This song must have been written shortly before, or perhaps during the recording sessions for the "Strangeways, Here We Come" album which took place in March-April 1987 at Wool Hall Studios in Bath, with Stephen Street as producer, helped by Johnny and Morrissey.

album version {5:25}

• "Strangeways Here We Come" album

This song has never been performed specifically for radio or television.

This song was never done live by the Smiths. It has been performed live 64 times by Morrissey after the Smiths. It was introduced in September 2007, halfway into the 2007-2008 Greatest Hits tour and performed 41 times until the end of that tour, making it almost a setlist regular. It was done a further 23 times on the 2009 Tour Of Refusal, this time a near-regular during that tour's first half.

live Waukegan 2007 {5:52} [Morrissey after the Smiths]

• 7" single of "I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris"

monitor mix {6:31}

Taken from a record company cd-r of a scrapped reissue project, this was leaked at the end of 2010 on the rarities LP bootleg simply titled "The Smiths".

Quotes

"It was the first time the group played it together and we just switched the tape on and didn't take it terribly seriously. And I just fell onto a piano and began to bang away. We kept the tape because it had some unnameable appeal." Interviewer: "And people kept the piano away from you after that?" Morrissey: "People kept away from me after that!"
- Morrissey on "Death Of A Disco Dancer", Sounds, 18 June 1988.

"The vocal room [of Wool Hall Studios] houses an old Red Lion piano that I decide to bang during a run-through of Death of a disco dancer. More Lieutenant Pigeon than pianoforte, the Donnybrook punch-up pianner nonetheless remains in the track, and for the first (and last) time I am loosely listed as a musician."
- Morrissey, "Autobiography"