This Charming Man
by The Smiths
- 103
- BPM
- B major
- Key
- 1B
- Camelot
- 62
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Johnny Marr was a little jealous. Rough Trade labelmates Aztec Camera had started to get daytime radio play, and the Smiths' May 1983 debut single "Hand in Glove" had missed expectations. Marr felt the band needed an upbeat song to get the chart position they deserved. He wrote the music to "This Charming Man" for a John Peel session, on the same night he wrote "Still Ill" and "Pretty Girls Make Graves".
Geoff Travis of Rough Trade heard the Peel performance and suggested it as the single in place of "Reel Around the Fountain". The band recorded a version at Matrix Studios in London in September 1983. That version was unsatisfactory. They went to Strawberry Studios in Stockport and cut the version people know. Marr layered about 15 guitar tracks, including one made by dropping a knife with a metal handle onto the strings of a Telecaster.
Morrissey wrote the lyrics about a cyclist with a punctured tyre who is offered a lift by a man in a luxury car. He chose old-fashioned words such as "handsome" and "charming" on purpose. The line "A jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place" comes from the 1972 film Sleuth. The single came out on October 31, 1983 and reached number 25, then number 8 when it was reissued in 1992.
This Charming Man runs at 103 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.33 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 583 ms. It is in B major, Camelot 1B, which shares its notes with Ab minor and mixes cleanly with E major and F# major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.