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This Charming Man is a high energy, terribly catchy pop song, with some of Morrissey’s best vocals. It’s a great pop song, with a great beat and fun to dance to, not to mention the great sound of Johnny Marr’s guitars. From Wikipedia:

I’ll try any trick. With the Smiths, I’d take this really loud Telecaster of mine, lay it on top of a Fender Twin Reverb with the vibrato on, and tune it to an open chord. Then I’d drop a knife with a metal handle on it, hitting random strings. I used it on “This Charming Man”, buried beneath about 15 tracks of guitar … [it] was the first record where I used those highlife-sounding runs in 3rds. I’m tuned up to F# and I finger it in G, so it comes out in A. There are about 15 tracks of guitar. People thought the main guitar part was a Rickenbacker, but it’s really a ‘54 Tele. There are three tracks of acoustic, a backwards guitar with a really long reverb, and the effect of dropping knives on the guitar – that comes in at the end of the chorus.

It’s also a great song about–well, love, or at the very least the feeling of being overwhelmed by emotion.

Feeling detached from and unable to relate to the early 1980s mainstream gay culture, Morrissey wrote “This Charming Man” to evoke an older, more coded and self-aware underground scene. The singer explained of the song’s lyrics, “I really like the idea of the male voice being quite vulnerable, of it being taken and slightly manipulated, rather than there being always this heavy machismo thing that just bores everybody.”

The song itself is about an encounter between a young man whose bicycle has broken down, and the handsome stranger who picks him up and seeminglyl seduces him. The lyrics are provocative, heartfelt and just very nicely written.

Here’s a link to the video

And of course, the lyrics:

A punctured bicycle
On a hillside desolate
Will nature make a man of me yet?

A jumped up pantry boy
Who never knew his place
He said “return the ring”
He knows so much about these things
He knows so much about these things
He knows so much about these things