This Charming Man

Few pop singles open with such sunlit confidence and then tell a story so unsure of itself. "This Charming Man" sounds like a morning in a good mood, all bright guitar and bouncing bass, yet its narrator is a nervous young man on a deserted hillside, trying to decide whether to accept a stranger's offer. That gap between the cheer of the music and the hesitation of the story is where the song lives.

It has been read as a comedy of manners, a seduction, a coming-out sketch and a joke about poverty. Morrissey and Johnny Marr both seemed content to let all of those readings coexist.

How a Peel session became a single

The song began as a calculated move. Marr wrote the music in a single night in 1983, alongside two other Smiths tunes, to have material for an upcoming John Peel session^[1]. He has said he felt a pang of rivalry when labelmates Aztec Camera were getting daytime radio play, and he wanted something upbeat and in a major key that could actually chart^[1].

After hearing the Peel performance, Rough Trade's Geoff Travis suggested it as the next single instead of the more controversial "Reel Around the Fountain"^[1]. A first studio attempt in London was judged unsatisfactory, so the band recut it in Stockport with producer John Porter in October 1983^[1]. That version came out as the band's second single on Rough Trade at the end of the month^[1].

Marr's guitar part is the song's engine. Rather than strumming chords, he plays single notes and thirds that work as a counter-melody, built up from roughly fifteen overdubbed layers^[1]. The main sound came from a vintage Telecaster rather than the jangly Rickenbacker most listeners assumed^[1]. Underneath it sits a Motown-flavored bassline and a drum part originally programmed on a machine and triggered from samples of a real kit^[1]. It is a record of great polish that still feels light on its feet.

A story told by someone who is being persuaded

The narrative is simple. A cyclist's tyre goes flat on a remote hillside. A well-off stranger in a luxurious car stops to offer a lift. The two flirt, the cyclist wavers, and the stranger proposes an evening out^[2][3]. What makes it unusual is whose perspective we hold. Morrissey said he liked the idea of a male voice that is vulnerable and open to being manipulated, rather than a swaggering one^[1].

That choice runs against the grain of most rock songs of the period, in which the singer is the one doing the pursuing. Here the narrator is the pursued, flustered and flattered and slightly out of his depth. The comedy comes from how little it takes to tip him over: a bit of attention, a bit of comfort, and the possibility of a different evening than the one he had planned.

Poverty also runs through the story. Morrissey told an interviewer in 1984 that he had spent years without a job or money, and that he rarely had clothes fit to wear to parties^[5]. The narrator's practical excuse for not going out becomes a gentle joke about class. The driver has a fine car and a confident manner, while the cyclist has a punctured wheel and nothing to put on. Desire, in this song, is always tangled up with who has the means to act on it.

Borrowed words and a courtly voice

The language is deliberately a little old-fashioned. Morrissey said he wanted to revive vocabulary that people no longer use^[1], and the effect is of a drawing-room comedy transplanted to a lonely English road. A line was lifted from the 1972 film Sleuth, Anthony Shaffer's play of games and sexual undertone^[1][5], and a refrain about having nothing to wear has also been tied to the 1961 film A Taste of Honey^[5]. These borrowings place the song in a tradition of British stage and screen, rather than in the rock and roll tradition its guitars belong to.

Literary readers have noticed how much the song resembles a short story with a twist of rural gothic about it: a stranded traveler, a mysterious benefactor, an invitation that could be a rescue or a trap^[3]. The ambiguity is the point. The song never says what will happen after the lift is accepted.

The question of what kind of song it is

Many listeners hear a gay seduction, and the song has been celebrated as a queer anthem^[4]. Some commentators describe it as a story of sexual initiation, while Mat Snow has argued that Morrissey, feeling alienated from the openly gay culture of the early 1980s, instead evoked an older, more coded underground scene^[1].

Morrissey himself was wary of the obvious reading. He said he disliked the way the gay press pushed the song so hard in that direction, and that he hated the idea of sex being discussed in a trivial or festive way^[1]. That did not shut the interpretation down so much as complicate it. The song can be about desire between men, about the fear and excitement of being noticed, or about the general nervousness of being young and poor and unsure what you are being offered.

Marr, for his part, has reportedly found the words puzzling when asked what they mean^[3]. It is a useful reminder that the song was a collaboration between a lyricist who loved ambiguity and a guitarist who cared mostly about the feel of the thing.

Where it sits on the debut album

Oddly, the song was not on the original UK version of The Smiths in February 1984. The UK LP left it off, while it appeared as track six on the American Sire releases and on the UK cassette, and every pressing since the 1992 reissues has included it^[2]. The Peel session take lives on Hatful of Hollow^[1].

The album itself had a troubled birth. An earlier set of sessions with Troy Tate was scrapped, and Porter's sessions were squeezed between tour dates at several studios^[2]. Morrissey later said the finished record was not good enough, though the band had spent only about six thousand pounds and needed it out^[2]. It went to number two on the UK chart and stayed there for 33 weeks^[2].

Reviews at the time were mixed, with some critics lukewarm about the production and others calling it stunning, while retrospective ratings have been far warmer^[2][6]. Its themes of unrequited love, isolation, identity and sexual confusion are all present in miniature in the single, which is the sunniest version of the band's worldview^[2]. Where other songs on the record are murky, "This Charming Man" is bright and quick, but the uncertainty at its center is the same.

Top of the Pops and the long afterlife

The single reached number 25 on the UK chart and topped the indie chart in 1983^[1]. Its television debut on Top of the Pops, with Morrissey waving flowers, was for many viewers their first sight of the band^[1]. Noel Gallagher has said his friends mocked the performance while he found it life-changing^[1].

Critics were almost unanimous in their praise. Paul Morley of the NME called it one of the year's greatest singles, and Robert Palmer of the New York Times described it as sparkling, soaring pop-rock^[1]. The sleeve used a still of Jean Marais from Jean Cocteau's film Orphée, a choice that signaled the band's taste for European art cinema over rock mythology^[1].

A 1992 reissue reached number eight, the band's highest UK chart position^[1], and Mojo placed the song first in its 2008 list of the greatest British indie records^[1]. It has been covered by acts including Death Cab for Cutie, Stars, and The Killers, who played it with Marr at Glastonbury in 2019^[1].

It is worth noting how deliberately the band made a pop record here. Marr has said he wanted a major-key song that could break through on the radio^[1], and the brisk arrangement shows it. Yet the Smiths did not sand down their peculiarities to get there. The archaic phrasing, the sexual hesitation and the film-lover's references all survived into a record that reached the charts^[1].

That balance of accessibility and oddness is arguably the band's signature. The single gave a wide audience a way into a group that could otherwise have stayed a cult concern, and it did so without apology. For many young listeners in 1983 and after, the combination of a gorgeous tune and an unashamedly strange narrator was a revelation^[1].

Why it keeps working

The song has lasted because it makes ambiguity feel joyful. The guitars reassure you that everything will be fine, while the story withholds any such promise. A listener can hear a flirtation, a rescue, a trap, or all three, and the music is catchy enough to make that uncertainty enjoyable rather than anxious.

It also captures a particular kind of youthful self-consciousness: the feeling of standing at the side of the road, aware of your own shabbiness, while the world offers you something polished and tempting. Whether you accept the ride or not, the song understands why you hesitate. That wit and tenderness, delivered at three minutes of pure momentum, is what made the Smiths the band they became.