It begins as a great wartime film would, with the setting. Dame Cicely Courtneidge leads the chorus of “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty” as soldiers chant the cities of Liverpool, Leeds, and Birmingham—Northern industrial powerhouses where they hail from, and where they long to return. Johnny Marr’s wailing guitar commandeers the scene after 16 seconds, with Morrissey’s baritone arriving alongside Andy Rourke’s muscular bass and Mike Joyce’s pummeling drums. The Manchester boys are here, and the Hated Salford Ensemble are bidding farewell to this land’s cheerless marshes, written on the back of a quaint British postcard addressed to the House of Windsor.
Thirty years have passed since the Smiths released their 1986 state-of-the-nation address, The Queen Is Dead. Once deemed the greatest album ever by NME, the honor is a key entry in the band's ongoing canonization, alongside two nominations for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This mainstreamification of the Smiths’ legacy is not exactly new, but it's grown more sanitized over time. Even Prime Minister David Cameron—a Conservative, the party the Smiths rebelled against in their lifetime—has called The Queen Is Dead his favorite album. It wouldn’t be the last time Cameron would praise the Smiths publicly, either, naming “This Charming Man” as one of his eight Desert Island Discs for the BBC. “[Morrissey’s] lyrics—even the ones I disagree with—are great and often amusing,” he quipped.
Maybe Cameron’s devotion to the Smiths could be nothing but an attempt to dissociate himself from the antediluvian image of the Tories and their right-wing principles. But nonetheless, the whole thing bothers me, just like it bothers Marr and Morrissey. In fact, denouncing Cameron is the only thing the two have agreed on since splitting in 1987. The Smiths were a political voice for a profoundly polarized decade in Britain—and as time has elapsed, this aspect has diminished. If Cameron can chortle about the bloody end of establishment figures, then let there be no doubt that cultural amnesia has reduced the Smiths to little more than clever misanthropes.
David Cameron, stop saying that you like The Smiths, no you don't. I forbid you to like it.
— Johnny Marr (@Johnny_Marr) December 2, 2010
In 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was in its second term, victorious after defeating a year-long strike by the National Union of Mineworkers who protested the closure of the country's coal pits, most of which were in the North. With traditional industry hit hard, low state spending, and high unemployment, cities like the Smiths’ own Manchester watched as the South prospered through the increasing influence of privatized companies over the state, reemphasizing the attitude of a divide between regions. Manchester is romanticized by the Smiths on The Queen Is Dead—the credit to “Ann Coates” (like the Ancoats district) on “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” Southern Cemetery as the graveyard in “Cemetery Gates,” the portrait of the band outside Salford Lads Club on the inner sleeve—but, to Thatcher, the city represented the threat of labor movement and the Labour Party.
The Smiths never explicitly stated support for a particular party, but their involvement in benefit concerts and activism between 1984 and 1986 naturally aligns towards the political left. Marr and Rourke both took part in the Red Wedge tour, a youth program launched by Billy Bragg and Paul Weller affiliated with the Labour Party, which culminated in an impromptu performance by the Smiths at Newcastle City Hall in January 1986. But their views, or at least Morrissey’s, were certainly known. “The entire history of Margaret Thatcher is one of violence and oppression and horror,” he declared in 1984. “I think that we must not lie back and cry about it. She’s only one person, and she can be destroyed.” Moz's seditious cries in interviews may be remembered still before the Smiths’ lyrical charges, but at the time, his provocations were taken seriously. The same year, an IRA assassination attempt on Thatcher took place at Brighton's Grand Hotel, killing three people. “The only sorrow,” Morrissey said, was that “Thatcher escaped unscathed.” Conservative Members of Parliament and the tabloid newspaper The Sun urged Home Secretary Douglas Hurd to crack down on the Smiths.
Initially called Margaret on the Guillotine, The Queen Is Dead's title switch didn’t abate the band’s quest for retribution from the establishment. Religion, too, is scrutinized and satirized. In “Vicar In A Tutu,” Rose collects donations as the cross-dressing clergyman dances to the consternation of the monkish monsignor. In “Frankly Mr Shankly,” Morrissey’s dead-end job corrodes his soul, but he would sooner choose fame than be righteous and holy to escape his humdrum existence. To Morrissey, the Catholic Church is an institution for political order than morality, a place to “keep the working class humble and in their place.”
Religion and the monarchy may be a diversion from Thatcher, but they also link back to her: Both were two cornerstones of Thatcherism’s deference to order and tradition. By crudely caricaturing them in the songs, they play into the Smiths’ anti-establishment stance (not to mention Moz’s ongoing indictment of the religion under which he was raised). The title track attacks the old order’s existence for cooperating with Thatcher’s modernization, with a lament of being “hemmed in like a boar between arches.” Reform or escape from this immovable regime seems impossible—there is less absurdity in decapitating the Prime Minister or dreaming of killing the Queen after a talk about precious things, “like love and law and poverty.” But apparently for those charged with actually fixing the country’s hardships, the comedy of these scenes—like Charles in his mother’s bridal veil on the front page of The Daily Mail—is valued over the polemical. They are simply laughed off by Cameron as mischievous rather than controversial.
Growing up in the Northwest of England, The Queen Is Dead’s evocation of austerity and despondency in Manchester reflected my nearby hometown Skelmersdale. As I walked without ease on the streets where I was raised, I recognized the after-effects of the town's decline during Thatcher’s regime. With my class consciousness awakened, I remained ambivalent to identify myself to a homogenous society when my environment stood in contrast to the political, economic, and cultural power of the South.
Those injuries to the working class that the Smiths vocalized continue to happen today. In 1986, while national unemployment was at its highest in history, youth unemployment rose past one million—a statistic repeated in 2015. As of 2016, unemployment in Northwest county Lancashire makes up 11 percent of the national figure. In 1987, the year of Thatcher’s third consecutive election victory and the demise of the Smiths, Marr spoke of the hopelessness for youth in the area: “There’s no one who can stand for working people in England any more—it’s a Conservative dream.”
In the “age of austerity,” where welfare cuts are tokens from Cameron's government and the poverty and inequality statistics are more grim than under Thatcher, The Queen Is Dead remains a lifeline. Like many great albums, from The Times They Are A-Changin’ andWhat’s Going On, the Smiths’ third album was informed by its surroundings but also served to inform its surroundings. But now, 30 years later, a man born into privilege and removed from the specific political context of The Queen Is Dead, gets to remember the Smiths as “amusing.” Cameron does not find them threatening as we find him. That’s the scary part.