I’ve Changed My Plea To Guilty’ (Morrissey/Nevin), B-side of ‘MY LOVE LIFE’ (1991). Perhaps his finest collaboration with Mark Nevin, ‘I’ve Changed My Plea To Guilty’ is, furthermore, one of the greatest tracks in Morrissey’s entire catalogue. At the time, he seemed to agree, telling one interviewer in all sincerity it was ‘the best song, in my mind, that I have recorded’.
‘Sometimes there’s no point pretending that you’re innocent and so forth,’ he explained. ‘You may as well just jump off the cliff and say, “I’m guilty.”’ Standing in the shadow, if not the shackles, of Oscar WILDE, Morrissey throws his loveless heart to the lions, a willing martyr to an agonising loneliness trembling through his every soul-torn syllable. While in one sense eerily prophetic of the 1996 Smiths COURT CASE (bar the obvious difference in plea), the ‘emotional air-raid’ metaphor harked back to his earlier sleeve note for a never-released 1985 compilation by Ludus, the band of his best friend Linder STERLING. Reminiscing about his and Linder’s walks through Manchester, Morrissey wrote of their ‘hearts damaged by too many air-raids’.
The song’s power and beauty owed much to its simplicity, developing the stark piano and vocal template of Nevin’s earlier ‘THERE’S A PLACE IN HELL FOR ME AND MY FRIENDS’. Modelled on his home demo, Nevin constructed the opening and closing sound collage using samples of country singer Skeeter Davis’s 1963 hit ‘The End Of The World’ alongside Dictaphone recordings of a waitress friend from Minneapolis called Suzy Solan. The delicate mood cast was perfect for Morrissey’s condemned cell surrender, which is why the song inevitably lost some of its grace in concert when rearranged as a guitar track. But in its original form, ‘I’ve Changed My Plea To Guilty’ still hits the bullseye of heartache with a poetry and poise few Morrissey songs have matched since.