‘Meat Is Murder’ At 40: A Track-By-Track Guide To Every Song On The Smiths’ Second Album

Rusholme Ruffians

The lively Rusholme Ruffians is the first of two Meat Is Murder songs given a rockabilly bent, though its spine is surely its bassline – a remarkable, cyclical figure worked up by Andy Rourke. Marr, meanwhile, has freely admitted that he copped his chord changes from Elvis Presley’s (Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame (“That was blatantly done,” he wrote in his book Set The Boy Free: The Autobiography), with the band emphasising the point by segueing between the two songs during live shows in their latter days – as heard on The Smiths’ sole live album, Rank.

Often referred to as Manchester’s “curry mile”, due to its numerous Indian restaurants, Rusholme is a district of the city’s south side, while Morrissey’s lyrics were inspired by a famous Mancunian entertainer. However, while his heady words, referencing “the last night at the fair” and “whirling waltzers”, sound as though they could have been drawn from one of Shelagh Delaney’s kitchen-sink dramas, they actually nodded to Fourteen Again, a song from comedian, actress and playwright Victoria Wood’s gritty 1978 play, Talent.

I Want The One I Can’t Have

Driven by its no-nonsense backbeat and embellished by Marr’s chiming guitar filigree, I Want The One I Can’t Have is perhaps the archetypal Smiths song on Meat Is Murder. With hindsight, then, one can only assume that it was Morrissey’s provocative lyrics (“A tough kid who sometimes swallows nails, raised on Prisoner’s Aid/He killed a policeman when he was 13, and somehow that really impressed me”) which prevented it from being picked for single release.

“You got a sense of performance from him,” Meat Is Murder’s engineer, Stephen Street, said of Morrissey’s vocals on this song. Speaking in Tony Fletcher’s book A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga Of The Smiths, he added, “You can’t beat that. I’d rather it be slightly sharp or flat and be a performance than be note perfect and completely flat in delivery.”

What She Said

Accurately described by Tony Fletcher as “a frenetic, under-three-minute attack of buzzsaw guitars and constant drum rolls”, the punky, souped-up What She Said represents The Smiths at their most full-on and aggressive, with Mike Joyce’s inventive drumming catching the plaudits and proving his band had far more than jangly indie-pop in their arsenal. Indeed, the song is arguably all the more powerful because the musicians’ relentless sonic barrage contrasts so brilliantly with Morrissey’s mordant lyrics (“But then all the rejections she’d had/To pretend to be happy could only be idiocy”), transforming his abject nihilism into something gloriously defiant.

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

The first of Meat Is Murder’s two touchstone ballads, That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore occupies a strange position in The Smiths’ history. Touching on mortality (“When you laugh about people who feel so very lonely/Their only desire is to die”) and the band’s mercurial relationship with the rock press (“Kick them when they fall down”), the song was an immediate favourite of both Morrissey and Marr’s. As the guitarist later told Uncut magazine: “I thought it would be our big torch song, our Dusty [Springfield] single.” But Geoff Travis, head of the band’s label, Rough Trade, hadn’t been convinced.

Despite his reservations, Travis agreed to release That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore as a single, and it became The Smiths’ greatest miss on the charts, barely scraping the Top 50 when issued in the wake of the non-album single Shakespeare’s Sister. Nonetheless, this terse, plaintive ballad has retained its allure, with Marr later telling Record Collector that the song is his favourite on Meat Is Murder. “I think Morrissey is incredible on that, the end is brilliant,” he said.

Nowhere Fast

Most of Meat Is Murder’s songs feature lyrics with socio-political content, and Nowhere Fast is no exception. Indeed, on this occasion, Morrissey takes a direct stab at both the British monarchy and the state of the nation (“I’d like to drop my trousers to the Queen/Any sensible child will know what this means”), albeit in a slightly tongue-in-cheek, George Formby kind of way.

The second of Meat Is Murder’s two rockabilly-flavoured workouts, Nowhere Fast sees Rourke and Joyce handle a rattling, railroad-esque rhythm with aplomb while Marr gleefully unleashes his inner Scotty Moore. The guitarist explained more about the song’s genesis in a 2013 interview with The Guardian, telling the paper that it came from “a very deliberate and keen interest in finding rhythms that other bands around me were not using… Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley; and because I was such a Stones nut, Bo Diddley”. Admitting to having been “obsessed” by the famed “Bo Diddley beat”, Marr went on to reveal how, for Nowhere Fast, he’d attempted to turn it into “some idea of a fucked up Johnny Cash on drugs”.

Well I Wonder

Perhaps because it’s never been performed live, either by The Smiths or Morrissey as a solo artist, Well I Wonder is arguably the most overlooked song on Meat Is Murder. That’s a great shame, too, as it’s one of The Smiths’ most beautifully executed ballads. The secret to its success is its understatement, with the three musicians’ restrained (and largely overdub-free) performance providing the perfect backdrop for Morrissey’s forlorn treatise on loss and longing, his words this time inspired by Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 prose-poetry novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept.

Barbarism Begins At Home

As the uncontested kings of British indie-pop in the mid-80s, The Smiths wrong-footed fans and critics alike with the dynamic, disco-friendly Barbarism Begins At Home. Yet, while the track might have seemed like a radical stylistic departure, it’s important to remember that Marr and Rourke (along with The Fall’s future drummer Simon “Funky Si” Wolstencroft) had previously played in the dancefloor-friendly Manchester band Freak Party, and the pair were also highly appreciative of funk pioneers such as Chic’s Nile Rodgers and British jazz-funk bassist Mark King, of Level 42.

With Barbarism Begins At Home, The Smiths unleash a monster groove built around one of Andy Rourke’s greatest basslines. The official studio version actually plays out across seven minutes, but such is the suppleness of the performance that the song never feels overlong. However, its upbeat vibe acts as a Trojan horse for Morrissey to smuggle in an atypically short but brave lyric tackling the – then rarely discussed – issue of children exposed to domestic abuse (“A crack on the head is what you get for asking/And a crack on the head is what you get for not asking”).

Meat Is Murder

Morrissey’s invective on The Headmaster Ritual was entirely heartfelt, and the lyrics he supplied for Meat Is Murder’s title track reflected another issue dear to his heart. As a long-standing vegetarian, he was determined to make his thoughts known about factory-farmed meat, which he does with impassioned, eloquent observations (“Heifer whines could be human cries/Closer comes the screaming knife”).

In keeping with the song’s subject matter, Marr composed a mournful, waltz-like framework for Morrissey’s lyrics, supporting them with simple guitar chords and a solemn piano melody. Morrissey, meanwhile, supplied Stephen Street with a BBC Sound Effects album featuring the sound of mooing cows, to which the engineer added a recording of industrial saws, putting them through a reverse echo in order to create an abattoir-like noise.

It all made for a sombre, if extremely moving listen, with Morrissey succeeding in his quest to highlight vegetarianism in the popular media at a time when animal welfare wasn’t the mainstream issue it would become in the 21st century. Meat Is Murder also directly affected his bandmates, with both Mike Joyce and Johnny Marr adopting plant-based diets. “My decision to become a vegetarian was a natural commitment to the principles of the band, and a mark of solidarity with my songwriting partner and girlfriend,” Marr wrote in Set The Boy Free. “I didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before.”

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