The Police released their third studio album Zenyatta Mondatta in 1980, preceded by the single, Don’t Stand So Close to Me. The single gave the band their third number one single, following Message in A Bottle and Walking on the Moon from their previous album Regatta de Blanc in 1979. Additionally, the song won the band the 1982 Grammy Award for the Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. It was the biggest selling single in the UK in 1980.
Don’t Stand So Close to Me concerns a schoolgirl’s crush on her young teacher which leads to an affair, which is then discovered. Sting, who worked as a teacher before the band became successful, has denied that the song is autobiographical. He qualified as a teacher in 1974, after attending Northern Counties College of Education for three years, before working as a teacher at St. Paul’s First School in Cramlington for two years. Of Don’t Stand So Close to Me, Sting said in the 1981 biography L’Historia Bandido:
“I wanted to write a song about sexuality in the classroom. I’d done teaching practice at secondary schools and been through the business of having 15-year old girls fancying me – and me really fancying them! How I kept my hands off them I don’t know … Then there was my love for Lolita which I think is a brilliant novel. But I was looking for the key for eighteen months and suddenly there it was. That opened the gates and out it came: the teacher, the open page, the virgin, the rape in the car, getting the sack, Nabakov, all that”.
The lyrics and music of Don’t Stand So Close to Me were both written by Sting. Lyrically, the song deals with the lust, fear and guilt that a female student and a teacher have for one another. The female student’s feelings towards the teacher are found in lines such as “Young teacher, the subject, Of school girl fantasy, She wants him so badly, Knows what she wants to be”. Later in the song, we find the teacher’s feelings towards the student in lines such as “It’s no use, he sees her, He starts to shake and cough, Just like the old man in, That book by Nabokov”. The last line of the verse likens the affair between the song’s characters with the predicament of the characters in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita. In the novel, the male character, Humbert Humbert is obsessed with the 12 year old Delores Haze, whom he nicknames “Lolita” and becomes sexually involved with after becoming her stepfather. In Lolita, Humbert is described as “not quite an old man”.
Sting has often been criticised for rhyming “cough” with “Nabokov”. In an interview on sting.com, the singer said of the rhyme:
“I’ve used that terrible, terrible rhyme technique a few times. Technically, it’s called a feminine rhyme – where it’s so appalling, it’s almost humorous. You don’t normally get those types of rhymes in pop music and I’m glad”.
Don’t Stand So Close to Me features a guitar synthesiser in the middle of the song, played by Andy Summers. In an interview with sting.com, Summers said of the inclusion of the guitar synthesiser: “After Sting had put the vocals on Don’t Stand So Close to Me, we looked for something to lift the middle of the song. I came up with a guitar synthesiser. It was the first time we’d used it. I felt it worked really well”. The verses and choruses do not feature this effect. Don’t stand So Close to Me utilises a common effect in Police songs, that of the verses being quieter and more subdued whilst the chorus is bolder and bigger in sound.
A few years later, Sting was asked to perform on the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing (Brothers in Arms, 1985) due to being in Montserrat at the same time as the band were recording the song. Sting performs the “I want my MTV” line, which reuses the melody from Don’t Stand So Close to Me. After the likeness was mentioned to reporters during the promotions for Brothers in Arms, lawyers for Sting became involved and whilst early pressings of Brothers in Arms only credit Mark Knopfler with having written the song, later copies credit both Knopfler and Sting. It is one of only two shared songwriting credits on a Dire Straits album, the other being Tunnel of Love, from the 1980 album Making Movies, which includes an extract from The Carousel Waltz by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
In 1986, Don’t Stand So Close to Me was re-recorded with a new, more brooding sounding arrangement, a different chorus and more opulent production. The new version, titled Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86, appeared on the album Every Breath You Take: The Singles and was released as a single, reaching number 24 on the British singles chart. The song’s tempo was decreased for the new version and features a slight lyric change in order to compensate for it, with the line “Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov” becoming “Just like the old man in that famous book by Nabokov. The Police had already split by the time the single was released and aside from the then-unreleased De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da ’86, it is the most recent studio recording released by the band. A new music video was produced for the reworked song by Godley and Creme. The video is notable for its early use of computer graphics.
