FEATURE:
How Soon Is Now?
The Smith’s Meat Is Murder at Forty
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I am looking ahead…
to 11th February and the fortieth anniversary of perhaps the most underrated or under-discussed album from The Smiths. Their second studio album, Meat Is Murder, was released in 1985. It was a tremendous year for music. Standing alongside the best albums of the year is this classic. It contains a few of The Smith’s best songs. The Headmaster Ritual and Barbarism Begins at Home. How Soon Is Now? was included on the U.S. L.P. release. Arguably the very finest Smiths song! Compared to 1986’s The Queen Is Dead, there was not as much attention and focus on Meat Is Murder. Look online now and there is still comparatively little written about it. Granted, it is not as strong as The Queen Is Dead or Strangeways, Here We Come, but it is a remarkable album that warrants discussion. I am going to get to some features about The Smiths’ second studio album. First, this review from The Guardian highlights the strengths of Meat Is Murder:
“With their second proper album Meat Is Murder, the Smiths begin to branch out and diversify, while refining the jangling guitar pop of their debut. In other words, it catches the group at a crossroads, unsure quite how to proceed. Taking the epic, layered "How Soon Is Now?" as a starting point (the single, which is darker and more dance-oriented than the remainder of the album, was haphazardly inserted into the middle of the album for its American release), the group crafts more sweeping, mid-tempo numbers, whether it's the melancholy "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" or the failed, self-absorbed protest of the title track. While the production is more detailed than before, the Smiths are at their best when they stick to their strengths -- "The Headmaster Ritual" and "I Want the One I Can't Have" are fine elaborations of the formula they laid out on the debut, while "Rusholme Ruffians" is an infectious stab at rockabilly. However, the rest of Meat Is Murder is muddled, repeating lyrical and musical ideas of before without significantly expanding them or offering enough hooks or melodies to make it the equal of The Smiths or Hatful of Hollow”.
Although quite a personal take, Katharine Viner wrote about Meat Is Murder in 2011. Writing for The Guardian, their writers selected their favourite albums. There are some compelling arguments as to why Meat Is Murder is significant and holds a lot of treasures. An album that makes you stop and think. A snapshot of a particular time in British history:
“It starts as if in the middle of something – you're already part of this. Meat Is Murder is local and British from the first line – "Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools" – and expresses fury at a kind of school life that has been forgotten. When the album was released, corporal punishment was still legal – it wasn't banned until 1986 – and everyone had a particularly sadistic teacher like Morrissey's "spineless swines". Mine was Miss Grant, who had a flat bat on which she had chalked two faces, one happy and one down-in-the-mouth – if the smiling face was showing, the bat would be hitting someone that day. The brilliantly titled Barbarism Begins at Home, during which Morrissey yelps as if in pain, is also about children being hit – "a crack on the head is what you get for asking". There's a lot of violence in the Smiths.
Rusholme Ruffians, with Johnny Marr's rockabilly riff, is about Manchester too and makes the city (home of much of the history of British feminism, socialism, vegetarianism and the Guardian) sound exciting, a place where things happen. Who wouldn't want to be ruffian from Rusholme? I was from the other side of the Pennines, but pilgrimages to the city (because of the Smiths) gave me style (old men's coats from Affleck's Palace, the second-hand clothes and records emporium that opened in 1982), rare Smiths 12ins (What Difference Does It Make? with Morrissey on the front instead of Terence Stamp), photos in front of Salford Lads Club, chance meetings with Morrissey's ex-girlfriend (artist Linder Sterling, working in Deansgate Waterstone's), and, just a little bit, a sense of possibility.
It's a record full of yearning("I want the one I can't have, and it's driving me mad"), the humiliating obviousness of when you want something ("It's written all over my face"), low expectations ("Please keep me in mind"), the melodrama of youth("This is the final stand of all I am"), and romance ("My faith in love is still devout").
