It’s 1985 and Johnny Marr’s playing guitar in his kitchen.

He’s strumming something, finding it only mildly interesting, and is about to move on to something else.

Luckily, his friend, singer and lyricist Morrissey is there, and convinces Marr to stick with what eventually becomes ‘Cemetry Gates’, released the following year and perhaps the finest example of The Smiths’ greatness.

In the space of two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, Marr, Morrissey, bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce treat us to wonderfully jangly guitar that flits between melancholy and joy, some of Morrissey’s best ever lyrics (which poke fun back at the critics who had mocked his ‘tormented soul’ image, reference poets Keats, Yeats and Wilde, and include some genuinely laugh-out-loud lines), and a driving rhythm section that prevent Morrissey’s wandering melodies from drifting off into a neversphere.

The intrigue of this jam-packed song starts right there in the title: ‘Cemetry Gates’. Why the missing ‘e’ in ‘cemetery’? Nobody knows! It could have been a mistake, but it could have been part of that lyrical theme: the tussle between Morrissey and his critics.

As well as being portrayed as a cartoonish sorrowful misery, Morrissey was sometimes viewed as a pseudo-intellectual — the sort who would carry a book of poetry under his arm on his way out to dinner with no intention of reading. Could the missing ‘e’ be a deliberate ‘mistake’?

Less speculatively, the opening lament of ‘A dreaded sunny day, so I meet you at the cemetery gates’ is surely Morrissey taking the mick — either of his public perception or the Romantic poets’ gloom.

Then again, he used to walk with his artist friend Linda Sterling to a Manchester cemetery, and this is a man who reportedly once said, “This idea of fun: cars, girls, Saturday night, bottle of wine… to me, these things are morbid”. Maybe he really does hate the sun.

One of the most dissected lines of the song is the closing, “’Cause weird lover Wilde is on mine”. Except is it ‘weird lover’? Or is Morrissey taking a dig at Oscar Wilde’s supposedly overinflated belly with the line, “’Cause whale blubber Wilde is on mine”?

An article spending so much of its time on a song’s lyrics can feel a little off — such is music’s animalistic, primal joy and its power to transcend our silly little intellectualism and ego-stroking — but when discussing a devoted wordsmith, maybe it makes some sense.

That’s not to say that without Marr’s shining guitar and the rollicking drum and bass parts from Joyce and Rourke the lyrics would have anything like the same impact. Rourke’s merry extended notes give the song a constant forward momentum, and he chooses the perfect moments to let a note sing and when to fill space more tightly. Joyce doesn’t do anything showy. He simply does what’s right for the song, supporting that momentum with frequent and slightly skittish drum fills.

It’s difficult to say which of these qualities assist most in Morrissey’s melodies ringing in your head for days. Even if they aren’t the most immediately accessible, they have a staying power that’s rare for a song without a standout hook. A prime example being the emphatic, “But I’ve read well and I’ve heard them said  / A hundred times, maybe more” ("them" referring to his friend’s words) — quite an odd thing to exclaim with such passion. Throughout the song, in fact, you might forget that Morrissey’s singing about his friend’s plagiarism (while himself ‘borrowing’ a few lines from the film ‘The Man Who Came To Dinner’) and revel in its undeniable energy.

Thirty-six years after its release, Cemetry Gates lives on in all its miserable joy, its fleeting restlessness and possibly unintended hilarity.