Album: Strangeways, Here We Come
Year: 1987
. . .
“Love, peace and harmony”
“Death of a Disco Dancer” just might be my favorite Smiths song.
It’s right up there with “How Soon Is Now?” “The Headmaster Ritual” “The Queen is Dead” and “There is A Light That Never Goes Out,” and sometime I think I love it even more than all of those worthies because it was so much more weirder, more experimental and more powerful than the songs that surrounded it on Strangeways, Here We Come.
That, of course, includes the song before it “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish,” which is yet another big glam rock stomper, but had too many fake horns, 80s snare drum and not enough melody for me. It also reminds me of a song that a band that wanted to sound like the Smiths would write, and the song after it, the too-meta-by-half “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.”
Not so “Death of a Disco Dancer,” which, like all of their groundbreaking songs, sounds nothing like anything they’d done before and yet could only have been done by The Smiths.
“Death of a Disco Dancer” opens with Johnny Marr scraping his guitar strings against a menacing Andy Rourke bassline and a slow, skeletal Mike Joyce drumbeat, over which Morrissey sings a mordant opening verse.
The death of a disco dancer
Well, it happens a lot ’round here
And if you think peace
Is a common goal
That goes to show
How little you know
And then, with the emulator ghostly singing harmony vocals in the background, Joyce only slightly picks up the beat as Morrissey continues.
The death of a disco dancer
Well, I’d rather not get involved
I never talk to my neighbour
I’d rather not get involved
Oh
At this point, Marr starts playing an arpeggiated guitar riff — his spin on the Beatles “Dear Prudence“, as Morrissey quietly sings one of his most devastatingly cynical choruses.
Love, peace and harmony?
Love, peace and harmony?
Oh, very nice
Very nice
Very nice
Very nice
But maybe in the next world
And then he goes to the top of his range to sing it again and again, as Mike Joyce starts crashing his drums, adding rolls here and there and everywhere.
Love, peace and harmony?
Love, peace and harmony?
Oh, very nice
Very nice
Very nice
Very nice
Very nice
But maybe in the next world
Maybe in the next world
Maybe in the next world
All along, the song keeps building slowly and inexorably, and at some point the chipmunk backing vocals from “Bigmouth Strikes Again” show up and tauntingly chant “in the next world, in the next world, in the next world” because love, peace and harmony sure as shit ain’t gonna happen in this one.
And then after Morrissey wails a couple of mournful passes at “the death of a dissscooo dannnncer”, everybody goes absolutely nuts, without ever breaking the slow, steady inexorable tempo they established. First, Marr sets the emulator to “the Beatles” just to make the “Dear Prudence” connect explicit, and then attacks his guitar like he’s Lou Reed.
Oh, and remember that time in “The Queen is Dead” when Morrissey told Her Majesty “that’s nothing, you should hear me play pianner”? Well, now she gets to, as — in his only instrumental credit on a Smiths album (maybe ever) — Morrissey contributes some whacked-out piano, not even caring about things like tempo or notes or anything else.
Meanwhile, Mike Joyce continues to hammer his drums harder and harder and harder and Johnny Marr finishes it all off with one last cascading riff. Spectacular!!! And clearly the most fun the Smiths ever had in the studio.
“Death of A Disco Dancer” utterly killed me from the start, and I’ve never been able to get enough of it. Remember way back when I wrote about “Still Ill” and I said that one of my Smiths compilation tapes was called “Does the Marr Rule The Morrissey or Does The Morrissey Rule The Marr?” Well, the other one — because I had to have three hours of the Smiths on tape, c’mon! — was called “Love, Peace and Morrissey.”
BTW, while the Smiths never played “Death of a Disco Dancer” live, in 2011, as part of that bootleg treasure trove, their original studio take was released, and it was nearly as insane, with Morrissey taking a whistling solo and Marr’s rhythm guitar crawling right out of the room.
“Death of a Disco Dancer”
“Death of a Disco Dancer” first take
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