‘Strangeways, Here We Come’: the strange story behind The Smiths’ final album title
“It’s quite unique for good reasons and bad reasons,” The Smiths‘ leader Morrissey once said when describing the appeal of Manchester. “There is this great idea of Manchester as being a place of total doom, defeat, despair and depression,” the singer said, admitting the fact that these are all positives, in his view. The band’s fourth and final album, Strangeways, Here We Come, therefore, couldn’t have been a more fitting allegory for his beloved city.
The build-up to the release of Strangeways, Here We Come was undeniably strange. Despite their ongoing success, Johnny Marr took a break in June 1987 due to exhaustion, a move which left him feeling uneasy and his bandmates seemingly displeased. The next month, an article was published in NME with the headline “Smiths to split”, which Marr suspected Morrissey was involved in.
They had officially broken up by the time Strangeways, Here We Come was released in September of that year. Despite the dramatic unfolding of their dissolution, The Smiths pulled out all the stops for their final album, with Marr’s desire to move towards a more accomplished sound coming to the fore through the use of additional instruments like synthesisers, string arrangements, and drum machines.
As usual, Morrissey took the album title and artwork as an opportunity to display his personal interests, with the cover featuring an image of Richard Davalos from the 1955 movie East of Eden. In the picture, he is looking down at James Dean, who also featured in the film. Dean is a major hero of Morrissey’s, a fact which made the cropping of the image seem even more intriguing, with many questioning why the singer would choose to purposefully omit the actor from the album cover, considering the fact that he appreciated his work so much that he even wrote a book about him called James Dean Is Not Dead.
Regardless, Strangeways, Here We Come seemed the perfect title in many ways. The most obvious reason is its reference to Manchester’s notorious prison, Strangeways Prison, which was later renamed HM Prison Manchester. When Morrissey first heard its name as a child, it was “befuddling” as he couldn’t understand why they would give it such a whimsical name.
For the album, however, which coincided with a significant turning point in his life, it seemed necessary to give the record a name that reflected the uncertainty he suddenly faced. “Really, it’s me throwing both arms to the skies and yelling ‘Whatever next?'” he once said, alluding to the fact that his next chapter would likely head in a direction that even he couldn’t predict.
The line itself, “here we come”, was lifted from the Keith Waterhouse novel Billy Liar, which includes the utterance: “Borstal, here we come”. Morrissey, of course, took this and re-worked it to better mould into his perception of Manchester, where darkness and light intertwine, with “that hideous Victorian monstrosity” pinpointing the almost laughable debacle he was suddenly faced with.
Morrissey later expressed remorse for giving the project such a name, claiming it to be too obvious, but he “learned to love the title”, possibly due to the appropriateness of its connotations.
The Smiths continue to be a band largely associated with satirical quips and dichotomous ramblings about the sinister aspects of life set to upbeat and joyful musical arrangements, and Strangeways, Here We Come, both in title and sound, played into that tapestry of strangely contradicting elements.
