The smell—that fake charbroil—would end up becoming a familiarity, a second-skin aroma in the air that would make itself known whenever we drove onto base. As would the waxy slick of grease on the rooves of our mouths after every meal there. But right now, it’s 1985 and the biggest event on this American army base in Cold War Germany is that we’ve finally, finally gotten a Burger King.
It's such a big deal that on the day of the grand opening, a line snakes almost double around the boxy orange-and-brown restaurant. In honor of the occasion, Burger King is handing out free T-shirts with every Whopper. For years, the kids on base will wear these T-shirts proudly. In fact, I’ll find my “Burger King Grand Opening; Heidelberg, Germany 1985” shirt while rummaging through storage decades later, and remember this day vividly. Eventually, our base will see the addition of a Baskin Robbins, a Chi-Chi’s, and a Popeye’s, but up until Burger King planted the flag in ’85, we’d had nothing by way of franchised American fast food.
A year or so later, the novelty has worn off. Because of its proximity to the elementary school, the sports fields, and the youth center, I’ve eaten more Burger King than I’d ever really wanted to. Now, I’m sitting on the plush carpet at my babysitter Debi’s house while her teenage daughter Shelli sits behind me on the sofa, brushing my hair. Lately, under the leadership of Debi’s middle school-aged son, all the boys who hang out at Debi’s afterschool have gotten into skateboarding, and they’re often away at the local halfpipe all afternoon.
So it’s just me and Shelli in the house today. My hair is long and silky, and Shelli brushes it with care, almost putting me to sleep. Teenage girls with their short crunchy ’80s perms always want to fuss with my hair, whether that means teasing it out wildly like Tina Turner’s or carefully French braiding it. Shelli’s in a bad mood, though, because I’ve asked her how cheerleading tryouts went. Debi yells, much too sunnily, from the kitchen, “She didn’t make the team, but that’s ok because it means she has time for an afterschool job!”
I swivel around, messing up the French braid. “Where are you gonna work?” Shelli scowls. “Burger King.” I stick my finger in my mouth, pretending to gag. “You don’t like Burger King?” she asks. “You’ll probably have to touch raw meat,” I point out. “I would hate that.” “Why?” she asks. I screw up my face. “I hate knowing it’s dead,” I say, taking for granted that everyone feels this way. But I know everyone doesn’t.
Shelli laughs. “There’s this band called The Smiths, and they have a song called ‘Meat Is Murder.’” She sings some of the lyrics, giggling as though it’s all a bit ridiculous. “They’re, like, vegetarians.” I’m intrigued. My next-door neighbors are the Smiths, and they annoy my dad endlessly (Mrs. Smith often wanders over wine-drunk in the evenings to brag about her kids and gossip with my mom), and so there’s already something subversive glinting at the edges of this that feels deliciously dangerous to my nine or ten-year-old self.
Shelli tosses the hairbrush aside and saunters to her bedroom to retrieve the Smiths album, and we sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the record player. The grinding of the chainsaws is orchestral, the mooing of the cows is anxiety-inducing, and Morrissey’s voice is floating and operatic, full of compassion for these creatures on their march towards death. The flesh you so fancily fry / Is not succulent, tasty, or kind / It’s death for no reason / And death for no reason is murder. The cover features a photo of a beleaguered American soldier in Vietnam, Meat Is Murder scrawled on his peeling helmet.
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My uncle Harlan was in that war and, when he came back, he refused to talk about it—ever. Living on an army base, so many of my friends’ dads had been in that war, too. I know there were horrors. And so despite that I’ve yet to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or hear the term “Military-Industrial Complex,” those two concepts come together for me that afternoon. As does the knowledge that my squeamishness towards meat doesn’t make me a wuss (as Shelli jokingly implies), it makes me humane. By the next year, I’ll denounce meat and become the lone vegetarian in my middle school. Meaning, the Smiths are probably the first band to bestow me with an outsider identity.
I wasn’t the only one. “So the Smiths gave you a sense of ‘You’re not on your own’?” asks interviewer Tim Samuels in the 2013 documentary The Smiths: Not Like Any Other Love. A fan named Simon Armitage contemplates this for a moment. “Well, it’s like they were saying, ‘You are on your own, but there’s a lot of you out there.’” Eventually, in the eighth grade, I’d find another vegetarian named Kelly and we’d become close friends. By that point, however, the Smiths had broken up and Morrissey had begun his solo career. By my teens in the early ’90s, I’d have a full-blown crush on that charming man with the piercing blue eyes, wicked sense of humor, and lonely, literary way with words—Punctured bicycle on a hillside, desolate (swoon). Still, Meat Is Murder will always be the Smiths/Morrissey album to hold the most special place in my heart.
