“What She Said” by The Smiths

"What She Said" turns up on Meat Is Murder, the second Smiths album, which Rough Trade released in February 1985, and it's another Morrissey and Marr number: Johnny Marr wrote the music and Morrissey the words. Marr plays both guitar and piano here, with Andy Rourke on bass and Mike Joyce on drums, and the band produced it themselves, with Stephen Street, who had started working with them in the months before, as engineer.

The sessions ran from the middle of 1984 to December, split between the Fallout Shelter and Jam Studios in London and Ridge Farm in Surrey, and Marr sketched a good share of the demos at his place in Earl's Court. The album pushed their sound outward and their politics further into the open, and it gave the Smiths their only UK number-one studio album.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.