the song's buoyant optimism, Darling's enigmatic screen presence lends the sleeve an air of faded glamour and ambiguity, standing in deliberate contrast to the song itself.

Morrissey later alluded to the selection of Candy Darling with characteristic mischief. In a 1989 interview with NME, he was asked:

“Do you have a particular Camp Hall of Fame or heroes?”

“Yes I do. Candy Darling, she was the cover of ‘Sheila Take A Bow’. To be able to inflict Candy Darling on the record buying public was a perfect example of my very dangerous sense of humour.”15

As was his wont, Morrissey employed the deadwax of the single's A-side to convey yet another message to "the highly initiated," having "COOK BERNARD MATTHEWS" etched into the runout groove of both the 7- and 12-inch editions.

Compared with many of the other enigmatic inscriptions that appeared on Smiths releases, this one was relatively straightforward. A direct reflection of Morrissey's commitment to animal rights and his vegetarian lifestyle, the message was a pointed jab at Bernard Matthews,16 founder of Bernard Matthews Foods, the United Kingdom's largest producer of turkey products.17

The Slapdash Music Video

Prior to the release of the single, both Sire Records and its parent company, Warner Bros. Records, wanted to capitalize on the growing interest in the Smiths in the United States and saw a professionally produced music video as the perfect vehicle to do so. Having previously relied on an improvised promotional clip for “How Soon Is Now?”, they were keen to ensure that “Sheila Take a Bow” received a more polished visual treatment.

To that end, they sent 25-year-old director Tamra Davis18 to England to speak with Morrissey and find enough artistic common ground to bring the project to fruition. After lengthy discussions, Davis recalled: “We bonded on our love of old Hollywood and glamour,”19 and together they devised a concept in which the Smiths would be filmed performing, intercut with clips from classic Hollywood films. Thus, plans for the promotional video moved forward.

But when the day of the shoot in Battersea, London, arrived, Davis, the other members of the Smiths, their manager Ken Friedman, and the assembled crew of technicians and production personnel were all left waiting for the singer to appear - Morrissey had reprised his earlier game of hide-and-seek as he did for the initial recording session for the song - refusing to appear for the scheduled video shoot.

Instead of frantic telephone calls to his flat, Marr et al took action to physically locate the truant singer. According to author Tony Fletcher, Marr, Davis, and Friedman made a beeline for Morrissey’s home at 66 Cadogan Square in Chelsea - about 1.5 miles away as the crow flies - in an effort to salvage the shoot. Regardless of the more eccentric aspects of Morrissey’s personality, what then transpired at his doorstep defies easy explanation. As Tamra Davis later recollected:

“Somehow we know he’s there […] but he won’t open the door. And Johnny is saying, ‘We cannot be a band if this is how you’re going to act. Come on outside right now, we’ve got to do this, we’re responsible for this video, it’s costing us money.’ I remember very distinctly that I had no idea if Morrissey was standing behind the door laughing at the three of us pleading with him, or crying, also being upset. Because he was making this sound, like a cough […] Johnny was like, ‘That’s it. The band is over…And he walks away.”20

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The Smiths recorded “Golden Lights” at London's Jam Studios in June 1986 with producer John Porter, alongside “Ask” and an early version of “Is It Really So Strange?” Craig Gannon provided rhythm guitar on the track. Just as Morrissey had bypassed Porter by having Steve Lillywhite perform the final mix on “Ask,” he handed “Golden Lights” to producer Stephen Street for mixing (or, according to some accounts, to be “f*cked up” at Morrissey's instruction1) before Porter had the opportunity to complete his own mix. As a result, the finished recording sounded markedly different from what Porter had originally envisioned, including prominent bossa nova-style guitars that Street largely muted in the final mix.2 The late English singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl contributed backing vocals.

Written by English singer-songwriter Lynn Annette Ripley3, better known by the stage name Twinkle, “Golden Lights” was released as a single in February 1965, peaking at number 21 on the UK Singles Charts the following month.4 Twinkle’s original version can be heard here:

While the Smiths remained faithful to the melody of Twinkle’s original recording, their interpretation adopted a markedly different atmosphere. Whereas Twinkle’s version is unmistakably rooted in the pop sensibilities of 1965, the Smiths transformed the song into something darker and more unsettling. Atmospheric and ethereal, and enhanced by Kirsty MacColl’s haunting backing vocals, the recording represents a significant departure from the sound and style of the original.

Although Morrissey largely retained Twinkle's lyrics, which meditate on the ways fame and success can alter a person's identity and relationships, he made several subtle revisions that intensify the song's underlying sense of disappointment, loss, and betrayal. Twinkle's "golden lights" - a likely metaphor for fame and its attendant glamour- are transformed by Morrissey from "a whole lot of fame" into a "terrible shame," while other alterations make the lyrics more direct and accusatory, placing greater emphasis on the refrain, "Why did you change?" The result is a darker, more melancholic interpretation that accentuates the emotional cost of success and the sense of personal loss already present in the original lyric.

Listen to the Smiths’ cover of the song in the following link:

Release History

The Smiths released "Golden Lights" on 20 October 1986 as a B-side to the 12-inch edition of the "Ask" single, alongside "Cemetry Gates." The song was later included on the compilation album Louder Than Bombs, released in March 1987, and subsequently appeared on the 2011 compilation Complete.

The runout groove on the B-side of the UK release was etched with the phrase “TOMB IT MAY CONCERN,” a clever pun on “To whom it may concern” that likely alludes to the cemetery imagery of “Cemetry Gates.”

The Fault Line Beneath the Music

“Golden Lights” is generally regarded by many (though not all) Smiths fans as the weakest song in the band's catalogue, owing to its unusual arrangement, Morrissey's distorted vocals, and a style that stands distinctly apart from the Smiths' main body of work. Unsurprisingly, Johnny Marr detested the track, singling it out along with “Work Is A Four Letter Word” as being the nadir of the band’s output:

"Yeah, that [recording 'Golden Lights'] was another low point. Those are the two low points of our recording career [the other being “Work Is A Four Letter Word”], certainly. They're really inferior, and don't deserve a place alongside our own material."5

One can almost picture Marr gritting his teeth in the studio while recording “Golden Lights.”

