Panic: Behind The Smiths Song That Took A Swipe At 80s Pop Culture

Morrissey’s call to “burn down the disco” has been horribly misconstrued down the years, but as The Smiths’ biographer Tony Fletcher contests, Panic wasn’t about race or sexuality – it was aimed at the culture surrounding British pop music during the 80s.

In his book A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga Of The Smiths, Fletcher wrote, “For British Smiths fans, the ‘disco’ of Panic was generally presumed to be the longstanding city-centre meat market [nightclub], which suggested exclusivity by demanding patrons wear a tie, or at least to ‘dress smart’, but where drinks were overpriced, fights routine, and both the disc jockeys and the commercial Top 40 music they played was almost embarrassingly disconnected from the neighbouring streets.”

Noting that the song’s thematic hook lay in the lines “Because the music they constantly play/It says nothing to me about my life”, Fletcher observed that Panic’s “Hang the DJ!” refrain “was Margaret On The Guillotine [from Morrissey’s debut solo album, Viva Hate] in half as many syllables – and just as powerful.”

The recording: “Panic came together with great ease in the studio”

With hindsight, Panic’s title also feels especially apt, as The Smiths themselves went through a turbulent period early in 1986. The band’s landmark third album, The Queen Is Dead, was complete, but bassist Andy Rourke was briefly fired due to his heroin use. During Rourke’s absence band, The Smiths hired Craig Gannon to stand in for him, but with the bassist overcoming his problems and rejoining the group, Gannon was repositioned as a guitar foil for Johnny Marr. As far as both band and onlookers were concerned, the decision to readmit Rourke was the only sensible course of action.

“Rourke may have been the quietest member, he may have been the most subservient, but his contributions had proven absolutely imperative to the group’s success,” Tony Fletcher noted. “And in so many ways, he had served as the group’s rock and its soul, emotional terms that double as musical genres, and understandably so.”

With their new five-piece line-up quickly gelling, The Smiths entered London’s Livingstone Studios, where they successfully nailed Panic with producer John Porter in May 1986. The recording session ran smoothly, with Gannon quickly making his mark on the proceedings.

“Panic came together with great ease in the studio,” Fletcher detailed. “Despite [producer John] Porter recalling that Craig Gannon ‘diplomatically stayed out of the way’, the [then] teenager nonetheless played some of the key riffs on the recording.”

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Musically, Panic’s strident backdrop also owed a debt to an iconic 70s trailblazer whose catalogue had been inspiring both Morrissey and Johnny Marr since their formative years.

“The influence of T.Rex is very profound on certain songs of The Smiths, i.e. Panic and Shoplifters [Of The World Unite],” Marr told Les Inrockuptibles in 1989.

“Morrissey was himself also mad about [Marc] Bolan,” the guitarist continued. “When we wrote Panic, he was obsessed with Metal Guru and wanted to sing in the same style. He didn’t stop singing it in an attempt to modify the words of Panic to fit the exact rhythm of Metal Guru. He also exhorted me to use the same guitar break so that the two songs are the same!”

The release and legacy: “A tiny revolution in its own sweet way”

Regardless of Bolan’s influence, Panic was a powerful statement of intent on its own terms. Released as a single on 21 July 1986, and following in the slipstream of the critically hailed The Queen Is Dead, the song was voraciously received by The Smiths’ loyal fanbase. In fact, it rapidly shot to No.11, rewarding the band with their biggest UK singles chart success since the release of Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now in 1984.

Also a regular fixture in the band’s live set during their latter days (a buoyant rendition can be heard on their posthumously released live album, Rank), Panic remained a confirmed favourite with The Smiths themselves. Indeed, the very fact that he was able to get a song with such a subversive lyric into the upper echelons of the charts afforded Morrissey a degree of satisfaction.

“I thought the song was extremely funny, I really did,” he reflected in an interview with Record Mirror in February 1987. “And I thought it extremely funny to hear it on national daytime radio on the few occasions it was actually played in the mish-mash of monstrous morbidity… I think it was quite amusing – a tiny revolution in its own sweet way.”

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