After celebrating the success of their 1984 debut album with a move to London, the recording of Meat Is Murder saw the Smiths’ return to their native Manchester. Weary of the big city, the band wanted to reconnect with their homegrown influences and their hometown friends, and because they’d achieved fame on a national level, they felt they could return with a certain respectability. And indeed they did—Morrissey and Johnny Marr now had enough money to purchase houses in the suburbs.
The Smiths had formed in 1982, when guitar wunderkind Johnny Marr rang the doorbell of Steven Morrissey, a wannabe writer four years his senior, and asked him if he fancied forming a songwriting duo. “I was somewhat of back-bedroom casualty,” Morrissey admitted. “I spent a great deal of time sitting in the bedroom writing furiously and feeling that I was terribly important and feeling that everything I wrote would go down in the annals of history or whatever.” Morrissey had briefly been the singer in a band called the Nosebleeds, he was known for penning opinionated letters to the British music press (some of which actually got published), he’d founded a New York Dolls fan club, and he’d been a quiet but ubiquitous fixture in the local punk and post-punk scenes, which is how he’d first come to Marr’s attention (they’d met briefly at a Patti Smith concert).
It was Morrissey’s reputation for mysteriousness and eccentricity that made Marr suspect he might be the perfect songwriting partner. Both young men were of the same second-generation Irish community in industrial Manchester, but Morrissey was known to keep to himself pretty much everywhere. In other words, he was a recluse. So Marr agonized over how he might approach him. It wasn’t until he confided his agony to his friend Joe Moss that Marr developed a game plan. Moss showed Marr a documentary on the famous Brill Building songwriting partners Leiber and Stoller, a partnership that all started with the convivial Leiber knocking on the door of the much more introverted Stoller. Marr began to all but romanticize the meeting, and vowed to soon knock on the door of shy Steven Morrissey.
And then he finally did. Marr took a bus with his friend Stephen Pomfret on a bright day in May to Morrissey’s house, and Morrissey, who was known to rarely answer the door, actually descended the stairs sporting his signature cardigan, sky-high quiff, and National Health Service glasses. Though Morrissey had secretly nurtured the idea of being in a band after his brief stint in the Nosebleeds, he’d all but resigned himself to a life of quiet desperation. “I think at that time he’d given up the idea of it ever happening for him,” mused Marr. “It must have been really weird for him.” Indeed it was. “I was just there dying and he rescued me,” Morrissey said.
Marr’s shimmering, textured, and multi-layered approach to the guitar proved to be a perfect complement to Morrissey’s literary approach to lyrics. The Smiths would end up hitching onto a long tradition of Northern Realism, as encapsulated by the British New Wave cinema of the 1950s and ’60s. Morrissey was heavily inspired by the kitchen sink dramas of the British New Wave, which included black-and-white films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Billy Liar, and, most notably, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. In fact, Morrissey was a superfan of Delaney, who’d begun her writing career at the tender age of 18, so much so that he’d often give obvious nods to Delaney lines in the Smiths’ songs.
For Meat Is Murder, however, the Smiths decided to infuse their sophomore album with more blatant politics than nuanced portrayals of everyday post-war British life. “We feel that popular music should be used in order to make serious statements,” Morrissey said. “Because so many groups sell masses of records and don’t raise people’s level of consciousness in any direction, and we find that quite sinful.”
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At age 11, Morrissey had become a vegetarian after watching a documentary on farm animals. He’d been horrified by the scenes of cows and pigs thrashing spastically after being stunned, and vowed to never eat them again. Marr, as well as Smiths bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce, would also eventually decry meat under Morrissey’s influence. “It’s really on the same moral level of child abuse,” Morrissey would assert years later. “Animals are like children; they look to us for protection and we should protect them.” This parallel would be drawn on Meat Is Murder with “The Headmaster Ritual,” detailing the abuse Morrissey and his peers endured in the Manchester school system, the two songs bookending each other on the album.
Although Roxy Music’s John Porter had produced their previous album, Marr decided on Meat Is Murder to try his hand at production with the help of an engineer named Stephen Street. Porter suspected that his firing was because he’d become good friends with Marr, and he believed Morrissey thought he was driving a wedge between the songwriters. In an attempt to even things out, Porter had invited Morrissey over to his house for a vegetarian dinner one night, but the singer never showed up. Street, however, sensed that it boiled down to something other than simple friendship jealousy: “Part of the reason Morrissey didn’t want to work with John Porter is he thought that [Porter] was putting too much emphasis on guitars and not enough on his vocal.”
The band began recording with Street at Amazon Studios just outside of Liverpool, where Echo & The Bunnymen had recorded Porcupine. During the sessions, Marr took a more conservative approach than Porter had. “I always got the feeling that Johnny was being economical,” Street said. “He wasn’t layering just for the sake of layering.” Marr later said that the wet Liverpool winter—as well as the plethora of drugs the band (sans Morrissey) were taking—had an effect on the sound: “We were very druggy. It’s druggy music.”
