.
"As the corpse is downstairs in the main living room it means going out or watching television with death at one’s elbow."
("The Orton Diaries", December, 1966).
It’s an exhilarating number with its galloping pace. The drum machine and sound effects were obviously them wanting to steer the album some place new (and/or just have fun), like Marr trying to distance The Smiths from the ‘jingle jangle guitar’ and use more keyboard and string arrangements on Strangeways. The lyrics fit the song well, macabre and hilarious at the same time....
‘Stay home
Be bored
(It's crap, I know)
Tonight’
‘Oh Glenn
Don't come to the house tonight
Because there's somebody here
Who'll take a hatchet to your ear
The frustration it renders me
Hateful, oh...
Also makes one think of one of Van Gogh’s mad episodes.
Oh, don't come to the house tonight
Oh, don't come to the house tonight
Because you'll slip on the
Trail of all my sad remains
That's why, that's why
Goodbye my love, goodbye my love’
Marr commented on the song in 1987: "It was almost like we have a right to be slight right now, to be slightly less intense. So I was fine with it. I liked the beat. I liked Morrissey's singing and I liked my own weird backing vocal."
“[Johnny's] tremulous quaver on Death at one's elbow is a honeyed flow, although he insists that he cannot sing."
- Morrissey, "Autobiography"
‘Belch’