This month on Twitter, @sotachetan hosts #BrandedInSongs – which is a head-on collision of my personal world of music and my professional world of branding and advertising. The challenge is to simply pick a song with a brand name in its lyrics or title. I added one more criteria to my picks, which is this: the songs themselves must be as iconic as the brands they mention. No filler here.
Any time is a good time for The Queen Is Dead. But with Andy Rourke’s passing, I think it’s important to remember and celebrate how integral both he and Mike Joyce were to the sound of The Smiths. They were the engine room. Johnny Marr has commented on how significant a music moment it was when he first heard Rourke play the bass line for this title track from my favorite Smiths album. I felt the same way the first time I heard it.
It is an album opener that makes other album openers seem so inadequate. “The Queen Is Dead” kicks off with the sample from “Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty”. It was magnificent. Before long, Mike Joyce launches a barrage on the drum set and Andy Rourke creates a slinging, cutting bass line, both of which make you hate yourself for ever thinking The Smiths were all about Morrissey and Marr. They’re all firing on all cylinders here. And this title track sounds like nothing else that we’ve heard before. It’s luring us in. And our lives are never the same again because this is The Queen Is Dead.
"I say, Charles, don't you ever crave To appear on the front of the Daily Mail
Dressed in your Mother's bridal veil?"