The final result would see Meat Is Murder swagger onto the British charts at No. 1, knocking Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A. (1984) out of the top slot. An equally notable triumph, however, was that Meat Is Murder was a cohesive artistic statement, with the Smiths drawing together discussions of animal rights, child abuse, war, and other societal ills in one bold, strident, articulate package. It’s an album that forces the listener to spot the connective thread between everyday horrors and the more obvious political ones.
Morrissey refuses to mince words—“Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools”—on the album’s opener “The Headmaster Ritual.” Violence will be everywhere on this record, from the town fairground to the gym-class showers to the industrial slaughterhouses. And despite the song’s soft sunny jangle, the Smiths aren’t going to shield you from it. Here, we get a reference to the militarism of the album’s artwork, as well as foreshadowing of the industrialized animal cruelty to come: “Spineless swines / Cemented minds / Sir leads the troops / Jealous of youth / Same old suit since 1962 / He does the military two-step / Down the nape of my neck.”
The Smiths’ singer was not indulging in melodrama. “The horror of it cannot be overemphasized,” Morrissey said of St. Mary’s school. “Every single day was a human nightmare. In every single way that you could possibly want to imagine. Worse … the total hatred.” Morrissey recalled. “All I learnt was to have no self-esteem and to feel ashamed without knowing why.” In his 2013 autobiography, Morrissey would write of a male teacher who would ogle the boys in the showers, and also recount being caressed by a teacher applying ointment in a way that felt inappropriate. Corporal punishment was also frequently meted out.
The violence is infused with a bit of levity on the next track “Rusholme Ruffians,” which rips inspiration from Elvis’s 1961 hit “(Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame.” Morrissey takes us through battlefield scenes on the last night of the fair, with teenagers getting beaten up and stabbed while others fall in love, and though the narrator walks home alone, he assures us that “My faith in love is still devout.”
Although he often professed to be celibate and even asexual, Morrissey was able to express longing quite aptly. “I want the one I can’t have / And it’s driving me mad” is a strong declaration of carnal desire if there ever was one. And Marr captures the sonic restlessness. However, “I Want The One I Can’t Have,” with its mention of “a double bed and a stalwart lover,” is also a critique of the dreariness of working-class life. “In the lives of many working-class people the only time they feel they’re the center of attention is on their wedding day,” Morrissey told the NME. “Getting married, regrettably, is still the one big event in their lives. It’s the one day when they’re quite special.”
“What She Said” is a careening rocker that portrays a chain-smoking, suicidal female intellectual who eschewed her life of books for “a tattooed boy from Birkenhead” and now regrets it. (A longtime sufferer of clinical depression, Morrissey was able to get into the heads of other depressives with great accuracy, humor, and compassion). Meanwhile, my favorite track on the album, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore,” begins with one of my favorite lines: Park the car at the side of the road / You should know / Time’s tide will smother you. It’s an elegant ballad that revisits the hillside from the debut album’s “This Charming Man” (remember the punctured bicycle?), but this time the narrator is no longer young, beautiful, naïve, and free.
“Nowhere Fast” captures the loneliness of Morrissey’s bedroom (before he was saved by Marr) and the dullness of a town where “every household appliance is like a new science.” He also foreshadows his scathing critique of the British royalty on the next Smiths album with the line “I’d like to drop my trousers to the queen.” His loathing was likely already well-developed, based on the royals’ treatment of animals: “I think the royal family are evil, because they enjoy fox hunting,” he said. “These are despicable people.”
The shimmery and rain-soaked “Well I Wonder” draws inspiration from Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, about her love affair with poet George Barker. In contrast, with a funk-inspired bassline by Andy Rourke, “Barbarism Begins at Home” takes on domestic violence. “It’s not from my experience, really,’ Morrissey told the NME in 1985. “It was simply another recognition that the only channel of communication open to a lot of parents is violence.”
The album ends with the brutal but beautiful “Meat Is Murder,” which made use of a BBC sound effects record to create the slaughterhouse drama. It proved to be highly effective, and one of the band’s biggest achievements. “The amount of times that people have said that it was ‘Meat Is Murder’ that converted them [to vegetarianism] is astonishing,” observes Chrissie Hynde. “I’ve met so many people who have said that, and that’s why that song is so important.”
In the documentary The Smiths: Not Like Any Other Love, a fan named Wayne Hemingway stands outside Camden Market in the gray drizzle, contemplating what Meat Is Murder meant to him. “It was just a brilliant approach to politics really,” he says. “What the Smiths brought was politics that you could actually completely understand.”
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