Editor’s Note: Where I turn on MTV Classic and review the first full video I see.
The Smiths/”This Charming Man”
OMG, I fanboy love this song, and to a lesser extent The Smiths as well. I’ve never ever seen this video either! We start off with a black screen and an introduction stating the song name. I feel like this was a really British 80’s way to kick off a music video.
A bunch of petals are on what looks like grass and there’s a newspaper that I can’t quite make out anything other than The Smiths on it. We pan up and Morrisey is swinging a bouquet and starts singing and they are actually in a flat of some sort. I find this funny. A key to The Smiths as an overall band is that they aren’t really miserable at all, most of the time they are “taking the piss” as the say across the pond. This fact eludes most people.
So Moz is wearing a half unbuttoned shirt and has some rather unique necklaces on. I can now confirm that one of them features pearls and the other looks like a skinnier, dumber, longer version of something Jam Master Jay would have been rocking at the time as well.
The rest of the band looks pretty pale and British and dressed like normal pale British dudes would have dressed in the 80’s. Pretty much like the image below of the poster I had on my wall the majority of my 20’s.
Moz continues to swing the bouquet around and this video is basically him doing that and the band playing their instruments (as already noted above). I don’t think they had much of a budget for this video. There’s some confetti falling on the drums. Again not much $ to spend on this one. The lighting is awful in this video, probably on purpose cause I really don’t think the band gives a fuck about it at all. They probably wrapped the whole thing up in a few hours.
The video ends on a freeze frame of Moz with his eyes closed and someone throwing some of the flower refuse on his head. And the song clocks in at 2:43 so a quick video.
So to recap things someone at Warner Reprise was probably like, “Ok blokes, need to shoot a video for “This Charming Man” and we don’t have any money and you all could give fuck all anyway. We’ll use my flat, bring your gear, and this will all be done in an hour of so.” That all happened but Moz also brought some flowers cause he wanted to mess up that blokes flat.
Anyway, boring video, great fucking song.