Half a Person
A Song Born of Necessity
“Me and Morrissey would just disappear. Some of my favourite songs came about that way, like ‘Half a Person.’ We just locked ourselves away and did it. In the time it takes to play it, I wrote it. Morrissey was great in that respect. He knew when I was going to play something good.”1
The Smiths recorded “Half a Person” in October 1986 at Mayfair Studios in London just after it had been written. The song was recorded in the sessions for “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby” (which was intended as the band’s next single) and “London.”2 While John Porter produced the planned single, “London” and “Half a Person” were each produced by Stephen Street, Morrissey and Marr.3
Rather than following their typical bifurcated process - in which Johnny Marr would compose the core musical elements before Morrissey later added lyrics - “Half a Person” emerged from a rare real-time, face-to-face collaboration between the two, as Marr recalled when an interviewer asked him if he and Morrissey ever wrote a song together:
“Once, which was ‘Half a Person,’ that was incredibly uncanny. The morning we were supposed to do the B-side, he said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I picked up the guitar and said, ‘Maybe it should go like this?’ and he hummed the melody while I found some chords. It was done in about four minutes. We did it that one time because the tape was rolling in the next room and we hadn’t come up with anything. It was just a necessity.”4
The single version of the song can be heard in the following link:
The Smiths went on to record a slightly shorter rendition of “Half a Person” (3:31, compared to the 3:37 studio version) on 2 December 1986, this time with John Porter as sole producer, for what would prove to be the band’s final appearance on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 program (broadcast 17 December 1986). This recording diverges notably from the studio version produced by Morrissey, Marr, and Street: Morrissey’s vocals are treated with a pronounced echo and recede into the mix, while the instrumentation is brought forward with greater prominence.
Listen to the Peel version in the following link:
A number of white-label test pressings of the anticipated “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby” single were manufactured before the project was halted in favor of “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” which the band had recorded in November 1986.
For Morrissey, this decision sprang from an aesthetic and qualitative standpoint; he wasn’t pleased with Porter’s mix of the song. Johnny Marr’s assessment, by contrast, was strictly pragmatic: “Shoplifters was the better record.”5
Consequently, The Smiths’ 18th single, “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” featured the Mayfair Studios version of “Half a Person” as its B-side (along with “London” on the 12-inch edition6) when released on 26 January 1987. The single reached number 12 in the UK singles chart.
“Half a Person” appeared as the B-side to the France-only release of the “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” single (also issued in January 1987), which famously featured the “ice lolly” cover art.
The song was also included on the German release of the “Sheila Take a Bow” CD single, issued in April 1987 - effectively a mini-album in all but name, containing a whopping seven tracks.
“Half a Person” has also appeared on several compilation albums over the years, including The World Won’t Listen (February 1987); Louder Than Bombs (March 1987); Best… I (August 1992); the deluxe edition of The Sound of The Smiths (November 2008); and Complete (September 2011).
The single’s cover art features a 19 year old Elvis Presley in his first official press photograph, a gelatin silver print portrait that was heavily cropped and slightly pitched for the single. Taken by Memphis based photographer James Reid on 26 July 19547 (shortly after the release of “That’s All Right”8), the image conveys Elvis’s early "Hillbilly Cat" aesthetic before he became a global star.
Elvis’s visage exudes a sense of grit and quiet determination. Re-touched to suggest a sharp forward lean, the image conveys the impression of a young man looking toward what lies ahead, poised on the very cusp of stardom and success. Or perhaps the cover captures Presley gazing into the abyss of celebrity - its uncharted waters filled with dangers yet unknown. The washed-out quality of the image as it appears on the single cover lends it a distinct vintage character; some might even say it imparts an otherworldly feel, acting as a subtle portent of what is to come.
Morrissey’s admiration for Elvis Presley is profound, functioning as a lasting model of artistic impact and cultural presence of near-mythic proportion. With The Smiths, he incorporated Elvis directly into performance by opening “Rusholme Ruffians” with verses from Elvis’s “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame.”9 The Smiths are even said to have recorded an unreleased cover of “(Now And Then There's) A Fool Such As I”10
Both with the Smiths and in his solo work, Morrissey continued to draw on Elvis’s
