Remembering The Smiths' album Meat is Murder
Meat is Murder is packed full of social commentary beautifully framed by Johnny Marr's guitar
The Smiths' eponymous 1984 debut album established them as a musical force to be reckoned with, but it was their follow-up that made them Britain's newest and most uncompromising social commentators.
The principal theme occupying couldn't be broadcast more loudly: lead singer Morrissey's militant vegetarianism had become one of his most talked-about characteristics. That and the flowers he'd wave while performing or stuff into his back pocket.
But while the public perception of Morrissey, and vegetarians in general (remember, this was 1985, the era of Thatcherism and its associated machismo), was fey and fragile, there was nothing shy or retiring about the album track. Played to a backdrop of buzzing abattoir saws and bovine screams, 's sinuous groove is at once catchy and nauseating, its gentle roller-coaster textures more than a little sickly. And that's before the lyrics kick in.
Morrissey's remarks about vegetarianism to the press had been bombastic, caustic and accusatory. In , he went for the emotional jugular, declaring the traditional Sunday roast a deadly bloodbath and Christmas lunch a massacre. "Heifer whines could be human cries/ Closer comes the screaming knife/ This beautiful creature must/ This beautiful creature must die", he opines over Johnny Marr's loping guitar line.
And on it goes, in blood-soaked imagery, denouncing meat as no less than homicide.
