Recording
The album was produced by Morrissey and Marr, working predominantly with engineer Stephen Street, who had engineered the band's 1985 album, Meat Is Murder. Street recalled, "Morrissey, Johnny and I had a really good working relationship — we were all roughly the same age and into the same kind of things, so everyone felt quite relaxed in the studio".
At the time the group was having difficulty with its record label Rough Trade. According to Street "but this didn't get in the way of recording because the atmosphere in the studio was very, very constructive."
The first song from the album to be recorded, in July 1985, was "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side". The recording, made with engineer Stephen Street at a small studio in Manchester and initially intended as a demo, was considered by the band to be good enough for release as a single. It went on sale on 16 September 1985 and made number 23 in the UK Singles Chart.
In August 1985, "Bigmouth Strikes Again" and "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" were recorded at RAK Studios in London, along with the B-sides to "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side", "Asleep" and "Rubber Ring". Kirsty MacColl sang a backing vocal for "Bigmouth Strikes Again" but it was considered "really weird" by Marr, and was replaced with a sped-up vocal by Morrissey in the final mix, for which he is credited as Ann Coates on the sleeve of The Queen Is Dead. "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" includes a false fade near the start, intended by Street to give the impression of a door closing and opening again. During the same session, a first version of "Never Had No-one Ever" was recorded.
The bulk of the album was recorded in the winter of 1985 at Jacob Studios in Farnham, under the working title "Margaret on the Guillotine".
"Frankly, Mr. Shankly" was an attempt to recreate the "vibe" of Sandie Shaw's "Yesterday's Man", although "it didn't quite work out that way", according to Marr. Linda McCartney was asked to play piano on the track, but declined, and a first take featuring a trumpeter was scrapped. The version originally intended for inclusion on The Queen Is Dead was ruined by a technical glitch on the tape, and so the song was re-recorded with John Porter at Wessex Studios in London.
"The Queen Is Dead" was among the last songs to be recorded. Its distinctive tom-tom loop was created by Mike Joyce and Stephen Street using a sampler. A line of guitar feedback was played by Marr through a wah-wah pedal throughout the song.
Read more about this topic: The Queen Is Dead
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