It Took Seconds

Three minutes and forty-eight seconds: The Smiths’ “Rubber Ring” is an odd song - a time capsule address from a singer to his future former fans, asking them not to forget him, knowing they will. It’s simultaneously nakedly manipulative and unusually honest, and in some ways it overshadows everything else Morrissey did. (It’s a good, unshowy Johnny Marr moment too - a teasing, vamping not-quite-skank which turns into an uneasy swirl). Morrissey himself is now far older than he was when he wrote “Rubber Ring”, and I wonder what he thinks of it these days.

It’s a song whose effect shifts with context: taken by itself - as here - it’s a curio, perhaps a rather self-important one. You might be more likely to have heard it on Louder Than Bombs, where it’s thrown out somewhere midway through the second side, just another B-Side on a careless compilation that muddles up the band’s two fairly distinct phases.

Its original appearance was more interesting, as a B-Side on the 12” of “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”, exactly the kind of track that was clung to by the devotees “Rubber Ring” addresses. In this original form “Rubber Ring” merges with another B-Side, “Asleep”, about suicide, or at the very least dying in ones sleep and being happy about it. Which throws more emphasis on the track’s fade-out sample, the “You are sleeping. You do not WANT to believe.” loop. This in itself has a macabre origin - it’s from Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead, and the speaker is delivering a clipped translation of the language of the dead, picked up - we’re led to believe - on special recording equipment. And communication between the dead and the living is what “Rubber Ring” is all about. “Living” is linked with laughing, dancing, NOT being a Smiths fan any more: Morrissey is singing as a ghost himself - “hear my voice in your head”. Or as a guide: the land of the dead is loneliness, isolation, a teenage bedroom, and Morrissey’s job in “Rubber Ring” is to keep you safe until you get out of it.

I heard “Rubber Ring” for the first time in my own teenage bedroom. I was 15. It was the closing track on The World Won’t Listen, the first thing I’d ever heard by The Smiths. In memory that first encounter is probably the most intense listening experience I’ve ever had: I listened to “Panic” alone several times before I could even get to the second track. My identificiation with the song was immediate and total. It didn’t matter that I enjoyed pop music and the radio, it was the dissatisfaction in the song that had me. Every other song on the album - the ones with words, anyhow - had something else for me to relate to, grab on to, delight in and aspire to. (Aspiring to the Smiths is a terribly dangerous business but I didn’t know that then.) And then - at the end - this, telling me that the key to everything I’d just heard is that it’s temporary, a skin I was going to shed - if things worked out, that is. “YOU ARE SLEEPING.”

Quite an album, then. To swipe the imagery of another Englishman who linked death and adolescence, “Panic” was like finding a world in my wardrobe (or on my bedroom floor: I was a fifteen-year-old boy; it’s the same thing) and “Rubber Ring” is Aslan telling me my next visit might be my last. Nylon, lipstick and invitations permitting.

What would your 3’48” track be?