The Headmaster Ritual, the first track on The Smiths’ second album, Meat is Murder (1985) tackles a taboo subject in the field of education, that of corporal punishment. In state-run schools, and also in private schools where at least part of the funding came from the government, corporal punishment was outlawed by Parliament with effect from 1987. In other private schools in England and Wales, it was banned in 1999. Scotland followed in 2000 and Northern Ireland in 2003. In 1993, the European Court of Human Rights held in Costello-Roberts v. UK that giving a seven year old boy three whacks with a gym shoe over his trousers was not a forbidden degrading treatment.
The implement often used to deliver corporal punishment in state and private schools in England and Wales was a flexible rattan cane, applied either to the student’s hands or, especially in the case of teenage boys, to the seat of the trousers. Slippering, the act of smacking the bottom with the hand or a slipper, was widely used as a less formal alternative. In a few English cities, a strap was used instead of a cane. In Scotland, a leather strap, known as a tawse, administered to the palms of the hands, was universal in state schools but some private schools used the cane.
In 2005, there was an unsuccessful challenge to prohibition of corporal punishment in the Education Act 1996 s.548 by headmasters of private Christian schools. They claimed it was a breach of their freedom of religion under Article 9ECHR. In a poll carried out amongst 6,162 UK teachers by the Times Educational Supplement found that one in five teachers would still back the use of caning in extreme cases.
The Smiths’ The Headmaster Ritual tells of Morrissey’s days at St. Mary’s Secondary Modern School and the corporal punishment handed out there by the “Belligerent ghouls” who “Run Manchester schools”. In the manner we have come to expect from Morrissey when he gets a bee in his bonnet, he does not even attempt to mask his contempt, as he continues to tell of “Spineless swines” and graphically discusses the beatings handed out in lines such as “Mid-week on the playing fields, Sir thwacks you on the knees, Knees you in the groin, Elbow in the face, Bruises bigger than dinner plates” and “Please excuse me from gym, I’ve got this terrible cold coming on, He grabs and devours, He kicks me in the showers, kicks me in the showers, And he grabs an devours”.
In 1997, Johnny Marr told Guitar magazine that it took him two years to complete work on the guitar part of the song: “The nuts and bolts of The Headmaster Ritual came together during the first album [The Smiths, 1984] and I just carried on playing around with it. It started off as a very sublime sort of Joni Mitchell-esque chord figure; I played it to Morrissey but we never took it further. Then, as my life got more and more intense, so did the song. The bridge and the chorus part were originally for another song, but I them together with the first part. That was unusual for me; normally I just hammer away at an idea until I’ve got a song”.
The Headmaster Ritual is the first song of an album’s worth of songs mentioning violence of some sort. Take for example, Rusholme Ruffians where “someone’s beaten up” at “The last night at the fair”; …
I Want the One I Can’t Have with its cameo appearance from “A tough kid who sometimes swallows nails, Raised on Prisoner’s Aid, He killed a policeman when he was, Thirteen” …
… and Barbarism Begins At Home where “A crack on the head, Is what you get for not asking” and “Unruly girls, Who will not settle down, They must be taken in hand”.
Morrissey would revisit the theme of education on his 1995 album Southpaw Grammar. According to Morrissey, the title of the album refers to “the school of hard knocks”. ‘Southpaw’ is slang for a boxing left-hander and ‘Grammar’ is a reference to British grammar schools. The Shostakovich Fifth Symphony sampling 11 minute long opening track, The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils turns the idea of the teachers bullying the pupils seen in The Headmaster Ritual on its head. This time, the pupils are in control and wreaking their merciless revenge on those “Belligerent ghouls”. Society has now changed and teachers struggle to control unruly children. The teachers are now persecuted by nasty, spiteful students. Gone are the days of corporal punishment; “Lay a hand on our children”, sings Morrissey, “And it’s never too late to have you”.
Starting off this week’s theme of education is a song that could have also been placed in ‘Crime in Music’ a few weeks back. That song is I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats, from the album The Fine Art of Surfacing (1979). The song became the band’s second number one after previous single, Rat Trap (from the album A Tonic for the Troops, 1978).
