Oh, I didn't realise that you wrote poetry ,
I didn't realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry
Song by The Smiths from their ground breaking The Queen Is Dead album.
A silly but catchy little piece of music that some of us can relate to, wasting
our lives in cubicles and hotels, meeting rooms and airports, talking to pointy-haired bosses and helpdesks
Frankly, Mr Shankly, this position I've held, it pays my
way, and it corrodes my soul
It's right in the same The Smiths genre as Unhappy Birthday and I Won't
Share You; simple, clean melodies, that you'd expect some Itsy Bitsy Teenie
Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini kind of lyric to. Instead we get Morrisey's
black cynicism and melancholy right in our solar plexus.
The comical Frankly, Mr. Shankly is even more amusingly
forceful when considering its placement in the track listing, in between the
epic The Queen Is Dead and the bleakly beautiful I Know It's Over. His arch
comments on soul-less industry types contains a mere hint of his future
seeming animosity towards the mentally disabled, most notably on Kill Uncle
track Mute Witness.
Rumour has it that his portrait of a righteous and holy pain in the arse
was a jab at sometime manager, Geoff Travis. Geoff replied to this accusation
with : "Well, it's not a particularly charming thought, is it ? There's a
huge amount of humour in the song and I'm not really upset by it. Camp spite ? I
think there's a lot of that there, but I don't take it too seriously. Morrissey
like to have some fun and that's what rock 'n' roll is about."
Analysis by John Levon, moz@compsoc.man.ac.uk, republished with kind
permission.
I'm working on the chords, but seriously, that's not my talent at all.