This Charming Man

'This Charming Man' was the Smiths’ second single, released October 31, 1983. The song is defined by Marr's jangle pop guitar riff and Morrissey's characteristically morose lyrics.

Morrissey said of the song's lyrics: "I really like the idea of the male voice being quite vulnerable, of it being taken and slightly manipulated, rather than there being always this heavy machismo thing that just bores everybody."

The lyrics of 'This Charming Man' comprise a first person narrative in which the male protagonist punctures one of his bicycle's tires on a remote hillside. A passing "charming man" in a luxury car stops to offer the cyclist a lift. While driving together the pair flirt, although the protagonist finds it difficult to overcome his reluctance: "I would go out tonight, but I haven't got a stitch to wear". The motorist tells the cyclist: "it's gruesome that someone so handsome should care".

Morrissey deliberately used archaic language when composing the voice-over style lyrics. His use of phrases and words such as 'hillside desolate', 'stitch to wear', 'handsome' and 'charming' are used to convey a more courtly world than the early-Eighties north of England. Morrissey had already used the word 'handsome' in a song title—in "Handsome Devil", the B-side to "Hand in Glove"—and observed in a 1983 interview with Barney Hoskyns that he used the word to "try and revive some involvement with language people no longer use. In the daily scheme of things, people's language is so frighteningly limited, and if you use a word with more than 10 letters it's absolute snobbery."

As with many of Morrissey's compositions, the song's lyrics feature dialogue borrowed from a cult film. The line "A jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place" is borrowed from the 1972 film adaptation of Anthony Shaffer's 1970 play Sleuth, in which Laurence Olivier plays a cuckolded author to Michael Caine's 'bit of rough'.

The line "I would go out tonight but I haven't got a stitch to wear." was possibly written from Morrissey's personal experience:

"For years and years I never had a job, or any money. Consequently I never had any clothes whatsoever. I found that on those very rare occasions when I did get invited anywhere I would constantly sit down and say, 'Good heavens, I couldn't possibly go to this place tonight because I don't have any clothes... I don't have any shoes.' So I'd miss out on all those foul parties. It was really quite a blessing in disguise."
- Morrissey, 1984