According to singer and songwriter Bob Geldof, he wrote I Don’t Like Mondays after reading a telex report at Georgia State University’s campus radio station, WRAS, on the shooting spree of 16 year old Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children in a school playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, USA on the 29th January 1979. Spencer killed two adults and injured eight children and one police officer. Spencer showed no remorse for her crime and her full explanation for her actions was “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day”. Within the next month, Geldof had written the song and it had been performed live for the first time. In an interview with Smash Hits in 1979, Geldof explained how he had come to write the song:
“I was doing a radio interview in Atlanta with [Johnnie] Fingers and there was a telex machine beside me. I read it as it came out. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel and I just said, ‘Silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload’. I wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said, “Tell me why?” It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn’t an attempt to exploit tragedy”.
The telex machine is mentioned in the second verse with the lines, “The telex machine is kept so clean, And it types to a waking world”. Elsewhere in the song, the chorus takes the form of a police investigation, with the backing vocals singing, “Tell me why” and Geldof singing “I don’t like Mondays … I wanna shoot the whole day down”. Meanwhile, the verses of the song find the school and Spencer’s parents trying to find a reason for the tragedy before Geldof concludes that “… that there are no reasons” both speaking of various peoples’ shock over the senselessness of the killings and echoing Spencer’s lack of remorse.
The song was originally intended to be a B-side but Geldof changed his mind following the song’s success with audience on the Boomtown Rats’ US tour. Spencer’s family tried unsuccessfully to prevent the song from being released in the US. Despite it being a number one single in the United Kingdom, the song only reached number 73 on the US Billboard Hot 100. The song was played regularly by US radio stations in the 1980s. However, radio stations in San Diego did not play the track for years after the crime in respect to local sensitivities about the shooting and to the families of the victims. In the UK, the song won in the Best Pop Song and Outstanding British Lyric categories at the Ivor Novello Awards.
Eight months after the shooting, Spencer pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon. She was sentenced to 25 years to life. She has been denied parole four times since 1993 and will not be considered again until 2019.
The Boomtown Rats performed the song for Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in 1985. This performance became the band’s last final major appearance. After singing the line, “And the lesson today is how to die”, Geldof paused for a moment. The crowd applauded on the significance to those starving in Africa which the event had been organised to help.
Right from her early days, Kate Bush was never afraid of demonstrating her literally knowledge. For her first single, Bush had released Wuthering Heights (The Kick Inside, 1978), based on Emily Bronte’s novel of the same name (1847).
For her second album Lionheart (1978), she had referenced J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan in both Oh England My Lionheart …
… and In Search of Peter Pan.
Further to this, Get Out of My House from 1982’s The Dreaming album was inspired by Stephen King’s 1977 novel, The Shining.
For her 1985 album, Hounds of Love, Bush’s love of literature and writing about her favourite works in song took a biographical turn with the song Cloudbusting, which took its cue from Peter Reich’s 1973 book, ABook of Dreams, a biography of his father, Wilhelm Reich.
Wilhelm Reich (1897 – 1957) was an Austrian psychiatrist and philosopher who was trained in Vienna by Sigmund Freud. Reich’s work combined Marxism and psychoanalysis in order to advocate sexual freedom. He would often visit parents in their homes to see how they lived, and took to the streets in a mobile clinic, promoting adolescent sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, a provocative message in Catholic Austria. His aim was to attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment.
In the 1930’s, Reich became an increasingly controversial figure. From 1932 until his death, all his work was self-published. His promotion of sexual permissiveness disturbed the psychoanalytic community and his associates on the political left, and his vegetotherapy, in which he massaged his undressed patients in order to dissolve their muscular armour, violated the key taboos of psychoanalysis. In 1939, he and his son moved to New York, in part to escape the Nazis. Shortly afterwards, Reich proposed the concept of orgone, a physical energy contained in the atmosphere and in all living matter. In 1940, he started building orgone accumulators, devices which his patients sat inside of in order to harness the reputed health benefits. This led to newspaper reports about sex boxes that cured cancer. Reich is also famed as the inventor of the Cloudbuster, a device which manipulated the orgone energy in the atmosphere, forcing clouds to form and causing rain. This invention is what informed the concept of Bush’s Cloudbusting.
After two critical articles about Reich in The New Republic and Harper’s, the US Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, believing that they were dealing with a “fraud of the first magnitude”, In 1956, Reich was charged with contempt for having violated the injunction and was sentenced to two years in prison. In the summer of 1956, six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. Reich died of heart failure whilst in prison just over a year later and days before he was due to apply for parole.
Although Bush’s Cloudbusting is the most recognised, and personally, I feel the best song based on Reich, his life and concepts, it was not the first. Other songs about Reich include Birdland by Patti Smith, from her debut album Horses (1975), which is also based on A Book of Dreams.
