The “imperial phase” is a nifty concept coined by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys that describes the point in a pop performer’s career arc when they can do no wrong—that Midas-touch stretch when creative risks and commercial heights keep peaking. Signaled by its aptly regal name, The Queen Is Dead is when the Smiths crest into their own imperial moment. Morrissey’s words and delivery were never more deftly idiosyncratic or grandly moving; Johnny Marr’s guitar overflows with sparkling melody while his arrangements sustain a balance between spareness and intricacy. Rhythm section Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce supply foundation and frolic, proving once again how indispensable they were to the group’s magic. For believers, the release of The Queen Is Dead in June 1986 proved that the Smiths were the greatest group in the world.
Trouble was, there weren’t that many believers in those days. Imperial in their own minds, the Smiths could never convince enough of the pop public to agree with them that they were the crucial group of their era. It’s now so commonplace to bracket the Smiths and the Beatles together that you forget just how marginal Morrissey and his minions were in their time.
Because they believed in the Top 40 as pop culture’s central arena, the Smiths reactivated the ’60s practice of releasing lots of non-album singles. But they never came close to dominating the chart like the Beatles or the Stones. After a flurry of good-sized hits at the start of their pop career, by 1985 their singles had fallen into a disappointing pattern. Fan sales would propel “How Soon Is Now,” say, or “Shakespeare’s Sister” into the lower middle of the chart—but then the single would quickly plummet, its rapid exit seemingly hastened by the group’s appearances on “Top of the Pops,” where Morrissey’s ungainly dancing felt mesmerizingly subversive to fans but grotesque to regular eyes.
Increasingly grandiose and paranoid, the singer alleged there was a conspiracy of radio silence to suppress his profoundly serious lyrical content in favor of the trite and trivial. “In essence, this music doesn’t say anything whatsoever,” he declared of the competition. “It’s an absolute political slice of fascism to gag the Smiths.” A month after the release of The Queen Is Dead, the quartet threw down the gauntlet with non-album single “Panic,” whose war-cry chorus proposed to “hang the blessed DJ” for constantly playing music that “says nothing to me about my life.” Along with the broadcast media, the band blamed its record company, Rough Trade, for a perceived weakness on the promotional front. Geoff Travis, sorely tried boss of the illustrious independent label, remarked waspishly that Morrissey seemed to believe “he had a divine right to a higher chart position.” His wording is revealing: Divine right is something possessed by kings and queens.
The conception of Morrissey as the unacknowledged ruler of pop—as a spurned savior who could restore to British music the urgency and relevance it had during punk—is one of the shadow implications of the title The Queen Is Dead, lurking behind its overt anti-royalism. On one level, the exhilarating blast of the title track is meant to be taken as the long-awaited sequel to “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols.
But if this is punk reborn, it’s a radically camp version of it, starting with the song’s name, which is borrowed from a section about a drag queen in Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. Rather than Johnny Rotten’s full-frontal assault on the “fascist regime,” Morrissey is impertinent, declaring himself a distant relation to the royal family and breaking into the palace only to engage in arch banter with Her Majesty. (The inspiration here came from a 1982 incident in which a mentally unbalanced man snuck into the Queen’s bedroom and chatted with her.) Morrissey further suggests to Prince Charles that it would be a lark if he cross-dressed in his mother’s wedding clothes and posed on the front page of the right-wing, royals-obsessed newspaper The Daily Mail. The absurdist fantasia of Morrissey’s lyric recalls the black comedies of ’60s gay playwright Joe Orton, in which every kind of conventional propriety is riotously inverted. But under the frivolity, there’s a plaintive seriousness to the lines about castration and being tied to your mother’s apron strings: Morrissey seems to identify with Charles, who’ll never become the man he’s meant to be until his mother finally kicks the bucket.
A complex allegory about arrested development on the individual and national level, “The Queen Is Dead” starts with a sample from The L-Shaped Room, one of those British black-and-white social realist films of the early ’60s that Morrissey adores. A middle-aged woman sings “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty,” a First World War ditty of patriotic homesickness. Nostalgia folded within nostalgia, the sample—even if intended as bitterly ironic—shows Morrissey’s fatal attachment to the past. Like Rotten in “God Save the Queen,” Morrissey knows there’s no future in England’s dreaming; the country will never move forward until it abandons its imperial legacy of deluded exceptionalism. But the outlines of a future Brexit supporter are already becoming clear.
From Prince’s “Controversy” to Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” it’s always perilous when pop stars start to address their own position as public figures. Where “The Queen Is Dead” is the sort of Big Statement a band makes when it acquires a sense of its own importance, “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” is one of a group of full-blown meta-songs on the album. Morrissey appeals to the sympathy of his disciples by lamenting the far larger number of indifferent doubters out there: “How can they hear me say those words still they don’t believe me?” There is a hint of reveling in the martyr posture in “Bigmouth Strikes Again” too, what with its references to Joan of Arc going up in flames. It doubles as both a relationship song and a commentary on Morrissey as the controversialist forever getting in trouble for his caustic quips and sweeping statements.