When Morrissey suggested to Marr that they record The Cookies'6 “I Want A Boy For My Birthday”7 in August 1982, Marr enthusiastically embraced the idea, recalling, “Great, this'll really freak ’em out! I was really happy to encourage it.”8 To be fair, the recording was never intended for release, having been made solely to help newly recruited bassist Dale Hibbert familiarize himself with the song - and, perhaps, the fledgling band's aesthetic - ahead of its debut performance. Indeed, the fact that Hibbert never bothered to return the recording speaks to its originally fleeting and informal purpose.9

The bonhomie that characterizes many productive creative partnerships was doubtless at play when Morrissey persuaded Marr to record a largely forgotten song by an American girl group. By 1986, however, the pair had already written a substantial body of work together, rendering the need to delve into the depths of 1960s pop obscura in search of B-sides an unnecessary exercise at best. Indeed, less than a year later, Morrissey's insistence that the Smiths record Cilla Black's “Work Is A Four Letter Word” proved to be the final straw for an exhausted and increasingly frustrated Johnny Marr.

Morrissey's Defence of Playful Perversity

Morrissey's view of “Golden Lights,” and the Smiths' other cover versions - including James' “What's the World?” - was more balanced and considerably less severe. In a 2007 Q&A on True To You, he explained:

“Everything has its place and its reason. Certainly, the early Smiths covers, for example ‘Work is a four-letter word’ and ‘Golden lights’ were done as acts of playful perversity - they weren’t meant to be groundbreaking miracles of sound. And that’s usually how it is, just a matter of throwing something unexpected into the mix.“

Covering near-forgotten songs by Twinkle and Cilla Black can reasonably be construed as a form of indulgence on Morrissey's part. By 1986, the Morrissey–Marr songwriting partnership had fully blossomed, producing a body of work that propelled the Smiths into the rarefied heights of the British indie scene and beyond. While Marr viewed such cover versions as unwelcome distractions, Morrissey saw them as playful diversions - a musical equivalent of a tonic to take the edge off the world-weary melancholia that permeated much of the Smiths' catalogue.

Morrissey’s motivation was not without precedent. One is reminded of the Beatles’ “Wild Honey Pie” from their eponymous 1968 album - a playfully anarchic musical doodle (and, to some ears, a gratingly inane one at that) inserted among songs widely regarded as the apogee of the band’s creative output. Then there is “Revolution 9,” from the same album, a piece so avant-garde that it is better described as a sound collage than a song in the conventional sense.

In the decision to release such tracks, one can discern a certain artistic confidence on the part of Lennon and McCartney. Rather than reflecting laziness or a decline in their creative powers, these recordings suggest a band that no longer felt compelled to prove itself. By that point in the Beatles’ career, the scope and quality of their work had already rendered such validation unnecessary.

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The Queen's First Death

The story of “The Queen Is Dead” actually begins with a live performance of “Barbarism Begins at Home” at the Beacon Theater in New York City on 18 June 1985 during the North American leg of the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder tour. The band closed their second consecutive night at the Beacon with “Barbarism,” during which Morrissey ad-libbed the line, “the queen is dead.”

Listen at 2:50 in the following clip to hear the added line:

This erudite reference, almost certainly drawn from the title of a story in Hubert Selby Jr.’s2 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn,3 was more than a casual literary flourish. The title’s associations with domestic abuse and social cruelty resonated closely with the themes already present in “Barbarism Begins at Home.” Nevertheless, it was likely intended at the time as little more than an offhand allusion, deployed to deepen the already unsettling atmosphere of the song.

The Queen Is Dead is the title of the second of Selby’s six loosely connected stories in Last Exit to Brooklyn. In Selby’s novel, the “Queen” is Georgette, a sharp-tongued, drug-addled transgender prostitute who is subjected to domestic abuse at the hands of her violently homophobic brother:

“She had come home one morning with one of her friends after a three day tea party with her makeup still on and her older brother slapped her across the face and told her that if he ever came home like that again hed kill him. She and her friend ran screaming from the house calling her brother a dirty fairy. After that she always called to see if her brother was in before going home.”4

Selby prefaced the story with a quotation from Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

This inclusion is profoundly ironic. A passage affirming humanity as God's creation is placed before a story in which the protagonist is abused for expressing an identity that challenges conventional notions of “male” and “female.” The result is a striking paradox: those who claim allegiance to divine order become agents of cruelty, placing society itself - not the protagonist - at odds with the spirit of the biblical text.

Within the context of “Barbarism Begins at Home” - a song that argues brutality originates not in society at large, but within its supposedly civilizing institutions: the home, the family, and the school - Morrissey’s ad-libbing of Selby’s title is yet another example of his gift for clever and ironic intertextuality in performance. At the same time, this seemingly offhand utterance on a clement June evening in New York City in 1985 marked the first appearance of a phrase that would soon lend its name to one of the Smiths’ most iconic songs.

Out of Noise, Something Beautiful

“The Queen Is Dead” was recorded by the Smiths in the autumn of 1985 at Jacobs Studios in Surrey, alongside most of the material that would appear on the album The Queen Is Dead. Morrissey and Johnny Marr produced the recording themselves, with Stephen Street serving as recording engineer. The track, in forma prima, ran in excess of seven minutes and concluded with a planned fade-out. Street recommended that it be shortened by approximately one minute and that the fading outro be removed.

Listen to the original full version of “The Queen Is Dead” here:

While Morrissey drew upon literature, contemporary events, and his own social observations in shaping the song's title and lyrics, the distinctive sound of “The Queen Is Dead” emerged through a creative synthesis of ideas brought to the studio by the entire band. Morrissey himself contributed the suggestion of opening the track with the wartime standard “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty,”5 but the song's ferocious sound owed much to Johnny Marr's enthusiasm for the Stooges, MC5,6 and other proto-punk influences including the Velvet Underground.7 When Johnny Rogan observed during a 1992 Record Collector interview that the song was “...obviously influenced by the Stooges and the MC5,” Marr readily embraced the comparison, offering a lengthy and far-ranging response:

