The Smiths LANDMARK: The Queen Is Dead by: Steve Scully Tue:13-Nov-07 Label: Warner Year: 1986 WB rating 91 out of 100

In the slow-dance number, ‘I Know It’s Over’, Morrissey croons over the brilliant touch of Mike Joyce on drums, Johnny Marr’s minimalist, classic rock guitar and Andy Rourke’s all-pervasive, utterly compelling bass. Morrissey’s lyrics are as tongue-in-cheek as they are incisive:

If you’re so funny/ Then why are you on your own tonight?/ If you’re so clever/ Then why are you on your own tonight?/ If you’re so very entertaining/ Then why are you on your own tonight?/ If you’re so terribly good-looking/ Then why do you sleep alone tonight?

Beneath Morrissey’s aggression, Rourke’s bass is perfectly-paced, but exudes life as he seems almost to consciously fumble the fret runs. It’s with the utmost skill and professionalism that The Smiths deliver their parodical, cynical masterpiece. In the same song, Morrissey, in a moment of moroseness, smoothly sings, “Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head,” offering nice lyrical fodder for the self-pitying types, caught up in existential crises and revelatory moments of mortality. But don’t be mistaken and take this as the paradigmatic emotional underscore for The Queen is Dead. Instead, it’s the rare moment on the album where Morrissey’s quips, jibes and captious mockery are directed inward. But Morrissey isn’t dishonest – he most certainly acknowledges the pains of life, the hypocrisy of society (you need only look to their previous releases for that, Meat is Murder for example). Rather, all this pain, all this destruction, are just more stuff to laugh at.

Otherwise poignant sentiments are laced with such lyrical playfulness that Morrissey seems to sit on the border of comedian and tragedian: his humour, while revealing rather powerful themes, is based for the most part on derision. Whereas ‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’ could be read as an honest diatribe against the bureaucracy of the entertainment industry, it’s all done with just that hint of cynicism: “Fame, fame fatal fame/ It can play hideous tricks on the brain,” he laments, and continues to make the bold statement that “sometimes I’d feel more fulfilled/ Making Christmas cards with the mentally ill.” By the time he finally tells this Mr Shankly that he’s “a flatulent pain in the arse,” Morrissey’s lyrics have taken on so much of a comedic bent that no resounding thematic element could possibly survive.

Some may say that this superficiality – this obvious intent on deriding any person or concept that could lend itself to deeper thought – must detract from the effectiveness of a piece of art. Truthfully, Morrissey’s lyricism is so charged with energy and intellect that it makes perfect sense when sentiments like “life is very long when you’re lonely” sit side-by-side with “some girls are bigger than others/ some girls’ mothers are bigger than other girls’ mothers.”

As charged as it is with sarcasm and insidious wit, The Queen is Dead never sees The Smiths take their eyes off the ball, as they produce track-after-track of brilliant pop music. Undoubtedly, there are highlights (much-publicised highlights), but on revisiting the album some of these seem to fade amidst the lesser known tracks. For sure, ‘The Boy With The Thorn in His Side’ shows Marr’s pop/rock genius, and ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’ is a perfect pop track in which the marriage of drum and bass is enviably tight, the move to chorus subtle and smooth amid quiet synth orchestration. This is stuff everyone knows. But ‘I Know It’s Over’ is quiet and evocative, ‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’ utterly hilarious and ‘Never Had No One Ever’ an experimental precursor to the ingenuity of the likes of modern-day greats like Radiohead. The self-mockery in ‘The Queen is Dead’ is mixed with a general irreverence that a subscription to pop sensibilities is generally at odds with: “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.”

Like his favourite linguist, Oscar Wilde, Morrissey has a biting sense of humour, and on The Queen Is Dead – while he may not exhibit a Bono-esque world citizen mentality – he most definitely remains true to himself. In ‘Cemetery Gates’, he sings “Keats and Yeats are on your side/But you lose/Because Wilde is on mine,” and he couldn’t be more correct: Wilde’s most lasting sentiment was that of ‘art for art’s sake’, and while The Queen is Dead is undoubtedly a product of its time, it’s far from being purely contextual. The Smiths were a band making music for its own sake – feather boas, wacky hair-dos and all, Morrissey made this painfully obvious.