Cloudbusting is about the relationship between Wilhelm Reich and Peter Reich as a young boy, told from the perspective of Peter Reich as an adult. The song describes the boy’s memories of his life with Reich on their family farm and research centre, which Reich named Orgonon, hence the song’s first line, “I still dream of Orgonon”. Today, Orgonon is a museum dedicated to Reich and his research. Of the first verse of Cloudbusting, which continues, “… I wake up crying, You’re making rain, And you’re just in reach, When you and sleep escape me”, Bush told Alternative Press Magazine in 1989:
“All of us tend to live in our heads. In Cloudbusting, the idea was of starting this song with a person waking up from this dream, “I wake up crying”. It’s like setting a scene that immediately suggests to you that this person is no longer with someone they dearly love. It puts a pungent note on the song. Life is a loss, isn’t it? It’s learning to cope with loss. I think in a lot of ways, that’s what all of us have to cope with”.
The second verse of Cloudbusting, “You’re like my yo-yo, That glowed in the dark, What made it special, What made it dangerous, So I bury it, And forget it” refers to part of Peter Reich’s A Book of Dreams in which he tells of his father’s dislike of fluorescent light of any kind, believing that it held bad orgone energy. Wilhelm made Peter bury his fluorescent yo-yo in the back yard in order to stop its harmful effects. The yo-yo of which Bush speaks stood out from everything around it, thus bringing attention to itself in much the same way that Wilhelm Reich’s genius set him apart from other people and brought attention to him, leading to his demise. Reich’s genius made him a very special person but also caused him to appear “dangerous” to the Federal Government.
In the song’s chorus, we find the lyrics “But every time it rains, You’re here in my head”, referring to the cloudbuster built by Wilhelm Reich. In these lines, every time Peter sees the rain, he remembers his father and his experiments. In an interview for MTV in 1985, Bush said of these lines:
“And the song is really using the rain as something that reminds the son of his father. Every time it rains, instead of being very sad and lonely, it’s a very happy moment for him, it’s like his father is with him again”.
The chorus’s phrase of “… something good is going to happen” refers to the recurrent foreboding in A Book of Dreams that “something bad was going to happen”.
The lyrics of Cloudbusting’s third and fourth verse describe Wilhelm Reich’s abrupt arrest and imprisonment, the pain of loss felt by the young Peter and his helplessness at being unable to protect his father: “On top of the world, Looking over the edge, You could see them coming, You looked too small, In their big, black car, To be a threat to the men in power” and “I hid my yo-yo, In the garden, I can’t hide you from the government, Oh God, Daddy, I won’t forget”. Additionally, the lyrics “On top of the world, Looking over the edge, You could see them coming”, refers to the following passage in A Book of Dreams:
“He was like a man who was standing on top of the world looking over into a new world. That is what Daddy was like. He had lifted himself so he was looking the horizon to a new world, a free and happy world. He stood there on the edge of the universe looking into the future … They pulled the ladder out from under him and killed him”.
The wonderful seven minute long music video for Cloudbusting, directed by Julian Doyle, the was an idea collaboration between Terry Gilliam and Kate Bush and features Canadian actor Donald Sutherland in the role of Wilhelm Reich, whilst Bush plays his son, Peter. The video shows Wilhelm and Peter on top of a hill attempting to make the cloudbuster work. Wilhelm leaves his son on the cloudbuster and returns to his laboratory, where in a flashback, he remembers the times he and Peter enjoyed working on various scientific projects. He is then interrupted by government officials who arrest him and ransack the laboratory. Peter senses that his father is in danger and tries to reach him to no avail, watching as his father is driven away. Peter runs back to the cloudbuster and to his father’s delight, gets it working and begins to rain.
The video was filmed at The Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire, England. Bush personally approached Sutherland to ask him to appear in the video at the hotel room in which he was staying. She found out where he was staying from actress Julie Christie’s hairdresser. In the UK, the music video, conceived more as a short film than a standard video, was shown at some cinemas as an accompaniment to the main feature. Due to difficulties in obtaining a work visa for Sutherland at short notice, the actor offered to work on the video for free. Despite the fact that the events in the story took place in Maine, the newspaper clipping in the video reads “The Oregon Times”, possibly in reference to Reich’s home and laboratory, Orgonon.
