'Ask' - The Smiths (1986)

"Spending warm Summer days indoors,

Writing frightening verse,

To a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg."

Morrissey wants you to hang out of a car door. Speeding down a motorway. With a video camera. Sounds like a dream job. This was the brief given to an old work colleague of mine called Chris. (No, not that Chris. Or this Chris. There are too many people called Chris in my life.)  

In 1986, The Smiths commissioned a short film from director Derek Jarman to support the release of ‘The Queen Is Dead’. The agreement seems to have been ‘you can do what you like, just don’t expect the band to appear’. Chris was the cameraman on the wildly expressionistic results  – and he appears briefly in the background to the playful video for ‘Ask’ that was recorded the same year.

When I met Chris, nearly a decade had passed and he was a salesman at the video production company where I got my first job. You could tell his heart was elsewhere. And most days his body was elsewhere too, as he continually called in with increasingly inventive excuses as to why he wouldn’t be coming in to the office. Two favourites were…
"I slept in a graveyard."

"I’m chained to a bed and haven’t got the key."

But I think he topped both of these the day he sent us a fax from his local library:
"Can’t make calls today. Lost my voice."

And he never returned.

'The Queen Is Dead' - The Smiths (1986)

“And so I broke in to the Palace,
with a sponge and a rusty spanner.
She said, “Eh, I know you and you cannot sing.”
I said, “That’s nothing; you should hear me play piano.””

I’m not sure if inflicting ‘The Queen Is Dead’ on to a largely uninterested Fifth Form English class is still part of the National Curriculum, but it certainly should be. It’s why I always looked forward to Ms Taylor’s classes twice a week – she was quite simply the most inspiring teacher in the school. In her classes, English wasn’t just about essays on the classics. It was alive and all around us in music, films and the NME (well, that’s how I interpreted it). If the town had put a ban on dancing, she’d have been the one encouraging us to go all Footloose.

When you’re at school, it’s hard to imagine your teachers share anything in common with you. (It's often hard to imagine they’re even real people – hence that shocking moment when you see your teachers in a pub for the first time.) But Ms Taylor liked The Smiths. More than that, she’d seen The Smiths live in Manchester. I was in awe.

I like to think that her idea to bring our favourite records in to English was set up knowing I’d choose some Morrissey to entertain the class. I don’t think we won over many new fans – no-one appeared to be defacing the Five Star stickers on their notebooks or writing Moz on their arm with a fountain pen. Spirits noticeably lifted when the title song came to an end. But were quickly deflated when it became apparent that Ms Taylor had decided we should listen to the whole first side of the album. The best twenty minutes I ever spent in a classroom.

I’d like to see Ms Taylor again. She truly is one of those wonderfully spirited teachers who make you want to stand on your desk and seize the day.

Spotify linky:
The Smiths – The Queen Is Dead / Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty [Medley]