Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. Photograph: Myung Jung Kim/PA
Twenty-five years ago this month, Morrissey and Johnny Marr formed the Smiths. Having just finished writing a reflective piece about the band's legacy for the Observer Review, I felt compelled to put together the inevitable top 10 of my favourite Morrissey/Marr songs. I stress this is purely personal, the songs I'd put on a Desert Island compilation for when I was feeling sorry for myself, lying on my hessian hammock in my bamboo bedsit. Feel free to disagree ...
1. There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (from The Queen is Dead album, 1986) Doomed romanticism of the highest order. Marr's chiming guitar augmented by artificial strings, and Morrissey at his most windswept and adolescent. All together now: "And if a double-decker bus ..."
2. How Soon Is Now? (b-side to William, It Was Really Nothing single, 1984) Epic, trippy, oscillating guitar riff that sounds like nothing else in the Smiths canon. Morrissey responds in kind with one of the great opening couplets (filched, incidentally, from George Elliott's Middlemarch): "I am the son and the heir/ Of nothing in particular." The closest the Smiths got to a stadium anthem.
3. Reel Around the Fountain (album track from The Smiths, 1984) One of Morrissey's many lyrical nods to Salford playwright Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, and one of the Smiths' earliest classics. It sounds even better in earlier versions, most notably a BBC session version.
4. Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want (b-side to William It Was Really Nothing single, 1984) Short and sweet, a mere one minute and 50 seconds, but all the more heartbreaking for its brevity. Basically, another Morrissey ode to himself, and his years of thwarted ambition, but perhaps the most nakedly melancholy Smiths song of all.
5. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (album track from The Smiths, 1984) The first Smiths song proper, and an extraordinary accomplished track from their debut album. Though described by Morrissey as being about "a relationship I had that didn't involve romance", the song has a dark lyrical undertow that borders on the creepy. But this one just grows and grows.
6. Cemetery Gates (album track from The Queen is Dead, 1986) Morrissey's ode to the joys of competitive grave-watching: "It's a most gripping pastime, I can assure you." The narrator's sidekick is widely assumed to be Morrissey's friend-come-muse, Linder Sterling. "Keats and Yeats are on your side/ But you lose because Wilde is on mine." Too true.
7. The Queen Is Dead (album track from The Queen is Dead, 1986) Another classic that catches the group at the height of their collective powers: thunderous drums, an extraordinarily melodic bass line, and Marr's velvety guitar underpin Morrissey's treasonable anti-Royalist lyric. The one song where the group's Irish rebel roots show though most defiantly.
8. Rusholme Ruffians (album track from Meat is Murder, 1985) Marr's Bo Diddley-esque rhythm and a Morrissey lyric that nicks from/pays homage to a Victoria Wood ditty, Fourteen Again. What other rock singer would steal from Wood? The first time that Morrissey touches on what would become a favourite topic, the lure of the low-life hooligan.
9. I Want The One I Can't Have (album track from Meat Is Murder, 1985) A typically dark and labyrinthine Morrissey lyric that begins with a jaundiced view of working-class ambition, touches on juvenile murder and casual sex, and somehow manages to sound doggedly romantic. "The riches of the poor" in all their fleeting glamour.
10. Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me (album track from Strangeways, Here We Come, 1987) Morrissey's favourite Smiths song. And David Bowie's. It nods lyrically to Joni Mitchell's Hejira, one of Morrissey's favourite albums. For once, he sounds utterly sincere in his elucidation of loneliness. A fitting swansong to the Smiths' brilliant career.
