59. The Smiths - Shakespeare's Sister (Rough Trade)

One week at number one on w/e 6th April 1985

You have to be careful not to wholly trust your own memory - it can play tricks on you, twisting facts into new narratives for no discernable reason. This week, for instance, I misremembered Belle and Sebastian’s “chartbreaker” “Legal Man” as a number 9 hit, then realised through cross-checking with Wikipedia and other sources that I’d confused it with John Otway’s fanbase driven smash “Bunsen Burner”. A weird thing to do as, beyond the fact that both acts have excessively devoted fans, they otherwise have little in common.

Likewise, I had “Shakespeare’s Sister” filed in my mind as The Smiths first flop since “Hand In Glove”, which is also utterly wrong; the reference books prove it was a modest number 26 hit, and that their first disappointment came later. In this case, though, it’s easy to hear why my brain reshuffled the facts around and punished this single with an imaginary non-top 40 placing.

My associations with The Smiths have been ongoing throughout my life. Most of my friends love them. My wife was, for a long period, obsessed with them. I’ve been taken along to club nights that play nothing but Smiths singles, and been around people’s houses and listened to Smiths mixtapes over dinner. I never shared the fanaticism any of these people had, but their ideas of what made the group matter, and where their strong points lay, became the backbone of my understanding. When you’re not hopelessly devoted to a group yourself, you take your cues from the fans around you, the ones who have put in the studious graft with passion.

In all my life, I think I’ve involuntarily heard “Shakespeare’s Sister” a mere handful of times. It’s the Smiths single no-one dances to and nobody I met ever cross-analysed or had pegged as their "one". Listening back to it again for the first time in years, it’s also amazing how slight it is compared to their other singles so far. The shuffling rockabilly rhythm feels more akin to the Brilliant Corners or even The Meteors, while Morrissey wails about suicide and throwing himself down on the “rocks below”. It feels like more of a tantrum than a song, the non-chorus of “Oh let me go!” intervening at numerous points to act as a brief bit of respite rather than a hook. Beyond the mysteriously tranquil instrumental interlude, the song just scrabbles its way up some jagged scree on a steep slope, occasionally losing its grip or catching its breath, then starting up all over again.

Morrissey has made it clear that it was inspired by a concept in Virginia Woolf’s “A Room Of One’s Own”, where the writer theorised that if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister, she would have been equally mistreated by her parents and society and forced to live a dissatisfied and mentally anguished life. What we’re hearing, then, is the sound of that torment; a retro rock and roll tantrum, a scramble of malcontent, a gibbering fit which never quite settles down enough to make its lyrical ideas coherent. In fact, in places the lyrics feel rather random and almost baffling - over the years I’ve had a total failure of imagination about the final lines “I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar/ it meant you were a protest singer”, and I still can’t understand why it's relevant now; if it turns out that Morrissey half-inched them from another source and that book or article would hold the key to their relevance and meaning, I wouldn’t be at all surprised, but nothing seems to have turned up so far.

What the track isn’t, by any stretch, is a logical single. Rough Trade didn’t want to release it as one. Johnny Marr seemed to enjoy the idea of it being put out, but only as a wild statement. The only person who thought it was an obvious 45 was Morrissey himself, who in later years mused about its relative failure with bafflement, blaming the record company for failing to do their jobs properly. This wouldn’t be the first time his idea of what the public actually wanted diverged enormously from all available evidence.

Groups with devoted fanbases do produce interesting and unlikely hit singles, though, and “Shakespeare’s Sister” feels akin to The Jam’s “Funeral Pyre” both structurally and in terms of chart performance. Both feel under-aired and broadly disregarded outside their fanbases, both only flashed into the mainstream public consciousness briefly, both are lyrically scattershot and borderline hysterical in their pace, and neither are records most people would reach for if they wanted to introduce people to either group’s work. They are, however, both confident and muscular recordings, helped along enormously by the strength and determination of their respective rhythm sections, and that’s about as much as you can possibly say.

It might even be that “Shakespeare’s Sister” has had more of an afterlife than it would otherwise have experienced thanks to Siobhan Fahey’s group being named after it when she exited Bananarama. Her decision to do so makes an odd kind of sense – if you’re going to out yourself as someone who is more than “just” a pop artist, nailing your colours to this mast shows a willingness to be as interestingly contrary as possible.

New Entries Elsewhere In The Chart

19. Microdisney - In the World EP (Rough Trade)​

Peak position: 8

The indie chart debut for Cork’s finest, though their previous single “Dolly” might also have registered had the NME not been on strike shortly after it was issued.

The group had started out as a curious post-punk funk shambles in Ireland before slowly but surely casting off some of their awkward melodies in favour of an almost mid-seventies, pre-punk craftsmanship and melodic coherence. “Dolly” – dismissed by a college friend of mine in the nineties as “basically old man’s music” – was all prettily plucked nylon string guitars and bedsit yearning, and had arrangements which wouldn’t have shamed an Al Stewart album. 

Later on, though, they began to seem like the indie group whose Velvet Underground obsessions only stretched as far as John Cale's work. The “In The World EP” reintroduces weirdness to proceedings, keeping the craftsman’s touch but occasionally veering off the map unexpectedly. Final track “464” mopes and mourns before breaking into a screeching interlude where Coughlan squawks a misogynistic word salad, following it up by going back into a more tuneful segment which begins with the lyrics “Oh dearie me, I’m in a state”. He’d change the lyrics for later live renditions, but for me its purpose felt clear; the heartbreak you suffer following the shock of affairs and betrayal can often be a very strong test of exactly how right-on you really are. Saying the right thing is an entirely different matter from feeling the right thing.

Lead track “Loftholdingswood” is one of the group’s finest, though, a Sunday morning mope around the clean and empty suburbs of England, the band’s observations being closer to bemused outsiders and travellers than Ray Davies clones. “Aren’t you glad you were born in England/ Aren’t you glad you were born an angel?” sneers Coughlan, after reflecting on the Catholic church’s impact on Ireland, or perhaps he's mocking an English person’s view of their impact on that country (“I died on the cross/ and now I’m the boss”). As you can probably tell, I think this EP is bloody marvellous, but its approach and mood really isn’t for everyone. Why weren’t Microdisney huge? Well, you really don’t need a documentary to explain that one (though I’m glad one was made anyway). Let's face it, John Cale's solo albums never went platinum either. 




27. The Gents - Shout! (Lambs to the Slaughter)

Peak position: 27

The early eighties mod revival was brief but surprisingly successful; besides the godfathers The Jam, Secret Affair and The Lambrettas also achieved a degree of bona-fide success in the UK, with various other acts lower down the pecking order also managing to cultivate surprisingly dedicated fanbases. By 1985 it really was all over, though, leaving any remaining audience for mod’s second wave to gather round gigs organised around scooter rallies and retro nights in various seaside towns.

The Gents were around in the early eighties when the starting gun was fired, but never signed to a major label and seemed to carry on playing live and issuing records long after their friends and rivals gave up and went home. This cover version of the already endlessly covered “Shout” is more spirited and punchy than most – it outperforms The Lambretta’s take on “Poison Ivy” to my ears – so it’s perhaps not surprising that it cheekily peeked its way over the threshold of the Indie Top 30.

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Number One In The Official Charts

Philip Bailey with Phil Collins: "Easy Lover" (CBS)