“Yes, I just traced it back. It was Morrissey’s idea to include ‘Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty’ and he said, ‘I want this on the track’. But he wasn’t to know that I was going to lead into the feedback and drum rolls. It was just a piece of magic. I got the drum riff going and Andy got the bass line, which was one of his best ever and one that bass players still haven’t matched. I went in there with all the lads watching and did the take and they just went, ‘Wow’. I came out and I was shaking. When I suggested doing it again, they just said, ‘No way! No way!’ What happened with the feedback was I was setting my guitar up for the track and I put it onto a stand and it was really loud. Where it hit the stand, it made that note of feedback. I did the guitar track, put the guitar on the stand, and while we were talking, it was like, ‘Wow, that sounded good’. So I said, ‘Right - record that!’ It was going through a wah-wah from the previous take, so I just started moving the wah-wah and it was getting all these different intervals, and it definitely added a real tension. I loved Morrissey’s singing on that, and the words. But it was very MC58. Morrissey has a real love for that music as well. I remember him playing the Ramones as much as he played Sandie Shaw.”9

Marr later expanded upon the accidental feedback effect described above, explaining in greater technical detail how one of the recording's most distinctive sonic features emerged from the manipulation of a resonating harmonic and a wah-wah pedal:

“I’d done the rhythm track for The Queen Is Dead, and left the guitar on the stand. The wah pedal just happened to be half open, and putting the guitar down made the guitar suddenly hit off this harmonic. We were back at the desk playing back the rhythm track and I could still hear this harmonic wailing away, so we put the tape back onto record while I crept back into the booth and started opening up the wah-wah, thinking ‘Don’t die, don’t die!’ Eventually I opened up the pedal, and ‘Wooooohhhhhh!’ Kept it going, too. Great accident...”10

From Andy Rourke’s perspective, much of the song’s development owed itself to the simple expedient of extensive jamming in the studio:

“Sometimes you can go into the studio and you can play for a whole day and nothing will happen. That day magic happened and we came up with this amazing song that became the theme of the whole album.”11

Mike Joyce’s thunderous drum introduction was achieved through an innovative recording technique suggested by engineer Stephen Street. Joyce had devised a relentless rolling tom-tom pattern that gave the song its driving urgency, but found it impossible to maintain the continuous drum roll while simultaneously performing the snare fills, cymbal crashes, and other embellishments required by the arrangement. Street therefore had Joyce record the tom-tom pattern separately, sampling and looping a short section using an antiquated sampler before overdubbing the remaining drum parts.12 As Street later recalled, “We got Mike to play this rumbling rhythm and then sampled a small section of it.”13

Joyce initially regarded the process as “a bit like cheating,” but ultimately conceded that Street's approach allowed them to achieve an extraordinary sonic effect. The resulting layered drum track became one of the defining features of the recording and helped propel the song's ferocious momentum. Ironically, Joyce's concerns about reproducing the part live proved unfounded. Despite the studio trickery employed to create the recording, he successfully replicated its power and urgency in concert, a feat that should put to rest any lingering doubts about his considerable abilities as a drummer.14

Equally essential to the recording's momentum is Andy Rourke's extraordinary bass performance. Rather than merely anchoring the rhythm, his fluid and melodic playing intertwines with Marr's guitar work, adding both propulsion and complexity to the track's relentless drive. Marr's admiration for the bass line is understandable; its combination of power, movement, and melodic invention remains one of the recording's most celebrated features. The following link contains an instrumental demo of the song that showcases Rourke’s nimble bass playing in remarkable detail, revealing why, decades later, it still stands as one of the defining bass performances in the Smiths’ catalogue:

Morrissey, meanwhile, matched the intensity of the instrumental performance with one of the most urgent vocal deliveries of his career. Singing in a rapid, almost breathless cadence, he sounds less like a detached commentator than a man attempting to outrun the social decay, political malaise, and personal frustrations described in the lyrics. The result is a performance that transforms what might otherwise have been a sardonic social critique into something far more immediate and visceral.

Beyond the Monarchy

In appropriating Selby’s work for the title of the Smiths’ 1986 album and its opening track, Morrissey was almost certainly invoking not merely the words themselves, but the atmosphere of alienation, moral exhaustion, and outsider identity permeating Last Exit to Brooklyn; themes that resonated deeply with his own experience of post-war industrial England. In this sense, “The Queen Is Dead” becomes more than a provocation aimed at the monarchy15, suggesting instead the spiritual decay of an older Britain already long in decline.

Notwithstanding its beginnings, Morrissey’s finalized lyrics for the song ultimately operate on several levels at once, addressing family repression, religious hypocrisy, class consciousness, youth disaffection, sexual unease, poverty, and the suffocating rituals of everyday English life, all filtered through his characteristic mixture of irony and mordant humor.

Adding a twist to the matter, Morrissey later asserted that “The Queen Is Dead" was not to be taken too literally as being an anti-monarchist diatribe:

“It doesn't necessarily mean Queen Elizabeth. There's a safety net in the song... that the old queen in the lyrics is actually me. So when they lynch me or nail me to the cross, I have that trapdoor to slide through. But, having said that, the song is certainly a kind of general observation on the state of the nation."16

Given the notable camp references in the song ("I say, Charles, don't you ever crave / To appear on the front of the Daily Mail / Dressed in your Mother's bridal veil?" and "I'm the 18th pale descendent / Of some old queen or other"), it is reductive to read The Queen Is Dead as a straightforward anti-monarchist polemic.

Morrissey also drew upon Michael Fagan’s17 infamous 1982 trespassing incident for lyrical inspiration, with the song’s third verse contains a direct reference to it:

“So I broke into the Palace / With a sponge and a rusty spanner / She said: “Eh, I know you, and you cannot sing” / I said: “That’s nothing - you should hear me play piano”.

In July 1982, unemployed Londoner Michael Fagan exposed a series of alarming security failures when he twice breached Buckingham Palace. After an initial intrusion in which he wandered the palace undetected for nearly half an hour, Fagan returned days later, scaling the perimeter wall, evading security alarms that were mistakenly dismissed as faulty, and entering Queen Elizabeth II’s bedroom.

Startled awake, the Queen quickly left the room to summon help while palace staff and police eventually removed the intruder. The incident prompted widespread embarrassment, a critical review of palace security, and offers of resignation from senior officials. Ironically, because trespassing at Buckingham Palace was not then a criminal offence, Fagan was charged only with theft for drinking wine found inside the palace. Following psychiatric evaluation, he spent several months in a mental hospital before being released. Despite his later brushes with the law, Fagan maintained that he harbored no ill will toward the Queen, even lighting a candle in her memory after her death in 2022.