It's also funny. "I'd like to drop my trousers to the Queen," sings Morrissey on Nowhere Fast. "Every sensible child will know what this means. The poor and the needy are selfish and greedy on her terms." It's hard to hear the song without wondering if Morrissey is already, on only his second album, parodying himself: "If the day came when I felt a natural emotion, I'd get such a shock I'd probably jump in the ocean."
I love the way What She Said, one of the best Smiths songs, is told from a female perspective – it's rare for male songwriters to write about women with empathy rather than desire – and how it taps into a certain kind of teenage girl's fantasies: "What she read, all heady books, she'd sit and prophesise … It took a tattooed boy from Birkenhead to really open her eyes." And the tune! Morrissey beats a path to your head, but it's Marr who carries the words to your heart.
And then, right at the end, the title track: a great political song, and the best ever written about animal rights. (Even famous vegetarian Paul McCartney, who has written tracks about the British in Northern Ireland, revolutionary politics and 9/11, has never written a song about vegetarianism. He once told me he'd always found it curiously hard to commit one to paper, even though he'd tried, and that he greatly admired the Smiths' effort.) Meat Is Murder's sinister opening, full of strange noises that conjure up an abattoir, moves into a terrible, beautiful melody. "The carcass you carve with a smile, it is murder … And the turkey you festively slice, it is murder." The song made me stop eating meat, and I haven't eaten it since”.
In 2015, a thirtieth anniversary feature was published by The Quietus. It is a really detailed and in-depth piece that reveals depths and layers of the album I had not considered. If you have not heard Meat Is Murder before then please do go and play it:
“The things that gave The Smiths the capacity to change lives were the same set of factors that ensure their records remain arresting and remarkable all these years later. Morrissey’s lyrics spoke about real lives with an honesty and a clarity that rock and pop often shied away from: here was someone writing about heartbreak and isolation not as mythic subjects that somehow glorified the sufferer, but as the all-too-real consequences of the everyday. You didn’t get the sense, as one sometimes does from songwriters, that they were trying to make it sound like they were doing all this to provide escapist or aspirational entertainment – the characters Morrissey wrote about were you, or the folks around you, or the people you thought you might one day be. They looked like a band, they had that indefinable star quality, and there was the strangeness of Marr’s music and the ambiguity around Morrissey’s in-song personas that meant you were never thinking they were just the same as you – but they were a lot nearer to being people you might know than the rest of the pop world of the mid-1980s. So as great as the music was, and as unique and untouchable as parts of it undoubtedly were, these records felt like they could have sprung from you, your mates, your wider social circle. As Thom Yorke put it, introducing Radiohead’s cover version of the opening track from Meat Is Murder during a 2007 webcast, "this is about when we were younger – but we didn’t write it." And in Marr’s capable hands, each lyric was arrowed into your head and your heart with the most appropriate and individual accompaniment, music reinforcing the lyric’s emotions and making the songs impossible to not have some kind of personal reaction to and relationship with. These songs became your friends.
The decision the band had come to about production by the time they made Meat Is Murder was important, too. Their first album had had to be completely re-recorded and nobody seems to have been overjoyed with the results. They stuck with producer John Porter right up to the final track made before the Meat Is Murder sessions began, and given how tremendously that song turned out, you do wonder whether the relationship was ended just when it had started to find its feet. Porter’s input to ‘How Soon Is Now’ proved critical: he encouraged Marr to locate the arrangement that worked and the final mix, which he oversaw, still ranks as one of the finest moments of 1980s music – hell, it’ll probably be in many people’s all-time Top 20. Yet the band decided to go it alone, and produce their second album themselves, with help from an engineer (Stephen Street). It could’ve gone wrong in a number of different ways, but what Marr and Morrissey may have lacked in studio experience they more than made up for in musical knowledge, self-belief, and a certainty in what they were doing and how it ought to sound. A brief hand, here, for Joyce and Rourke: according to the credits on every Smiths record they weren’t involved in writing the music, and their part in the court case that dominated proceedings after the band broke up will have soured many fans to them and cost them sympathy and empathy. But even Morrissey, as he despairs of what he considers their treachery in his book, acknowledges their particular and singular excellence: and on Meat Is Murder they came into their own giving these songs power and poise, perfectly preparing and solidifying the bedrock on which the songs were to be built.
