Saturday, June 15, 2013

ACBA: The Smiths' Sheila Take A Bow 12" (with Warhol cover)






Sheila Take a Bow, the Smith's 1987 non-album track single (the highest charting of their career) featured a cover image of Candy Darling taken from the Paul Morrissey directed film Women in Revolt (also known as Andy Warhol's Women in Revolt). The film featured Darling and two other transgendered superstars - Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn - in a parody of the women's liberation movement.  

Darling died in 1974 at the age of 29. The last song on Morrissey's solo album You Are the Quarry is titled "You Know I Couldn't Last," a slight paraphrase of her famous deathbed quote. Peter Hujar's photo, "Candy Darling on her Deathbed", was used by Antony and the Johnsons for the cover of their 2005 album I Am a Bird Now.

Darling is also the subject of the Velvet Underground song "Candy Says" and the second (and most famous) stanza of Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side": 

Candy came from out on the Island
In the back room she was everybody's darling
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
She says, "Hey, babe
Take a walk on the wild side"

Like the Smiths' eponymous debut (see previous), the cover to Sheila Take A Bow was not executed by Warhol himself. It was released in April of 1987, two months after his death. 












1 comment:

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