The Headmaster Ritual

“I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior.” - Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928)

During the Troy Tate sessions in London for the Smiths’ debut album, in the midst of 1983’s exceptionally hot summer, Johnny Marr began working on a tune that would eventually become “The Headmaster Ritual.” While still in its nebulous state, he periodically returned to it throughout the following year, refining and polishing it much like a lapidary patiently working a gemstone.

Marr later recalled, “I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote it, and I quite like that. I think it’s a handy device for cutting out the brain static that gets in the way of coming up with chord changes.”1

That sense of experimentation seems to have defined the song’s unusually long gestation. Marr later described how its disparate pieces gradually came together over the course of the following year:

“The nuts and bolts of The Headmaster Ritual came together during the first album, and I just carried on playing around with it. It started off as a very sublime sort of Joni Mitchell-esque chord figure; I played it to Morrissey but we never took it further. Then, as my life got more and more intense, so did the song. The bridge and the chorus part were originally for another song, but I put them together with the first part. That was unusual for me; normally I just hammer away at an idea until I've got a song. It's in open D turning, with a capo at the second fret. Again, it was heavily overdubbed."2

The song took on its final form some sixteen months after its initial conception, in October 1984, during the Meat Is Murder sessions, where the band rehearsed the arrangement and Morrissey added the lyrics.3

Marr noted that composing the song took him the longest ever for him to write any song:

“’The Headmaster Ritual’ was a favourite of mine for a long time just because I’m really pleased with the guitars on it and the strange tuning... For my part, ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ came together over the longest period of time I’ve ever spent on a song. I first played the riff to Morrissey when we were working on the demos for our first album with Troy Tate. I nailed the rest of it when we moved to Earls Court. That was around the time when we were being fabulous.”4

The song was mainly recorded in October 1984 at Amazon Studios in Liverpool, with the Smiths - mostly Marr - acting as producer and Stephen Street as recording engineer. Additional work was performed the following month at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, when overdubs were added to the track. The song's final mixing was completed in December 1984 at Island Record's Fallout Shelter in London.5

“The Headmaster Ritual” was accorded a place of some distinction on Meat Is Murder, opening the Smiths’ second studio album when it was released on 11 February 1985. Its life as a single, however, was far more fragmented. In the United States, Sire Records tucked an edited version of the song away as a B-side on its 7-inch release of “How Soon Is Now?” in the spring of 1985.6

That summer, the song was granted a rare release of its own in the Netherlands, where it appeared as a 7-inch single. Britain, curiously, had to wait. “The Headmaster Ritual” would not receive a UK single release until late 1988, more than a year after the Smiths had dissolved, when it finally appeared in the comparatively modern guise of a CD single.

Listen to the “The Headmaster Ritual” in the following link:

The cover art for the Dutch single was originally intended to be a still of Sir Laurence Olivier with cane raised over Terence Stamp’s hand from the 1962 film Term of Trial.7 While Stamp gave his consent to use his image, Olivier was slow to respond in time for the release.

Consequently, Morrissey culled a black-and-white image of a child dressed as a cowboy from the 1965 film The Uncle8 for the single.

When the song was issued as a single in the UK in 1988, its sleeve featured a smiling Viv Nicholson (appearing for a third time on a Smiths release) sitting at an easel, painting.9

The song opens with an open-tuned chord that Marr has described as what Joni Mitchell10 “would have done had she been an MC5 fan or a punk rocker,” adding “I knew pretty much what every guitar track would be before we started.”11 The arrangement is more layered than it sounds. Alongside two Martin D-28 acoustic tracks, an Epiphone chorus part, and the trebly Epiphone Coronet heard at the end, Marr built the song’s signature riff from a doubled Rickenbacker figure. As he later explained:

“‘The Headmaster Ritual’ main riff is two tracks of Rickenbacker. I wasn’t specifically thinking of the Beatles’ ‘Day Tripper’ even though it sounds like it, but I did think of it as a George Harrison part.”12

For his part, Morrissey colorfully described Marr’s performance on the recording as “a live-wire spitfire guitar sound that takes on all-comers.”13

The result is nothing short of brilliance. Marr’s opening riff immediately announces the song’s intent, soon joined by Andy Rourke’s nimble, restless bass line and Mike Joyce’s adroit drumming, punctuated by oddly complementary cymbal splashes. Beneath and around them, the arrangement remains remarkably fluid, even as Morrissey steadily unleashes some of his most devastating lyrics.

Yet for all its force, “The Headmaster Ritual” also possesses an unexpected poignancy. There is an almost wistful momentum to the music that sits strangely against the harshness of the subject matter. Its chorus introduces a captivating wordless yodel that returns in the outro, where Morrissey sustains the vocalization for roughly one minute and twenty seconds as the song slowly fades away. The effect is dissonant and haunting, leaving an impression that lingers well after the music has ended. Morrissey himself sounds less defiant than wounded: earnest, anxious and at times almost pleading. His repeated desire simply to “go home” transforms what might otherwise have been a furious denunciation into something more vulnerable, the recollection of a frightened schoolboy trapped within an institution he has come to despise.