What's your favorite Morrissey or The Smiths song?
I like "Will Never Marry", "Every Day Is Like Sunday", and "Last of the Famous International Playboys". Out of those, the last song is likely the one I can listen to in the most situations.
This week’s NME celebrates The Smiths masterpiece ‘The Queen Is Dead’ with a whopping seven page look at the iconic record. Yes, if there was a book compiling the most-used chat-up lines at indie discos that would sit on the first page. Well, if we'd compiled it anyway.
2009’s hipster rom-com 500 Days Of Summer pulled the shutters up on the icebreaking qualities to be had on admitting your Smiths fandom, featuring a cringe-inducing exchange from the two romantic leads about the brilliance of ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’. And yet that question has continued to intrigue, mostly because The Smiths' five-year reign atop indie's pile was so fruitful and varied. Basicially, it says a lot about you, depending on which track you rate.
So we popped the question to the likes of The Vaccines, Hurts and Wild Beasts - click below to hear what their answers were. We also had an ask around the office to find out what the NME staff favourites are. “’You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby’.
Being into Guns 'N Roses, Nirvana, really shit hip hop (and I mean REALLY shit – we’re talking Naughty By Nature here, for fuck’s sake) and swaggering baggy as a kid, I’d always written The Smiths off as the most god awful wet-the-bed indie imaginable. Then I heard ‘You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby’, and I realised that you didn’t need to be some cock-swinging monkey man like Axl or Ian Brown to be hard as hell. What Morrissey and Marr constructed was a world of tender torture and sweeping emotion that bore deep into your core and gave your heart a sound beating.
Please don’t tell my 13 year-old self I actually said that though. “An obvious choice, but ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ is probably the greatest indie single ever, and for me conjures delirious memories of careering around Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff in my first year of university – scenes still being replicated to this song in indie discos nationwide every Friday night. Johnny Marr’s guitar work on this song is simply stunning.
Intricate, beautiful, yet it hits you in the heart and in the hips every time. Meanwhile Morrissey’s lyrics which switch from the point of view of a boy and girl, clearly enamoured but waiting for the other to make the first move, are tragically comic. It’s a simple, short Smiths song but encapsulates in two minutes and 48 seconds everything the band did brilliantly.
“’This Night Has Opened My Eyes’. It has a really spooky feel to it and I love the story it tells. "I’m going to go for ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, just edging it over a host of others.
Includes some of Morrissey’s best lyrics, his sense of indignation and fury while attacking the teachers who bullied him at school both compelling and terrifying at the same time. What’s your favourite Smiths anthem? NME.COM blogs contain the opinions of the individual writer and not necessarily those of NME magazine or NME.COM.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.