The Smiths – The Smiths – Q Smiths Special June 2004

The Smiths – The Smiths – Rough Trade – Rough 61
Vocals – Morrissey, Guitars, Harmonica – Johnny Marr, Bass – Andy Rourke, Drums – Mike Joyce.
Reel Around The Fountain; You’ve Got Everything Now; Miserable Lie; Pretty Girls Make Graves; The Hand That Rocks The Cradle; Still Ill; Hand In Glove; What Difference Does It Make?; I Don’t Owe You Anything; Suffer Little Children.
Recorded at Pluto in Manchester, Eden in London, Matrix in London and Strawberry in Manchester, Winter 1983.

Released 1984 (UK), peaked at number 2.

The 80’s was an unlovely decade, politically, culturally, and musically, and tribal options for young music fans were unappetising. If you needed a sense of belonging, you could opt for the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and sew a shiny Saxon patch onto your denim jacket, or become a crusty-goth and follow New Model Army, Skeletal Family and Southern Death Cult around drab Midland towns with an Army And Navy kitbag. Across the Atlantic, American bands like Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth and REM were already doing amazing things, mixing psychedelia, avant garde noise and roots rock influences into a robust post-punk template. But they were far away. So is it any wonder that, in the months preceding the initial stirrings of The Smiths, even Lloyd Cole’s first album had seemed like a lifeline to would-be sensitive types without their own flag to wave.

When John Peel first started playing The Smiths’ debut single, Hand In Glove, in 1983, it was clear they would immediately find their own fanatical constituency. A 1984 Go-Betweens gig at Aston university saw a man with Morrissey hair dressed in Morrissey clothes cavorting with Morrissey moves at the front of the stage. How strange it must have been for the literate Australian expatriates to look down and realise their poetry reading, outcast fan-base was already moving on to a more easily assimilated idol. And when The Smiths’ eponymous album finally appeared, even though every song on it was familiar from bootlegs of Troy Tate’s scrapped studio versions that circulated with the cider at parties, it was an instant classic.

There can’t have been many albums stranger and more provocative than The Smiths to scale the heights of number 2 in the UK charts. Before the advent of the CD reissues and the full scale exhumation of the past, The Smiths’ twangy guitars and 60’s beat group stylings sounded vital and unprecedented, even though Johnny Marr’s Roger McGuinn flourishes were lost in a muggy mix and the keyboard parts, played by a bloke from Mike And The Mechanics, seemed somewhat superfluous. And in an era where the apogee of proto-Goth, post punk fashion was to go onstage looking like a mascara smeared Native American tribesman in a bin liner, The Smiths’ studied drabness seemed almost chic. Above all, in 1984, the weird Polytechnic literary criticism that passed for music journalism found its perfect fodder in Morrissey’s lyrics, which played multi-layered, ironic games with meaning, sexual identity, notions of the unreliable narrator, and saucy seaside postcard humour. In the 70’s spliffs were rolled on Led Zep and Yes gatefold sleeves, while Tolkienesque artwork was perused for clues. The lyrics on The Smiths offered a far more satisfying opportunity for detective work, even if some of Morrissey’s more oblique strategies were soon to explode in his scrumpled face.

The Smiths is an unashamedly provincial and nostalgic album. It couldn’t be written today, when there is a Weatherspoons pub in every high street and all city centres sport cobbled pavements and the same thirty shops. Morrissey’s imagery was defiantly not from London, and reflected the last gasp of a culturally specific notion of the North reflected by the 60’s kitchen sink dramas from which much of the band’s sleeve art was culled. The album’s vocabulary evokes a pre-lapserian age, where Morrissey could speak to confused adolescents about their confused adolescent sexuality using metaphors that today no-one would dare touch. Thus, The Smiths’ epic opener, Reel Around The Fountain, explores the loss of sexual innocence with lines that are at once lascivious, sleazy and impossibly romantic, over a woozy, hazy backing. The narrator of The Hand That Rocks The Cradle appears both touched and somehow enflamed by a child’s defencelessness. And Suffer Little Children is clearly a sincerely meant, if perhaps ill advised, elegy for the young victims of the Moors Murders, that, if it were any more musically or lyrically sophisticated, would seem unjustifiably offensive. Morrissey buckled in the predictable tabloid shit-storm that followed, and attempted to clarify his position. He’s since learned that a great artist need never explain or apologise.

Returning to The Smiths two decades later and listening anew, the enduring and absurd myth of Morrissey’s miserableness is instantly exploded. Here are dozens of hilarious lines that comfort and yet also mock the introspective audience that made the album their own. “I know I need hardly say how much I love your casual way but please put your tongue away”, pleads the protagonist over Miserable Lie’s full-on rockabilly rhythm, and who could have been stupid enough to take Still Ill’s “I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving. England is mine! It owes me a living.”, seriously? Rock’s idea of humour still only stretches as far as covering Simon and Garfunkel songs as if they were punk classics, or getting a rap about smoking dope onto Top Of The Pops. The Smiths, in contrast, evidences a genuine and timeless wit.

By the time The Queen Is Dead came out many of the band’s first fans had stopped listening to The Smiths. It was an Oedipal thing I think. What choice did a young man have when faced with something that exerted so powerful an influence on his life but to reject it. Nonetheless, their quiffs never quite grew out. And in the 90’s, when Cornershop and a host of NME journalists crucified Morrissey over his pre-Britpop use of Nationalistic imagery, might it not be fair to say that part of their anger was an attempt to annihilate the memory of their devoted, unquestioning teenage selves that snapped up The Smiths the day it hit the racks? I saw Morrissey again for the first time in nearly 20 years at his recent Royal Albert Hall show. It felt good to be back. He is that rare thing, a proper, old fashioned star. Relax, Smiths fans, and listen to that first album again. You were right all along.