The Smiths
I’ve touched on The Smiths’ literary allusions before in my Oscar Wilde print, but recently I’ve been listening to them a lot again (long-time fan, you see) and wondering how I could make a decent print equivalent of their well-read, bleakly nostalgic pop. Surveying a pile of recent vintage Penguin Book purchases, the idea suddenly struck me - what if Morrissey and Johnny Marr had been full-time novelists, and instead of releasing albums they wrote a series of connected novels? ‘Consider x as a form of y’ is one of my favourite mental exercises (and was done so well byAlfred Jarry and JG Ballard, amongst others), so I set to work.
The result is a set of four prints, one for each of the four main studio albums The Smiths released from 1984-7. Morrissey’s titles sit so well with the worn spines of these books. Here’s their debut album ‘The Smiths’:
Then, ‘Meat Is Murder’:
Next, their masterpiece, ‘The Queen Is Dead’:
And finally, ‘Strangeways, Here We Come’:
Click on the images above to go to my shop, where the prints are now available.
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