‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’: The Smiths song that almost featured Linda McCartney
The Smiths never seemed to fit into any one category. From the first time Morrissey opened his mouth to sing, the band made songs that were as indebted to the work of The Rolling Stones and The Beatles as they were to Willia Burroughs and John Keats. Although both the poetic and the musical sides of the band’s sound were able to fit nicely under one roof, one of their classics almost had a helping hand from one of the giants of rock and roll music.
Then again, not every band member could claim to be snobs about any particular style of music. For as insufferable as Morrissey might come off in interviews, Johnny Marr was always more than happy to talk about the best music that he had seen, either waxing poetic about The Rolling Stones or later getting involved with Noel Gallagher.
During The Smiths’ prime, though, the band had started to take their sound into bold new directions following the release of their sophomore album, Meat is Murder. From the strains of ‘How Soon is Now’ to the poetic musings about the horrors of school on ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, the band were inching closer to their peak until they reached the album The Queen is Dead.
Across all ten tracks on the album, the band finetuned everything that made them stand out, having the perfect balance of Morrissey’s traditional melancholy lyrics paired with Marr’s outstanding fretwork. Although the band had settled into writing songs that had a slower tempo on tracks like ‘I Know It’s Over’, ‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’ showed that the band still had a sense of humour about themselves.
Spitting out lyrics about a former boss that he had, Morrissey tears his former employer to ribbons throughout the song, ridiculing his wretched poetry and informing him that he would go down in musical history. Although the song benefits from having a reasonably sparse arrangement, the original take was set to have Linda McCartney.
After being known as Paul McCartney’s bandmate in Wings, Linda had moulded herself into a fantastic musician in her own right. Throughout the 1970s, Linda was known to provide the ideal backing vocals on every Wings project, even matching McCartney’s zaniness on albums like Red Rose Speedway and Band on the Run. Besides her vocal talents, Linda was known for providing different synthesisers to the group, including the fantastic live spectacles that went into the tour for Venus and Mars.
Although McCartney would retire from Wings after 1980, Linda received a letter from The Smiths to play piano on the track. When talking about the track, Marr recalled Linda having to turn them down, telling NME, “Not many people know this, but Morrissey wrote a postcard to Linda McCartney asking her to play piano on it. She said no, she couldn’t do it, but we would have loved for her to do so because we were big fans of hers”.
Even though the idea of a piano solo would have given the song a lot more substance, the track is probably better for it, allowing Marr to stretch out his talents on the guitar instead of adding extra layers into the mix. ‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’ may be considered another great song amid classics, but the peppiness of the track is something that only a handful of Smiths classics have possessed since.
