The Curious Story of ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side’

By Oliver Tearle

Writing songs about unhappy or unrequited love, or about how the world doesn’t understand you, is harder than it looks. Or rather, writing good songs about unrequited love is hard: the temptation to over-egg the emotional pudding can easily lead the lyricist to pen something too mawkish, too self-pitying, for anyone else to relate to it.

When that happens, you end up with a sort of ‘why do nice girls hate me?’ effect which is more laughable than affecting.

The Smiths were not the cheeriest of bands, and Morrissey is not the most hopeful of songwriters, but what rescues their songs from this charge of super-sentimentality is their wit and humour (Morrissey’s leading literary influence is Oscar Wilde, after all). The self-effacing quality to his lyrics prevents the Smiths’ songs from becoming self-pitying.

The thorn in the side

‘The Boy With the Thorn in His Side’ is perhaps the band’s finest expression of unrequited love and generally just feeling hard done by. The ‘thorn’ the boy has in his side is his desire for love – to be loved, of course, but also to give love to somebody. In a typical Morrisseyish move, this love is ‘murderous’: so fierce and passionate it’s potentially destructive. Violence is never far away from love in the Smiths universe.

So although he affects to hate everything, behind that hatred there’s a desire for the opposite: love. But nobody believes him when they look in his eyes. Yet it’s pretty much true that all those hooligans, villains, and thugs whom Morrissey’s lyrics celebrate and even romanticise, deep down, just need a good hug. They’ve been starved of love and that’s why they’ve ended up hooliganising.

Even when the singer does find love, everyone around him can’t believe that he and his partner really are capable of love. Before the song becomes too sorry for itself, Morrissey salvages it by asking (in vain, one suspects) where you need to go when you want to be like a normal proper person, and which special ‘contacts’ you need to know.

The line is simultaneously funny and tragic, sending up the idea that outsiders often feel as if ‘normal’ people have been on some sort of course or given some kind of cheat sheet to enable them to cruise through life.

Morrissey and the music world

In an interview with Margi Clarke, Morrissey was categorical about the song’s meaning. Denying that it was inspired by an Oscar Wilde story, he told Clarke that the ‘thorn’ represents the music industry which wouldn’t believe anything he said. You can watch the interview here: the relevant discussion begins at around the four-and-a-half-minute mark.

Curiously, the Wilde story Clarke alludes to in this interview does have a link to music. In his fairy tale ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, Wilde tells us of a kind-hearted nightingale – a bird famed for its beautiful singing voice – who helps a lovelorn student by procuring a red rose for him to give to his beloved.

The rose-tree tells the nightingale about the sacrifice she must make in order to create a red rose:

‘If you want a red rose,’ said the Tree, ‘you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with your own heart’s-blood. You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn. All night long you must sing to me, and the thorn must pierce your heart, and your life-blood must flow into my veins, and become mine.’

So perhaps despite Morrissey’s dismissal of this theory, the Wilde story was at the back of his mind when he composed the lyrics to ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side’.

A more general meaning

However, it’s probably only dyed-in-the-wool Smiths anoraks (if you can have woollen anoraks) who know about Morrissey’s more personal, biographical explanation for the song’s origins and inspiration.

Most listeners will obviously relate to the song’s wider message of alienation and frustration over being misunderstood. That’s the beauty of Morrissey’s image of having a ‘thorn in one’s side’: it’s a well-known idiom referring to a cause of one’s distress or annoyance.

Final thoughts

But ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side’ is one of those Smiths songs in which the real meaning of the song cannot be reduced to its lyrics. Take Morrissey’s falsetto yodelling which makes up the last minute or so of the track: has romantic longing and heartbroken yearning ever been expressed better in a pop song, without a single word being uttered?

This is something we find in other Smiths tracks, notably ‘Barbarism Begins at Home’ from earlier in the same year as ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side’ (from the 1985 album Meat Is Murder). Morrissey knew that some emotions go beyond words, but the singing voice can still express them, better than any words ever could.