Not Fade Away 1986: There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, by The Smiths

"Is there life before death?" Dublin graffiti, 1980s

"Infatuation is the true pop response ..." Simon Reynolds, Bring the Noise, 2007

Sometimes all you can do is say enough. Sometimes, saying no is the only weapon you have.

We have come late to the story of The Smiths. Not out of choice - I could have happily selected them in 1983, 1984, 1985 or indeed next week for 1987 - but because I'm not sure I can tell you how important the Smiths were to me more than once. I think I only have one shot at it. Otherwise it will dribble away to some kind of fanboy waffle when what I want to impress on you is why the Smiths mattered more than any other band in the 1980s. Or at least why they mattered more than any other band to me.

And that is a problem. Because part of the reason comes down to the culture of the time. I'm averse to leaning too much on context in this space because the whole point is I'm choosing songs that still stand up and don't need special pleading.

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out stands up. I defy anyone to say otherwise, but the otherness of the Smiths, their blazing difference was not just down to the fact that they were a guitar band in an age of synthesizers, that they had a musical genius in Johnny Marr or a lyrical one-off in Morrissey (in his recent biography of Pop, Yeah Yeah Yeah, Bob Stanley argues that Morrissey is Britain's greatest ever lyricist). It was also down to what they stood for and, more importantly even, what they stood against; "their partiality" as the music writer Simon Reynolds wrote in Melody Maker in 1987.

We'll get to that in a moment. But let's start with the personal. The Smiths' constituency - one they found almost immediately - was the bookish, the shy, the sexually inexperienced, those who felt locked out of the world, who felt they were losing in life before they had even begun. At the time - or at least within recent memory - I fitted into most of those categories.

When I first heard them it was one of the first times I recognised a vision of myself in pop. Not the person I might have wanted to be, but someone I actually was. Morrissey was funnier, more literate, more eloquent than I, but I could identify with the bookish, impoverished, anxious, shy face he presented to the world. I might have wanted to be an alien sex god but the reality was I was a provincial nobody with a bad haircut with nothing to say.

The Smiths offered me - us - a voice; an eloquent, angry, forlorn, maudlin, comic voice.

In a decade when music began to speak to the nouveau riche - lifestyle products geared towards the newly emerging yuppie class, young in body but adult in possessions, with their own car, maybe their own flat and in the years ahead their own British Gas shares - the Smiths were defiantly adolescent in their concerns. Their songs were about boys and girls (some of them afraid), not men and women. That in itself was political. In the eighties we were all being urged to stand up for ourselves at every turn, to care about ourselves first and foremost ("There is no such thing as society") and damn the rest. In the eighties the world around us was no time to be young.

Margaret Thatcher had a hold over Britain in a way that none of those who succeeded her as Prime Minister could manage because she made us all choose sides. Or have a side forced upon you. All those eighties pop acts - Wham, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet - were portrayed as Thatcherite models of success, even if Wham played miners' benefits and Spandau ("Thatcherism on vinyl" according to the Guardian) had as many Labour voters in their ranks as Tories.

And once your side had been chosen you could either sulk with the losers or party with the winners.

Some of us were happy to sulk of course, as Mark Simpson noted in his book Saint Morrissey: "Thousands of young people fled to Morrissey's version of that decade, abandoning in self-righteous disgust the shiny High Street one that everyone else seemed to live in: the wake-me-up-before-you-go-go-kajagoogoo-morning-in-America-do-they-know-it's-Christmas-the-price-is-right--for-I-am-your-laydee--and-yoo-are-my-maan-this-lady's-not-for-turning-gotcha-this-time-you've-gone-too-far-Alexis-red-gold-and-green-cruise-missiles-are-the-guarantors-of-peace-we-begin-bombing-in-five-minutes-just-rejoice--at-that-news-you're-about-as-easy-as-a-nuclear-war-isn't-Princess-Di-pretty-Eighties."

I have spent a lot of time in this blog speaking up for pop's right to be shiny and glittery, but by the mid-eighties it was even beginning to get in my eyes. Pop, particularly after Live Aid, no longer belonged to us. It belonged to Basildon Man. Top of the Pops was a permanent party. What if you wanted a bit of grit? Well, you could retreat to the margins of course (anyone for a Tools You Can Trust John Peel session?). Or you could follow Morrissey and Marr as they offered a rain-drenched, concrete-built, defiantly northern alternative that had a splendour and glory that Phil Collins just couldn't offer.

The fact that they were so obsessed with the past - played out in all those record covers and Morrissey's lyrical magpie tendencies - was itself a rejection of the here and now. Another great big no.

At the time that was sometimes portrayed as a little Englander approach. The Smiths didn't seem to be listening to much hip hop after all. Then again, Johnny Marr later revealed that the bridge for There Is A Light That Never Goes Out was an intentional steal from Marvin Gaye's Hitch Hike. And remember how Morrissey and Marr had initially bonded. When asked to choose a record to play in Morrissey's bedroom, Marr chose the B-side of a Marvelettes single to his partner's approval. Their hinterland was always greater than they were given credit for.

As for this song. Well, it's just great isn't it? (Sorry, fanboy waffle I know, but it's no less true for that.) This is The Smiths at their most romantic, their most morbid, their grandest. A celebration of otherness, a rueful glimpse of sexual frustration, a consoling hymn for those of us who had been locked out of life, of the party, of the eighties.

In 1986 I left university. I was 23. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I had no job, no plan, no friends. The girl was miles away. I spent each day drifting, increasingly miserable. One afternoon, having spent the day in the library, I sat on a public bench near the Albert Hall in Stirling killing time until I went back to my digs for the evening meal. A boy approached with a huge boombox on his shoulders. Out of it I heard the first notes of There Is A Light That Never Goes Out and I remembered something Bowie used to sing: "You're Not Alone".

Jump forward nearly 30 years. This summer I caught a bit of Johnny Marr's Glastonbury gig on telly. At its climax he sang There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. It hit me where I live. It made me think of who I was back then, how far away that seems now and yet how close to me that younger version still is. And it still sounded like the most beautiful, the most true thing I've ever heard.

Other Contenders

Kiss, Prince & The Revolution

Papa Don't Preach, Madonna

Rainy Night in Soho, The Pogues

Rise, Public Image Limited

When I Think of You, Janet Jackson

What Have You Done For Me Lately, Janet Jackson

I Can't Live Without My Radio, LL Cool J

Hounds of Love, Kate Bush

I Want You, Elvis Costello

Suburbia, Pet Shop Boys

Ain't Nothing Goin' On But the Rent, Gwen Guthrie

Levi Stubbs' Tears, Billy Bragg

E=MC2, Big Audio Dynamite

Is There Anyone Out There, Mighty Mighty

Therese, The Bodines

She Gets Out the Scrapbook, Furniture

Then NME Single of the Year: Kiss, by Prince & the Revolution

John Peel's Festive 50 winner: There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, The Smiths

And the best-selling single of 1986: Don't Leave Me This Way, The Communards