Guardian Unlimited
Dorian Lynskey
Friday September 23, 2005
Readers recommend songs about school
This week's top 10
1 School Days (Ring Ring Goes the Bell) Chuck Berry
2 All Dressed Up for School Beach Boys
3 Baggy Trousers Madness
4 What I Go to School For Busted
5 School Nirvana
6 Expectations Belle & Sebastian
7 The Headmaster Ritual The Smiths
8 This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave Pet Shop Boys
9 The Art Teacher Rufus Wainwright
10 Starfish and Coffee Prince
In Britain, at least, The Headmaster Ritual is the ne plus ultra of school songs. Johnny Marr set out to compose "what Joni Mitchell would have done had she been a punk rocker", while Morrissey tore into the "belligerent ghouls" who "run Manchester schools".
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My post in the forum (Score:1)
http://www.morrissey-solo.com/discuss/index.cgi?r
(User #14395 Info | http://www.camdram.net/shows/06/evening_with_gary_lineker)
Headmaster Ritual rocks because (Score:1)
its so sweet to see when a pupil surpasses the teachers.
and as Morrissey keeps demonstrating, success is the sweetest revenge.
(User #13974 Info | http://www.myspace.com/wallieworld)
good they included "The Headmaster Ritual"... (Score:1)
(User #9259 Info)
The Headmaster Ritual (Score:1)
What do you think of the live version on Who Put The M In Manchester?
(User #14088 Info)
Goddard on 'Ritual' (Score:1)
Influences from Joni Mitchell to George Harrison, and the riffs in the Beatles’ “I feel fine” were identified in Johny Marr’s musical arrangement. For the lyric, Ken Loach’s “Kes” was cited, but Morrissey wasn’t reticient about owning up to the autobiographical background, quoted as saying about St. Mary’s Secondary School, Stretford: “If you dropped a pencil you’d be beaten to death. It was very aggressive. It seemed that the only activity of the teachers was whipping the pupils – which they managed expertly”; and “Five years of education here proved to have no effect on me whatsoever, and I’m sure no effect on anybody else except in a very adverse sense. Not to be recommended”.
Manchester Education Committee tried to ban local air-play, but Morrissey defended his onslaught on Granada TV, replying to a charge by Tony Wilson, Factory Records boss, that he was a “man trapped in a woman’s body” with the retort that Mr Wilson was a “pig trapped in a man’s body”, and later altering this to, a “man trapped in a pig’s body”!
(That last part sounds a bit like the sub-text of a parliamentary debate!)
With the abolition of corporal punishment in the meantime, Goddard comments that: “It was shrewd of Morrissey, a decade later, to write a reverse thesis of “The Headmaster’s Ritual” – the self-explanatory “The Teachers are Afraid of the Pupils”…
(User #12673 Info)
All Smiths/Moz set list (Score:1)
Suffer Little Children
Ambitious Outsiders
Michael's Bones
Handsome Devil
Used to be a Sweet Boy
The Boy with the Thorn in His Side
I Want the One I Can't Have
Girl Least Likely To
Encore: The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils
(User #2244 Info)
Starter for ten! (Score:1)
(User #4233 Info)
here's another (Score:1)
(User #1113 Info)