Ever
since I was first bewitched by Moz and his band of northern indie-rockers as a
student, I have loved them. I could have chosen many of their songs as my all-time
favourite, the list of camp and fabulous, funny, flamboyant little ditties is
long and the list that I love is almost as lengthy. But my absolute favourite
of their songs, and my favourite song of all time, has to be the title track
from their 1986 album, The Queen is Dead.
What
sets this song apart from the rest? It’s length for a start. Almost twice as
long as some of the other songs on the album, this is 6 minutes and 27 seconds
of magic, beginning with a fabulously low-fi sampling of music hall hit Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty. Just
as the cockneys of old hit their stride, a rousing bongo-beat cuts across the
acapella vocals and suddenly the mood becomes somewhat darker, more urgent.
Then a strange, almost female voice that could be Morrissey manipulated with
some kind of musical engineering whispers, spookily “I don't bless them!” A typically bold and unequivocal statement from The
Pope of Mope begins what are, quite frankly, some of the oddest and funniest
lyrics in British popular music.
One of the reasons that I love this song is because it tells
a story. The tale it tells is of a man on the cusp of adulthood, hemmed in by
the cheerless greenery of England and her traditions. He is clearly someone who
is keen to seek out wider horizons, but the irony is that for all his awareness
of his homes shortcomings, he could never leave our land and its “cheerless
marshes”, not least because of his unbreakable bond with it… This is, after
all, his motherland and he is “tied to his mother’s apron”, despite the deep
frustration it brings him. And God, can you hear the frustration in Morrissey’s
lyrics: trapped, maddened and as concerned with his damp quiff as he is with
love, law and poverty, our hero wanders the green gardens of England, seeing
but never quite experiencing the hedonistic delights of Thatcher’s Britain
(after all, when “peddled drugs” as a child, he sighs wearily that he “didn’t
even know what drugs were”).
But amongst all this dour longing for another land or another
life, Morrissey surprises us with bursts of wry, northern humour that never
fail to make me laugh out loud. He relays an anecdote of when he “broke into
the palace”, armed only, and for reasons known only to Morrissey himself, “with
a sponge and a rusty spanner”. The Queen apprehends him and comments that she
knows who he is but that she thinks he “cannot sing”, but unfazed by the
sovereign’s critique of his vocal abilities Morrissey comments dryly “That’s nothing;
you should hear me play piano”. He doesn’t tell us what the Queen responds to
this witty one-liner, but I can only imagine that she and the corgis chased him
out of the palace fairly swiftly. As well as this he comments briefly on a
foray into genealogy which ends, not with finding that he is a secret nobleman
but that quite simply he is “the 18th pale descendant of some old
queen or other”. You and me both Moz.
Capturing perfectly the morbid thoughts of a rebel who never
quite got into the hard stuff, Morrissey has penned an anthem for teenagers in
their bedrooms everywhere. Knowing that there is more to life than this, but
possessing neither the faculties nor wherewithal to go out and get it, the song
ends in solid, punchy low notes and a fast beat which disguises the sadness of
the tragic assertion that “life is very long when you’re lonely”. It certainly
is, but you can’t help but feel as this song ends starkly and suddenly, that
perhaps that is exactly how Morrissey likes it.
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