The Smiths, Rusholme Ruffians (1985)

Artist: The Smiths
Title: Rusholme Ruffians
Description: album track, Meat Is Murder
Label: WEA
Release date: 1985
First heard: 1985

The late Ian MacDonald strikes just one bum note in the otherwise consummate Revolution In The Head. It’s the bit about Penny Lane where he says, “Anyone unlucky enough not to have been aged between 14 and 30 during 1966-7 will never know the excitement of those years in popular culture.”

What about people “unlucky enough” to have been 13 or 31? Pah. No good can come of such exclusive, self-mythologising, snotty cultural protectionism.
That said, anyone unlucky enough not to have been in higher education during 1983-1987 will never know the excitement of The Smiths.

I wrote those opening paragraphs for an assessment of the Smiths’ second studio album Meat Is Murder for a special Q supplement about ten years ago. The album, my abiding favourite, was released on Valentine’s Day in 1985; on that day, the Smiths were aged 23, 21, 20 and 21, Morrissey the eldest. Having left school in 1976 to sign on, he was getting on a bit, but the other three, grammar school boys to a man, might have been at college themselves in 1985. They weren’t, but the music they made spoke to many of those who were. Meanwhile those who weren’t had the pleasure instead of incorrectly saying, “That Morrissey – he’s so miserable.”

It’s no slight to call the Smiths a student band. For it was deep within the fertile soil of the nation’s draughty, Soviet-style halls of residence and rented rooms in equivalents of Whalley Range that their unique, intoxicating, life-altering guitar music took root. Higher education, its freedoms increasingly besieged in the mid-80s from a begrudging Sir Keith Joseph and his harebrained idea of something called “top-up fees”, used to be a place where you took stock of your life as you passed from late teenage to early 20s. (That’s all gone now, of course. I will forever give thanks that this band released an album for each of my four years in higher education.)

The Meat Is Murder tour would take them from university gigs into Britain’s pavilions, hippodromes and winter gardens (I saw them for the first and only time at Brixton Academy, one of the best gigs I ever experienced). The LP and tour scored a direct hit with the band’s traffic cone-collecting constituency: vegetarianism; republicanism; activism (Moz had attended an anti-Abortion Act march in 1980, saying, “I love a good demonstration”); pacifism (the Vietnam-themed cover); even an opener decrying the education system. But within it, run on a skiffle theme, is what remains for me the Smiths’ finest hour: the gloriously alliterative Rusholme Ruffians. (I had never heard of Rusholme; a band educating me there from the Top 40, a theme I often warm to.) As a keen student of Moz’s lyrics, which are closer to poetry than even Dylan’s in my opinion, I never tire of reciting these:

Last night of the fair
By the big wheel generator
A boy is stabbed
And his money is grabbed
And the air hangs heavy like a dulling wine

It’s one of the few songs I can confidently sing from one end to the other without pause, deviation or hesitation. It’s not to in any way discount the unique contribution of Marr, Rourke and Joyce, who combine like stars in a constellation to create the most breathtaking, head-spinning whizz round that fair, from whirling waltzer and the top of the parachutes to the lonely walk home, but Ruffians is Morrissey’s ultimate triumph: descriptive, evocative, fast, funny, fleet of foot and ripe with imagery (“dulling wine”, “the grease in the hair”, “a tremulous heart”, the name scratched on a arm “with a fountain pen”). Alan Bennett couldn’t have set the scene any more eloquently or viscerally.

As with the rest of the perfectly ordered album – and I even like the title track, that’s how much I like it, give me a fountain pen and I’ll roll up my sleeve and prove it – it’s crunchily produced, melancholy and witty in just the right measure (a balance that would be tipped in favour of the latter on the next two albums). On the whole, it’s hard to disagree with Smiths chronicler Johnny Rogan’s assessment that Meat Is Murder is “the group’s most abrasive and satisfying work”. You will have you own favourite track. But I have mine.

It certainly fulfilled Morrissey’s earlier prediction and helped us get through our exams.