‘How Soon Is Now’ was, infamously, rejected as a single by Rough Trade; in his autobiography, Morrissey tells of being brought down from cloud nine to terra firma when label boss Geoff Travis conspicuously failed to be as knocked-out by the track as the band were. That initial decision to relegate the song to b-side status was soon reversed – the track, included on the ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ 12" and on the brilliant Hatful Of Hollow singles/b-sides/outtakes collection in 1984, was voted Number One in that year’s Festive 50, compiled by John Peel from listeners’ lists of their favourite three songs of the preceding 12 months, and Rough Trade bowed to the inevitable by making it a January a-side ahead of February’s release of Meat Is Murder. That it became the de-facto lead-in single to an album it doesn’t appear on and wasn’t made during sessions for is intriguing. But the objection that has been reported as the label’s major one to releasing it at the time it was new – that its sound would have been a surprise to the band’s extant fan base – still holds water. Nothing in their discography matches it, and if you were just presented with the records and had no contextual data available, placing that song into a sequence that shows a logical progression – of writing, performance or production – would probably prove impossible: certainly, if you had no other information to go on, you would probably place it after Meat Is Murder rather than before in the band’s chronology. Nevertheless, some of its sonic elements are echoed in the album made shortly afterwards, most notably the use of harmonics and sustained tones in Marr’s guitar parts. To these ears, those bits of ‘How Soon Is Now’ have always sounded like or evoked birds – the slide-guitar parts as avian calls while the sonic imagery seems to suggest flight. But maybe that’s just me.
Perhaps oddly, considering the album title and the way it helped usher in an age where vegetarianism and animal rights moved from the fringes to the mainstream of western society (seriously: you couldn’t get a veggie burger or a meat-free lasagne in a British cafe in 1984, and if you asked for a meal without meat you’d often have been laughed at), there’s no other song on the record that broaches those subjects. If there is a predominant lyrical concern, it’s violence and abuse – of teachers against pupils in ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, of parents against children in ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’. Yet in a way these ideas are all of a piece, the words chosen with deliberation and precision: "barbarism", "murder" – these evils have become banal or mundane, and by using words to describe them which remind the listener of the horror the writer wishes to highlight, we’re forced to confront an atrocity we take for granted because of its ubiquity and reassess our responses to it. In truth, therefore, the album’s key unifying theme is not vegetarianism, or bullying, but social conditioning and double standards. It’s a record that reminds you that you have to draw your own lines, because the places where others have tended to draw them for us are built on a foundation of hypocrisies.
Humour is never far away, even though this lot are supposed to be the masters of misery. In this one strange way (sorry), The Smiths are a bit like NWA: there’s quite a few laughs in the records, but significant parts of the audience seem predisposed not to find them. Morrissey is a hugely funny writer, as anyone who’s enjoyed his uproarious autobiography would have noticed without fail – yet too often his lyrics are taken at face value. This is nonsensical: we don’t presume him to be stumbling and inarticulate because the characters in his songs may be, yet many of us seem to assume that when he writes a couplet like "I want to drop my trousers to the world/I am a man of means – of slender means" that he’s bemoaning his lot rather than sending himself up for supposedly doing just that. There is also humour in the music. You can read Marr’s fascination with the "wrong" chords – such as how, in ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, he deliberately goes to a chord you’re not expecting next – or his apparent need to find new hoops for rock to jump through as devices intended not just to provoke and sustain attention but to raise a smile. What’s so consistently great about Meat Is Murder is that on more or less every track, it manages to do all of this, all at once.