The song begins with a snippet of the aforementioned ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’, sung by actress Cicely Courtneidge18 in her role as Mavis in the 1962 film The L-Shaped Room19. This film, a favorite of Morrissey’s, is emblematic of the bleak “kitchen sink” realism that emerged in post-war British cinema, depicting lonely and socially marginalized figures navigating the emotional and material drabness of urban England. By opening “The Queen Is Dead” with a rousing piece from a largely forgotten music hall tune, Morrissey immediately situates the song within a distinctly British landscape of nostalgia, alienation, class consciousness, and national decline.

The scene from The L-Shaped Room containing the full rendition of ‘Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty’ can be seen here:

From Album Track to Single

Released on 16 June 1986, The Queen Is Dead studio album announced itself with its eponymous opening track. The album spent 22 weeks on the UK Albums Chart, peaking at number two.20 Listen to the album track here:

Whether the Smiths should have released "The Queen Is Dead" rather than "Bigmouth Strikes Again" as the lead single from the forthcoming album remains

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"Singles-wise, my favorite is 'How Soon Is Now?'... This sounds incredibly egotistical, but I wanted an intro that was almost as potent as 'Layla' - when that song plays in a club or a pub, everyone knows what it is instantly. 'How Soon Is Now' is certainly one of the most identifiable songs I've done, and it's the track most people talk to me about.”
- Johnny Marr, Guitar Player, January 1990

Students of classical Greek literature will recall the myth of Orpheus, whose lyre music was said to tame animals, bend trees toward him, move stones, still rivers, and strip human beings of all resistance to emotion. Like a modern-day Orpheus brought to life, the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” has accrued an almost mythic status: a song that seems to suspend ordinary time itself. Johnny Marr’s tremolo guitar does not merely accompany the track; it induces a trance-state, while Morrissey sings like someone suspended between confession and invocation, his voice carrying the hypnotic pull of an incantation. The result is something far removed from a conventional pop song; rather, it is a kind of spell, both haunting and emotionally inescapable. Like the myths that preceded it, the song suggests that music can do far more than merely express feeling. It can alter perception, dissolve certainty, and draw the listener into a space where desire, isolation, and even identity become temporarily inseparable.

Conceived at Earl’s Court

Over the course of a few days in June 1984 at Earl’s Court in London, a Promethean Johnny Marr composed the tunes to songs that would become “William, It Was Really Nothing,” “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want,” as well as another song that began with the working title of “Swamp,” which would eventually become “How Soon Is Now?”

"I did 'How Soon Is Now?' on a portastudio. That, 'William, It Was Really Nothing' and 'Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want', I did in a period of about four to five days when I was living in a flat in Earls Court. That was done when we needed a follow-up to 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now'. 'How Soon Is Now?' was really a good one. Musically it was a perfect cross between a sweaty swamp backing track and an intense, wired shock every few bars. I knew what I was doing with those tracks. The priority was to do 'Please Please Please' and 'William'. Then we needed the extra track and just nailed that one."1
- Johnny Marr

Standing apart from the breathless jangling melancholy of “William, It Was Really Nothing” and the chiming wistfulness of “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” - each of which contained the frequent chord changes Marr employed to spectacular effect throughout much of the Smiths’ catalogue - “Swamp” represented something markedly different. For this piece, Marr wanted to build a song around a single chord (in this case, F♯) as much as possible.

The Alchemy of “How Soon Is Now?”

Sans Morrissey, Marr, Rourke and Joyce began working in earnest on “Swamp” in July 1984 at London’s Jam Studios with producer John Porter:

“Everybody was a bit hungover from the night before. I don’t know what had gone on. (...) Johnny played me a little chord sequence which I thought was kind of interesting, but very pretty.”2

While Porter was impressed by the basic riff that Marr played for him, he thought that the song needed something else. The two then began discussing the early recordings of Elvis Presley, which led to an impromptu jam session of the song “That’s All Right.” During the jam session, Marr began to develop his chord progression, which inspired the arrangement associated with the song. As John Porter later recollected:

“[…] I seem to remember saying to him, 'Play what you think is "That's All Right"' - you know, the old Arthur Crudup3 tune. 'Play your impression of that.' So he did.”4

“So I said, 'Right, now play your chord sequence two octaves down from where you've done it, and let's bolt it on to this other part.' And that sort of happened. They did three takes.”5

Although “That’s All Right”sounds radically different from “How Soon Is Now?” on the surface, both songs draw emotional power from simple, blues-rooted structures, using repetitive groove and distinctive guitar texture to create a hypnotic, immersive atmosphere where mood matters more than musical complexity.

For the initial takes of the song, John Porter positioned microphones at varying distances around the studio in an attempt to capture a murky, atmospheric ambience - fittingly aligned with Johnny Marr’s temporary working title for the track, “Swamp.” Marr would often sustain the central F♯ chord for extraordinarily long passages, sometimes extending to sixteen bars at a time. Although only a handful of takes were recorded, enough material was generated to fill an entire reel of tape, including one sprawling performance that reportedly exceeded fifteen minutes.6

Marr later described “How Soon Is Now?” as a deliberately “worked on” attempt to create an unmistakable Smiths signature: “a track with an intro that you couldn’t forget, something that you knew straight away was The Smiths.” While much of the composition had already been demoed before entering the studio, the song’s defining tremolo effect had yet to be fully realized, though Marr later admitted that such a sound “was bound to surface on a Smiths track sooner or later,” owing largely to his growing fascination with Bo Diddley’s rhythmic guitar approach. Marr also drew inspiration from Hamilton Bohannon’s “Disco Stomp,” as well as the dual-guitar interplay heard during the instrumental break of Can’s “I Want More.”7

Marr wanted the final recording to feel “really, really tense and swampy, all at the same time,” an atmosphere that increasingly shaped the direction of the sessions as the distinctions between songwriter, producer, and engineer became progressively fluid.8

To build the effect, Porter sent the previously recorded guitar signal back through Fender Twin Reverb amplifiers configured with different tremolo rates. Marr recalled initially recording a regular rhythm guitar part with a capo at the 2nd fret on a Gibson Les Paul before routing the signal out into the live room to four Fender Twins. Rather than relying on automation, Marr and Porter manually manipulated the tremolo controls during playback in an effort to keep the oscillations synchronized with the music. “John was controlling the tremolo on two of them and I was controlling the other two,” Marr explained, “and whenever they went out of sync we just had to stop the track and start all over again.” Engineer Mark Wallis frequently rewound and restarted the tape during these attempts, and in some cases only a few usable seconds survived from each pass. Marr later summarized the process succinctly: “It took an eternity.”9

