When I was 14 years old, I hotfooted it after school to my local record shop in Manchester to buy the new album by local heroes, The Smiths, as a matter of some urgency. This is what anxious Northern youth did by way of personal medication back in the summer of 1986. With its boldly unequivocal title, The Queen is Dead was set to elevate the band from their position as mascots of idiosyncratic, parochial charm, singing about Rusholme funfairs and Whalley Range bedsits, into a confident, streamlined global machine taking sharp punches at British institutions on behalf of an energised new generation.
It pulled off the trick handsomely. By giving the record an arch Republican stance, The Smiths guaranteed a loyalty stamp from teenagers hoping to agitate their grandparents. That was the matter of the monarchy pretty much settled for me. I concocted quick, irate adolescent theories about the rotten British class system’s endemic interconnections with inherited privilege, imagining the closure of Buckingham Palace sorting all that out in a stroke. Between a thrilled bedroom screening of a friend’s worn VHS of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, hearing my big brother’s copy of Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ and this fresh musical pronouncement on the dastardly royal family, my case was closed.
