There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
by The Smiths
- 68
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 53
- Danceability
- 4
- Acousticness
"There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" was not a UK single until 1992, five years after the Smiths broke up. WEA put it out on October 12 to promote the compilation ...Best II. It reached number 25 on the UK Singles Chart and number 22 in Ireland. That was the band's last UK Top 40 appearance. In 2005 Morrissey released a live version as a double A-side with his cover of Patti Smith's "Redondo Beach", and it reached number 11.
It had been a candidate for a single much earlier. After The Queen Is Dead, a dispute with Rough Trade held up releases for nine months, and label owner Geoff Travis wanted this song as the comeback. Johnny Marr insisted on "Bigmouth Strikes Again". Morrissey later said that by the time it might have followed, the band had written "Panic". In 1986 the song became the second Smiths track to top John Peel's Festive Fifty.
The band began work on it at RAK Studios in London in late 1985. Marr built a synthesized string arrangement on an E-mu Emulator, credited on the album to the "Hated Salford Ensemble". The recording was finished in November at Jacobs Studios in Farnham, Surrey, where Marr added a flute melody. He said that with the volume turned right up, his shout of "That was amazing" can be heard at the very end.
There Is a Light That Never Goes Out runs at 68 BPM, the tempo of slow ballads, ambient and downtempo. In classical terms it sits in largo territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 3.53 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 882 ms. It is in E major, Camelot 12B, which shares its notes with C# minor and mixes cleanly with A major and B major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.