On this day in 1984, four Manchester boys put out an album that would change the destiny of rock and pop music forever.
My favorite image of The Smiths isn’t actually of the band itself, but of four German girls on a fairground in the early 1960s—faces stern and hair teased to extraordinary heights—taken by Beatles friend and photographer Jürgen Vollmer and eventually featured in his 1981 bookSkimming through the pages with much more famous pictures of the Hamburg-era Beatles themselves, Smiths singer Morrissey settled on two of Vollmer’s images from the collection for the front and back covers of the...
Toss the word “miserable” around to your heart’s desire, but the hyperbole, wit, pettiness, humor, arrogance and heart add up to something much more maligned: melodrama. It’s not quite camp, but more like soap opera—something historically derided and, as such, usually coded as feminine.
The result is a thunderous, bittersweet testament not only to the impenetrable bond between its two writers, but between the band and those who shared their mark of otherness. “Yes, we may be hidden by rags / But we’ve something they’ll never have” could have been the engraving on the band’s proverbial tombstone and, in a sense, it was: another uncanny, poignant moment arrived in December 1986, when the band’s first single was thein concert.
When a band as driven by obsession and moving at a rapid-fire pace as this one was is tasked with containing their essence in a 40-minute album, you can imagine roadblocks come aplenty.
Compare that decadence to something like “Still Ill,” which seems to depict the collapse of this same impossible romance that was never founded on anything besides physical want. “And though I ended up with sore lips / It just wasn’t like the old days anymore” alone encapsulates so much of Morrissey’s—and maybe our—struggle to determine the correct course of action when that once abundant desire runs out or can’t be matched by the other person involved.
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