I Know It’s Over is The Queen Is Dead’s first pause for breath. As usual, Morrissey’s mordant wit is mistaken, historically, for unmitigated misery. “Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head.” What an opening line!
Remember all those classic blues and folk songs that billow forth from the point of view of a dead and buried body? “The clay it is my bed, my dearest dear,” says The Lover’s Ghost in the traditional tune of the same name. And “see that my grave is kept clean”, commands Blind Lemon Jefferson of those that should outlive him. But Morrissey eschews both the grey phantom and the sightless yellow fruit to channel instead the spirit of the music hall comic Sandy “Can you hear me, Mother?” Powell, even as dusty death claws at his throat.

Time has been unkind to Andy Rourke’s bass parts, which on The Smiths’ eponymous debut especially seem inappropriately funky, but here he’s a model of gentlemanly restraint, pulsing slowly under one of Morrissey’s most telling portrayals of sexual and social isolation.
I Know It’s Over sounds superficially like a romantic ballad, but the first two minutes see the protagonist envisioning his own suicide, and wishing various ill-suited couples the happiness he’s denied. A Byrds-y Johnny Marr arpeggio breezes briefly for ten seconds at one minute and fifty, the classic guitar pop associations of the sound subtly at odds with the self-loathing sentiment.
It’s a brilliantly judged contribution, both musically, and in terms of its cultural resonances.

The lyrics for the second half of the song, crucially, are set for the most part in inverted commas. Thus the chain of crushingly comic put-downs that begins “If you’re so funny why are you on your own tonight?”, escalates brutally through “If you’re so terribly good looking why do you sleep alone tonight?” and ends with the deflating “because tonight is like any other night, that’s why your on your own tonight, with your triumphs and your charms, while they are in each other’s arms” is addressed to the protagonist.
On paper, and in Morrissey’s performance, the words are ambivalent, and could even be the caustic teasing of a sympathetic and encouraging friend, sick of the singer’s introspection.

Unfortunately, Marr’s inane keyboard part attempts to make the sentiment unambiguously sad, diminishing the emotional scope of the song. Six tracks later the same approach wrecks There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. How come Marr knew how to write countless timeless guitar parts but sounds so ephemeral on the synths?
We’re told Arabic carpet weavers introduced deliberate errors into their patterns as only Allah was allowed to be perfect. It’s lucky then, that Morrissey had Marr at his side here to shield him from God’s jealousy.

It’s tempting to see the protestations that ‘love is natural and real’ in the face of the assumption that it cannot be so ‘for such as you and I’ as the genesis of the more explicit struggles between religious prohibition and gay or bisexual impulses, that reach their apogee in the 2004 song I Have Forgiven You Jesus.
But Morrissey’s always been one of those artists whose peculiarly specific way of looking at the world results in an unexpectedly universal relevance.

In closing he succeeds, against all sense, in making a return to that opening line – “Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head” – a euphoric exultation, and there are, strangely, few experiences more uplifting and life-affirming than standing in a crowd of shapeless middle aged men bellowing it back at him.