Friday, June 09, 2006 AD
Talk about precious things
TAKE me back to dear old Blighty...The NME is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the release of The Queen is Dead (currently available for £4.97 on Amazon.co.uk - can you afford not to buy it?) with a special anniversary issue.
As well as various reminiscences by ex-Smiths and other pop luminaries - and some hilarious letters sent to the NME in the 1970s by an earnest young New York Dolls fan by the name of "Steve Morrissey" - the issue includes a reprint of the NME's original 1986 review.
The "10/10" rating given on the online version is retrospective: the original review doesn't include a score, and in some respects it's surprisingly lukewarm. While describing the album as being "as exciting and direct a pop or record as we are likely to hear this year", the reviewer also refers to "one spot of neo-psychedelic posturing and a couple of mediocre singles". Even a later reference to the "uncanny catchiness of seven of these ten tracks - a good ratio by any one's standards these days" seems rather faint praise.
(One of those "mediocre" singles was "The Boy with a Thorn in his Side", for heaven's sake - just how cloth-eared was that reviewer?)
Perhaps the album was one of those that took some to time for its reputation to grow. Perhaps it's the fact that it became the Smiths' "Abbey Road" - the last album released while they were still together being recognised as possibly their best. Or perhaps (to be a little cynical for a moment) it's that the NME in 2006 knows how to sell a few extra copies to nostalgic men in their thirties and forties...
And even the less-than-entirely-reliable 1986 reviewer had the good sense to recognise "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" (surely the Smiths' finest five minutes) as a "pearl".
