The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
The Smiths · produced by Morrissey and Johnny Marr · Rough Trade · about 37 minutes
Mode
The guitar-band LP as literary persona; grievance raised to grandeur and undercut by wit
Mythos
The dead queen and the nation as her corpse; love consummated only in death, in a car on an ordinary night
Phase
Ten tracks, two sides of five; the first moves from the nation to the self and its burial, the second from comedy to the light and out on a joke
Presentation
Album; ten songs by Morrissey and Marr, about thirty-seven minutes, one of them recorded a year earlier for a single
Register
Fury, music hall, ballad, rockabilly and a pastoral with strings, in one voice comic and wounded at once
Scale
A palace, a pub, a churchyard, the streets the speaker was raised in, and a car at night
Governing Proposition
A guitar band on an independent label sends one voice, comic and wounded at once, through an England whose institutions are already dead, and finds that the only way out it can imagine is a death beside the beloved; the record sets its griefs and its jokes side by side until the jokes are the form the grief takes.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on another record. A few bars of “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty”, a music-hall song of the First World War, as it is sung in the film The L-Shaped Room (1962), long for an England to come home to. Then the drums cut it off: a driving tom-tom pattern, a fast bass line, a guitar run through wah-wah and feedback, and for six minutes the song does not let up. The nation is introduced as a sampled memory before it is declared dead. Everything that follows is lived in the country the opening has buried.
The title song walks that country. Church, pub and palace still stand, and nobody inside them believes. The speaker is an exile in his own land and then a housebreaker: he climbs into the palace with a sponge and a “rusty spanner”, and the monarch, meeting him, answers with a jibe at his singing. The queen is dead, the nation is her corpse, and the man who wanders it is armed with a household tool and a joke. There is a joke about the heir as well, one that a British single of 1986 could not have carried on daytime radio. A pop record names the monarchy and attacks it.
Rough Trade released the record in Britain on 16 June 1986, and Sire in America the same month. All ten songs are credited to Morrissey and Marr. Morrissey sings; Johnny Marr plays guitars and keyboards, Andy Rourke bass and Mike Joyce drums. “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” was recorded the year before for its single of September 1985, and “Bigmouth Strikes Again” came out as a single in May 1986. The sleeve carries a still of Alain Delon from the film L’Insoumis (1964). Five songs a side, about thirty-seven minutes; the two that run past five minutes, the title track and “I Know It’s Over”, are both on the first side.
Movement II
After six minutes of fury the record turns to the music hall it sampled at the start. “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” is a resignation letter set as a comic song: a worker tells his employer that he is leaving, and the employer is told off in a jaunty pastiche. Labour and art meet in it, and art wins by being rude. The turn is the record’s second claim, made at once. Wit is the provincial’s only weapon, and the same voice that has just declared the nation dead will spend half the record joking, so that the jokes are not relief from the grief but another way of stating it.
“Cemetry Gates”, its title misspelled on the sleeve, closes the first side brisk and bright, on acoustic guitar. Its graveyard is full of writers. The song names Keats, Yeats and Wilde, and its subject is literary theft: the autodidact building a self from lines borrowed from the dead, “Keats and Yeats” for company among the stones. The song knows what it is describing and is cheerful about it. The self it shows is made of reading, and the reading is stolen, and none of that makes it less a self. It is the record’s lightest account of its own method.
“Bigmouth Strikes Again” opens the second side on fast strummed guitars, acoustic and electric. The speaker compares himself to Joan of Arc. The backing voice is credited to “Ann Coates”, which is Morrissey’s own voice sped up, the name a pun on Ancoats, a district of Manchester: the singer is mocked by his own voice under a false name. His apology, “I was only joking”, is the record’s method in four words, grievance raised to grandeur and taken back with a grin. “Vicar in a Tutu”, a rockabilly shuffle, makes its joke at the Church, though the title track has already made it.
Movement III
The third track is a slow ballad that builds for nearly six minutes. It opens by addressing the speaker’s mother and grows by accretion, verse on verse, toward a high, sustained vocal near the end, where he imagines the soil falling on his own head. The song never releases, because nothing in it will change. The burial is extravagant enough to be comic, and it is not only comic. Whether it is self-pity or the anatomy of self-pity has never been settled, and the song supports both answers; listeners forty years on still disagree.
“Never Had No One Ever” is slower and heavier still: one long complaint with little harmonic relief, a bad dream some twenty years long, in the streets where the speaker was raised. Loneliness here is not a mood. It is a condition of class and of a city, and the form refuses relief because the speaker has none to offer. The song says one thing at length, and the length is its point, though a shorter song would lose little. Between these two tracks the first side completes its course from the nation to the self and its burial, before “Cemetry Gates” turns it to laughter.