The cloudbuster depicted in the video was designed and constructed by people who worked on the alien in the film Alien (1979) and later, Aliens (1986). The machine bears only a superficial resemblance to the original cloudbusters, which were smaller and featured multiple narrow, straight tubes and pipes and were operated whilst standing on the ground. The video makes reference to Peter Reich’s A Book of Dreams, acknowledging the song’s inspiration, in the scene where Bush pulls a copy of the book out of Sutherland’s coat.
The video is a magnificent retelling of the song and of the life and times of Wilhelm and Peter Reich. If the song successfully manages to convey the moment when a child first realises that adults are fallible lyrically; then the video, in which Bush, as always, uses her significant acting talents so wonderfully, is a powerful visual interpretation of that theme. When asked about her role in the video during a 1985 interview with MTV, Bush replied:
“I think it’s something I’d obviously worried about. When you’re not a child, there are a lot of things that could be a problem. Like I could look old and not young. And we were also [coughs] – excuse me – trying to take away the feminine edge so that in a way I could be a tomboy rather than a little girl. Trying to keep the thing as innocent as possible. And I think rather than being that worried about playing a child, I was just worried about the whole process of acting, because it’s something I’ve not really done, in a true sense. I’ve performed in lots of ways, but not really acted. And it was something that I was wary of and I was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed it”.
Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits’ fifth album, was released in 1985. The album charted at number one worldwide, spending ten weeks at number one in the UK and nine weeks at the top spot in the US and thirty-four weeks at number one in Australia. It became the eighth best-selling album in UK chart history, is certified nine times platinum in the US and is one of the world’s best selling albums, having sold over thirty million copies worldwide. It was also one of the first albums to be released in the CD format. Following the release of opening track So Far Away as the first single just prior to the album’s release, the second single was one of Dire Straits’ most recognisable, famous and enduring songs, Money for Nothing.
Money for Nothing is notable for several reasons: Its controversial lyrics, groundbreaking video and cameo appearance by Sting, who sings the song’s falsetto introduction and backing chorus, “I want my MTV”. The single’s accompanying video was also the first to be aired on MTV Europe when the network started on the 1st August 1987. The single was one of the band’s most successful, staying at the top spot in the US for three weeks and peaking at number four on the UK charts. Money for Nothing went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal in 1986 at the 28th Grammy Awards.
The lyrics of Money for Nothing are written from the point of view of a working class man working in a hardware store who is watching music videos on MTV and commenting on what he sees. Singer, guitarist and songwriter explained the song’s meaning in a 1984 interview with critic Bill Flanagan, saying:
“The lead character in Money for Nothing is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television / custom kitchen / refrigerator / microwave appliance store. He’s singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. I wanted to use the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real …”
In a 2000 interview with Michael Parkinson on his television programme, Parkinson, Knopfler explained the origin of the lyrics again, saying that he was in New York and stopped by an appliance store. At the back of the store, they had a wall of TVs which were all showing MTV. Knopfler continued to explain how there was a man working there dressed in a baseball cap, work boots, and a checkered shirt delivering boxes who was standing next to him watching. As they were standing there watching MTV, Knophler remembers the man coming up with lines such as “what are those, Hawaiian noises? … that ain’t working” and so on. Knopfler asked for a pen to write down some of the lines to eventually put them to music.
The character in the song, speaking in the first person, refers to a musician that he sees on the screen “Banging on the bongos like a chimpanzee” and a woman “Stickin’ in the camera, man we could have some fun”. He moans about how the artists that he sees get “money for nothing and chicks for free” and describes a singer as “that little faggot with the earring and the make up” and moans about how the artists that he sees get “money for nothing and chicks for free”.
In an interview with Blender magazine in 2007, Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx claimed that the song was written about his band, saying: ““Money for nothing and the chicks for free … that little faggot got his own jet airplane”. They were in a store that sells televisions, and there was a row of TVs all playing Motley Crue – and that’s where it came from. Isn’t that great?”