“Frankly, Mr. Shankly” is petty as meta goes: At the time, nobody but a handful of music industry insiders could have known that it’s a mean-spirited swipe at Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis. What’s more interesting now is Morrissey’s admission of his insatiable lust for attention—“Fame fame fatal fame/It can play hideous tricks on the brain”—but nonetheless he’d “rather be famous than righteous or holy.” Couched in a jaunty music-hall bounce, the song also serves as a preemptive justification of the Smiths’ decision to break with Rough Trade for the biggest major label around, EMI.
The cleverest of the meta-pop Smiths songs of this period, though, can be found on this reissue’s second disc of B-sides and demos. Originally the flipside to “Boy With the Thorn,” “Rubber Ring” gets its name from the life-preservers you find on ships. Although his songs once saved their lives, Morrissey anticipates his fans abandoning him as they grow out of the maladjustment and amorous ineptitude in which he will remain perpetually trapped. The empty young lives will fill up with all the normal sorts of happiness, he predicts, and the Smiths records will be filed away and forgotten. “Do you love me like you used to?” Morrissey beseeches, as if he’s actually in a real romance with each and every one of his fans, acutely aware of the perversity and impossibility at work in pop’s psycho-dynamics of identification and projection.
Two other loose categories could be formed out of the songs on The Queen Is Dead: Beside the meta, there’s the merry and the melancholy. Despite the morbid (and misspelled) title, “Cemetry Gates” is sprightly and carefree. Even though they’re strolling among the gravestones quoting poetry at each other to show how intensely they feel the sorrow of mortality, the life-force is strong in these precocious youngsters. As so often with Morrissey, the frissons come with the tiny quirks of unusual word-choice or phrasing—the little jolt of the way he pronounces “plagiarize” with an incorrect hard “g,” for instance. Featuring the album’s second instance of cross-dressing, “Vicar in a Tutu” is a slight delight with just a casual twist of subversiveness in a passing reference to the priest’s kinky antics being “as natural as rain”: This freak is just as God made him. Almost cosmic in its insubstantiality, “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” seemed at the time an anticlimactic ending to such an Important Album. Now I think the understatement is just right, rather than the obvious curtain-closer, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”—the glide and glisten of Marr’s playing on “Some Girls” is that never-fading light.
And then there’s the life-and-death serious stuff. Both songs of unrequited love, “I Know It’s Over” and “There Is a Light” make a pair: The first spins majesty out of misery, the second transcends it with a sublime and nakedly religious vision of hope-in-vain as an end in itself. The writing in “I Know It’s Over” is a tour de force, from the opening image of the empty—sexless, loveless—bed as a grave, through the suicidal inversions of “The sea wants to take me/The knife wants to slit me,” onto the self-lacerations of “If you’re so funny, then why are you on your own tonight?” and finally the unexpected and amazing grace of “It’s so easy to hate/It takes strength to be gentle and kind.” Not a strong or sure singer by conventional standards, Morrissey gives his all-time greatest vocal performance, something ear-witness Johnny Marr described as “one of the highlights of my life.”
As for “There Is a Light”—if you don’t tear up at the chorus, you belong to a different species. The scenario involves another doomed affair, a love (and a life—Morrissey’s) that never really started. But here Morrissey hovers in an ecstatic suspension of yearning that becomes its own satisfaction, an emptiness that becomes a plenitude. The greatest of his many songs about not belonging anywhere or to anyone, it so very nearly tumbles into comedy (and there are those who’ve laughed) with the melodramatic excess of its image of the double-decker bus and the romantic entwining-in-death of the not-quite-lovers. But the trembling sincerity of “the pleasure, the privilege is mine” keeps it on the right side of the gravity/levity divide in the Smiths songbook.
Marginally more robust and shiny than the last time it was remastered, this new Queen comes with a couple of extra discs and a DVD that contains a promo directed by British filmmaker Derek Jarman. The demos contain differences that will interest the diehards. “Never Had No One Ever,” the album’s one real dud, is enhanced by an unlikely trumpet solo and some strange moaning from Moz. Elsewhere, you hear the singer trying out different word-choices and phrasings: The demo of “I Know It’s Over” lacks the “oh, mother” address and its bed is “icy” not “empty.” For those who like that sort of thing, there’s a live album, recorded in Boston in August 1986. Having seen them twice in their quasi-imperial prime, I never thought the Smiths were that potent as a live band: The delicate flower of Marr’s playing fared better in the studio, Morrissey’s voice strained to compete with amplified music, and the electricity came mostly from the audience’s ardour.
Being a Smiths fan during the band’s actual lifetime felt like an aesthetic protest vote signaling your alienation from both the ’80s pop mainstream and the political culture it reflected. As that context drops away with the passage of the decades, what endures is the peal of exile in Morrissey’s voice, a timeless plaint of longing and not-belonging. Without Morrissey’s tart wit and strange mind, Marr can be merely pretty, as shown by the instrumental B-sides of this era. Equally, without Marr’s beauty, Morrissey can be unbearable (as much of his post-Smiths career bears out). But when Morrissey’s sighs are caressed by Marr’s serene, synthesized strings on “There Is a Light,” or when the singer’s wordless falsetto flutters amid the guitarist’s golden cascades in “Boy with the Thorn,” there’s something miraculous about the way their textures mesh. It’s a great musical tragedy that barely a year after releasing The Queen Is Dead, this odd couple went their separate ways, for reasons that still feel not fully explained. These boys were made for each other—and surely deep down they still know it.