Porter also reinforced the rhythmic pulse by programming LinnDrum10 percussion patterns built around shakers, tambourines, congas, and cowbells. These signals were used to trigger a Drawmer noise gate11 that interacted dynamically with the tremolo guitars, producing a tightly controlled, swirling rhythmic motion beneath the track’s unstable analog textures. To manage the limited track count available on twenty-four-track tape, the layered guitar recordings were repeatedly combined into stereo submixes, while selected passages were additionally routed through a Leslie speaker cabinet12 to introduce further movement and spatial depth. The original extended jam was eventually reduced to an approximately eight-minute master, still unusually long by the Smiths’ standards.13

Additional overdubs were later added, most notably a slide guitar figure that Marr believed introduced the recording’s defining sense of tension. “As soon as I played that bit on the second and third strings,” he later recalled, “John Porter put an AMS harmoniser on it.”14 Porter processed these parts through an AMS DMX 15-80 harmonizer15 and delay unit capable of storing short digital snippets of audio - a remarkably advanced feature at the time. Marr further explained that “we recorded each individual string with the harmoniser, then we tuned the B string down a half step and harmonised the whole thing,”16 producing the unstable, shimmering texture that became one of the recording’s defining sonic characteristics. Engineers had already begun discovering that the device could function as a primitive sampler, and Porter deliberately emphasized delayed and pitch-shifted textures to introduce subtle instability into the recording’s sonic character. Though Porter later claimed involvement in performing one of the slide parts, Marr disagreed; nevertheless, Marr consistently credited Porter’s technical instincts as central to the final sound of the record.17

Another key overdub was the chiming guitar notes heard at the end of each verse, performed using the guitar’s natural harmonics to create a vibraphone-like texture. Marr later acknowledged that the figure closely referenced a synthesized phrase from Lovebug Starski’s “You’ve Gotta Believe,”18 a conscious nod toward contemporary dance and early hip-hop production styles that stood in contrast to the Smiths’ prevailing public image as guitar traditionalists.19

As soon as the recording session was completed, Porter sent a rough mix to Morrissey:

“It was a Saturday. I don’t think Morrissey was there. I posted it, or somebody posted it, through Morrissey’s letterbox that night and then he came in the next day with his book and sang possibly one or two takes. And it was done. I thought, ‘Right, well, now we’re starting to move into second gear. Now we’ve got something that we can sell in America. Now we’ve got a band that could be like R.E.M. are now.’ We were all really, really excited.20

Marr later remembered that when Morrissey recorded the vocal, “it was the first time we’d all heard it,” prompting Porter to jokingly misinterpret the opening lyric as “I am the sun and the air...” before realizing Morrissey was actually singing, “I am the son and the heir / of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.”21

Porter mixed the Jam Studios recording of the song at Marcus Studios, though the result differed notably from the definitive version. Morrissey’s vocals are tinged with an intrusive echo effect, while the prominence of Johnny Marr’s slide guitar part is noticeably diminished. More problematic was an experimental “dub section” that suddenly arrives at the 5:05 mark. While this addition to the song was awkward at best, Morrissey’s vocal flourishes - humming around the two-minute mark followed by muted yodeling beginning at the 4:08 mark - sound misplaced on the track. Bizarrely, the music cuts out completely at the 6:15 mark, with Morrissey immediately uttering “OK?” into the sudden and wholly deafening silence. This comment, which was clearly meant only for the recording session crew, was left in. After a few moments of continued silence the music fades back in and the song continues until it slowly fades out for a final time shortly after the seven-minute mark. Of the various sonic hiccups contained in this mix, it was the inclusion of the “OK?” that irked Morrissey the most, leading the band to reject this mix.22

Listen to the rejected Marcus Studios mix of the song in the following link:

Porter managed to salvage the song in fairly short order, performing a ground-up remix of the track using an automated desk at Eden Studios in Ealing, London. This version, which Porter later referred to as “the Remix,” was approved by the Smiths for for release and became the definitive version.23

Heir to Nothing in Particular

Morrissey quickly assembled the lyrics by culling material from various works in progress in his notebooks. The song’s opening lines - “I am the son, and the heir, of a shyness that is criminally vulgar / I am the son and heir, of nothing in particular” - were almost certainly adapted from a line in George Eliot’s2425 Middlemarch26: “To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular.”27

Eliot’s novel and “How Soon Is Now?” share a preoccupation with alienation, frustrated idealism, and the difficulty of forming authentic human connection within restrictive social worlds. In the song, the narrator is painfully self-conscious and emotionally isolated despite being surrounded by people - “There's a club, if you'd like to go / You could meet somebody who really loves you” - a circumstance that resembles that of several characters in Middlemarch. While the possibility of personal growth and meaningful companionship exists in the novel, Morrissey’s narrator in the song is left mired in melancholy and emotional paralysis (“See, I've already waited too long / And all my hope is gone.”) Both the book and the song present lives shaped by the chasm between idealism and reality.

At the risk of venturing too far into the abyss of analysis, the song becomes something of a philosophical rabbit hole filled with themes rarely encountered in a pop composition. Indeed, beneath its surface lies an extraordinary subtext largely opaque to the casual listener. From a Nietzschean and broader philosophical perspective, “How Soon Is Now?” is less a song about romantic loneliness than a meditation on alienation and identity. At its core, Morrissey appears to be singing about the modern individual’s desperate need for recognition.

Critically, the narrator defines himself not through strength or self-creation, but as “the son and heir / of a shyness that is criminally vulgar” and “of nothing in particular” - a condition that recalls Nietzsche’s vision of a post-religious world stripped of inherited meaning and certainty.28 The narrator then reveals his profound vulnerability: the insistence that “I am human and I need to be loved” expresses an all-too-familiar longing for connection that repeatedly collides with social failure, isolation, and emotional paralysis. In this sense, the song also evokes the ethos of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose work frequently portrayed modern life as spiritually hollow and emotionally estranging, leaving individuals suspended between longing and exclusion. Many of Pasolini’s characters similarly appear desperate for authentic connection in a world increasingly incapable of providing it.