The lyrics in the song’s second verse, “See that little faggot with the earring and the makeup, Yeah buddy that’s his own hair, That little faggot got his own jet airplane, that little faggot he’s a millionaire” sparked much controversy, with several publications deeming them to be homophobic. In a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, Knopfler said of the criticism:
“I got an objection from the editor of a gay newspaper in London – he actually said it was below the belt. Apart from the fact that there are stupid gay people as well as stupid other people, it suggests that maybe you can’t let it have too many meanings – you have to be direct. In fact, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s a good idea to write songs that aren’t in the first person, to take on other characters. The singer in Money for Nothing is a real ignoramus, hard hat mentality – someone who sees everything in financial terms. I mean, this guy has a grudging respect for rock stars. He sees it in terms of, well, that’s not working and yet the guy’s rich: that’s a good scam. He isn’t sneering”.
The songwriting credits for Money for Nothing are shared between Knopfler and Sting. Whilst Dire Straits were recording the song in Montserrat, Sting was also visiting the city and Knopfler invited him to add some background vocals. Sting has said that his only writing contribution to Money for Nothing was the line “I want my MTV”, which follows the melody from The Police’s song, Don’t Stand So Close to Me (Zenyatta Mondatta, 1980).
In terms of the song’s music, Knopfler modelled his guitar sound for the distinctive riff after ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons’ trademark guitar tone, much due to the fact that ZZ Top’s music videos were very popular on MTV. In an interview with Musician magazine in 1986, Gibbons stated that Knopfler had asked for his help in creating the right guitar sound for the track, but also said, “He didn’t do a half-bad job, considering I didn’t tell him a thing!”
The video for Money for Nothing, directed by Steve Barron, who also directed the videos for A-Ha’s Take On Me (Hunting High and Low, 1985) …
… and Thomas Dolby’s She Blinded Me With Science (The Golden Age of Wireless, 1982), was seen as highly innovate at the time.
The video was the one of the first to feature computer generated animation by means of the early program, Paintbox. Apparently, the characters in the video were supposed to have more detail, such as buttons on their shirts, but the project went over budget. The video won the award for Best Video at the MTV Music Awards in 1986.
In the book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (2011), it is explained by various people who worked at the network that Dire Straits’ manager Ed Bicknell asked MTV what they could do to get on the network and break America. MTV’s answer was, for them to write a hit song and have a top director make a video. In a 2011 interview with Culturebrats, Barron said of the video:
“The song is damning to MTV in a way. That was an iconic video. Te characters we created were made of televisions, and they were slagging off television. Videos were getting a bit boring, they needed some waking up. And MTV went nuts for it. It was like a big advertisement for them”.
Suffer Little Children, the final song on The Smith’s self-titled debut album (1984), is a chilling and sombre account of The Moors Murders, carried out by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady between July 1963 and October 1965. It would be a further year before Hindley and Brady confessed to the murders and the full extent of the crimes that inspired Suffer Little Children would come to light. At the time of the song’s writing and release, Hindley and Brady had both maintained their innocence and had not told the police about two of the murders, hence Suffer Little Children only including the names of three of the victims.
“Over the moor, take me to the moor, Dig a shallow grave, And I’ll lay me down”
The first victim of the killer couple was the 16 year old Pauline Reade, Hindley’s neighbour. Reade had disappeared on her way to a dance at the British Railways Club in Gorton, Manchester, on the 12th July 1963. On the same evening, Brady had told Hindley that he wanted to “commit his perfect murder”. He told Hindley to drive her van around the local area whilst he followed on his motorcycle. Upon spotting the victim for “his perfect murder”, he would flash his headlights and Hindley was to stop to offer that person a lift.
Driving down Gorton Lane, Brady saw a young girl walking towards them and signalled Hindley to stop, which she did not do until she had passed the girl. Brady stopped his motorbike alongside Hindley’s van and demanded to know why she had not offered the girl a lift, to which Hindley replied that she recognised the girl as Marie Ruck, a neighbour of her mother’s.
Shortly after this failed attempt, at around 8pm, the couple were driving down Froxmer Street when Brady noticed a girl wearing a pale blue coat and white high-heeled shoes walking away from them. Brady once again signalled for Hindley to stop. Upon stopping, Hindley recognised the girl as Pauline Reade, a friend of her younger sister, Maureen. Reade accepted a lift from Hindley. Hindley told Reade that she had lost an expensive glove on Saddleworth Moor and asked if she would mind helping her to find it. Reade said she was in no hurry and agreed to helping Hindley.
