"In the summer of 1991, during the planning stages of the album Your Arsenal, Morrissey sent Mark Nevin a cassette of the 13 instrumental demos he’d chosen to work on – ‘11 Squire Nevin, 2 Alain White’ – along with an extra ‘Ray Kink schoolboy prank’ he was ‘toying with’. The latter was The Kinks’ ‘Harry Rag’, a tongue-in-cheek ode to the British working classes’ fatal romance with cigarettes (‘Harry rag’ being cockney rhyming slang for ‘fag’) from their 1967 album Something Else By The Kinks. The prospect of Morrissey singing Ray Davies – the greatest English pop lyricist of one era interpreting the work of his equally brilliant forerunner – was extremely tantalising. It was also fascinating to speculate that after covering Paul Weller’s ‘That's Entertainment’, Morrissey was tracing the lineage of the ‘British mod sophisticate’ (as he’d taken to calling himself on a recent press advert for the single ‘Sing Your Life’) back further to Davies. Though his band did learn and rehearse ‘Harry Rag’, Morrissey swiftly abandoned the idea."
(from Mozipedia)
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