103. The Smiths - Girlfriend In A Coma (Rough Trade)

One week at number one on 29th August 1987

Sometimes, amidst a string of often more noble efforts, one particular single becomes a catchphrase in a band’s career. It’s not necessarily their best single, or the most advanced, or even their biggest hit; it’s the one that seems, rightly or wrongly, to define their whole ethic to the Mums, Dads and "squares".

While watching “The Chart Show” in the summer of 1987, the video for “Girlfriend In A Coma” came on and my parents immediately began spluttering in disbelief. “Oh, come on. Is this a joke?” they roared; a question that probably needed to be asked, since Morrissey was, as ever, playing his role dryly. “Well, I’ve heard everything now”, my Dad muttered, and from that day forth, whenever Morrissey appeared on television, “Girlfriend In A Coma” would be brought up. To my parents, Morrissey was no longer the man with some flowers up his bum – his previous identifying factor in my house - but the bloke who had a partner in intensive care.

“Is this his new one, then?” my Dad would ask. “Is it about his girlfriend again? Is she out of hospital now? Well, at least he’s got that going for him, anyway”.

And it didn’t stop with my parents. Smash Hits listed the single as having one of 1987’s very many “rum” song titles. It also later became the name of a reasonably good novel by Smiths fan Douglas Copeland, and I’ve also seen poetry events named after it (“Girlfriend In A Comma”) and reviews of curry houses referring to it (“Girlfriend In A Korma”, even though that doesn’t really work unless the eatery involves cannibalism). On and on the track’s influence churns, despite the fact that it’s not exactly a radio favourite – and is obviously banned from every hospital radio playlist in the land – and wasn’t really regarded as much more than a quirky glitch in the Smiths catalogue at the time. It was reviewed favourably enough and sold healthily, but it hardly sat alongside “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” or “This Charming Man” as being their most respected work.

Firstly, as to the completely fair question about whether this is a joke – I would argue (as I did with my parents at the time) that it’s really more of a cheeky homage. “Girlfriend In A Coma” feels spectacularly indebted to the sixties death disc, although instead of The Shangri-Las “Leader Of The Pack”, it appears to be taking its cue from Twinkle’s much more mournful, understated motorcycle crash 45 “Terry”.

Twinkle was supposed to have been a superstar in the sixties, a prodigious teenage singer-songwriter whose pop songs seeped with vulnerability and introversion. Instead, the music business pulled her in then spat her out with distaste after her attempts to follow up her big hit faltered. Her second single “Golden Lights” was a mournful study of the downside of being a famous person’s other half, and was actually written while she was dating Dec Cluskey of The Bachelors. The public only cared enough to take it to number 21, and it would be her second and final hit.

The Smiths covered it in 1986 and placed it as the extra track on the 12” single of “Ask”, so they had already doffed a cap to her work. “Girlfriend In A Coma” appears to be looking more in the direction of “Terry”, noting its strangely hushed and understated delivery of a deeply controversial subject matter (it was effectively banned by the BBC for its morbidity). If the subject matter of the leathered-up motorcycle tragedy of “Terry” is vaguely rock and roll – even though its shuffling rhythms and delicately plucked instruments barely qualify – “Girlfriend” erases every last final drop of teenage rebellion from its likely influence and is lyrically stark and almost weirdly understated.

Marr’s simple, unambitious but pretty acoustic guitar lines combine with Morrissey’s softly sung pleas of “I know, I know it’s serious”, “No I don’t want to see her” and, contradicting himself in his mental muddle, “Would you please let me see her”, to create what can only be described as a sombre lullaby of panic. The string section adds some drama to the mix, but it’s ultimately an exhausted collection of thoughts, positive and negative, guilty and concerned (“There are times when I could have strangled her/ but you know, I would hate anything to happen to her”).

There’s an alternative reading to the above, of course. Just as you might listen to Cliff Richard’s “Carrie” and suspect the man at Carrie’s old address had murdered her, I’ve often had a slight feeling of unease that Morrissey is hinting that he is in some way responsible for the coma. His lines about murdering or strangling her followed with “you know, I would hate anything to happen to her” feel almost as if he’s protesting too much, playing a role; yes, of course we regularly bickered, your honour, but it wasn’t me in the greenhouse with the quiff and the cricket bat.

The only thing that scuppers the above is the track’s genuine sense of kitchen sink distress, the repetition and disorder. Where Twinkle sang “Don’t do it, don’t do it!” Morrissey also repeats himself and circles slowly around the truth, arriving thereas the reality of his situation cements itself (“Let me whisper my last goodbyes”).

