Jeane The Smiths

'Jeane,' a glorious 1983 B-side track by the Smiths, is a grimy gem. It shoots out the raw ache of lower middle-class disillusionment - in the Smiths' Thatcherite Britain equivalence, that would be 'working class'. To love and be loved is one thing. To live a life where love can live and thrive, you need material comfort - which is where this song goes off the usual Top of the Pops track and delivers the missive.

Yet, amid the squalor, there's a strange, sad tenderness where the listener imagines how things would have gone if the singer and his partner 'had enough'. The repeated refrain, 'We tried and we failed,' is like a church bell being rung to articulate shared defeat, a tragic bond between two people clinging to dignity in a world that offers none.

Johnny Marr's guitar jangles with slow, pointless urgency. The riff is insistent, driving the song forward like a train rattling through Bulandshahr station.


'Jeane' doesn't aspire to grandeur. It's 'over', so, yes, it wallows, it flails, it fails. And in doing so, it captures something transcendent. Beauty sometimes lingers in hopeless spaces.