In his Smiths song “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” Morrissey uttered the famous line, “Reissue! Repackage! Repackage!/Reevaluate the songs/Double-pack with a photograph/Extra Track (and a tacky badge).” Ironically, his solo career finds him with equally as many compilations and repackaged albums as official studio records. Even more ironic is the fact that Bona Drag, his first compilation album, followed right after his first solo album, and is perhaps one of his strongest releases. Twenty years later, this compilation has been remixed, remastered, and repackaged with six new songs. But Bona Drag really is not as superfluous as it seems. Culled from the astonishing seven singles he released between 1988 and 1990 (of which only three were culled from Viva Hate), the songs found here merely scratched the surface of what he had released within those two years. It was to his credit that he kept the album succinct, focusing on the best of the B-side material.
To enhance his lyrical wit, and to help make his mark as a solo artist in his own right, Morrissey enlisted some excellent help with those songs, including such talents as The Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly on “Suedehead,” and “Everyday is Like Sunday,” Mary Margaret O“Hara on “November Spawned a Monster,” and a lineup that was, in essence, a Johnny Marr-less Smiths on “The Last of the Famous International Playboys” and “Interesting Drug,” a catchy number that also included Kirsty MacColl And for a three decades-long career, fewer songs carry the emotional punch of “Will Never Marry,” the clever observational humor and sadness of “Hairdresser on Fire,” or the lush, romantic longing of “Suedehead.” These first seven singles are arguably Morrissey’s best; as they hinted at a promise that his legacy of the Smiths would be equaled by an equally engaging solo career.
It would have been easy to fill Bona Drag with the half-dozen or so other songs from this era that were not included here. Instead, the six songs added to this edition are all outtakes. Though unreleased until now, they could easily fit within any of his releases. The most revealing number is the rough demo version of a number written for Sandie Shaw, 1988’s “Please Help the Cause Against Loneliness, as one starts to hear his direction towards the style he favored in the early 1990s. It also puzzles why “Happy Lovers at Last United” and “The Bed Took Fire” remained unreleased for twenty years—both could easily have been A-sides. We must leave it to the whim of Morrissey as to what justification exists to explain why these numbers remained in the vault for two decades.
One quibble, though. While this is a welcome reissue, it would have been well-served to have been repackaged with the DVD of “Hulmerist,” a video collection that was released in conjunction with Bona Drag. His excellent songs were well-matched with some of the best videos of the 1980s, especially on “Suedehead” and “Everyday is Like Sunday,” and it’s a shame that the visual element of this era was not included as well. That criticism aside, this reissue of Bona Drag is a nice souvenir of Stephen Patrick Morrissey’s formidable talents in his formative post-Smiths years.
