(#311: 23 February 1985, 1 week)
Track listing: The Headmaster Ritual/Rusholme
Ruffians/I Want The One I Can’t Have/What She Said/That Joke Isn’t Funny
Anymore/Nowhere Fast/Well I Wonder/Barbarism Begins At Home/Meat Is Murder
The only connection with Born In The U.S.A. is the Vietnam one,
the cover photograph being a still from Emile de Antonio’s polemical 1968
documentary In The Year Of The Pig,
the slogan on Marine Cpl Wynn’s helmet having been altered from “MAKE WAR NOT
LOVE.” But where Springsteen’s music is dry, cracked and reserved, that of The
Smiths is fluid, focused and explosive (the big difference is Springsteen and
Morrissey’s respective attitudes to trains, as “I’m On Fire” and “Nowhere Fast”
demonstrate; the freight train running through Springsteen’s head is urgent and
painful, whereas Morrissey simply hears a distant train and finds it “sad”).
Meat Is Murder was the only one of The Smiths’ four studio albums, not counting
compilations, to make number one in the group’s lifetime. The other three all
peaked at number two, suggesting that Rough Trade did not have the resources or
the will to push the records further. Discounting the Hollies’ Greatest compilation, this was also the
first number one album achieved by any act from Manchester. It took that long?
The Smiths’ second album
was not alone among 1985 number ones in standing in pronounced opposition to
the overall trend, but its oppositional stance was by some distance the most
violent and confrontational. It was largely recorded in what Morrissey
describes in his Autobiography as
being “a predictably cheap studio in Liverpool” (Amazon Studios) and produced
by the group themselves, clearly relieved to be free of John Porter’s
classroom, although the young Stephen Street was also present as engineer.
The record has remained
somewhat undervalued, but the group wanted it to be far more representative
than their debut of what they were able to achieve onstage, and as far as
achievements – or records – go, Meat Is
Murder might be their most remarkable one. Actually, it’s more than that;
about midway through “What She Said,” even almost three decades on from when it
was made, it becomes unavoidably evident that this is one of the great British
rock ‘n’ roll albums, up there with The
Sound Of Fury and A Hard Day’s Night,
with a febrility not seen in this tale since Stupidity.
Nothing that has come
before, not even the Pistols, is really anything like what The Smiths achieve
here. I do not propose a detailed analysis of Morrissey’s lyrics, since there
are more than enough of these to be found elsewhere, and, like Eminem, one has
to be wary of paraphrasing entire sets of words. As a band, however, this album presents the performance of a group of
musicians at their absolute and most confident peak. In “What She Said,” Johnny
Marr and Mike Joyce in particular hang on to the rollercoaster with a singeing
intensity, perhaps meaning to drag British rock back to 1963 and start again,
but absorbing the lessons of everything that came after 1963. The drive and
propulsion are terrifying and predicate Foo Fighters far more than they do
Oasis.
All that really needs to
be said is that the album’s principal, and very darkly expressed, themes are
those of violence and death. Despite Morrissey’s use of words hardly glimpsed
in pop discourse such as “ghouls” and “devout,” he is most emotionally direct
when he uses no words at all; the extended yarragh
on “Headmaster Ritual” (never forget The Smiths’ irreducible Anglo-Irishness), the
wordless/indecipherable high voice alter ego that we glimpse on “That Joke” and
“Well I Wonder,” the barks and yelps in “Barbarism” (which in itself puts me in
mind of Rob Gretton at the end of “Everything’s Gone Green”). Although the “same
old suit since 1962” jibe in “Headmaster Ritual” is smart – the implication
being that the headmaster behaves as though the Beatles had never happened –
much of the album sounds like pre-Beatles pop funnelled through a New York
Dolls filter. “Well I Wonder,” for instance, could almost be Michael Cox (“Please
keep me in mind” is a very pre-Beatles pop sentiment), although the
accompanying music is far more reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac.
Likewise, “Rusholme
Ruffians” is only half “His Latest Flame”; Marr’s descending half-tone
sequences turn the song into something else. The more subtle nod to Elvis is
the false fadeout of “That Joke” which puts me in mind of “Suspicious Minds”;
the same endless, hellish cycle. “Barbarism Begins At Home” is a sort of
missing link between Spandau Ballet (it’s in the same key as “Paint Me Down”
and Marr’s chordalities are as inventive as Gary Kemp’s) and Graham Coxon’s
Blur (see #316 for the precursor to Damon Albarn’s Blur). Andy Rourke’s bass is
tirelessly creative throughout; note how the rockabilly jaunt of “Rusholme” is
underscored by a funk bassline that could have come from Larry Graham.
But the home and school
violence, the guilty second-hand fascination with violence or worse being done
to others, all culminate in the grimly funereal procession of the closing title
song (see Joy Division’s “The Eternal” for an unlikely comparison point). No
real reason or logic can be attributed to statements like “Death for no reason
is murder” – but you could say the same about “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
(perhaps the other end of this particular telescope); both are polemical
statements designed to affect the gut and help change things, and there is no
telling how many young Smash Hits
readers set about altering their lives after reading Morrissey’s patient
explanation of why he was a vegetarian. It is meant to be an unsettling coda in a year where “aid” was already being
turned into an aesthetic and political blindfold, a huge monochrome NO to the
primary-coloured YES which dominated its year. If things had been different,
the next and much apter TPL entry
would have been Songs From The Big Chair
(the therapist responding to the patient). But that was kept off number one by
entry #312, which demonstrated that the music business preferred to pretend
that The Smiths hadn’t happened.