Reade was 16 years old, a few years older than their intended first victim, Maria Ruck. Hindley realised that there would be slightly less commotion over the death of a teenager than there would be over a child of seven or eight. Upon reaching the moor, Hindley stopped her van and Brady arrived shortly afterwards on his motorcycle. She introduced him to Reade as her boyfriend and said he had also come to find the missing glove. When questioned, Hindley told the police that Brady had taken Reade onto the moor whilst Hindley waited in the van. After about 30 minutes, Brady returned alone and took Hindley to the place where Reade lay dying. Her throat had been cut twice with a large knife, with the larger of these wounds being across her voice box. The collar of Reade’s coat had been pushed into the wound in a deliberate fashion.
Whilst Brady had gone to find the spade which he had hidden nearby to bury the body, Hindley told of how she had noticed that Reade’s coat was undone and her clothes were untidy, leading Hindley to guess that Brady had sexually assaulted her. However, Brady’s account of the murder differs greatly. Brady claimed that Hindley was present at the crime scene and that she even took part in the sexual assault. After burying Reade’s body, Brady put his motorcycle in the back of Hindley’s van. Whilst returning home, Hindley and Brady passed Reade’s mother, Joan, who was accompanied by her son, Paul. Hindley and Brady stopped to help Joan search the streets for her daughter.
Oh John, you’ll never be a man, And you’ll never see your home again”.
The second victim of The Moors Murders was 12 year old John Kilbride. Hindley and Brady approached Kilbride at a market in Ashton-Under-Lyne in the early evening of the 23rd of November 1963. The couple offered Kilbride a lift home, telling him that his parents would be worried about him being out so late. They bribed Kilbride with a bottle of sherry and he got into the Ford Anglia car that Hindley had recently hired. Once in the car, Brady told Kilbride that the sherry was at the couple’s home and that they would have to make a detour to collect it before dropping him home. Once they were on their way, Brady suggested another detour to search for a glove which he said Hindley had lost on the moor. Upon reaching the moor, Brady took to the child with him to supposedly search for Hindley’s glove whilst Hindley waited in the car. Brady sexually assaulted Kilbride and attempted to slit his throat with a 6-inch serrated blade before eventually strangling him with a piece of string, possibly a shoelace.
“A woman said: “I know my son is dead, I’ll never rest my hands on his sacred head.””
The third victim was Keith Bennett, who vanished from his grandmother’s house in Longsight, Manchester, during the early evening of 16th June, 1964, four days after his twelfth birthday. Hindley asked Bennett for his help in loading some boxes into her Mini pick-up truck and told him that she would drive him home afterwards. Once she had lured him into the pick-up truck, she drove to a lay-by on Saddleworth Moor, where Brady was waiting. Once again, Bennett was told that Hindley had lost a glove and she had asked for his help in finding it. Brady went with Bennett to find the fictitious glove. Hindley kept watch until 30 minutes later when Brady reappeared, alone and carrying a spade which had been hidden there earlier. When Hindley asked Brady how he had killed Bennett, he said he had sexually assaulted him and strangled him with a piece of string.
“Lesley Ann, with your pretty white beads”.
On the 26th December 1964, Hindley and Brady went to a local fairground in search of another victim. They noticed Lesley Ann Downey standing beside one of the rides. After realising Downey was on her own, they approached the 10 year old girl and deliberately dropped some of the shopping they were carrying close to her. They asked for Downey’s help in carrying the shopping to the couple’s car and then to their home. Downey agreed and once back at Hndley and Brady’s home, she was undressed, gagged and forced to pose for photographs before being raped and killed. It is suspected that like the previous two victims, Downey was strangled with a piece of string.
When questioned about the murder, Hindley maintained that she had gone to fill a bath for the child and on returning found the girl dead, killed by Brady. However, Brady stated that it was Hindley who killed Downey. The morning after the murder, Hindley and Brady drove Downey’s body to Saddleworth Moor and buried her, naked with her clothes at her feet, in a shallow grave.
“Edward, see those alluring lights? Tonight will be your very last night”.
The final victim of the couple was 17 year old engineer Edward Evans. On the 6th October 1965, Brady had met Evans at Manchester Central Railway Station. Hindley had driven Brady to Manchester Central Station and waited outside whilst Brady selected their victim. After a few minutes, Brady reappeared with Evans, introducing Hindley as his sister. Brady invited Evan’s back to the couple’s home at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue in Hattersley, Manchester for a drink, where Brady beat him to death with an axe.