Of course, I have no doubt that the single probably isn’t intended as an entirely serious artistic statement – it’s The Smiths attempting sixties baroque pop but amping the tragedy and the melodrama to the max, taking the ideas as far as they’ll go before the balloon bursts and the idea becomes too ridiculous to contemplate. It walks a very fine line between homage and parody, and in its own way is as attention seeking as “Panic” or “Shoplifters Of The World Unite” – only the idea seems to have had much more durability and continued shock value than either of those, the thought of quiet ballads to comatose lovers being too ludicrous for some to handle.

Once again, though, we find ourselves talking about Morrissey’s lyrics and intentions ahead of the music or even the quality of the song itself, and in both those cases, its also a deeply strange Smiths single, lacking the melancholic pomp and ambition of “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”, or the glam cut and thrust of their most recent work. Instead, it’s a pretty wind-up music box melody with some stabbing strings in place of a chorus, barely two minutes of hospital bedside prayers set to folky Pebble Mill guitar lines. There were other better songs they could have lifted from the album “Strangeways Here We Come” first, and it once again seems to have been a deliberately contrary act; a sign that whatever else you think about them, The Smiths were never quite going to play to any sensible rulebook, and this would be to their benefit rather than their detriment.

As for Twinkle, she tried. Her last serious attempt to score a hit in the sixties was “Mickey” in 1969, a superb three-and-a-half minute cut which Immediate Records butchered into a meaningless edit for the 7” single release. Listen to it and tell me you can’t hear a hit single in waiting, or even the voice of Kirsty MacColl on the horizon; but whereas The Smiths had other famous singles in their kitbag besides “Girlfriend In A Coma”, Twinkle was doomed to always be remembered as the teenager who sang a gentle song about a motorbike accident. 

She died of cancer in 2015, and her obits spoke lots about “Terry” – about the outrage it caused in the press and in parliament and her wealthy background - and little about her other songs or her latter-day activities as an Animal Rights campaigner. Is life always like this, brother? Good for one, and bad for the other?

New Entries Elsewhere In The Charts

8. Ghost Dance - A Word To The Wise EP (Karbon)

Peak position: 7

Ghost Dance were fronted by ex-Skeletal Family singer Anne-Marie Hurst, and the “Word To The Wise” EP managed to get Chrysalis Records excited enough to lasso them out of the indie sector.

It’s packed with more than one song which proved they’d matured from their earliest releases. “When I Call” is the eerie, phantom-in-the-forest anthem, but for me it’s “Fools Gold” which really soars. Goth Rock basslines meet with chiming and enticing guitars as the track gradually builds into an almighty chorus with some suitable spectral howls from Hurst at the tail end. Intricately produced and arranged, and with some killer guitar riffs meeting with her powerful vocals, it really isn't terribly alternative, to be truthful. Rather, it sounds like a band declaring to the world, and perhaps major labels in particular, that they have the skills in place to take their sound into the world of serious rock music.

Sadly, by the time their Chrysalis album “Stop The World” came out in 1989, interest had considerably waned, and there would be no further new recordings until their inevitable reformation in the 2020s.

18. the Chills - House With A Hundred Rooms (Flying Nun)

Peak position: 18

Spacey, sparse 45 with taut rhythms and sulking melodies and gentle keyboard frills, “House With A Hundred Rooms” is one of those minimal singles the indie scene coughed up regularly in the eighties. The difference between The Chills and most of the other artists in these charts, though, is that there’s no dead wood in the grooves; no slack production values or clumsy, ponderous instrumentation. They have a clear vision and stick to it, shutting you into their cavernous abode.

22. Guthrie Handley With Wayne Hussey - Where Was? (Lamb to the Slaughter)

Peak position: 22

Ex-Naked Voice member Guthrie Handley teams up with goth-of-the-moment Hussey for this one-off single, presumably in the hope of his solo career receiving a boost; sadly, it didn’t work out that way and nothing further was forthcoming on vinyl.

“Where Was?” is another mid-eighties goth number whose dramatic, woebegone melancholy (“There is no silver lining!”) combines with the steady tick and thump of a dependable drum machine and some low frequency riffs. It’s become something of an obscurity in Hussey’s catalogue as the years have marched on, never quite being fully reappraised.

23. T. Rex – The Peel Sessions (Strange Fruit)

Peak position: 21

Number One In The Official Charts

Rick Astley - "Never Gonna Give You Up" (RCA)