ABON 0158. 1986. THE SMITHS – THERE IS A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT

In the mid to late 1980s if you talked to anyone interested in Rock music who wasn’t an avid Smiths’ fan (and even some of those who were), you could be sure that they would sooner or later suggest that the Manchester band sounded miserable and depressive. And with titles like ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ and ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’, front-man Morrissey seemed intent on reinforcing this view. 

In reality however - if you dug just below the surface - it was never that simple or simplistic. 

Morrissey was a far more complex character than the miserable tag would suggest. Touchingly sympathetic and insightful one day, selfish and vindictive the next. Confident in his own genius to the point of extreme arrogance yet full of self-doubt and fear at the same time. 

And the music he produced with the other three (and for a brief period, four) Smiths was also far more complex and far more emotionally uplifting than a brief listen with half an ear or a glance at the titles of the songs would suggest. 

Morrissey was (is!) not actually a depressive at all. He was a true romantic at heart - focussed on dreams, hopes, desires and other, better Worlds, in which he became the person he really wanted to be or knew he really was, under the surface. Rather than the (apparently) shy, awkward boy of his Manchester youth. And these dreams, hopes, desires and the other Morrisseys that populated them would feature prominently in practically all of The Smiths’ most wonderful and famous songs. 

So if you listened hard enough to The Smiths there was nearly always a light at the end of the song - a light created from these essentially positive, uplifting and sometimes genuinely touching visions that usually centred on love and relationships and emotional contact and acceptance. Even if in the very same song, your girlfriend was in a coma. 

And the ‘miserableness’ that the half-listeners heard wasn’t miserableness after all. All genuine romantics have a fear, a self-doubt in their hearts - that their dreams just might never come true, that they might die without that other World ever being reached or that the dream might be shattered at the very moment it is about to come true through rejection. 

Morrissey seemed to have an even greater sense of these fears than the most romantic of romantics - maybe because, as he hinted in several of his songs (‘Ask’ being a good example), he had been painfully shy as a youth. So in his lyrics he seemed to dial up these fears to the point where sometimes they were the only thing some people heard. That girlfriend would only be in a coma in a Smiths’ song. 

Maybe it was a genuine defence mechanism on his part - if you are going to brazenly tell everyone your innermost desires you might want to hedge your bets and suggest you think they won’t come true and therefore you won’t be too disappointed when they don’t,  even if you secretly wish to God they would. 

Or maybe he created some of the most memorably pessimistic lines really just for dramatic effect. Or maybe - and more likely - both hypotheses are true. 

Whatever the real reason…it worked. Brilliantly. 

Morrissey was such a remarkable wordsmith he could pull it off - writing songs that could suggest both things at once - the hopes and the fears in the same song. Songs that managed to suggest beautiful, uplifting visions and rays of hope whilst at the same time being punctured, but not completely floored, by the worries of a real human romantic who had been disappointed (inevitably) before. 

Set over a more mundane musical backdrop, the sadness and bleakness of every other Morrissey line might have dominated – and the songs really would have been floored. But in The Smiths, Morrissey’s words had the added luxury of floating over the intricate, airy, soaring flights of fantasy provided by Johnny Marr’s sublime guitar work. Marr was in a class of his own in conveying hope and optimism through just the flick of a wrist. And so Morrissey’s half-optimistic, half-pessimistic poetry was nearly always magical and uplifting – to my ears - rather than bleak and depressive. 

And as a solo artist, after The Smiths, even when he wrote equally wonderful lyrics, he rarely attempted to play the double-edged game that he did in The Smiths. And that must have been partly because he knew they would not be soaring above Marr’s guitaring. So as a solo artist without Marr, we saw a harder-edged, less idealistic, less revealing, less fragile Morrissey. Still a wordsmith supreme but less the romantic. 

‘There Is A Light’ from their masterpiece, ‘The Queen Is Dead’, is a perfect example of Morrissey soaring above Marr, when he could have crashed and burned relying on anyone else’s hands. A song that is essentially a dream about love, but also about suicide under a double-decker bus, lifted to a higher plane of hope, wonder and optimism by Marr’s musical genius. Leaving the miserableness somewhere down below. 

Released 1986.

Available on the album, ‘The Queen Is Dead’: Amazon