You can get off to a fast start. You can sustain your opener with the main course, not filler. But can you end on a high note? Sometimes I wonder if recording a strong closer is the most difficult thing to pull off when it comes to album rock. When it comes to the cream of the crop in music, I can think of more strong openers than strong closers. Nonetheless, I still have my favorites which I’ll be featuring on Mental Jukebox all month.
I’ve written a few times before about the impact that The Queen Is Dead has had on my experience as a music fan. Hearing it for the first time was transformative. It was an album that I had to listen to from beginning to end from the moment I picked up my cassette at Tower Records that fateful Saturday evening. This is very much attributed to the strength of every track and the sequence in which they appear. The Queen Is Dead starts out with a banger and then takes the listener on a rollicky journey of mid-tempo, slow ballads, bangers and then culminates unexpectedly with the iconic closer “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”.
The track picks up here where Morrissey left off with the historical references earlier in the album. With Keats, Yeats and Wilder in “Cemetry Gates” and Joan of Arc in “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, The Smiths rewrite the textbooks one more time in “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” – this time with Anthony and Cleopatra. The lyrics are powerful in their witty, imaginative state. The music is unexpected with fade-ins and fade-outs on the volume and as expectantly jangly as we want it to be with Marr’s melodic guitar riff. It’s not my favorite Smiths anthem, but it is my favorite closer from these Manchester boys.
“As Anthony said to Cleopatra As he opened a crate of ale: ‘Oh I say, Some girls are bigger than others’.”