Album: Meat is Murder
Year: 1985
. . .
“It’s written all over my face”
Meat is Murder was a strange beast: side one was uniformly great and side two — outside of the U.S. addendum of “How Soon is Now?” — er, wasn’t, as after a decent (another) rockabilly tune and an atmospheric one, it closed with two duds. Johnny Marr’s tuneless experiment with blue-eyed funk went nowhere fast and his decision to make the title track a dirge was far less admirable than his decision to instantly go vegetarian in support of his partner.
So I mostly stuck with side one, which featured four straight bangers, one of which was “I Want The One I Can’t Have,” which started off with Marr jangling killer leads in and around Morrissey’s naked plea to, well get naked.
On the day that your mentality
Decides to try to catch up with your biology
Come round
With Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke holding down a breakneck rockabilly rhythm — it was basically born from a studio jam (though still credited to Morrissey and Marr) — Marr switches on a dime from liquid leads to just framing chords as Morrissey hits the chorus:
Cause I want the one I can’t have
And it’s driving me mad
It’s all over, all over, all over my face
And they liked this opening verse and chorus so much, they repeated it before moving on, as Morrissey perhaps becomes the first writer in pop history to use “stalwart” in a pop song.
A double bed and a stalwart lover, for sure
These are the riches of the poor
A double bed and a stalwart lover, for sure
These are the riches of the poor
Meanwhile, Marr is killing it with his lead guitar, but not so much Morrissey, who turned in a vocal performance that he ended up hating. Which might be why it was a standard in their live set: he wanted to make up for what he considered to be a subpar vocal performance, which is too bad for a song that concludes with a frenzied “if you ever want self-validation / meet me in the alley by the railroad station”, but yeah, his vocal is too whiny by half.
That’s probably also why they never released it as a single, even though they’d originally thought about it.
“I Want The One I Can’t Have”
“I Want The One I Can’t Have” Live in Madrid, 1985
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkNQZotRc5g&t=8m35s
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