Barbarism Begins at Home

"From the time you get hit when you're a child, as covered in a song called 'Barbarism Begins At Home', violence is the only answer. Conversation is pointless."1 - Morrissey

Although it was formally released in early 1985, the musical foundations of “Barbarism Begins at Home” stretch back to the summer of 1983. Its lyrics were written sometime between then and the song’s live debut in December of that year at London’s Electric Ballroom on 19 December 1983, where Morrissey introduced it with the wry remark, “Here’s one for the bootleg friends...” Over the course of 1984, as the Smiths took it on tour, the composition continued to evolve, both musically and lyrically, before finally assuming its definitive form.

According to Mike Joyce, the initial version of ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’ was about seventeen minutes long when the band first performed it:

“Mozzer had been knocking the red wine back and we got out there and it was about seventeen minutes long. Moz kept going into that middle bit - yodeling. Fuckin’ on and on. Johnny kept coming over and looking at me, and every time he did it I thought, ‘Thank God, he’s going to stop it.’ We were knackered.”2

In reality, the debut performance of the song was only 6:20 in duration and differed markedly from the recording that would appear slightly more than a year later on Meat Is Murder. Its structure was looser, and it contained several verses and lines that were ultimately discarded before the band entered the studio. Among the abandoned lyrics were, “I’ve always been such a decent lad” and “I am the man to keep you in place.” Despite its unfinished state, the new composition was greeted as enthusiastically as the band’s established material, prompting Morrissey, in mock disbelief, to ask, “Are you sure? Are you sure?”3

Listen to the Smiths’ debut performance of the song at the Electric Ballroom here:

The Smiths continued to perform “Barbarism Begins At Home” live throughout 1984, but the extra lyrics gradually disappeared, eventually becoming the familiar song heard on Meat Is Murder.

As an aside, from late 1984 to the end of the song’s live career (in June 1985), Morrissey would sometimes end the song with “...a crack on the head because of all the silly little things that you said, and you said the queen is dead...” Considering that “The Queen Is Dead” wasn’t written until late 1985 (about October or November 1985), it would seem that the genesis of the song occurred in this earlier time-frame when Morrissey began to include this extra lyric.

Along with the other tracks that would appear on the Meat Is Murder studio album, "Barbarism Begins at Home" was recorded largely in October 1984 at Amazon Studios in Liverpool, with the Smiths - primarily Johnny Marr - overseeing production and Stephen Street serving as recording engineer. Additional overdubs were completed the following month at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey before the track received its final mix at Island Records’ Fallout Shelter studio in London in December 1984.4

The album version of the song can be heard in the following link:

In January 1985 a limited number of promotional 12-inch singles containing “Barbarism Begins At Home” were distributed to radio stations in the UK. Discogs.com shows two different versions, each numbered RTT171: one that featured the album version and another that contained both the album version and a 3:48 edited version. The runout groove on the A side of both versions of this promotional single was etched with “THESE ARE THE GOOD TIMES,”5 a seemingly upbeat message likely conceals something far darker: a mordant inversion of nostalgia, steeped in Morrissey’s characteristic gallows humor. The supposedly “good times” of childhood and domestic respectability are recast as something crueler and more sinister, exposing the home not as a sanctuary of innocence, but as the very place where “Barbarism Begins at Home.”

The song was formally released 11 February 1985 as the penultimate track on Meat Is Murder, just before the album’s concluding titular track. Considering the normalization of mortal violence Morrissey explores in “Meat Is Murder,” “Barbarism Begins at Home” becomes the natural prelude to the gruesome detail contained in the the final track, where normalized cruelty reaches its most disturbing expression.

Two months after its initial release on Meat Is Murder, ‘Barbarism Begins at Home’ received a limited single release in Germany (both 7-inch and 12-inch editions) and Italy (only in 7-inch) in April 1985. In both countries, the 7-inch featured an edited 3:48 version of the title track, while the German 12-inch retained the full-length version. Listen to the edited version of the song in the following link:

“Barbarism Begins At Home” was not released as a single in the UK until 1988, when it was issued as a CD single featuring the edited version rather than the full album edition.