About

"When Derek Jarman made three films for The Smiths, I don't think anyone expected them to be popular – how could they be? Jarman was far too talented."
Morrissey, The Catalogue (1988)

Music videos provided Derek Jarman with an important source of income during the early 1980s while he waited for funding to realise his production of Caravaggio. Yet Jarman remained sceptical of the medium, arguing that the "music video is the only extension of the cinematic language in this decade, but it has been used for quick effect, and it's often showy and shallow."

The most important project he would undertake in this period was for The Smiths, creating a three-part film in support of their 1986 album The Queen is Dead. Without featuring the band – they had requested not to appear in the video – 'The Queen is Dead' opens with a young girl wandering through an abandoned gasworks in East London spray-painting the song's title across a wall before rummaging through an industrial wasteland. 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' combines scenes of a car burning, over a figure mournfully remembering a romantic day in the park. 'Panic' re-enacts a scene from Thomas Middleton's playThe Revenger's Tragedy in which the Duke kisses a poisoned skull; Jarman's version features a young man sharing a joint as he kisses the skull, before recoiling in disgust.

Commissioned by Rouge Trade and filmed with the assistance of recent graduate filmmakers Richard Heslop and John Maybudy, the project enabled Jarman to upgrade to a Bealieu Super-8 camera and develop complex techniques of editing and superimposition he would later use in The Last of England. It was first televised on BBC2 in September 1986; the film was edited onto video and blown up to 35mm where it was shown in London cinemas before screenings of Alex Cox's film Sid and Nancy 1986. Later that year Jarman directed the video for The Smiths single Ask 1986.