Don’t forget the songs (Part one)
I tend to be the place where those social media posts end. You know the ones?….
“I have been challenged to name my favourite ten houseplants/Sanitary products/Flavours of Rice cake, with no explanation…Each day I will presume someone is vaguely interested in my tastes, so I will annoy the life out of ten random friends and get them to do the same thing”.
Well….With the plague kicking in, and concentration levels at an all-time low, I decided that rather than do as I’m told (I never do that), I would list my favourite or most influential albums, but actually explain why….Ooh the controversy. So here goes…..In no particular order…….I shall begin with a love letter to an album…..
- Meat is Murder – The Smiths 1985
Now it has become rather unwise to state any kind of love for The Smiths since Morrissey turned into a complete arse. Perhaps he has always been that way, and my blind devotion to this band just made me gaze elsewhere? Anyway, I remember Monday 11th February 1985 as if it were but a few years ago. A fresh faced young man with an experimental quiff, Oxfam clothes and a job that gave me too much money to spend sensibly, found me counting the minutes until my lunch break, when I could gallop with wild abandon down from Holborn to Oxford Street, to hand over my less than hard earned cash for two copies of Meat is Murder from the Virgin Megastore on it’s release day (One on Vinyl, and one on cassette). Whilst queuing (Yes…there was a lengthy queue for such things in those day…None of this instant download or streaming gratification…you had to work hard for your music in those days), I was treated to what can only be described as a musical juxtaposition, with Chas and Dave making an in-store appearance for one of their albums….I knew all the words, but tried hard not to be seen to be enjoying such a treat, as it wasn’t the done thing to like Chas & Dave if you were an apostle of The Smiths. Anyway…The Cassette version went straight onto the walkman, and I was transported into a world that I seldom left for several months. A world of monochrome 50’s and 60’s imagery, with the sublime guitars and off-kilter lyrics that I had been dreaming of since the moment I had listened to their debut eponymous album in 1984, and then devoured every single, b-side, Interview and photograph. The album could have been awful, but the anticipation has reached such a fever pitch, I declared it an all time classic before I had made it back to the office. It wasn’t awful of course. From the opening bars of the Headmaster Ritual, to the tortuous closing refrain of Meat is Murder, I had found the album of my life, with not a second wasted.
“Sir leads the troops, Jealous of youth, same old suit since 1962…He does the military two step down the nape of my neck
I want to go home, I don’t want to stay, Give up education as a bad mistake”
And so it came to pass that Morrissey seemed to understand my life in full detail. At 4.55 the opening track was not the longest, but the opening salvo of guitars could go on for severa calendar months in my opinion. From the Headmaster Ritual we went to Rusholme Ruffians..A Leiber and Stoller tribute, with a trip to the fair, a stabbing, and the terrible truth…
“And though I walk home alone
I might walk home alone…
…But my faith in love is still devout”
All underscored with the lightest of light Acoustic guitar rhythms and an almost jaunty…YES Jaunty! The Smiths could jaunt with the best of them..Jaunty melody…..Oh how many times I recalled those words over the next few years. To add torment to the mood, The next track was “I want the one I can’t have”, and that was it…I was destined to be alone for the rest of my life and it was to be deliciously soundtracked!
“On the day that your mentality
Catches up with your biologyAnd if you ever need self-validation
Just meet me in the alley by the
Railway station”
And then to swerve a little, we are treated to “What She Said”, a punk driven attack on the senses, with lyrics like you’d never heard before or after….
“What she read
All heady books
She’d sit and prophesise
(It took a tattooed boy from
Birkenhead
To really really open her eyes)”
Funny, unusual, and as I said, beyond anything else that was being performed….A Swift change of pace, with the divine “That Joke Isn’t funny anymore”.and we are in stereotypical Smiths territory again…A warm place to mope, and a repetitious mantra to end
“I’ve seen this happen in other people’s
Lives
And now it’s happening in mine“
Repeat to fade out, in again and out, and I’m gone already. The guitars still make the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention with every soar and swell 35 years later.
“Nowhere fast” comes next, the paradiddle train sounds, the proud Anti Monarchist soundbites and the delicious opening lines ;
“I’d like to drop my trousers to the world
I am a man of means, of slender means”
Then to the track of the album for me, the warm autumnal shower of “Well I wonder”….Layered Acoustic guitars, plaintiff vocals and a heart wrenching lyric that spoke for everyone of a certain age…
“Gasping – dying – but somehow still alive
This is the final stand of all I am
Please keep me in mind”
Falsetto vocals to end, and an overdubbed shower of rain, and it’s hide under the duvet time, only to be rudely awaken by the funk driven, whipcrack filled behemoth that is “Barbarism begins at home”…with the primal yelps of the “Disciplined children” in the lyrics, and a monsterous Rhythm track that only Rourke and Joyce could provide. It was the highlight of any “Indie Disco” at the time and still illicits a twitch or two in the limbs of this avowed non-dancer. Then the party ends….The Buzz saw, the Bovine screams, and the eerily sinister titular track orders you to step away from the Burgers. I did. For 6 years. Immediately. It’s a powerful song!
So that is Meat is Murder. Peculiar, beautiful, heartwrenching and in my humble opinion, as close to perfect an album as you can get. It’s relevant, funny, poetic, and so full of class.
Album two to come…….
