The Smiths released The Queen Is Dead

The Queen Is Dead The Smiths

Released: June 28, 1986 Peak: 70 US, 2 UK, 29 CN, 30 AU Sales (in millions): 0.85 US, 0.3 UK, 1.25 world (includes US and UK) Genre: altnerative/new wave

Tracks: Song Title [time] (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to charts. The Queen Is Dead/ Take Me Back to Dear Old Blightly (medley) [6:24] Frankly, Mr. Shankly [2:17] I Know It’s Over [5:48] Never Had No One Ever [3:37] Cemetry Gates [2:39] Bigmouth Strikes Again [3:12] (5/19/86, 26 UK, 2 CO) The Boy with the Thorn in His Side [3:16] (9/23/85, 23 UK, 10 CO) Vicar in a Tutu [2:22] There Is a Light That Never Goes Out [4:03] (10/12/92, 25 UK, 2 CO) Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others [3:16] Lyrics by Morrissey. Music composed by Johnny Marr. Total Running Time: 36:48 The Players: Morrissey (vocals) Johnny Marr (guitar, etc.) Andy Rourke (bass) Mike Joyce (drums)

Rating: 4.556 out of 5.00 (average of 27 ratings) Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

The Kings of Mope Rock If you weren’t already aware, Morrissey invented being sad. Okay, not really. But the man born Steven Patrick Morrissey and his ragtag gang of working-class men from the gloomiest and greyest parts of Manchester called The Smiths long cultivated such a specific brand of being sad and lonely with their music that it’s almost impossible to remember that sorrow existed before The Queen Is Dead.” CQ “The original kings of British mope rock could have earned that title on the basis of this album alone.” RS Morrissey let listeners “know that their angst and alienation had a voice – an aching, unforgettable voice.” EW’12 College-rock audiences in the eighties “often listen[ed] to The Smiths…to battle the depression of adolescence, and then subsequently dismiss[ed] the band later in life along with the painful memories of youth. But that does a great disservice to a group with complex arrangements and literate lyrics that inspired Radiohead on to greatness.” RV More Than Just Morrissey’s Melancholy “The Queen is Dead is the Smiths at their most clever, politically poignant and musically adventurous.” PM “The songwriting, ever melodic with Morrissey’s instantly recognizable baritone voice, is clever and dark and mournful and self-deprecating – something that all post-Morrissey lyricists have tried and failed to emulate.” CQ “Morrissey spills out his elegant melancholy” EW’07 via “wry and witty lyrics about love (and also the eternal absence of it).” CQ And, yes, while he does explore “the feeling of an unending loneliness but the lack of want to ever rectify it” CQ he also offers “waspish observations on the British obsession with social propriety and its appetite for juicy scandal.” PR “The anti-royalist record’s lyrics had more bite than the commentary of any popular British punk group through Morrissey’s particularly English wit.” PM His “self-pitying monologues” PR are backed by the “much scruffier” TM “liquid lead guitar of janglemaster Johnny Marr.” EW’07 “Marr and the rhythm section blaze trails toward an idealized zone of rock (and sometimes pop) sunshine. Their runaway exuberance magnifies and sometimes mocks Morrissey’s gloomy desperation” TM by “forming a happy counterpoint.” ZS The mix has been described as “absolute bliss meets a razor blade.” ZS “Lots of acts have milked that contrast. But few have taken it to the delightful extremes that define the Smiths’ third album, The Queen Is Dead.” TM The album marked the group’s “great leap forward, taking the band to new musical and lyrical heights.” AM They were “in the middle of one of the greatest creative rolls that any band or artist has EVER managed.” CAD Johnny Marr’s Role “The album’s genesis seems to have been kickstarted by…Marr.” CAD Morrissey kept falling out with the group’s managers so Marr was largely running the group. AD “In the preceding year or so the band had all individually drifted down to live in London and he felt that the music was suffering as a consequence…He moved back north to a place near Manchester and urged the others to follow suit which they eventually did, renting properties nearby. Throughout the summer of 1985 Morrissey and Marr really got to work, crafting early drafts of what were to become some of their finest ever songs.” CAD Marr “created a dense web of guitars” AM “and the rich musical bed provides Morrissey with the support for his finest set of lyrics” AM and “some of his finest, most affecting songs.” AM They “focus on heartbreak and isolation with just enough beauty to provide a ray of hope among the clouds of sadness.” RV Morrissey “delivers a devastating set of clever, witty satires of British social mores, intellectualism, class, and even himself.” AM The Impact “No one could keepu up with the Smiths during their five furiously creative years together.” CM They were signed to “their often wayward independent label, Rough Trade…in 1983… [who] watched them swiftly establish themselves as the most important British group of the decade.” CM They became “a crucial presence and a touchstone for subsequent generations of young music fans.” CM On The Queen Is Dead “every strand of the Smiths’ ability was fully realized” CM in “a lifetime’s worth of revelatory music.” CM The album “explores mortality, love and redemption like few bands. This album is among the best the ‘80s pop scene had to offer and a remarkable achievement of musical artistry.” RV It is “the best album by the band that defined the genre they sprang from, if Indie/Alternative is even a genre.” CAD “The Smiths’ success brought about a resurgence of guitar-led pop in Britain after a period dominated by synthesizers.” TB They “made it possible for future independent acts such as Oasis and The Stone Roses to break into the mainstream.” PR On Queen, “The Smiths peak as both writers and performers.” AD This “is the album that best captures the droll humor and musical extravagances that made the Smiths so riveting.” TM It “defined their times and gave us one of the greatest songwriting partnerships there’s EVER been.” CAD “Forget Her Majesty — on The Queen Is Dead the Smiths simply slay us all.” EW’07 The Songs Here are thoughts on the individual songs from the album. “The Queen Is Dead” “The