It’s time for another Friday Covers Edition. This time, it’s one of the finest jangly songs written in the 1980s…
The Smiths - “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” (1986)
The song features an ascending F#m–A–B chord sequence that guitarist Johnny Marr took from The Rolling Stones cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike”. Marr said in 1993 that he included the figure as an “in-joke” to determine if the music press would attribute the inspiration for the part to “There She Goes Again” by The Velvet Underground, whom he contended “stole” the figure from “Hitch Hike”. Marr commented, “I knew I was smarter than that. I was listening to what The Velvet Underground were listening to”.
Allmusic’s Tim DiGravina argues that while depressed characters were a regular feature in Morrissey’s work, his lyrics on “There Is a Light” “ups the sad-and-doomed quotient by leaps and bounds.”[3] Goddard argues in his book Songs That Saved Your Life that the basic narrative story is similar to that of the James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause, in which Dean—an idol of Morrissey’s—leaves his torturous home life, being the passenger to a potential romantic partner. According to Goddard, an earlier version lacked some of the finished version’s ambiguity, culminating in the line “There is a light in your eyes and it never goes out”. [Wikipedia]
