2. “Everyday Is Like Sunday” – Morrissey
(From the album Viva Hate)
1988
Viva Hate went all the way to #1 on the UK charts and, perhaps somewhat surpringly, to #48 in the USA where the album earned support from college radio and, to a lesser degree, from MTV. Morrissey followed up the success of “Suedehead” with the second single “Everyday Is Like Sunday”. “Everyday Is Like Sunday” is a dramatic ballad based on Neville Shute’s novel On The Beach about nuclear holocaust and living in a place so boring and unimportant that nobody even bothered to nuke it. Thus, the song’s protaganist must wait for a natural death rather than a quick one. While the song is quite morbid in its literal interpretation, “Everyday Is Like Sunday” is more a song about loneliness and longing and wanting to be someplace other than where you are. It was another hit for Morrissey and peaked at #9 in the UK. Following the success of Viva Hate Morrissey wrote a handful of other songs with Stephen Street before moving on to begin a writing and working partnership with the production duo of Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. These various writing sessions (which also saw him working with former Smiths bandmates Andy Rourke, Craig Gannon, and Mike Joyce on some tracks) eventually led to the release of three non-album singles – “The Last Of The Famous International Playboys”, “Interesting Drug”, and “Ouija Board, Ouija Board”. The first two of these, co-written with Street, reached the UK Top 10 while the latter, written with Langer and Winstanley, went Top 20 in the UK. All three songs were also hits on the US alt rock charts. Morrissey then decided to begin work on the follow-up to Viva Hate and entered the studio with Langer and Winstanley on that album. However, that project would end up going in a different direction than expected.
Follow all the posts at the Alternative Reality site: www.alternativealbumsblog.wordpress.com
Alternative Reality: An Alternative Music Blog 