FEATURE:
Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure
Morrissey - Suedehead
___________
THE reason why I am including…
Morrissey’s Suedehead in this feature is that some might feel embracing a Mozzer song is a bit controversial - what with his political views and the fact he divides people. I can understand that, though he has written some genius tracks (both with The Smiths and solo). Taken from his excellent debut album of 1988, Viva Hate, Suedehead was Morrissey’s first single. I think it is one of the best tracks in his catalogue. I like the fact that Suedehead is the seventh track on his debut album. It is quite unusual to release a debut single that is so far down the running order. I really love early-Morrissey. Whilst his stock and reputation has taken a hit through the years, I do not think people should see listening to his music as a guilty pleasure or something quite conflicting. I want to bring in a couple of articles regarding the song – one that discusses the symbolism and visuals in the song’s video. Before getting to the first one, a little overview on Suedehead from Wikipedia:
“Suedehead" is the debut solo single by English singer Morrissey, released in February 1988. The track was featured on Morrissey's debut album, Viva Hate, and the compilation album Bona Drag, the latter of which also featured the B-side "Hairdresser on Fire". The artwork of the single features a photo taken by Geri Caulfield during a Smiths gig at the London Palladium.
"Suedehead" charted higher than any of the singles released by Morrissey's former band the Smiths, peaking at No. 5 on the UK Singles Chart and reaching the top 10 in Ireland and New Zealand. The music video, directed by Tim Broad, features Morrissey walking through the streets of Fairmount, Indiana,[3] the hometown of actor James Dean, including shots of the school where Dean studied and the Park Cemetery, where he is buried. Other allusions to Dean in the video include a child (played by Sam Esty Rayner, Morrissey's nephew, who went on to direct the video for "Kiss Me a Lot" in 2015) delivering to Morrissey a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Dean's favourite book”.
The first feature that I want to spotlight is from Radio X. They remark that, whilst the lyrics are quite personal, Morrissey was not going to be too revealing and open at such an early stage of his solo career:
“The debut solo single by Morrissey was released on 27 February 1988. Suedehead was the warm up for the singer’s first post-Smiths album, Viva Hate, which hit record shops on 14 March that year. The video sees Moz touring the streets of Fairmount, Indiana where his hero James Dean grew up.
Suedehead was a make-or-break moment for Morrissey. The demise of the Smiths the previous autumn had caused ripples in the music industry and within fandom.
He needn’t have worried: his first release for major label EMI made Number 5 in the UK charts, which was higher than any Smiths single had achieved at that point.
One of their songs was Suedehead, which was to be the first glimpse of the post-Smiths Morrissey. The lyrics were obscure, apparently written about someone in Morrissey’s teenage years, but as he told the NME in February 1988 “I'd rather not give any addresses and phone numbers at this stage.”
The “suedehead” of the title refers to an offshoot of skinheads - the late 60s counterculture that was given a boost in the 1970s with the arrival of punk. They drew bad press by being associated with violence and racism, but the roots of the culture lay in music and fashion.
Suedehead was the title of a 1971 novel by Richard Allen, the follow-up to the successful Skinhead. However, Morrissey claimed that the song had nothing to do with the book: “I did happen to read the book when it came out and I was quite interested in the whole Richard Allen cult. But really I just like the word 'suedehead’.”
The song ends with the lines “It was a good lay, a good lay” - a very un-Morrissey sentiment at the time, for a man who claimed celibacy as a way of life: “ was never a sexual person,” he once said.
With sublime lyrics, a top Morrissey vocal and composition by producer Stephen Street, I think that this was a remarkable debut single. I know that some feel odd about liking Morrissey now. Do we separate the artist from their public persona? If some of his more recent albums have lacked his edge and humour, Viva Hate is a wonderfully quality-filled and rich album. Alongside Everyday Is Like Sunday, Suedehead is a classic! I really love the video for the track. It is so cinematic, simple and lush. I came across an interesting feature that talks about some of the scenes and nods in the video:
“Morrissey sits pensively in a bathtub, a poster of James Dean and Richard Davalos rising above him and the accoutrements of a writer—a typewriter, a fountain pen, a volume of Byron—about him. Lest there be any doubt about the subject of Moz’s contemplation, shots of a handwritten note signed “Jim {Brando Clift} Dean” and a 1955 copy of The Fairmount News bearing a report of Dean’s death flash by. All of this set the scene for Morrissey’s video for “Suedehead,” his 1988 debut solo single; and fitting for a song about obsessive love, it offers a portrait of the singer-songwriter in his element as a devoted, unqualified fan.
Moz’s existence as a fan began early, and ran deep and unabashed. His adolescence, when not spent in thrall to the transformative music and magic of T.Rex and David Bowie, and presiding over the England chapter of the New York Dolls fan club, saw him firing off letters to editors of music magazines, praising and defending his favorites from Sparks (“Today I bought the album of the year”) to The Cramps (“Back to the Cramps or perish”). His 2013 Autobiography, recounting his teenage fandom, contained swooning passages on Andy Warhol and Patti Smith, and unleashed rapturous homages to pop culture. “Loudly and wildly the music played,” went one, “always pointing to the light, to the way out, or the way in, to individualism, and to the remarkable if unsettling notion that life could possibly be lived as you might wish it to be lived.”
Appropriately, since he professed to be “more impressed with [Dean’s] life off the screen,” the video, directed by Tom Broad, sees Morrissey making a pilgrimage to his hero’s birthplace, Fairmount, Indiana. There, the singer walks the town’s snow-blown streets, snaps pictures, and visits Dean’s old hangouts from a cafe to a drugstore to his now-abandoned high school. “To [the town’s] locals, I must seem like a bit of nonsense from Montague Square,” he later wrote in Autobiography. He calls on the farm owned by Dean’s surviving relatives, Marcus and Ortense Winslow, and in the barn, does a bit of light reading—as a young Jimmy Dean used to do—before surveying the handprint and initials his idol left in the cement floor. (The film crew later departed the farm under some awkwardness, after Dean’s cousin Markie discovers Morrissey’s hand in James Dean is Not Dead.)
The film culminates with a beautifully shot segment at Park Cemetery, where Moz visits—and apparently, wept at—the graves of the fictitious Cal Dean (Dean played Cal Trask in East of Eden) and the real James Dean. As the video fades out, an image of Dean appears, floating above the proceedings, handsomely brooding over Moz’s vigil by his grave.
The subject of the “Suedehead” video, though, seems less James Dean than the act of homage itself. Note all the meditative gazes, for one. Here, Morrissey doesn’t just underscore his obsession with the actor right down to the minutest detail (Byron is Dean’s middle name; The Little Prince, which Morrissey brandishes, is Dean’s favorite book), but literally walks in his hero’s footsteps, reliving his “magnificently perfect” life. At one point, he’s pictured astride a motorbike, in a pose not at all different from Dean’s stance as depicted on the cover of “Bigmouth Strikes Again”.
If you have avoided Morrissey’s music because of his views and political allegiances, then I would say that you are missing out on so much great music. Rather than it being a guilty pleasure, Suedehead is a beautiful, witty and fascinating song that introduced the post-Smiths song to the world. One could forgive Morrissey for taking a while to get going after The Smiths split. There was no danger with his debut single. Suedehead is a confident and incredible track. It is one of those songs that you can listen to once and it will come back to mind…
OVER and over again.