‘Vicar In A Tutu’: The Smiths song Johnny Marr said was a “throwaway”
Most albums will have a filler track or two. Somewhere amid the hits, the ambitious experimental works and the emotional outpours, artists will often slot in a slightly less memorable tune to fill the space. It’s often a song that fits within the collection but doesn’t necessarily stand out amongst it, perhaps a shorter or less serious endeavour. For The Smiths and for The Queen Is Dead, that song was ‘Vicar In A Tutu’.
After paving the way for themselves to become Manchester indie staples with their self-titled debut and follow-up album Meat Is Murder, The Smiths well and truly cemented that reputation in 1986 with The Queen Is Dead. Between the devastating ‘I Know It’s Over’, the more playfully deprecating ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, and the ever-iconic ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, the album was filled to the brim with guitar hits.
But even The Queen Is Dead couldn’t escape the inevitability of the filler track. Sandwiched in between ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side’ and ‘There Is a Light’ sat ‘Vicar In A Tutu’, a tiny, two-minute-long track that guitarist Johnny Marr himself once described as “throwaway”. During a conversation with NME about the iconic album, he explained the thought process behind the inclusion of the track.
“We had so many big songs,” he explained, “we thought it would be OK to come up with a couple of things that were a little more throwaway.” One example of this was ‘Vicar In A Tutu’. While Marr admitted that it wasn’t one of his “favourites,” he suggested that it was a “laugh” and “made a change from trying to change the fucking world”.
The song certainly does provide a moment of release from the nihilistic self-hatred that usually characterised Morrissey’s lyricism. Rather than longing for a love or proclaiming his heavenly misery, the more joyous track found the frontman singing of his titular character, of a vicar in a tutu, over twinkling and swaying instrumentation.
Tackling the topic of religion in song often brings with it a certain weight, and so too does the topic of gender, but The Smiths manage to evade this heaviness on ‘Vicar in a Tutu’. Instead, Morrissey relishes in the image, deeming it “not strange” and suggesting “any man could get used to” the “fabric of a tutu.” His delivery is slightly lighter than usual as the guitars swing around him.
It’s easy to see why Marr considered the song to be a “throwaway” track, a filler on the album amid the hard-hitters, but perhaps it was also a necessary breather from Morrissey’s wails. Placed between the singer’s ruminations on death and loneliness, it provides a respite from the melancholy and proof that The Smiths can do more than just misery.
“It gave the album depth,” Stephen Street rightly stated, “a comic character song. It shows Morrissey’s sense of humour.” Though there are glimpses of the lyricist’s sense of humour amidst his self-deprecation, this was the most obvious example of his more light-hearted lyricism, of his ability to tackle huge topics with wit and joy.
‘Vicar In A Tutu’ may be a throwaway song, one that remains completely overshadowed by the giants that surround it, but this was exactly its purpose. Short and cheerful, it provided us with another side of The Smiths amidst The Queen Is Dead.