“THAT Is Just Noise”: The Smiths Confront Their Own Masterpiece

Despite its prominent place within the Smiths’ catalogue, “How Soon Is Now?” was not considered representative of the band’s overall musical style. When Rough Trade Records owner Geoff Travis first heard the song, he reportedly felt it was too incongruent with the Smiths’ established sound to function effectively as a single.

Morrissey later recalled the experience in Autobiography:

“Johnny’s affectionate closeness to John Porter [producer] had finally clicked beyond price with ‘How Soon Is Now?’, and so dazed had I been that I ran from the studio with a final mix and jumped into a black cab, piling out at Collier Street, where I took the stairs five at a time and powered into Geoff’s office. Geoff swivels in a large chair and I balance on a footstool as the song plays. ‘How Soon Is Now?’ struck me as a new landmark, but once the track had ended, Geoff broke the silence: ‘WHAT is Johnny doing?’ he said. ‘THAT is just NOISE.’ The Collier Street clouds lowered, and ‘How Soon Is Now?’ resigned itself to B-side status.”29

John Porter shared Morrissey’s frustration:

[…] And Geoff [Travis of Rough Trade Records] was kind of... he didn’t really like it. Which rather deflated me. And subsequently they just put it out as a fucking B-side. I mean, they murdered it.”30

Not surprisingly, Travis’ recollection of the matter was somewhat different:

“…I remember really liking it. I think it took us a few weeks to realise how good it was. Obviously it came out as a single in its own right later. Maybe you could say we made a mistake not releasing that as the A-side (of William)."31

The Many Incarnations of “How Soon Is Now?”

Though not a physical release, the song was debuted to the public on 9 August 1984 when it was broadcast on John Peel’s BBC Radio One program. John Porter produced this version of the song, which was recorded at Maida Vale Studios, London, on 1 August 1984. Listen to the Peel version here:

Porter attempted to persuade Geoff Travis to reserve “How Soon Is Now?” for a future A-side release, believing the song possessed considerably greater commercial potential. His efforts, however, proved unsuccessful, as Travis instead elected to issue the track as the B-side to the 12-inch edition of “William, It Was Really Nothing,” released by Rough Trade on 24 August 1984 alongside “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.” The single reached No. 17 on the UK Singles Chart.32

Listen to this version, often referred to as the “12-inch version” due to its length (6:43), here:

The B-sides of both the 7- and 12-inch editions of this single were etched with the phrase “ROMANTIC AND SQUARE IS HIP AND AWARE.” This seemingly enigmatic message neatly encapsulated Morrissey’s instinct for inverting conventional notions of “cool.” At a time when emotional detachment and sexual bravado dominated popular culture, the inscription subtly reframed sensitivity, awkwardness, and romantic vulnerability not as liabilities, but as signs of emotional intelligence and self-awareness. At once playful and sincere, the message mirrored the emotional ethos at the heart of “How Soon Is Now?” itself.

The Italian release of this single is an anomaly within the Smiths’ discography, containing the rejected Marcus Studios mix of “How Soon Is Now?” on the 12-inch edition in place of the remixed Eden Studios track. It is also misprinted on the B-side label as 6:43 in length when, in fact, the Marcus Studios mix runs 7:06.

While “William It Was Really Nothing” was well received, it was “How Soon Is Now?” on its B-side that truly captured the attention of listeners. Night-time British radio picked up on the song almost immediately, and by the autumn of 1984, “How Soon Is Now?” had become one of the most requested tracks on several prominent UK radio programs.

This groundswell of popularity eventually led Rough Trade to release the song as a UK single on 28 January 1985, and only after some wrangling on the part of Geoff Travis, who was apparently chafing at the lost commercial opportunity of not having followed John Porter’s earlier advice to reserve “How Soon Is Now?” for an A-side release.

According to Morrissey, Travis reluctantly agreed to release the freshly recorded “Shakespeare’s Sister” as a single, provided that Morrissey consent to a re-release of “How Soon Is Now?” as an A-side:

“Shakespeare’s Sister bursts out one night in a snowbound studio in Surrey. I felt we had outstripped ourselves again […] To his credit, Geoff jumped into his battered Astra and chugged his way through a blizzard to hear the song at the studio, but he is not impressed with it. He lays out his compromise: ‘I’ll release this as a single if you give your approval for How soon is now? to come out first - as an A-side.’33

Unlike the respectable chart position the “William” single had achieved, the “How Soon Is Now?” single only reached No. 24 on the UK Singles Chart. This is hardly surprising considering that many fans already had the song by way of its prior B-side release the previous August. Moreover, the song was also included on the Smiths’ Hatful of Hollow compilation album, which had been released on 12 November 1984.

For the 7-inch edition of the UK single, the song was edited down to 3:41 and contained a simple fade-out at its conclusion. This version is known as the “Single Edit”. The 12-inch edition of the UK single contained the long version of the song. Listen to the Single Edit used for the UK single here:

The UK single sleeve featured a heavily cropped photo still from the 1958 film Dunkirk34, depicting actor Seán Barrett35 in prayer.

The runout groove on the A-side of the UK single was etched with the phrase “THE TATTY TRUTH.” While clearly intended with a degree of irony, Morrissey’s use of the adjective “tatty” is nevertheless revealing. Rather than presenting the song’s emotional core as some profound revelation, the inscription instead frames it as a worn, threadbare reality - an old truth rather than a new one - thereby casting the track in a more cynical light. The sentiment would later resurface more explicitly in “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me,” wherein Morrissey bleakly observes: “this story is old - I know / but it goes on.”

In North America, Sire records released the song as a single in November 1984. Because the original recording of “How Soon Is Now?” ran nearly seven minutes, Sire viewed the song as impractical for commercial American radio and single release, both of which traditionally favored shorter, more immediately accessible tracks in the U.S. market. At the behest of Sire, recording engineer Phil Brown36 created a substantially condensed 3:53 edit of the song specifically for the North American market.37

Listen to the Phil Brown edit of the song here:

Believing strongly in its commercial potential, Sire then aggressively promoted “How Soon Is Now?” following its release. A separate edit of the song appeared on a promotional “radio-only” sampler LP in the United States. At nearly 5:25 in length, this version was apparently intended as a compromise between the long version and the Phil Brown edit of the song.38 Listen to it here:

The U.S. single also abandoned the original UK and European sleeve artwork - the aforementioned cropped still from the film Dunkirk - in favor of a publicity photograph of the Smiths taken backstage at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England on 23 June 1984, the same image found inside the gatefold sleeve of the Hatful of Hollow compilation album. Apparently Sire Records considered the original artwork unsuitable for the American market, believing the subject in the image appeared to be clutching his crotch rather than holding his hands together in prayer.

