Strangeways, Here We Come Turns 25
Strangeways, Here We Come Turns 25:
The Smiths commenced recording their fourth (and ultimately final) full-length knowing the title of the album and little else. Still, the band possessed such a strong sense of self — with a variegated cosmology that made room for cult film stars and Wilde worship, the Brill Building and monarchic brickbats — that Strangeways, Here We Come would accrue all kinds of meaning. Johnny Marr thought the title, a reference to the familiar name of HM Prison Manchester, was a bit too on Moz’s schnozz, if you will, but at this point he knew the score. Soon enough, the band’s storied partnership split into its own strange ways; three years later, the prison exploded.
Twenty-five years on, the legacy of Strangeways is still not fixed. Is it a consciously gloomy swan song? A document of a disintegrating band? The creative culmination of six remarkably productive years? It hasn’t been settled. A few years after its release, Marr told journalist Johnny Rogan that he detected a “poignancy” and an “air of foreboding” about the record. But one of the cardinal principles of music criticism (and fandom) is not to necessarily take the artist’s cue.
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The Smiths commenced recording their fourth (and ultimately final) full-length knowing the title of the album and little else. Still, the band possessed such a strong sense of self — with a variegated cosmology that made room for cult film stars and Wilde worship, the Brill Building and monarchic brickbats — that Strangeways, Here We Come would accrue all kinds of meaning. Johnny Marr thought the title, a reference to the familiar name of HM Prison Manchester, was a bit too on Moz’s schnozz, if you will, but at this point he knew the score. Soon enough, the band’s storied partnership split into its own strange ways; three years later, the prison exploded.
Twenty-five years on, the legacy of Strangeways is still not fixed. Is it a consciously gloomy swan song? A document of a disintegrating band? The creative culmination of six remarkably productive years? It hasn’t been settled. A few years after its release, Marr told journalist Johnny Rogan that he detected a “poignancy” and an “air of foreboding” about the record. But one of the cardinal principles of music criticism (and fandom) is not to necessarily take the artist’s cue.
Read More...
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