The Smiths

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I would have put Meat Is Murder in 3rd (behind your Top 2, with which I completely agree) and Strangeways as the last one. Equally, without Marr’s beauty, Morrissey can be unbearable (as much of his post-Smiths career bears out). Morrissey further suggests to Prince Charles that it would be a lark if he cross-dressed in his mother’s wedding clothes and posed on the front page of the right-wing, royals-obsessed newspaper The Daily Mail. Even though they’re strolling among the gravestones quoting poetry at each other to show how intensely they feel the sorrow of mortality, the life-force is strong in these precocious youngsters. But under the frivolity, there’s a plaintive seriousness to the lines about castration and being tied to your mother’s apron strings: Morrissey seems to identify with Charles, who’ll never become the man he’s meant to be until his mother finally kicks the bucket.

I only have the US version of this but that’s definitely the LP mix of “Hand in Glove” that fades up at the start. They had a magnificent rhythm section in bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce, who were unflashy, tough, and supple. It’s one of their best but also a little atypical – their typical sound is a lot janglier – Marr’s said that Roger McGuinn is one of his big influences. Two other loose categories could be formed out of the songs on The Queen Is Dead: Beside the meta, there’s the merry and the melancholy. WEA decided to promote the album in the UK by re-releasing the "Ask" single with its two original B-sides, "Cemetry Gates" and "Golden Lights".She hit the big time, as a member of The Fugees and as a star of Sister Act 2, while still a teenager. The Smiths is the debut studio album by English rock band the Smiths, released on 20 February 1984 by Rough Trade Records. Morrissey appeals to the sympathy of his disciples by lamenting the far larger number of indifferent doubters out there: “How can they hear me say those words still they don’t believe me?

What’s more interesting now is Morrissey’s admission of his insatiable lust for attention—“Fame fame fatal fame/It can play hideous tricks on the brain”—but nonetheless he’d “rather be famous than righteous or holy.Louder Than Bombs augments the 12 core tracks with the not-yet-on-album-in-America songs from Hatful of Hollow, along with the material from the "Sheila Take a Bow" single. The intensity of the first one now pushes it a little way down the list for me and my number one would be Strangeways, with those deliciously bitchy songs about ageing people and dead stars.