100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 The Queen Is Dead

02 Frankly, Mr. Shankly

03 I Know It’s Over

04 Never Had No One Ever

05 Cemetry Gates

06 Bigmouth Strikes Again

07 The Boy with the Thorn in His Side

08 Vicar in a Tutu

09 There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

10 Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others

No-one could keep up with the Smiths during their five furiously creative years together. At times even the Manchester quartet struggled to keep pace with their own output. The Queen Is Dead, their third album and undoubted masterpiece, was held up for more than six months as the group sparred with their often wayward independent label, Rough Trade, which had signed the group in 1983 and watched them swiftly establish themselves as the most important British group of the decade. When it finally appeared, the album proved to be an alchemical finality; every strand of the Smiths’ ability was fully realised, every song tied together.

It began with the bedsit giving way to Buckingham Palace. A sample of the old music hall staple, ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’, is overrun by a pummelling drum tattoo and a catalytic guitar part, with the title track matching vocalist Morrissey’s whimsy to a deft condemnation of Britain’s ruling bodies. The song is a sustained burst of fantastical imagery – at one point Morrissey asks Prince Charles if he’s keen to wear his mother’s bridal veil in the Daily Mail newspaper – and the scope of the words drew an equally inventive tune from guitarist Johnny Marr.

The idea that the Smiths were fey, already mocked by 1985’s Meat Is Murder set, is rendered ludicrous by the fury of the track ‘The Queen Is Dead’ and the sophistication of what followed.

The Morrissey and Marr team, the core of the group (as subsequent lawsuits involving drummer Mike Joyce and bassist Andy Rourke would sadly make clear), never repeated themselves across the 10 tracks. The melancholic indie-pop and intuitive jangle of their early singles and self-titled debut is updated here by snarling guitar rock (‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’), sparkling acoustic pop (‘Cemetry Gates’), a pungently melodramatic ballad (‘I Know It’s Over’), and post-punk rockabilly (‘Vicar in a Tutu’). No sound was beyond them.

As a lyricist Morrissey had never been funnier – all 139 seconds of the bouncy ‘Frankly Mr. Shankly’ mock Rough Trade’s boss Geoff Travis in excruciating detail. But humour and mordant truth are two sides of the same coin on this album. The despairing ‘I Know It’s Over’ is a requiem for a hoped-for relationship that never truly existed, and even as it begins with Morrissey picturing his own burial, the sentiment proves to be stark and self-lacerating. ‘With your triumphs and your charms/While they’re in each other’s arms,’ he sings, and the song’s defiance can’t lessen the distress.

The hopeful ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ became a signature selection, with wretchedly comic tragedy in the form of accidental death by oversized vehicle (10-ton truck, double-decker bus – take your choice) seguing into an expansive melody that turns the song into a last hope for the emotionally wracked. Critics always wrote Morrissey off via clichés – the term ‘miserablist’ was popular – but his lyrics explored those very labels to their extreme, until they were turned inside out. Tragedy had a punchline; satire revealed unwelcome truths.

Little more than a year later, in the winter of 1987, and with the release of their frustratingly uneven final studio set, Strangeways, Here We Come, the Smiths fractured under self-imposed stresses. But they have remained a crucial presence and a touchstone for subsequent generations of young music fans. As with another Manchester four-piece, Joy Division, their music has transcended the ready-made image supplied by their devotees. The Queen Is Dead is an album of concise clarity: 37 minutes, 10 songs – a lifetime’s worth of revelatory music.