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Not since The Beatles had the UK witnessed a homegrown pop act pump out such a steady stream of essential material in such dizzyingly quick succession. Across barely five years, Manchester’s The Smiths hit the charts like an indie whirlwind, dropping a voluminous level of fantastic singles around their four albums before grinding to a halt in 1987, two months before their parting record Strangeways, Here We Come.
With such a brief tenure, it isn’t easy to mark out any distinct chapters in The Smiths’ story. Creatively, The Queen Is Dead‘s elegiac shimmer and dramatic keys pushed their sonic peripheries to new horizons, and an evolution in Morrissey’s lyrical barb began to take further aim at the wider world than before. However, The Smiths’ brief flurry in the alternative world was too ephemeral to chronicle much of a trajectory beyond—arrive, make glorious music, leave with a bang.
If one were to eke out some kind of tentative transition, 1985’s Meat Is Murder could be presented as their most pivotal. Imbuing elements of rockabilly, funk, and acoustic lament in their indie sophomore, The Smiths’ future sonic hinterlands were first spotted from Meat Is Murder‘s expanded vantage. While later CD issues would include 1984’s ‘How Soon Is Now?’ as the sixth track, the album was only ever served by one single in the UK, a dramatic cut with little in the way of obvious pop appeal.
Dreaming up a sweeping scope of a number with its sombre waltz balladry, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ stands as the record’s grand centrepiece. Johnny Marr’s stretched-out backwards guitar, soaring around Morrissey’s passionate mourn, makes for one of the pair’s finest collisions.
As is typical, Morrissey hides the subject matter behind oblique ambiguity. One clue revealed to Melody Maker by the frontman was a riposte to journalists obsessed with his lyrical affinity with the depressed and the dour, while later allusions to a relationship with a journalist added further intrigue.
For such a colossal single, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ was one of the easier Smiths cuts to put together. “It just fell through the roof,” Marr revealed, “It was one of those lovely times when the feeling just falls down on you from a ceiling somewhere and it almost plays itself.”
A giant in their already impressive songbook, unleashing it onto the charts was still a risky move. “I’d secretly wanted it to do well, because I thought it would be our big torch song, our Dusty (Springfield) single… For about two days, I got excited thinking we might have a big ‘All I See Is You’-type torch song in the charts. Then reality struck. Why would they play that continuously on Radio 1?”
Shooting to the top of the UK Indie charts, a lowly 49 on the general UK Singles Charts proved the doubts were not unfounded. Yet it proved to be a fan-favourite and a much-loved piece between Morrissey and Marr, enduring as one of The Smiths’ finest compositions as further time passes.
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