‘Barbarism Begins At Home’, occasionally described as an attempt at funk, is fairly obviously not The Smiths putting in an application for a support tour with Level 42. Rather, between the lyric and Rourke’s bass line – a pastiche of the slap-and-pop style, more Kajagoogoo than Brothers Johnson – it is surely designed to evoke that atmosphere in an unhappy home where even the soundtrack is selected by others, where the individual and the different is crushed beneath the tyranny of supposed consensus. It’s difficult now to recall the era with quite the precision that may be required, and even harder to explain to anyone who’s come of age in our present epoch of digital superfluity – but music that the likes of The Smiths made was still very much considered to be the preserve of the outsider. They were among the most popular artists not connected to the major-label system, but their music was tolerated within the mainstream and never as big in commercial terms as their reputation today might make you think was the case. None of their singles got higher than Number 10 during the band’s lifetime: daytime radio play was limited, and even the evening-show plays they got became, eventually, a bit more begrudging, as they gained in popularity and DJs keen to champion new music perhaps felt the band were too big to need their help any more. Yet they were always more John Peel than Gary Davis, and so to hear this band – the heroes of the night – playing something that sounded like a slightly menacing, deeply unsettling take on the music daytime radio loved… well, you knew this couldn’t be an attempt at selling out – it was all about subverting.
The other clever musical joke comes in the form of ‘What She Said’, which Peel trailed on his show as The Smiths essaying heavy metal. It isn’t, quite, though you can sort of understand why he suggested it. Instead, what Marr did was to take the kind of double-time, triplet-based riff you’d occasionally find rock bands using for closing codas of songs, and constructed the entire piece out of it. The biggest wonder of all is that Morrissey managed to write and sing a song that could sit on top of it – it’s the lyrical equivalent of a winning ride on a bucking bronco. It’s ridiculous and brilliant at the same time – you’re laughing at how over-the-top it is while shaking your head in amazement at its daring. Marr even manages to finish the song in the "wrong" place – holding back the last crunching powerchord that would resolve the riff in a formally correct way (partially because the next chord in the sequence would send it all back to the top – for its duration, the riff seems to keep tumbling over itself, always ending back at the beginning in the musical equivalent of an Escher spiral staircase). It’s a short song and it’s showy, and it may be a bit too clever for its own good – but in its own way it’s a perfect encapsulation of what this band were about, and as fine if extreme an example of what they were capable of as can be imagined.
It’s also one of three songs on the album where Morrissey relies on ad libs apparently derived from folk song styles and traditions which take the place of hooks or choruses. It’s a curious habit and one he didn’t pursue for long. ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, the non-LP single released just after Meat Is Murder and recorded around the same time, has a section in the middle where he gets close to it, but – unless a short blurt in ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ counts – the technique seems to be limited to this particular period. It happens in ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, where the hook is a wordless series of vocal sounds; in ‘Rusholme Ruffians’, as a kind of distant echoed response to the narrator’s rhetorical question about what would happen if "I jumped from the top of the parachutes"; and in ‘What She Said’, where it ends several of the stanzas. Why he chose to do this, and to do it such a lot but for such a brief period, isn’t clear, though it’s tempting to see it as both an attempt – possibly subconscious, though from someone so deeply committed to an ongoing investigation of what being British might mean, that seems unlikely – to imbue the Smiths’ material with something that tied it stylistically to a deep and ancient tradition of British songcraft, and at the same time as a nod to Pentangle, a key influence on Marr.
