As Anthony said to Cleopatra
The Smiths - 'Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others' (The Queen Is Dead - 1986)
For a band who were together for only five years1, The Smiths had quite a tumultuous history in terms of which versions of their records went out. First, their debut album, The Smiths, was recorded under Troy Tate’s supervision and then again by John Porter, with the former available as bootlegs and the latter the final version of the album. Hatful of Hollow is a compilation of BBC Radio Sessions, though it is treated by many as an album proper. Whilst Meat is Murder went out with a hitch in 1985, by the end of the year, the band could not release The Queen is Dead due to a legal dispute with Rough Trade, which took seven months to resolve.
So it wasn’t until June 1986, ten months after the lead single ‘The Boy With A Thorn In His Side’ was released the album saw the light of day. Despite the fraught 1986 with bassist Andy Rourke allegedly sacked via Post-It note by Morrissey for his heroin usage, replaced by Craig Gannon and then reinstated2 and then Rourke’s visa issues almost holding up their North American tour, they delivered an album stuffed with some of their brightest moments. From the unimpeachable heights of the title track, the sentimental anthem ‘I Know It’s Over’, and the album’s penultimate track - the shining lament ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’. The closing track would have to be quite something to top that.
One of the zombie factoids about this song is that the lyrics are literally influenced by the 1964 Carry On film Carry On Cleo. This was cleared up in Simon Goddard’s 2002 book on every song The Smiths recorded - Songs That Saved Your Life. At no point in Carry On Cleo does Sid James (as Mark Antony) turn to Amanda Barrie (as Cleopatra) and go, “Ooh, I say” whilst opening a crate of ale. Perhaps you can imagine it, but that doesn’t mean it happens. There is some direct pilfering3 with the line about sending a pillow paraphrased from Johnny Tillotson's 1962 single "Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On".
The lyrics themselves are a somewhat frivolous and trite acknowledgement by Morrissey, at the age of 26, that indeed some girls are bigger than others. While we usually find Stephen Patrick Morrissey waxing lyrical about legs, it is breasts4 that are the subject at hand here - one which they tackled very early in their career on ‘Handsome Devil’. Suppose you want to give Moz some slack. In that case, you can argue that there is a point here that he is highlighting from the Ice Age to that point in time (The Dole Age5) that men’s fascination with the various shapes and sizes of the female form has been a consistent topic of not only interest but conversation among men.
Morrissey’s withered disdain seems to suggest that he would like to move the conversation on to something more profound, which feels like a very Morrissey thing to say to be honest.
Elsewhere on the album, we have vicars in tutus and a suicide pact by double-decker bus. There is an obvious juxtaposition between the over-wrought seriousness of ‘Never Had No-One Ever’ and the music-hall malarkey of this seaside humour.
That isn’t the only juxtaposition we find in ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’. Moving away from the lyrics if we move to guitarist Johnny Marr’s music - which he posted through Morrissey’s letterbox, as he’d done many times before during their songwriting partnership. In 2011 he said in the NME that he was particularly proud of the music, and his heightened expectations for a finished product were crushed when his singer returned with the utterly irreverent and silly lyrics you hear. He also confessed to having been surprised when Morrissey suggested the title. He laughs about it now6 but admits he was hoping for something more profound.
He is correct - it is an intricate and beautifully arranged piece of music with a great guitar melody and engineer Stephen Street’s false fade in and out at the start, which he described as;
A bit like opening a door, closing it, then opening it again and walking in.
It is achieved by increasing the reverb on the drums, fading down and then back up into a cleaner sound.
It is hard to be too tough on Morrissey for not matching the arrangement to a more appropriate lyric - one of the joys of the band’s work is that sometimes you get a lyric that doesn’t square with the music we are hearing. ‘Vicar In A Tutu’ and ‘Never Had No One Ever’ are additional prime examples on this very album. For all the Never Been Kissed sixteen-year-old boy from England dynamic, there is something quite amusing about the record ending on an exploration of the changes (or lack of ) lady shapes through the ages.
Which reminds me, Lynn pass me my Dictaphone…
Their whole career falls between May 1982 and June 1987. As a comparison, this is slightly less time than it took Radiohead to follow up The King of Limbs with A Moon Shaped Pool.
Gannon was shuffled to rhythm guitar for a bolstered, three-guitar line-up
Talent borrows; genius steals.
If there is any doubt about this, the song made a live debut at The Smiths’ final “proper” concert at Brixton Academy in mid-December 1986, where an extra verse discusses what amounts to a topless calendar in a mechanic’s workshop.
Unemployment in the UK was over 10% for the entirety of the band’s existence.
But at the time, it was terrible.