What carries the griefs is the playing. Marr writes his guitars as an ensemble, overdubbed parts voiced like a small orchestra. Rourke’s bass on the title track moves through the register like a second melody, fast and structural, closer to Motown or the Velvet Underground than to the band’s earlier records. Joyce’s tom pattern carries six minutes without fills to lean on. Morrissey’s phrasing bends lines across the bar and against the tune, and rises into falsetto at the climb of “I Know It’s Over”. The production is at times thin. The parts are not.
Movement IV
A young person rides in a car at night with someone he loves and has no home he can go back to. He imagines dying beside the beloved, under a “ten-ton truck”, and finds the thought a happiness. It is the Liebestod, love consummated only in death, moved into a car on an ordinary night. It is also a social fact, stated without comment: a generation, and a sexuality, without a public place, for whom the only consummation that can be imagined is the end.
The form says the rest. The song is set to a lilting major tune, with strings and flute from a sampler written as countermelody, and the happiness of the music is the speaker’s happiness. Without it the song would be a lament, which it is not. It ends on a repeated phrase that does not resolve. Whether it is sincere or a joke is the record’s open question in its purest form, and the song bears both readings. The sampled strings sound like their year; they have lasted as period, not as dead matter.
It comes after “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”, the oldest recording here, made for a single the year before: chiming guitars, a lighter tempo and wordless falsetto passages that rise on beauty of line alone. Together the two make the record’s height on its second side. The light near the close answers the dead queen at the opening, the one thing in the record that does not die against the one that has. The pairing is there to be heard, but the record does not build it into a passage; it leaves the two at either end and lets the listener join them.
Movement V
The record does not end on the light. “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” opens with a guitar passage faded in and out before the song begins, then layered chiming guitars, and the record ends on a joke about bodies. After the car and the truck, a laugh. It is the law of the whole stated a last time: the grief is not allowed to stand alone, and the joke is not allowed to be merely a joke. The two most distant things on the record, the burial of the third track and the vicar of the eighth, belong to the same dead England and are spoken by the same voice.
The band ended within a year of the record. Strangeways, Here We Come, its last studio album, followed in 1987, after the split. Derek Jarman made a short film called The Queen Is Dead in 1986, set to three Smiths songs, two of them from this album. The return since has been steady: Rogan’s history in 1992, Goddard’s song-by-song study in 2002, Morrissey’s Autobiography in 2013 and Marr’s Set the Boy Free in 2016, and the demos of the 2017 reissue. The British guitar music of the following decade took the record as the standard of the album, and Britpop’s guitarists named Marr as their model.
Its limits are plain. The condition it states is one condition, the unhoused young self, and the nation is seen through that same speaker; every order the record touches passes through his grievance, and the sacred and history appear only as institutions mocked. The band’s own turn came with its first records, and here it is perfected more than left; the anti-monarchist song had gone first, in “God Save the Queen” (1977). What it has outlasted is long: the band, its label’s world, and a decade in which its singer’s public reputation fell. The record still opens on the sampled song cut off by the drums, and still ends on the joke.
Act III · The Twelve
Ten tracks in about thirty-seven minutes, most of them required by what the record says. The title track states the nation, “I Know It’s Over” and “Never Had No One Ever” the self, and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” the one way out the self can imagine. The comic songs are not decoration: “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” and “Cemetry Gates” carry the record’s second claim, that wit is the provincial’s only weapon. The subtractive test bites in two places. “Vicar in a Tutu” could go with little loss, its joke at the Church already made in the title track, and “Never Had No One Ever” says one thing at length.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The record states a condition, and it holds. The title track shows England in 1986 as a country run by institutions already dead: church, pub and palace standing, nobody inside them believing. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” shows a young person with no home to return to, for whom dying beside the beloved under a “ten-ton truck” is the only consummation imaginable: a generation, and a sexuality, without a public place. “I Know It’s Over” and “Never Had No One Ever” show loneliness as a condition of class and city, not a mood. The condition is one, the unhoused young self, stated from every side with great precision.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height comes on six of ten tracks, and the best of it is very high. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is transport: strings and flute lift a death wish into happiness, and the song ends on a repeated phrase that does not resolve. “I Know It’s Over” climbs for nearly six minutes to a held high note. The title track’s fury is also grandeur; “Never Had No One Ever” reaches dread by weight; “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” rises on wordless falsetto; the faded opening of “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” is beauty of texture alone. The other four are jokes, level by design.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth is built inside two songs and evoked across the rest. The title track builds one: the queen is dead, the nation is her corpse, and the speaker wanders it as exile and housebreaker, entering the palace with a “rusty spanner”. The particular stays particular, down to the pub and the palace bedroom, while the figure stands for a whole order’s afterlife. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” builds the Liebestod inside a car on an ordinary night. Joan of Arc in “Bigmouth Strikes Again” is evoked for a joke. The dead queen at the opening and the light near the close make a pair, but the record never builds them into a passage.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The departures are real, and they gather in the title track: six minutes of wah-wah, feedback and a bass line closer to Motown or the Velvet Underground than to the band’s earlier records, opened on a sampled music-hall song. A pop LP attacks the monarchy by name, with a joke about the heir that daytime radio in 1986 could not have carried, and sets comedy and despair side by side as one voice. On an independent label the stake was real. Held well below the top: the band’s own turn, the clean guitar group against the synthesisers of 1983, came with its first records, half this album perfects that manner, and “God Save the Queen” (1977) had gone first.
