The Smiths song Morrissey said was “spiritual shoplifting”
During his tenure with The Smiths, Morrissey was a tremendous fan of creative borrowing. From James Dean’s hair to Oscar Wilde’s flowers, the singer seized upon a whole host of inspirations to craft his own onstage personality. Naturally, those influences wove their way into his songwriting too, and nowhere more so than on ‘Shoplifters of the World’.
But stealing as an inspiration is not as overt as the title suggests. The elusive lyrics of ‘Shoplifters of the World’ have often been incorrectly debated as being about everything from theft to homosexuality, an accusation that Morrissey seemingly couldn’t escape as a songwriter.
During a 1987 interview, Morrissey was asked to explain why it wasn’t a call to arms for wanton robbery. “[It does] not literally mean picking up a loaf of bread or a watch and sticking it in your coat pocket,” he said. “It’s more or less spiritual shoplifting, cultural shoplifting, taking things and using them to your own advantage”.
It’s an incredibly nuanced look at The Smiths and their sponge-like tendencies, wrapped up in what is primarily perceived as a Marxist call to arms. Even the single’s cover art reinforces the theme of intellectual theft, adorned with a portrait of a young Elvis Presley.
It was The Smiths at their finest, Morrissey’s powerhouse intellect paired with Johnny Marr’s glittering guitar. Morrissey reflected on that combination in 1997, telling KROQ that the song was penned during what he believes to be The Smiths’ greatest era: “Very, very witty single and a great moment for The Smiths in England,” he said. “I think it was probably the best days of our career. It was just a very funny time and a time of very sparky rebellion, and this song, more than any, I think, exemplifies that. I like it.”
Marr himself took a leaf out of Morrissey’s “cultural shoplifting” book by looking at Nils Lofgren of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band for some very overt inspiration. “You can hear Nils Lofgren’s influence on me in the solo on ‘Shoplifters Of The World Unite’,” Marr told The Guitar Magazine. “That’s all done with false harmonics, which is a steel player’s technique: you touch the strings with a right-hand finger an octave higher than where you’re fretting, and then pluck the string with your thumb.”
But it was Morrissey’s exasperated explanation of the song’s meaning that remains most memorable. “I mean, there’s someone in Huddersfield who might have a fascinating, fiery explanation, and then I go and shatter it by saying it’s about greyhound racing,” he told the Record Mirror in 1987. “Their life collapses.”
Not content with collapsing lives by proving or disproving fan theories on the song’s meaning, he continued: “I mean, I could talk about nuclear weapons, but it gets quite tiresome, doesn’t it? Everyone gets quite bored with it”.
In typically wistful Morrissey fashion, he mused: “I often wonder why shoplifting can be such a serious crime when making nuclear weapons isn’t. That should really be a crime, I think, but it isn’t. We live in a very twisted world, with a very twisted morality.”