The curious approach to marketing the album reached a bewildering peak in the summer of ’85 when what one can consider the third single in the campaign was released. After ‘How Soon Is Now’ and ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, the decision to release ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ bordered on the obtuse. Other bands had done OK without having singles taken from albums, some of them even on Rough Trade (The Fall spring most readily to mind), so it wasn’t as if releasing a string of non-LP singles would have been unprecedented. The song had to be edited for release as a single – the false ending on the album became the real ending of the 45, lest any radio DJ be taken unawares and start to talk in the gap – and, with the definite exception of the title track and the possible exception of the beautiful, rain-spattered ‘Well I Wonder’, it’s easily the least immediate song on the record. That said, it remains a quintessential Smiths song, a bruised and beautiful thing aching with melancholy and simmering with the sense of explosive power held in reserve. A better bet, surely, would have been the other track on the album which distilled the essence of the band into a single song – ‘I Want The One I Can’t Have’ teeters similarly close to self-parody but is far more immediate, its up-tempo brashness probably better suited to the demands of mid-’80s daytime radio and more likely to tempt the curious uncommitted into a purchase.
The lesson is clear. This wasn’t a record that improves by being broken down into singles, parcelled up into hit-worthy packages, taken apart to be put back together later. In truth, any of these songs could have been singles, but perhaps it would have been better if none of them ever were. Gallagher is right: it is the band’s best album. The Queen Is Dead tends to take the plaudits, and Morrissey reckons the fourth and final studio LP, Strangeways, Here We Come, found the group firing on every cylinder and is, to his mind, their finest achievement. But the life-changing Meat Is Murder is the one”.
Although Meat Is Murder has more contrasting reviews compared to their eponymous 1983 debut and The Queen Is Dead, it is still an important part of their cannon. As it is forty on 11th February, it is worth shining a light on The Smiths’ magnificent second studio album. This site sourced a critical review from Rolling Stone:
“Lead singer and wordsmith Stephen Morrissey (who goes by his surname professionally) is a man on a mission, a forlorn and brooding crusader with an arsenal of personal axes to grind. Drawing on British literary and cinematic tradition (he cites influences ranging from Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), Morrissey speaks out for protection of the innocent, railing against human cruelty in all its guises. Three of the songs on Meat Is Murder deal with saving our children — from the educational system (“The Headmaster Ritual”), from brutalizing homes (“Barbarism Begins at Home”), from one another (“Rusholme Ruffians”). The title track, “Meat Is Murder,” with its simulated bovine cries and buzz-saw guitars, takes vegetarianism to new heights of hysterical caniphobia.
A man of deadly serious sensitivity, Morrissey recognizes emotional as well as physical brutality, assailing the cynicism that laughs at loneliness (“That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”). Despite feeling trapped in an unfeeling world, Morrissey can still declare, “My faith in love is still devout,” with a sincerity so deadpan as to be completely believable.
Though he waves the standard for romance and sexual liberation, Morrissey has a curiously puritanical concept of love. He’s conscious of thwarted passion and inappropriate response, yet remains oddly distant from his own self-absorption. The simple pleasures of others make him uncomfortable as if these activities were the cause of his own grand existential suffering. Morrissey’s uptight romanticism wears the black mantle of a new Inquisition.
In contrast to Morrissey’s censorious lyrical attitudes is the expansive musical vision of guitarist and tunesmith Johnny Marr. When these two are brought into alignment, the results transcend and transform Morrissey’s concerns. The brightest example is the shimmering twelve-inch “How Soon Is Now?” (included as a bonus on U.S. copies of Meat Is Murder). Marr’s version of the Bo Diddley beat and his somber, reptilian guitars propel Morrissey’s heartfelt plea — “I am human, and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does” — into the realm of universal compassion and post-cool poetry. At this point, his needs seem real, his concerns nonjudgmental, and his otherwise pious persona truly sympathetic”.
On 11th February, we mark forty years of Meat Is Murder. The second album from The Smiths saw the band diversify. It was the band’s only album to reach number one in the U.K. In 2003, Meat Is Murder was ranked number 295 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die in 2005. I was keen to spend some time with Meat Is Murder ahead of its fortieth anniversary. It still holds power and relevance to this day. It is…
AN underrated gem of an album.