storming title track” AM is “full of quiet rage.” RS It is “a lyrical and musical tour-de-force.” CAD “The title track opens with a sample of ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty,’ a song written during World War I, which twists into an uncharacteristically aggressive barrage of drums from Mike Joyce – as Johnny Marr’s distorted wah-wah effect explodes alongside Morrissey’s vocal while he wails ‘Her very Lowness with her head in a sling / I’m truly sorry, but it sounds like a wonderful thing’ in an unflinching display of vitriol for English royalty.” PM “The song is a sustained burst of fantastical imagery.” CM Lyrically, the song “can be taken on (at least) three different levels. The first, and obvious one would be an attack on ‘her very Lowness’ herself and the Monarchy as a whole, in Morrissey’s opinion an outdated and irrelevant institution.” CAD “Secondly, we can take ‘The Queen’ of the title to mean Britain itself. He’s bemoaning the fact that the country is…no longer the place it used to be, broken, impoverished, a generation condemned to the dole queue by Thatcher and her “no such thing as society” mantra. Then again, the title could refer to Morrissey himself” CAD who once said it was autobiographical. CAD Regarding the music, Marr said, “I had an idea to do a song that had the aggression of the Detroit garage bands, ‘cos I’m such a Stooges fan. And it’s influenced by the Velvets too – it’s The Smiths does The Stooges does The Velvet Underground.” NME “Frankly Mr. Shankly” Frankly Mr. Shankly is “strummy social commentary” RS with its “deliciously comic music hall stomp.” CAD The “acoustic guitar lend[s] a fine contrast to the preceding track.” CAD “As a lyricist Morrissey had never been funnier…[as he mocks] Rough Trade’s boss Geoff Travis in excruciating detail.” CM As Andy Rourke said, “It was like taking the piss out of the headmaster.” NME Morrissey reached out to Linda McCartney to ask her if she would play piano on it because, as Marr said, “we were big fans of hers.” NME Unfortunately, she declined. “I Know It’s Over” “The lovely melancholy” AM of the “mellow ruminations of I Know It’s Over” PM makes for “a heartbreaking, beautiful lament, loaded with emotion and sung with epic passion.” CAD It “is a requiem for a hoped-for relationship that never truly existed.” CM Reviewer Adrian Denning called it “Morrissey’s finest five minutes and forty nine seconds as a vocalist.” AD “Never Had No One Ever” “Never Had No One Ever is more of the same in terms of feel. Not quite so inspired this time but it remains perfectly fine.” AD Both are “nihilistic odes to perpetual loneliness” CQ On this one, “murky guitars provide the backing to Moz at his most miserable.” NME Morrissey explained, “It was about the frustration that I felt at the age of 20 when I still didn’t feel easy walking around the streets…where all my family had lived…It was a constant confusion to me why I never really felt, ‘This is my patch.’” NME “Cemetry Gates” “Plagiarists receive the sharp lash of the Morrissey tongue, over a deceptively jaunty pop backing.” NME The “catchy jangle-pop of Cemetry Gates” PM makes for “a lovely, jaunty tune to close the side with a bit of humour thrown in.” CAD Morrissey presents “the great poets as trading-card superheroes, …giving his friend John Keats and William Butler Yeats and keeping Oscar Wilde for himself.” TM Engineer Stephen Street said, “It’s all the best elements of The Smiths…It’s delicate, but it’s still got power.” NME “Bigmouth Strikes Again” The second half includes “two utterly wonderful singles.” CAD First, was Bigmouth Strikes Again,” a “rampaging Stones-style rocker about saying the wrong thing.” TM It features the “curiously empathetic line, ‘Now I know how Joan of Arc felt as the flames rose to her Roman nose and her Walkman started to melt’).” TM Mike Joyce said, “What a fantastic title – one of Mozzer’s better ones. And with this song, you can see why he made journalists cream their pants.” NME Marr said, “It’s as close as getting to the sound of my heroes as we came; the early Rolling Stones. There’s no other single like it. It’s a good example of our quirkiness.” NME “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” “Rarely has Moz sounded more poetic, crooning about young love” NME on “the wistful The Boy With The Thorn in His Side.” AM This was released as a single nine months before the album came out. “Moz calls out the band’s critics” CQ in this song and “Cemetry Gates.” “Vicar in a Tutu” “The faux rockabilly of Vicar in a Tutu” AM “is simple, stupid, happy.... and brilliant.” AD It is a nod “to music hall…about a cross-dressing clergyman.” NME Street said, “It gave the album depth, a comic character song. It shows Morrisey’s sense of humor.” NME Marr says, “It’s not one of my favourites but it was a laugh.” NME “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” “The epic There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” AM is “the album’s crown jewel.” CQ It “could well be the ultimate Smiths song…Critic and author Simon Goddard has dubbed it ‘the national anthem of Smithdom.’” CAD It was finally released as a single six years later. “Morrissey dares experiment with a rare optimistic approach to love – but which, inevitably, still ends in death.” CQ It is “a joyous celebration of being hopelessly in love” CAD and yet “Morrissey typically manages to throw in some mordant humour amidst the euphoria” CAD with lines like “And if a double-decker bus, crashes into us / to die by your side, such a heavenly way to die / and if a ten ton truck, kills the both of us / to die by your side, the pleasure and the privilege is mine.” Street said, “It’s very emotive, a stunning performance. It was a great arrangement by Johnny…Up ‘til then he had been wary of using keyboards, but we wanted something different…The result is sublime.” NME “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others “is perfect to close.” AD It is “designed soley to generate a smirk.” NME “The lyrics are funny and whilst your wiping away the tears from listening to ‘There Is a Light’ gives you another emotion entirely.” AD Notes: A 2017 collector’s edition added a second disc of demos and B-sides as well as a third disc of live songs.

