The Curious Story of The Smiths’ ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’

By Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ is the standout track on the Smiths’ 1986 album The Queen Is Dead, for at least a couple of reasons. As well as being one of the most dearly loved songs the band ever recorded and a firm fans’ favourite, the track is arguably the only song on the whole album which lacks the playful wit which is otherwise found everywhere on the LP.

(Yes, I said ‘LP’. I bought a second-hand copy of The Queen Is Dead, along with all of the band’s other albums, for £1 in a Northampton record shop in 2006. I was into vinyl both before and after it was cool.)

The ‘story’ of the song

The singer of ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ is someone with very little: no car of his own, and not even a home any more, perhaps because he’s been thrown out of the family home or at least doesn’t have a family that welcomes him.

He entreats his beloved to take him out somewhere full of music and youth and vitality so he can lose himself among other people and forget about his homelessness. The driving is symbolic: he is rootless and homeless and the motion of the car, of being driven (presumably, as it isn’t his car, he is actually being driven rather than literally doing the driving), reflects the fact that his life is in transit, that he is on the road to nowhere from a place that, for him at least, doesn’t exist any more.

He may be getting driven but he is not especially ‘driven’ or motivated himself: he wants to lose himself among other young people and complete his extinction of self, even before he half-longs for a complete extinction of his literal self towards the end of the song (again, using vehicles – the bus and the truck – as the potential agents of his destruction).

However, although he clearly has feelings for the beloved he is singing to, when he finally gets them alone (and we cannot say whether the beloved is male or female) he cannot go through with it: like T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, he is paralysed by fear and couldn’t ask them the question (presumably, ‘do you want to go out with me’ or ‘can I kiss you’ or … well, you can use your imagination).

And like Prufrock, he seems haunted by thoughts of extinction and escape which would end his troubles (although Prufrock tells us he is not Prince Hamlet, he harbours the same ambivalent attitude towards self-slaughter and seems to be half in love with easeful death).

But for Morrissey’s speaker in this song, this latter-day Mancunian Prufrock, he wants his death to mean something: if he died suddenly beside the one he loves, it would be a truly beautiful and blissful way for his life to end. Indeed, it would be an honour and even a ‘pleasure’.

In retrospect, that opening line of the song, ‘take me out’, comes to glimmer with its secondary meaning: not just ‘take me out for a night on the town’ but ‘kill me’ or ‘take me out of life altogether’.

Eros and Thanatos

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, posited that there were two forces at work in our unconscious minds: Eros (the life-force, governed by love, sex, and the desire to procreate in order to generate new life, and through doing so, preserve our own as a kind of genetic ‘memory’ within our offspring) and Thanatos (the death-drive, governed by a strange compulsion to repeat certain actions in imitation of ending one’s own life).

We might say that ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ is the meeting-point of these two forces: Eros gives Morrissey’s speaker the longing to die for love, and in wanting to be extinguished and end it all, he is also giving vent to the death-drive, or Thanatos.

We might even say that the latter is preferable to the former for the song’s speaker: note his hesitancy to act on his erotic impulses in that darkened underpass, itself a curiously Freudian space, we might say (and a tacit reminder of the road presumably overhead which has already carried so much symbolism in this song).

An autobiographical number

In an interview with the Dutch magazine Oor, Morrissey claimed that ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ is an autobiographical song. He told Martin Aston that there are three lines in the song which he couldn’t bear to listen to because they were ‘too personal’. The lines in question are those detailing the encounter in the darkened underpass.)

A religious song?

Gavin Hopps wrote a whole book, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, analysing Morrissey’s lyrics and treating them like any literary work. (If Bob Dylan can be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, why not? And Dylan has been given the literary-critical treatment by the masterly critic and longstanding Dylan fan, Christopher Ricks, in the book Dylan’s Visions of Sin.)

In his discussion of ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’, Hopps points out that the only true inextinguishable light is the light of God: a point made at the beginning of the Gospel of John, which talks of a light that ‘shineth in darkness’. What is the light that never goes out in the Smiths’ song? Could it be a holy light?

I’m tempted to answer ‘yes … and no’. The song is not a religious number, but Morrissey is pointing out that the human desire for love – to love and to be loved – is as strong as any religious faith. Just as people are often prepared to die for their sacred beliefs, so the singer in ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ is prepared to die alongside his beloved. It’s a kind of secular religious fervour: love so strong it’s worth dying for.

Never going home

In Morrissey: Scandal and Passion, David Bret points out that the line about never, never wanting to go home was borrowed from Judy Garland’s exclamation at the end of her 1961 Carnegie Hall comeback performance.