‘Jeane’: the worst song The Smiths ever wrote
There’s a dizzying pace of prolific brilliance when assessing The Smiths‘ body of work. Breathlessly releasing four albums in five years amid a slew of stand-alone singles and respective B-sides, the Manchester indie four-piece rivalled The Beatles with such consistent, high-quality output.
From their self-titled debut in 1984, The Smiths have garnered an intensely dedicated fanbase, guitarist Johnny Marr’s heavenly gift for melodic jangle and singer Morrissey’s rejection of frontman machismo and lyrical windows of dark humour and social alienation poured over by expertly quiffed devotees.
Just like The Beatles, however, not everything they touched turned to gold. It’s unanimously understood that the B-side of ‘Ask’ is their most bafflingly worst cut, a cover of Twinkle’s 1965 hit ‘Golden Lights’. With flanged vocals and pitch-altered harmonies, the whole sorry affair feels slopped together with little remaining studio time, plagued with a jerky plod that takes no time to rub the wrong way.
Whether borne from Morrissey’s indulgent love for English eccentricity or simply an exercise in subtle contrarian provocation, his insistence on covering Cilla Black’s 1968 number ‘Work is a Four-Letter Word’ quite literally broke the band, Marr telling Record Collector in 1992: “‘Work Is a Four Letter Word’ I hated. That was the last straw, really. I didn’t form a group to perform Cilla Black songs. That was it, really. I made a decision that I was going to get away on holiday. The only place I could think of was LA. LA was the only place I knew where there’d be sunshine, so off I went. I never saw Morrissey again.”
There’s also the instrumentals. Despite Marr’s attempts, he never quite seemed to pluck the same celestial melodies put to Moz’s lyrics as he could for his own solo compositions. ‘Oscillate Wildly’ is stirring enough, but ‘Money Changes Everything’ is a meandering outtake that sounds like a band killing time, reworked to greater effect on Bryan Ferry’s ‘The Right Stuff’ in 1987.
The nadir of The Smiths’ instrumentals is ‘The Draize Train’, an uninspired slap-bassed quasi-funk trudge that left Morrissey so unimpressed he allegedly refused to gift the track lyrics.
This leaves us with the worst Smiths song written by the band, Moz and Marr together sharing equal culpability. Their partnership was of such creative spark and magic that there isn’t a truly terrible cut to choose from across their brief but voluminous discography. If one were to select their ‘least good’ at gunpoint, ‘This Charming Man’s B-Side ‘Jeane’ strikes as one of their least interesting cuts.
It’s not a bad song. Morrissey’s lyrics are on good form, and there’s a welcome hacking abrasion that cuts a unique sonic character among their indie pop, pushing their sound closer to punk than they’d ever venture again. But among such a deep bag of gems that form the Morrissey-Marr songbook, ‘Jeane’ just exists as a fine song. A minor entry that struts unfussy with a direct urgency, missing some of Marr’s guitar finesse. Nothing remarkable, which among The Smiths’ high standards results in a cut that would be a lesser band’s highlight.