Resources and Related Links: DMDB encyclopedia entry for The Smiths AM AllMusic.com review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine CAD Cool Album of the Day review by Stephen Dalrymple CQ Consequence.net (9/12/2022). “The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time” CM Toby Creswell & Craig Mathieson (2012). 100 Best Albums of All Time. Hardie Grant Books. Page 102. AD Adrian Denning EW’07 Entertainment Weekly (6/18/2007). “The New Classics: Music” EW’12 Entertainment Weekly (9/27/2012). “Top 100 Albums” TM Tom Moon (2008). 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die. Workman Publishing Company, Inc.: New York, NY. NME NME.com (6/16/2016). The Incredible Full Story Behind the Smiths’ ‘The Queen Is Dead’ As Told by the Band” PM PasteMagazine.com (6/3/2024). “The 300 Greatest Albums of All Time” RV The Review (Oct./Nov. 2001). “The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time” by Clarke Speicher PR Paul Roland (2001). CD Guide to Pop & Rock. B.T. Batsford LTD: London. Pages 228-9. RS Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time TB Thunder Bay (2005). Albums: The Stories Behind 50 Years of Great Recordings. Thunder Bay Press; San Diego, CA. Page 233. WK Wikipedia ZS Zagat Survey (2003). Music Guide: 1,000 Top Albums of All Time. Coordinator: Pat Blashill. Music Editor: Holly George-Warren. Editors: Betsy Andrews and Randi Gollin. Zagat Survey, LLC: New York, NY. Other Related DMDB Pages: First posted 6/28/2012; last updated 8/25/2024.