The Queen Is Dead
The Smiths · Rough Trade · 1986
Edition №2
Forty years ago this month, The Smiths released The Queen Is Dead. I have owned a copy of it, in one format or another, for most of the time since, and I still do not have the one that matters.
I found the band at 13, through Meat Is Murder. My mom drove me to Sound Warehouse for the cassette. When the Queen Is Dead tour came through Texas I went to see them at the Bronco Bowl in Dallas, a room in the back of a bowling alley, with a few of my waver friends. None of us could drive yet, so one parent dropped us off and another came back for us. I did not know it would be the band’s last tour. I am fairly sure none of us did.
What followed was the usual teenage version of devotion, and not an original one. Lyrics on my textbook covers. The Morrissey haircut. The fake thick-rimmed glasses and the cardigans, the whole copy of the look he wore through the Smiths years, minus the gladioli. I was one of a lot of kids doing exactly the same thing.
The copies have come and gone since. Cassettes and CDs lost in various moves, replaced, lost again. What I have now is three: a US Sheffield Lab Matrix vinyl, a Japan first-generation CD and an American CD I keep mostly out of habit. Not one of them is the copy the verdict points at.
That verdict lands somewhere specific. Forty years of licensee pressings, remasters and reissues have produced dozens of ways to own this record, and they are not equal. One of them holds the recording best, and it has look-alikes close enough to fool a careful buyer. The work is knowing which copy that is, and how to tell.
The chain
This album has been pressed and repressed around the world for forty years. The chain sorts those versions by where they come from.
Recorded. 1985, Jacobs and RAK · tracked to a Mitsubishi X850 32-track digital machine, mixed and cut to analog · produced by Morrissey and Marr, engineered by Stephen Street. Released. 16 June 1986 · Rough Trade · pressed by EMI
So the original is a digital recording finished on analog, not an unbroken analog chain. The gap between those dates is a contract dispute. The album was finished at the end of 1985 and sat almost seven months while the band and Rough Trade fought over terms.
Master generations.
1986 — the original Rough Trade cut.
2011 — remaster by Frank Arkwright with Johnny Marr. The vinyl pressed from it carries the remaster’s sound.
2017 — Bill Inglot and Dan Hersch recut at D2 Mastering, Los Angeles. The current catalog master.
I wanted to get them sounding right and remove any processing so that they now sound as they did when they were originally made.
— Johnny Marr, on the 2011 remasters
Three countries cut their own originals, and a fourth pressed the first CD. Each got one thing more right than the rest.
Regional originals, each winning on one axis.
United States — Sheffield Lab Matrix vinyl on Sire. Widest image.
Japan — Victor pressing, cut at JVC’s Yokohama plant. Most tonally natural.
Germany — Rough Trade pressing, Joachim Hinsch lacquer at Pallas. Quietest surfaces.
Japan — 1986 Tokuma CD. The first-generation disc collectors prize.
Each is worth owning where it turns up.
The musicianship
The Queen Is Dead is the band at the height of what it could do, months before it came apart. Marr’s arrangements reach near-orchestral on “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” and turn mean on the title track, and Morrissey writes his funniest and his bleakest lines on the same record.
Personnel.
Morrissey · vocals
Johnny Marr · guitars
Andy Rourke · bass
Mike Joyce · drums
The sleeve credits two collaborators who do not exist. Ann Coates, the backing singer on "Bigmouth Strikes Again," is Morrissey through a harmonizer, sped up until the voice stops being his; the name is a pun on Ancoats, a Manchester district. The Hated Salford Ensemble, credited with the strings on "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," is Marr alone at an Emulator. The band wanted no outsiders on its best record, so it invented some.
Stephen Street, who engineered the sessions, described the confidence in the room.
It’s how The Beatles must have felt.
— Stephen Street, on recording The Queen Is Dead, Uncut
The following year the band was finished.
The verdict
The reference copy is the original 1986 UK Rough Trade pressing, by EMI.
What to watch for. A French-pressed copy carries the same Morrissey etchings as the UK original but came off a different lacquer, a different cut. The vinyl reissues cut from the 2011 digital remaster carry the remaster's sound, a step off the original. US club editions and the common US CD sit further down the chain again. Confirm a real UK original by the runout: the matrix reads ROUGH 96 A-1U-1-1- with EMI's 1U stamper, and Morrissey's etched lines, "FEAR OF MANCHESTER" on side one and "THEM WAS ROTTEN DAYS" on side two, ride the original cut. Read the matrix first, because those etched lines also turn up on the French pressing. "THEM WAS ROTTEN DAYS" is a line from the 1960 film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, one of the kitchen-sink pictures Morrissey stitched into the record. The album opens inside the same world, with Cicely Courtneidge singing "Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty" in a scrap of the 1962 film The L-Shaped Room. The record enters through one kitchen-sink picture and leaves through another, cut into the wax.
The dynamic range case
Every remaster made the record louder. The 1986 original is the most open version of The Queen Is Dead, and the two remasters since have only compressed it further.
Dynamic range by generation, album DR.
1986 original — DR12
2011 Marr remaster — DR9
2017 D2 master — DR8
Figures from the Dynamic Range Database. This is why the CD pick is an original-master pressing and not the louder 2017 anniversary remaster, and why the hi-res, which exists only as that 2017 master, comes with the same caveat. A clean original-master CD plays more open than the hi-res file, despite the lower resolution. It can also cost less: first-generation UK discs start around $12 used, against $17.99 for the download.
The endnote
Forty years on, I still do not own the copy this recording deserves. There is something about the records you find early, before you know what you are doing and who you are becoming. They become part of who you are. The Queen Is Dead shaped a younger version of me, and three copies later I am still chasing the one that holds it best. The 40th anniversary is as good a reason as any to fix that. Somewhere in a shop in England there is a first pressing with the right matrix and Morrissey's lines scratched in the runout, waiting for the next person who knows what it is.
Next Reference Check: Edition №3 - What’s Going On / June 23, 2026
Reference Checks is an evidence-led publication on the recording versions worth a serious listener's time. The reviewer's listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and absent from every verdict. Full evidence chain for this post is in the Reference Checks research dossier, available in the soon to launch paid tier.
Great read. Thank you!