Morrissey - Interesting Drug

JUL 01 1989 · 12:00

Morrissey - Interesting Drug (1989) Director: Tim Broad Era: Late Thatcherite Post-Punk Auteurism (1989) - British indie alternative at peak political confrontation; Morrissey's early solo career immediately following The Smiths' dissolution, operating within a charged atmosphere of anti-Conservative cultural resistance and emergent animal rights activism An exceptionally high-value archival artifact representing the intersection of British post-punk politics, animal rights activism, gender nonconformity, and indie auteur video-making. The video's documented production details, confirmed directorial credit, chart significance, and deliberate political text make it a primary source for researchers studying Thatcher-era cultural resistance in popular music. Tim Broad's premature death in 1993 lends his collaborations with Morrissey additional historical weight as a finite and irreplaceable body of work. Context: Released 17 April 1989, 'Interesting Drug' arrived at the zenith of Thatcherite Britain, when Conservative government policies bore heavily on working-class communities. Morrissey explicitly framed the song as a critique of the government's criminalisation of working-class drug use as a mechanism of social control. The video extends this politics visually, embedding animal rights activism, gender nonconformity, and youth rebellion into a realist British institutional setting. Co-written with Stephen Street and featuring former Smiths members, it represented one of the last links to the Smiths lineup before legal disputes permanently severed those ties. Reaching number nine in the UK, it was Morrissey's last top-ten single until 1994, cementing his post-Smiths cultural authority during a politically charged moment in British pop history. Director notes: Directed by Tim Broad; produced by Frank Hilton (per IMVDb). Released 1989 on HMV/EMI. The video interweaves a performance strand with a narrative strand featuring a group of high heel-wearing, NME-reading schoolboys who ally with an eccentric older woman cyclist. Morrissey appears toward the video's end distributing animal rights literature, after which the group breaks into a facility to free laboratory rabbits. The fictional school name 'Hawtrey High School For Boys' references Carry On actor Charles Hawtrey, a figure Morrissey admired. A copy of Herman Melville's Moby Dick appears as a prop. The graffiti 'Bad people on the right' in the video differs from the lyric ('on the rise'), a politically pointed substitution. The video drew controversy and was initially restricted by the BBC in part due to footage of a dead seal pup used in a related context. The video was produced in the United Kingdom and copyrighted (C) 1989 HMV.