The U.S. single remains the only occasion on which a portrait of the Smiths appeared on the cover of one of their releases. Morrissey derisively labeled it “an abhorrent sleeve,” lamenting what he viewed as a disregard for the band’s carefully considered visual aesthetic.39

Sire included the long version of “How Soon Is Now?” on its February 1985 release of the Smiths’ second studio album, Meat Is Murder, something Rough Trade elected not to do on the UK edition. Considering that Sire was still in the process of introducing the Smiths to an American audience, the decision made commercial sense, as “How Soon Is Now?” was among the group’s strongest and most accessible tracks. In the UK, however, the song had already been released three separate times between August 1984 and January 1985, making its omission from the British version of Meat Is Murder far less surprising, particularly given how dramatically the song stood apart

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From Maida Vale to Manchester

Built around Johnny Marr’s distinctive jangle-pop guitar riff and Morrissey’s characteristically allusive lyricism, rich with literary and cinematic references, “This Charming Man” remains one of the Smiths’ defining early recordings, crystallizing their singular musical and aesthetic identity.

According to Johnny Marr, he composed the music for the song in a scant 20 minutes:1

“Yeah, I remember writing it; it was in preparation for a John Peel single. I wrote it the same night as ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ and ‘Still Ill’ […] The way I used to work was that I’d write songs in batches of three, put them on a cassette, and give ’em to Morrissey. He’d have them pretty much finished by the next day, if not the day after that, which is something I’ve never come across before or since. Then Morrissey and I would bring them to the rehearsal room or, as we got successful, the studio.2

For his part, Morrissey described is task of adding the lyrics to Marr’s tune as almost effortless. He later recalled them as:

“just a collection of lines that were very important. They seemed to stitch themselves perfectly under the umbrella of This Charming Man.”3

The song was first recorded on 14 September 1983 at the Maida Vale Studio in London for John Peel’s BBC radio program, alongside “Back to the Old House,” “Still Ill,” and “This Night Has Opened My Eyes,” with Roger Pusey as producer. The session was broadcast one week later on 21 September.

This initial Peel Session version of the song later appeared on the Smiths’ 1984 compilation album, Hatful of Hollow. Listen to the Peel version of the song here:

As it happened, Rough Trade head Geoff Travis was present during the song’s initial recording for the Peel radio program, at the conclusion of which he reportedly exclaimed, “That’s a single.”4 This assessment was shared by the Smiths, who proceeded to record another version of the track at Matrix Studios in London with producer John Porter. This recording later became known as the “London version.”

Neither the band nor Travis, however, were satisfied with the result achieved at Matrix Studios. Although Porter proposed improving the recording through a proper mix session, Travis instead opted to have the band re-record the song entirely at Strawberry Studios in Manchester, again with Porter producing. This second recording - ultimately the definitive hit version - became known as the “Manchester version.”

Listen to a leaked instrumental demo of the song recorded at Strawberry Studios here:

Constructing the Soundscape

Sounding almost like a mad scientist describing an experiment, Marr explained in an interview the elaborate and remarkably inventive techniques he employed to achieve the song’s dense, distinctive sound:

“I’ll try any trick. With the Smiths, I’d take this really loud Telecaster of mine, lay it on top of a Fender Twin Reverb with the vibrato on, and tune it to an open chord. Then I’d drop a knife with a metal handle on it, hitting random strings. I used it on “This Charming Man”, buried beneath about 15 tracks of guitar ... it was the first record where I used those highlife-sounding runs in 3rds. I’m tuned up to F# and I finger it in G, so it comes out in A. There are about 15 tracks of guitar. People thought the main guitar part was a Rickenbacker, but it’s really a ‘54 Tele. There are three tracks of acoustic, a backwards guitar with a really long reverb, and the effect of dropping knives on the guitar – that comes in at the end of the chorus.”5

Far from mere studio gimmickry, Marr’s intricate layering of overdubbed guitar parts demonstrates both an intuitive experimentalism and an unusually sophisticated command of texture, harmony, and arrangement. Particularly impressive is the song’s shimmering complexity, not the result of surfeit, but of disciplined precision: each guitar line occupies its own carefully constructed place within the recording’s larger architecture.

Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce added a propulsive energy that was more rhythmically buoyant - even danceable - than was typical of most Smiths recordings. Rourke, in particular, provided the track with an agile, almost funk-like melodic fluidity that underpinned the arrangement. Joyce’s crisp, driving percussion complemented Marr’s shimmering layers of guitar. Collectively, they created a forward momentum marked by such lightness that “This Charming Man” feels simultaneously wistful, seductive, and exuberantly alive.

Release History and Alternate Versions

“This Charming Man” was released as a single on 28 October 1983, reaching number 25 on the UK Singles Chart. The 7-inch edition featured the definitive (Manchester) version with “Jeane” as its B-side. Listen to the definitive version of the song here:

The 12-inch edition of the single included both the Manchester and London versions of the song on its A-side along with “Accept Yourself” and “Wonderful Woman” on its B-side. Listen to the London version here:

In late 1983, New York City DJ François Kevorkian6 remixed “This Charming Man.” This version of the song, known as the “New York version,” was initially intended for limited distribution to New York club DJs; however, Geoff Travis was sufficiently impressed by Kevorkian’s mix to release it in the UK in December 1983.

Listen to the New York version here:

The B-side of Kevorkian’s remix featured an “Instrumental” sub-mix of the song, which is something of a misnomer as he retained a portion of the original song’s vocals (albeit heavily edited).

Listen to the B-side Instrumental here:

Morrissey publicly disowned Kevorkian’s remix of the song, later describing it as “an absolute thorn” and stating that he would “rather it not be there.”7 Geoff Travis later rebutted Morrissey’s criticism, stating, “It was my idea, but they agreed. They said ‘Go ahead’, then didn’t like it so it was withdrawn.” Travis added that “Nothing that ever happened in the Smiths occurred without Morrissey’s guidance; there’s not one Smiths record that went out that Morrissey didn’t ask to do, so there’s nothing on my conscience.”8

In the UK, “This Charming Man” was later included as a bonus track exclusively on the cassette edition of the band’s debut album, The Smiths.