This murder was to prove to be the couple’s undoing, as now becoming cocky and complacent, Brady had attempted to recruit Hindley’s brother-in-law, David Smith into their murderous plans. When the couple had arrived home with Evans, Brady had sent Hindley to fetch Smith. On returning with Smith, Hindley told Smith to wait outside for her signal, a flashing light. After the signal, Smith knocked on the door and was met by Brady who asked him if he come for “the miniature bottles of wine”. Brady led Smith into the kitchen and left him there, saying that he was going to collect the wine. A few minutes later, Smith heard a scream followed by Hindley shouting loudly for him to come and help. Smith rushed into the living room to the sight of Brady repeatedly striking Evans over the head with the flat of an axe. He watched in shock as Brady then throttled his victim with a length of electrical cord. During the process of killing Evans, Brady had sprained his ankle and the body was too heavy for Smith to take to the car on his own. They therefore wrapped the body in plastic sheeting and put it in the spare bedroom. Smith agreed to help Brady to dispose of Evans’s body the following evening. He went home and, horrified at what he had witnessed, told his wife, Maureen, what he had seen. The couple called the police from a public phone box at 6.07am the morning after the murder, the police searched the house and found the body of Edward Evans and Hindley and Brady were arrested.
When interrogated about the events, Hindley said “Whatever Ian has done, I have done”, alluded to in Suffer Little Children with the line “Wherever he has gone, I have gone”. Upon sentencing the couple to life imprisonment, the judge, Mr Justice Atkinson described Brady and Hindley as “two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity”.
“Oh, find me … find me, nothing more, We are on a sullen misty moor …”
Initially, the police were only aware of three killings, those of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride. The investigation was reopened in 1985 after Brady was reported in the press as having confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Hindley and Brady were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist the police in their search for the bodies of Reade and Bennett, by then having both confessed to their murders.
Hindley was characterised by the press worldwide as “the most evil woman in Britain”. She made several attempts to have her life sentence overturned, claiming that she was reformed and no longer a danger to society, but was never released. Hindley died in 2002, aged 60 years old. Brady was declared criminally insane in 1985 and has since been confined to the high security Ashworth Hospital. He has made it clear that he never wants to be released and has repeatedly asked that he be allowed to die.
At the time of the murders, Morrissey was a child himself, being 4 years old in 1963, making the youngest victims not too much older than him. The reaction in Manchester was one of horror and disbelief that such acts could happen and also that one of the perpetrators was a woman, perhaps why the song focuses more on Hindley than Brady. In Suffer Little Children, Morrissey may allude to the shock felt that one of the perpetrators was a woman in the phrase “Hindley wakes …” Hindle Wakes is 1910 play by Stanley Houghton (which has since seen various film versions). The play criticises the patriarchal society’s view that women, unlike men, are not governed by the laws of nature, primarily those related to sexual desires. Therefore, by referring to the title of the play with the phrase “Hindley wakes”, Morrissey may be extending this criticism to include many peoples’ beliefs, particularly at the time of Hindley’s arrest, that a woman is not naturally capable of horrors such as the Moors Murders or that she could not have been a conscious participant, instead being manipulated by the man.
Morrissey wrote Suffer Little Children after reading Emlyn Williams’s book Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection (1967). It was one of the first songs that lyricist Morrissey wrote with guitarist Johnny Marr. The title of the song is taken from the Gospel of Matthew 19:14 in which Jesus rebukes his disciples for turning away a group of children by saying, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for such is the kingdom of heaven”.
Suffer Little Children caused much controversy at the time of its release, particularly when placed in context of an album on which the opening song, Reel Around The Fountain, was said by many, including the press, to allude to a homosexual and potentially paedophilic relationship (“It’s time the tale were told, Of how you took a child, And you made him old”).
Similarly controversial at the time was track 5, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which the press also suggested was about paedophilia. These claims have been strongly denied by the band.
Suffer Little Children cause more controversy when it was featured on the B-side of the single Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now (1984). The single featured an image of 1960’s pools winner Viv Nicholson who bore more than a passing resemblance to Myra Hindley, something that many newspapers picked up on. As a result, the single and album were both withdrawn from sale by some retailers, including Woolworths and Boots. Despite this, Morrissey later struck up a close friendship with Ann West, the mother of victim Lesley Ann Downey, after she accepted that the band’s intentions had been entirely honourable.
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