1) The Queen Is Dead; 2) Frankly, Mr Shankly; 3) I Know It’s Over; 4) Never Had No One Ever; 5) Cemetry Gates; 6) Bigmouth Strikes Again; 7) The Boy with the Thorn in His Side; 8) Vicar in a Tutu; 9) There Is a Light that Never Goes Out; 10) Some Girls Are Bigger than Others
The Smiths hit parade. A band realising their talent after a shaky start and writing the songs that would be the base for their legacy.
Key tracks: "Cemetry Gates", "Bigmouth Strikes Again", "There Is a Light that Never Goes Out"
The Queen Is Dead is maybe not The Smiths’ best (though I mainly say that because I seriously struggle ranking their albums), but it is their most solid release, something which has a lot to do with how it’s the one album where the band themselves are operating comfortably. They were still very wet behind the ears on The Smiths, Meat Is Murder is just messy as all the dominant egos are clashing and come Strangeways, Here We Come the band were already unravelling. Each of those states had an impact on the sound of the albums themselves: on The Queen Is Dead the band is in harmony, and so is the album.
The concept most associated with The Smiths is that of obnoxiously intelligent and narcissistically witty melodramatic romantics who’d create a swiveling pop song to charm you in a second, and that’s exactly the kind of album The Queen Is Dead. Morrissey takes stabs at political establishments, lovers both would-be and already-gone, his nemeses and himself, Marr plays some of the most heavenly guitar jangles known to man like it was the easiest thing in the world and the oft-forgotten Rourke/Joyce rhythm duo make a good case for why the backbone they provide is just as essential for the band as the other two guys. The Queen Is Dead is The Smiths at their purest: no distractions or experiments, just focus on what they were best known of.
For a Smiths album The Queen Is Dead is shockingly consistent, both in quality and style. “Frankly Mr Shankly” and “Vicar in a Tutu” come closest to fluff, both being like short comedic interludes with tongue firmly planted in the cheek. But even they’re made out of the same elements that elevate the rest of the album and thus aren’t really a dip in quality – their brief levity is actually pretty fun. The rest of the song selection runs the gamut from the rollicking rockers to the sweepingly dramatic melancholy, and everyone operating together at their respective peaks brings a tone throughout that makes the tracklist feel like it might as well be a best of. And it just as well could be: the title track, “I Know It’s Over”, “Cemetry Gates”, “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” and “Some Girls Are Bigger than Others” are all among The Smiths’ best cuts. That’s whopping 70% of the tracklist and even the one remaining track not yet listed, “Never Had No One Ever”, is pretty good. The presence of “There Is a Light that Never Goes Out” alone makes for a convincing case of The Queen Is Dead being The Smiths’ most essential record: it’s not just The Smiths’ best song but one of the greatest of all time in general, full of poetically morbid and self-awaredly ridiculous hopeless romanticism and with an absolutely pristine-perfect arrangement and performance to back it up. It’s the ultimate love anthem for all the people too cool to have love anthems.
Meat Is Murder and Strangeways, Here We Come are more interesting as albums but The Queen Is Dead is the most instantly charming of The Smiths quadrilogy. It also stays that way and listening to further Smiths records rather just underlines how effortlessly lovely this one is. The only reason I’m not completely mad over it is, quite frankly, because The Smiths just never hit me on an emotionally personal level, like they do for many others: I admire, I appreciate and often I love but they never tug my soul like other acts do. But it’s easy to see why this has become their canon classic – it’s exactly what people want from The Smiths when they think about the band or read about their music, delivered in a fashion that perfectly matches their mythos.
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