The single was reissued in the UK in August 1992 and significantly outperformed its original release, reaching an impressive number 8 on the UK Singles Chart. In addition to the standard 7- and 12-inch vinyl editions, the reissue campaign included two limited-edition CD singles released one week apart. The first compiled the original single and B-side material, while the second collected every extant version of “This Charming Man,” including the “Manchester,” “London,” and Peel Session recordings, New York remixes by François Kevorkian, plus a bonus “Single Remix” of the London version that producer John Porter eventually completed.

Listen to the Single Remix version of “This Charming Man” here:

Cover Art, Deadwax Etchings, and Hidden Messages

While the 7-inch edition of the single featured the band’s name on its cover, it was omitted from the 12-inch edition (except for the German release of the 12-inch single).

As with virtually all Smiths singles and album covers9, the artwork for “This Charming Man” reflected Morrissey’s carefully curated visual sensibility, which drew freely from cinema, literature, popular culture, and provocative imagery. The cover featured a still image of French actor Jean Marais10 from Jean Cocteau’s11 1950 film Orpheus.12

The runout groove of the 12-inch single’s A-side was etched with the phrase “WILL NATURE MAKE A MAN OF ME YET?” This inscription, taken straight from the lyrics of “This Charming Man,” captures the song’s central anxiety regarding masculinity and identity. While “nature” ambiguously invokes biological maturity and presumptive heterosexual orientation, its framing and context within the song - suspended between yearning and irony - suggest uncertainty on the part of the

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Three years ago today (19 May 2023), Andy Rourke succumbed to pancreatic cancer.

Born Andrew Michael Rourke in Trafford on 17 January 1964, Andy grew up on the Racecourse Estate in Ashton upon Mersey, an area of Trafford that is 5 miles south of Manchester city centre. Andy’s Irish father, Michael, worked as an architect. His mother, Mary was English, making Andy the only member of the Smiths not of fully Irish descent. Andy and his three brothers were raised by their father after his mother separated from him and left the family home.

Andy received an acoustic guitar from his parents when he was seven years old. At the age of 11, he befriended a young John Maher (soon to be Johnny Marr) with whom he shared an interest in music: both attended St Augustine’s Grammar School in Wythenshawe in south Manchester. The pair spent lunch breaks in school jamming and playing on their guitars. When Marr and Rourke formed a band, Rourke switched to bass, which he fell in love with and continued to play for the rest of his career.

Leaving school at the age of 15, Andy worked a series of menial jobs while playing guitar and bass in various rock bands, including the short-lived funk band Freak Party with Marr. In December 1982, Marr invited Andy to participate in a recording session at Drone Studios in Chorlton, Manchester, with his new band, the Smiths, who were in need of a bassist. The rest, as they say, is history.

Andy’s bass playing on songs such as Barbarism Begins at Home, This Charming Man, The Queen Is Dead, and How Soon Is Now? was extraordinary, cementing his legacy as one of the greatest bass players of his generation. His rockabilly-inspired basslines on Rusholme Ruffians and Nowhere Fast further attest to the range and breadth of his prowess as a bassist.

When fabled session bassist Guy Pratt was drafted into rehearsals following Andy’s (brief) dismissal from the Smiths in early 1986, he arrived assuming that his involvement with the band was effectively a fait accompli. Surely a seasoned and experienced bass player such as Pratt was more than a match to the contributions of the recently fired Rourke. Pratt later wrote: “let’s face it, how many people would be bothered [by his replacing Andy]?”.

Pratt quickly realized that filling Andy’s shoes would be a formidable task - perhaps one he could not accomplish. Pratt marveled at the “sophistication” of what he was expected to learn. According to Pratt, his proverbial sigh of relief when it became apparent that Andy would be rejoining the Smiths was “almost palpable”.

After the Smiths dissolved in 1987, Andy performed on some of Morrissey’s early solo releases and even co-wrote a handful of songs with his former bandmate. Andy’s relationship with both Morrissey and Marr ended when he and Mike Joyce commenced legal proceedings against their former bandmates over royalties. Rourke settled out of court, and later rekindled his friendship with Marr.

Although best known for his work with the Smiths, Andy built a wide-ranging career beyond the band, collaborating with artists including Sinéad O’Connor, The Pretenders, Killing Joke, and Ian Brown. He later played with Freebass alongside members of Joy Division, New Order, and The Stone Roses, and joined D.A.R.K. with Dolores O’Riordan.

After moving to New York in early 2009, Rourke embraced a new chapter as a DJ and musician, later forming Blitz Vega and composing film music. In 2012, he married Francesca Mor. His final live appearance came in 2022, when he reunited onstage with Johnny Marr at Madison Square Garden.

Upon Andy’s passing, Morrissey released a statement on his former bandmate, the sentiment of which speaks for itself:

“Sometimes one of the most radical things you can do is to speak clearly. When someone dies, out come the usual blandishments … as if their death is there to be used. I’m not prepared to do this with Andy. I just hope … wherever Andy has gone … that he’s OK. He will never die as long as his music is heard. He didn’t ever know his own power, and nothing that he played had been played by someone else. His distinction was so terrific and unconventional and he proved it could be done. He was also very, very funny and very happy, and post-Smiths, he kept a steady identity - never any manufactured moves. I suppose, at the end of it all, we hope to feel that we were valued. Andy need not worry about that.”

Marr released a touching statement describing Andy as a “beautiful soul by those who knew him and as a supremely gifted musician by music fans“. Speaking about the early days of their friendship, Marr recollected that “We were best friends, going everywhere together [...] When we were fifteen I moved into his house with him and his three brothers and I soon came to realize that my mate was one of those rare people that absolutely no one doesn’t like.”

While they would likely have achieved success with another bassist, the Smiths would have been a very different band without the involvement of Andy Rourke. The distinctive chemistry and musical magic that defined the band would have been diminished without Andy’s melodic and inventive playing.

The enduring legacy of the Smiths stands as a testament not only to Andy’s immense talent, but also to his lasting influence on modern music.

Reflecting on his career, Rourke said: “I only wanted to play music … We knew we had something special.”