OK, that's not the stupidest thing I've ever heard. There are plenty worse. There are few others with such marvellous moments throughout. It's an album with at least 6 stone cold classics. And bathos can be a good thing. I like bathos well applied. But there are few such balefully bathetic moments as this album's low points.
Anyway, Morrissey. Morrissey and Marr. The severe dalliance. Or severed alliance. Everyone says Johnny Marr's a cool dude and everyone says he's one of the most wonderful guitar players too. That's never in doubt. Morrissey's a more controversial figure. Because he often seems such a bellend, it's quite hard to deal with.
Morrissey is, sort of, massively famous. Or at least, if he's in your sphere, he's massively famous. Broadsheet journalists write about him as if he's Michael Jackson. But he's, oddly, not actually that famous or successful. Were we to construct a list of acts who've sold more records than Morrissey, we'd probably find all kinds of irrelevances like Level 42 and Herman's Hermits and The Stereophonics there. The Smiths, though sometimes called their generation's Beatles, never had a Number 1 album and hardly had any Top 10 hits. It's a large, large cult, but no more.
I go back to my childhood to understand that. Watching Top of the Pops growing up, The Smiths, then Morrissey solo, were on it all the time with the some Number 14 single or uth-aa. And I couldn't stand it, I thought he was weird and it was always a tuneless racket.
[Incidentally, does anyone else have that, where if you grow up listening to bands before your taste is fully developed, and then it turns out they're kind of critically acclaimed, it's much harder to fully appreciate them. That's my excuse with bands like REM, New Order and U2. Well, my excuse with U2 is that they're awful, obviously. Also, incidentally, did anyone else, when they were little get the bands, all the British bands, confused. Look - Simply Red, Simple Minds, Dire Straits, U2, UB40, Level 42 - I could not tell any of them apart till about 1991.]
Anyway, getting back to The Smiths (who I confused with the Housemartins, I think), to be honest, even as I got older and listened to them on Virgin Radio or whatever, I really wasn't sold, I didn't hear much in the way of tunes. It took buying this here album in 1998 or 99 to really get it.
Once I got it, like many others, I instantly fell for it big time. Suddenly I understood what everyone had been going on about. My oh my, I Know It's Over, where's that been all my life? Then I heard Vicar in a Tutu, Never Had No one Ever and, mainly, Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others. Johnny Marr has tactfully said he prefers the music on that song to the lyrics. There are 10 songs on this album, and how can it be the greatest album of all time with two duds and one abomination. I'll ignore those songs for the rest of the time and treat 'The Queen is Dead' as a 7-track masterpiece.
The Smiths did have a perfect short career where they never released anything substandard - the first is pretty good, Meat is Murder is pretty fantastic and gets better the more you listen to it (though I hate the title track), Hatful of Hollow and Louder than Bombs are both tremendous compilations, The Queen is Dead is the zenith for most, though both protagonists cite Strangeways Here We Come as their favourite.
All great stuff, great iconography. No wonder our forebears in those dark 1980s fell so hard for them. The seven songs on 'The Queen is Dead' which I don't hate are the fearsome, funny title track, the beautiful I Know It's Over, the super-hilarious and cutting Frankly Mr Shankly, the marvellous central tunefest of Cemetry Gates, Bigmouth Strikes Again and The Boy With the Thorn His Side, and then, of course, There is a Light That Never Goes Out, which is better than most things ever.
Getting back to the puzzle of Morrissey, I've seen him just the once, second on the bill at Benicassim, I think to Franz Ferdinand (who were great, by the way).
It was kind of great, a thrill to start with, he played loads of good songs up front and then he actually played There is a Light ... and it felt like a profound life moment, and then he gave some shit patronising chat, played a few dodgy songs and it all kind of drifted and we got the beers in and waited for the headliner. For a noted wit, a lot of his chat is so lame. He has to live up to his idea of himself, and nearly always fails to, that's what I think.
Anyway, Morrissey's solo career has actually had several really great moments, I'll give him that, he's clearly a capable songwriter in his own right, but listening back to the Smiths as I've been doing lately, I really do appreciate the artistry of Johnny Marr. He's had a really good career himself, doing the job in all manner of bands and always making them better, but you do wonder if he might have done more, his arranging and compositional skill seems so vast.
Anyway, this is my compilation, it's the Smiths and Morrissey and would include anything Johnny Marr took the lead one, but nothing quite makes it.
The Headmaster Ritual
How Soon is Now?
The Boy With the Thorn in His Side
I Know It's Over
Irish Blood, English Heart - Morrissey
Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want
That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
Cemetry Gates
First of the Gang to Die - Morrissey
Well I Wonder
The Queen is Dead
This Charming Man
Everyday is Like Sunday - Morrissey
The More you Ignore Me, The Closer I Get - Morrissey
Suedehead - Morrissey
William it was Really Nothing
Panic
Bigmouth Strikes Again
Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now
There is a Light That Never Goes Out
I share really a lot of your sentiments here, although, oddly, I think my playlist would be almost enitrely different to yours (on the Smiths; you've picked all the best Morrissey solo stuff for sure). But I do share especially the difficulty of liking acclaimed bands that I didn't like when heard as a youngster. The Smiths being a prime example - I couldn't stand them on early listens, then got into them around the same time you did; guess a switch flicked in both our brains at a similar time, with no obvious prompting.
ReplyDeleteI will defend 'Some girls' as a non-abomination. The tune is too delightful to throw away, and i kind of admire Morrissey for being enough of a dick to just drop basically very silly lyrics on top of it, and then force it through the recording sessions. It does as well have a hint of TS Eliot's 'In the room the girls come and go talking of Michelangelo' which is equally maddening and yet too lyrical to comepletely reject.
He's a top class bellend, that one. But, if the internet is to be believed, a lot of people like to spend a lot of time admiring bellends.