Hector, the first of the gang to die

Written after moving to LA 1firts of the gang to die" was Morrissey's joyful requiem to a local young Latino criminal whose wayward lifestyle led him inevitably to an early grave. "Hector" may be a scarce name in Britian - synonymous with Scottish gentry and upper classes - but commonplace in Mexican communities. As a case in point, Hector "Weasel" Marroquin was the notorious leader of LA's 18th Street Latino gang before trying to reform by founding an anti-gang violence organization called "No Guns". Marroquin was later re-arrested in 2006 for - absurdly enough - possession of an illegal firearm. Even so, there's something tangibly perverse about any pop song that dares to christen its hero "Hector", an audacious joke magnified by its supreme popularity in Morrissey's repertoire a, to date, the track he's sung in concert more than any other since first introducing in August 2002, nearly two years before its official release.

In the song, "Hector" himself is but a vehicle - Morrissey's Hitchcockian MacGuffin if you like - to contrast the extremities of life and death within a romantic world view where love is reserved of watching sunrise behind a care home for the blind. Fitting neatly into his existing canon of crime songs such as "the last of the famous international playboys", it also provided him with a chance to wallow in his own gang fantasies of life among the "pretty pretty thieves". If anything "first of the gang to die" is Morrissey's most shameless glamorisation of villainy, smitten by the memory of the lost lad who "stole our hearts away".

The song's mass appeal owes a great, great deal to Whyte's languid but loveable rosy-cheeked guitar riff, its milkman-friendly melody anchoring a lyric which otherwise lacks any obvious anthemic qualities, certainly paling in significance beside, the human gravitas of, say, "there is a light". 

Yet if it seems outrageous that several thousand people at a time bounce up and down at Morrissey gigs in beery chants "Hector was the...", then perhaps that's the whole point. Its victory of preposterous pop spirit over rational common sense is reason enough.

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"First Of The Gang To Die"