I can't scan so I have typed it:
Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me
Recorded: March-April 1987, Wool Hall Studios, Bath
Produced by: Johnny Marr, Morrissey ans Stephen Street
Album track from: Strangeways, Here We Come. Sep. 1987
Subsequently issued as: Single A-side, dec. 1987 (Highest UK Chart #30)
'The last of The Smiths blockbusting tearkjerkers, 'Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me' was lated cited by Morrissey as his favourite Smiths track (an opinion shared by David Bowie). Strangeways' emotionally raw, soul-baring centre reads like the final act in the tradegy of "The heir of nothing in particular", now older, world weary and rapidly losing the fight, staggering into the wings to an overpowering orchestral requiem, at once luxurious and moribund.
Thought it was the penultimate song added to the album, its clever chord structure can be traced back to 14 October 1986, the day after The Smiths played Carlisle Sands Centre: 'Some writing moments you do remember really specifically and that was one', eloborates Marr. 'We were coming down from Carlisle. I was sat on the tour bus, with my guitar unplugged. I'd come up with this figure, I was absolutely ecstatic about it, but I couldn't work out how my fingers were playing it. So I was holding my breath in case I lost it.'
With the majority of the album already written and rough mixed by Friday 20 March, Marr spent most of the next week assembling the song's base with Rourke and Joyce. The crux of 'Last NIght...' was duly completed by the following Thursday evening and, even without vocals, was already being earmarked as a potential album finale. Typifying the consummate musicianship illustrated throughout Strangeways, the individualistic performances were breathtaking. Joyce's beat was that of an exhausted heart shattering into a thousand tiny fragments, each eight-bar cycle ending with a sudden rhythmic cardiac arrest that altered the shape every time. Rourke played a similar blinder with his spacious pauses suddenly corkscrewing off in between Marr's glacial, emulated symphony (a Royal COmmand Performance from his electronic 'Orchestrazia Ardwick'). Neither could Marr resist inserting a vivid guitar solo towards the finish. Although this impulsive frill would eventually be faded prematurely, the opening lick can still be heard entering at 4.32 before being buried under the swelling strings.
Essentially the end product was two separate tracks sandwiched together. Marr had originally sketched its ambient two minute piano prologue as a different song in its own right. However, the juxtaposition of this sedate tranquillity as a precursor to the histrionic dirge that followed turned out to be a genius move.
Like some precious Italian reanaissance masterpiece, delicate finishing touches were added over the next fortnight before the tune achieved its full maturity. The same BBC sound effects LP Morrissey had used for the pneumatic drill intro of 'Death At One's Elbow' provided its disconcerting jeers of a violet crowd. Muted aquamarine flashes of whale song were also flecked onto its canvas. When, days prior to wrapping the album, The Smiths were called away to perform on Channel 4's The Tube (10 April), Street was still fine tuning its atmospheric preamble, dropping in some sub-bass notes as an adjoining flourish into the body of the song proper. The extreme swing sweep as the two halves crossover was also Street''s doing. 'It was a very Eighties thing I know, those really dramatic orchestral 'whoomph' effects. Every Trevor Horn record had one at the time. Me an Johnny found it on the Emulator and ordinarily it wouldn't have suited a Smiths record I don't think, but dropped in just at that point it really increased the drama of the whole piece'.
Morrissey submitted his vocal at the end of the week. 'Another of those', says Street 'where he came in, did it and everybody watching just went "Whoa!". It's often said about Morrissey that he didn't do a lot of takes , which is true. If he could've gotten away with it I'm sure he would've liekd to have done one take and just left it at that, but I'd always try and get him to do two or three. Morrissey would peak very quickly and I doubt if you'd get a better performance from him after the third time. But the reason he was that intense was because he used to really build himself up for it, almost like an actor. So with 'Last Night I dremat...' and a few others, he just gave his all first time round, there was no need to have him do it over and over again until it lost all emotion.
'Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me' was a harrowing a realisation of loneliness as its title suggested. Not a dream, but a nightmare, where love is forever unattainable and sleep is a torture of futile romantic fantasies. The lovelorn agaony is magnified by the waking acquiescene of 'another false alarm' (a phrase borrowed from Joni Mitchell's 'Amelia' as featured on 1976's Hejira, one of Morrissey's favourite Mitchell albums) and the shatteringly hopeless resignation that this merciless solitude is the protagonists life sentence. Morrissey's voice is all the more affecting for its lack of hysteria, baring his soul with an almost unbearable reconciled sincerity, breaking only during the last line with what the NME would describe as 'a [Bowie] 'Wild is the Wind' falsetto'. Though often belittled by those stony crtics who cynically dismissed his graveur, unloveable odes as a melodramtic image-conscious affectation, Morrissey's earnestness in this, The Smiths' most heartrending effusion of human desperation, is beyond dispute. Or as Smash Hits deemed it, 'the saddest, most woefully heart sizzling Smiths song ever'.
Placed at the start of Strangeways second half, it would also become their commercially unlikely , but symbolically poignant, Rough Trade swansong when released as a single in December (the 7-inch edit had to discard its protracted intro for radio purposes).
Since no promotional video was made and mimed performances were out of the question (Morrissey by now having declared himself a solo artist), 'Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me' was never promoted on TV, sabotaging the chart hopes of an already disadvantaged single even further.
...well, that was certainly my longest EVER post, hope it helps!
Love PTxx.
