Music Arcades: The Smiths: Panic

Summer of 1986. I didn't buy The Queen Is Dead then (surprisingly I never have), but this single was just too good to miss. I think there was a very good Derek Jarman video for it as well, but I only saw a clip of it once. Oh yeah, I always forget about that internet video place (it doesn't look very good in this pixelated, low frame-rate version):

English place names are notoriously poor grist for the songwriter's mill. You couldn't do an English version of Wanted Man, which is mostly just a list of place names; and Billy Bragg's A13 was conceived more or less to prove that point. I think Panic is as good a use of place names in English song as I can think of. Admittedly it brings in a couple of non-English names, but the metre and scansion of "Dublin, Dundee, Humberside", helped especially by the way Morrisey enunciates the vowels, is just exquisite.

As you approach the Lake District from the south, there are signs to a place called Grasmere, but I've always assumed that that isn't the place where "hopes may rise", and that there's another Grasmere somewhere else in the land.

The NME tried to stir up some controversy by charging that the "hang the DJ" and "burn down the disco" lines had racist overtones — because lots of DJs and people in discos were black. Hmmm. (I'd heard that the DJ in question was Paul Burnett, who inspired the song by following a news bulletin about famine and misery with a Wham song — hence "the music that they constantly play says nothing to me about my life.") Twenty years later, Stephin Merritt was on the receiving end of similar accusations.

Buy from MusicStack

MusicBrainz entry for this album