Score: 8.1 / 10
In the strongest songs the form is what the song knows. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” sets a death wish to a lilting major tune with strings: the happiness of the form is the speaker’s, and without it the song would be a lament, which it is not. “I Know It’s Over” grows by accretion and never releases, because nothing will change, and “Never Had No One Ever” refuses harmonic relief for the same reason. The sequence counts: nation to buried self on the first side, comedy to the light on the second, grief alternating with comedy as the form of the voice. “Vicar in a Tutu” and “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” are containers for a joke.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over forty years: Rogan’s history (1992), Goddard’s song-by-song study (2002), memoirs by Morrissey (2013) and Marr (2016), each reopening how the songs were made, and the demos of the 2017 reissue. On return the music keeps yielding: Marr’s guitars voiced like a small orchestra, Rourke’s bass moving through the title track like a second melody, the textures of “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”. The words yield because the question of tone never closes: is “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” sincere or a joke? The record supports both. The literature is thicker on the persona than on the sound, and the comic songs are spent on first hearing.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The record is the fullest statement of a model: a guitar band whose guitarist orchestrates and whose singer writes as a literary persona, comic and wounded at once, on an independent label. The band’s first singles set the model, and much of the reach travels under the band’s name, but this is the record that fixed it as the standard of the album. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the British independent guitar music of 1986 to 1990, which took this record as its measure; Britpop, whose guitarists named Marr as a model; the confessional, ironic male voice in indie rock in Britain and America; the indie album as a literary object.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over forty years. The record is in continuous sale and broadcast; “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” has become a standard, covered widely and used in film; bands born after 1986 play the title track. The record has outlived the band, which ended within a year of it, and its label’s world, and it has kept its audience through its singer’s fall in public reputation in the 2010s, strong evidence that the work stands apart from its author. On that evidence the top of the figure is scored partly as forecast. The sampled strings and the royal jokes are fixed to 1986, and have survived as period, not as dead matter.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing on most tracks. Marr sets overdubbed guitars as an ensemble: the wah and feedback of the title track, the chime of “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”, the faded opening of “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”. Rourke’s bass on the title track is fast, melodic and structural; Joyce’s tom pattern carries six minutes without fills to lean on. The strings and flute of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” are written as countermelody. Morrissey’s phrasing bends lines across the bar and against the melody. Held from the top: the production is at times thin, the strings are a sampler’s, and the idioms are few.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the record: the mock-heroic, grievance raised to grandeur and undercut by wit, with grief beneath the wit. The two most distant elements, “I Know It’s Over” and “Vicar in a Tutu”, obey it: the ballad’s burial is extravagant enough to be comic, and the vicar belongs to the same dead England as the title track’s church. A single speaking voice holds the whole, and one sound world, a guitar band with sparing colour, holds with it. The range, from guitar rock through music hall and rockabilly to a pastoral with strings, is moderate. Held from the top for range, not for law.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form beyond what the definition asks. The orders are many: state and monarchy in the title track; the church there and in “Vicar in a Tutu”; labour in “Frankly, Mr. Shankly”; the family, in the mother of “I Know It’s Over” and the home that cannot be returned to; erotic love, unconsummated; city and class in “Never Had No One Ever”; literature and its dead in “Cemetry Gates”; death throughout. In the title track palace, church, pub and self bear on one another. What holds the axis lowest is how they are held: every order is seen through one speaker’s grievance, and the sacred and history appear only as institutions mocked.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier IV — Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2, The Sublime at 9.0 and The Made at 9.0. Forty years of survival that has outlasted the band and its singer’s reputation, height on six of ten tracks with the best of it very high, and a making in which guitar, bass, drums and phrasing are each load-bearing.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5 — many orders present and joined in the title track, but every one seen through a single speaker’s grievance, with the sacred and history appearing only as institutions mocked. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.7 and The Swerve at 8.1: myth is built inside two songs and borne across the record by nothing, and the band’s manner is perfected more than left.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.7 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5.
Basis · the UK LP as released by Rough Trade on 16 June 1986, ten tracks in running order, two sides of five, about thirty-seven minutes; judged from knowledge of the recording, its documented making and its reception. Running times are approximate. The singles “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” (September 1985) and “Bigmouth Strikes Again” (May 1986), Derek Jarman’s short film of 1986 and the 2017 reissue with its demos are evidence, not the object. No lyric is quoted beyond a title or a fragment of four words; the words are otherwise paraphrased and the songs named.