Track of the Week: The Smiths: Suffer Little Children (1984)

Morrissey's fascination with ambiguity has run throughout his career, so it's appropriate that The Smiths' first album is riddled with it: both the sexual ambiguity the man would become famous for and a weird moral ambiguity, nowhere more apparent then on the unsavoury lullaby 'The Hand That Rocks The Cradle' and on 'Suffer Little Children', about the moors murders. The band understandably got a lot of flak for dealing with these subjects, with people accusing our heroes of encouraging child molesting and murdering. Which of course they weren't - Morrissey was simply using unusual perspectives to write songs from, and there is no reason that art should not be able to tackle morally difficult subjects, but in doing so the artist runs the risk of being villified and misunderstood - just ask Nabokov.
'Suffer Little Children' is Morrissey's tribute to the victims of the moors murders, something he says had a large affect on him when he was growing up, and it ballances his sympathy with his morbid fascination. The whole of The Smiths' self-titled debut is concerned with the themes of death and loss of innocence, so it is appropriate that the final song on the album deals directly with both. With lines like 'Dig a shallow grave / And I'll lay me down', he puts himself in the position of the murdered, vowing to haunt Hindley and Brady night and day - 'You might sleep BUT YOU WILL NEVER DREAM'. The seemingly innocent 'fresh lilaced moorland fields' are contrasted with the brutal murders and the 'stolid stench of death' that now fills them. But what makes the song special is the way that the lyrics' mourning for lost innocence and dark morbidity are echoed by Johnny Marr's guitar playing. The song is made up musically of two sections which are played after each other and repeated for the whole song. The first consists of major seventh chords, which are played gently like a lullaby and almost lull you into a false sense of security, but not quite - the added seventh means the chords don't sound as simple and happy as normal major chords. In the second section, the first two bars are made out of rising major chords, which sound hopeful and uplifting, but in the next two bars, major chords are followed by some nasty, chromaric minor sevenths that don't sound like they belong in the same key at all, brutally finishing the phrase. In this way, the structure of the song mimics the ambiguity of the lyrics. This is what made the Morrissey/Marr songwriting team so special - Marr's ability to write music that was suited perfectly to what was going on in Morrissey's lyrics. And Morrissey's strength as a vocalist is strongly in presence here - he twists the tune around his irregular lyrics instead of singing the same tune every time the verse comes up, forcing you to pay more attention to what he's saying whilst simultaneously freeing up the possibilities of his voice as an instrument. The overall effect is haunting and sinister, yet somehow still beautifully elegiatic, and ultimately the song is a moving tribute. I think that this is perhaps the main reason that Morrissey irritates me so much these days: far more galling then the man's overbearing arrogance is the fact that, without the alchemy Morrissey and Marr had together, his recent output is simply incabale of reaching such heights of brilliance and sheer magic as his work with The Smiths.