‘The Night Has Opened My Eyes’: The classic play that inspired one of The Smiths’ darkest hits
Being sad never sounded as cool as it did when The Smiths emerged in the 1980s.
Morrissey’s melancholia was paired with Johnny Marr’s groove-laden guitar parts to create this perfectly juxtaposed world of indie rock, where ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ could make you dance through the tears, while ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ had thousands of fans gleefully singing the lines “And if a double-decker bus / Crashes into us / To die by your side / Is such a heavenly way to die”.
Somehow, this bizarre marriage of ecstasy and despondency worked, with both Marr and Morrissey providing the band’s suitable yin and yang, and in those two aforementioned songs, you would be forgiven for thinking they had plummeted to the depths of their narrative darkness.
But, as is always the case with The Smiths, hidden depths existed within their catalogue of B-sides and scrap cuts, with some of their best and most memorable songs existing on the other side of a breakout single, most notably ‘How Soon Is Now?’ and ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’. However, what is perhaps their darkest lyrical take didn’t make any single at all and instead debuted on the Hatful of Hollow compilation in 1984.
‘This Night Has Opened My Eyes’ plummets The Smiths into uncharted territory, telling the tale of a teenage girl who, in a moment of sheer despair, drowns her newborn baby daughter in a river, following the betrayal of the baby’s father, who had suddenly left the new mother.
It was, even for Morrissey’s standards, a shocking storytelling turn that was relatively unprecedented within popular music, but while a quick glance at Morrissey’s career, from a retrospective point of view, would lead us to determine that he was somewhat capable of penning a song that dark because it was actually inspired by a separate source of literature.
“At least 50 per cent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney, who wrote A Taste Of Honey,” Morrissey explained of the lyrical inspiration, adding, “And ‘This Night Has Opened My Eyes’ is A Taste Of Honey song, putting the entire play to words.”
Set in a bleak Salford flat, A Taste Of Honey tells the story of Helen and her daughter Jo, the former, a neglectful mother and alcoholic, leaves Jo to create a life for herself, which she ends up doing through the romance of a car salesman, Peter. Eventually, through adulthood, Jo becomes something of a neglectful mother herself, mirroring her own mother’s habits and questioning the idea of nature versus nurture.
You can clearly see the parallels that made up the 50 per cent Morrissey outlined, but the other 50, most notably the drowning of the child, was left to The Smiths frontman. As a song, it’s a rather chilling reminder of just how dark the introspective state of Morrissey truly was, to a point where it almost went a step too far. It would have been far more obvious that he’d done so, had his partner Marr not delivered a truly delightful melody to live behind it.
