A Tribute to The Smiths

_**Airing on RaW at 8pm this Sunday, 24th February.**_

_The Queen is Dead_ is a student’s record. It’s anxious about the future (‘The Boy with the Thorn in his Side’), frustrated by authority (‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’), outwardly political (‘The Queen is Dead’) but essentially self-concerned, melodramatic (‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’), educated/ pretentious (‘Cemetry [sic] Gates’), sexually liberal (‘Vicar in a Tutu’), goes out (‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’) but is terrified by loneliness (‘I Know It’s Over’, ‘Never Had No One Ever’). It describes the hangover from adolescence, where the adult, having emerged from childhood, looks to make a start in the adult world, but remains fixated by the concerns of teenage years. This is an album, of course, that discovers only on its concluding track that ‘Some Girls are Bigger than Others’.

It’s a student mentality which means that lyrically the record isn’t as entrenched in earnestness as on The Smiths’ previous two albums and allows Morrissey to put his dry humour to use with great effectiveness. Fittingly so, then, the two points of utmost seriousness, ‘I Know It’s Over’ and ‘There is a Light…’ are each preceded by points of utmost silliness – ‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’ and ‘Vicar in a Tutu’ – giving the feel of a narrator whose defining feature is to be simultaneously self-indulgent and self-deprecating. Meanwhile, these great shifts in lyrical tone allow a variety in musical genre, where ballads are set against rockabilly and post-punk against music hall. Despite this, Johnny Marr’s arrangements play a less prominent role than on _The Smiths_ or _Meat is Murder_; there’s not the jarring outro of ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’, the lengthy funk jam of ‘Barbarism Begins at Home’, or anything particularly as striking as the opening riff to ‘This Charming Man’ or the dexterity of ‘The Headmaster Ritual’. The record is decidedly focused on the vocal line, and from that Morrissey’s best vocal melodies and lyrics arise.

It’s this unparalleled quality and its aptitude to the student mindset that has led me and a group of other students to create our Warwick tribute to _The Queen is Dead_, titled – of course – _The Koan is Dead_. We’ll be getting different students from the university to perform cover versions of every song on the album, interspersed with discussion of gendered identity, monarchy and motherhood; an 8-bit version of ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, using sound effects from Mario Bros.; poetry in response to first hearing ‘There is a Light…’; and, potentially, a sound-bite made by Johnny Marr himself. The songs are difficult to cover because they’re so eccentric and unusual, but it’s impossible for them to inspire a flat rendition; it’ll be exciting to hear these Morrisseyisms voiced in other voices, to see how the songs sound in the wake of Will and Kate when they were written by a man infuriated by Charles and Diana, to see how the student population reacts to lines such as “Frankly, Mr. Shankly, since you ask/ you are a flatulent pain in the arse”. Morrissey, I’m sure, will most likely find the concept vile from his hospital bed in Michigan, as he presently awaits treatment for a suspected bladder infection. But let’s all be in the hope that he will join us on Sunday, as life is very long when you’re lonely.