You could say that Morrissey and Marr were a Mancunian Morrison and Manzarek. Only, instead of demanding the world worship him as a snakeskin-clad shaman, Morrissey sang from the perspective of an invisible outsider, forever ignored and underestimated, and he did it while brandishing a bunch of gladioli and sporting National Health Service specs and a hearing aid. The world worshipped him anyway. The Smiths were the first serious, critically revered, independent act with a giddy, overemotional following forever on the verge of hysteria. The Smiths made big boys cry like little girls, and they made big girls wish the men in their lives were more like Morrissey. He was wittier. He felt more. He suffered more. He understood more. The Smiths may never have reached the same arena-filling heights as the Cure and Depeche Mode, but they earned their place in the Mount Rushmore of modern rock, and it was "How Soon Is Now" that put them there. If the decade has three great doomed love songs—"Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "The Killing Moon" being the other two—"How Soon Is Now?" is the most isolated, the most hopeless, the most alone. But while Morrissey sounds resigned to his loveless destiny, Johnny Marr's music has never been this big, rich, and deep. "Epic" is an overused word—especially in this book—but "How Soon Is Now?" is an epic of adolescent angst: It takes a handful of hurt feelings and makes them into a masterpiece.
LM: The Smiths didn't have a lot of the things I looked for in a band: escapist music videos, male members with makeup, at least one keyboard player. And their name was the most ordinary moniker a group could possibly have. But the Smiths were like no one I'd heard before—or since. Almost immediately upon hearing "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," they launched straight into my top-five favorite bands and never left. I didn't have to apologize for liking them. And being a Smiths fan reflected well on your movie taste and your literary quotient. Yes, Morrissey was divisive (some might say whiny), but no one ever captured loneliness, insecurity, and fumbling immature awkwardness like he did. No one ever sang my life like he did. I had no idea what a vegetarian even was before I heard "Meat Is Murder"—Morrissey's done more for animal rights in the past 30 years than anyone on the planet! And you know what the best thing he ever did was? Not get back together with the Smiths. Court cases and ill feelings notwithstanding, I'm happy I don't have to see them tainting that immortal legacy. Because no financially motivated reunion of the four now-50-something Smiths could ever equal the show in my head.
JB: Not a fan.
JOHNNY MARR: I think "How Soon Is Now?" is unusual because it sounds really, really good in a club when you're fucked up—and that's okay. "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" is a really loved song also, and "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" has a different kind of love for it. But "How Soon Is Now?" sounds really good in American clubs, and it was made late at night with a kind of swampy, sexy vibe going on. I don't think I've ever said "vibe" and "sexy" in the same sentence—the song must have something good going for it if it makes me use those words!
It was written over a three-day period. On the Friday, I sat down around noonish with my little Portastudio and wrote "William, It Was Really Nothing" and recorded it on a little four-track for the A-side of the next single. Because that was such a fast, short, upbeat song, I wanted the B-side to be different, so I wrote "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" on Saturday in a different time signature—in a waltz time as a contrast. I was kind of happied out after writing "William."
On Sunday night I kicked back and treated myself to writing something completely different from both those songs. I had a short, upbeat one and a short, sad one, so I decided to write a long, swampy one with a groove. I always wrote songs in batches of three and usually still do.
MORRISSEY: The song was recorded in North London, in the old Decca studios. It established a certain turning point for the band, even though we were still oddly associated with timidity. I think the lyrics embarrassed the other Smiths, and the producer [John Porter] said nothing, and greater emphasis was placed on the guitars. I'd reached the point where I had to register whatever it was I felt, and Angie Marr [Johnny's wife] was the first person who complimented me on the lyric.
ANDY ROURKE: I've never been embarrassed by his lyrics. They were truthful and down to the bone. I was embarrassed to show my dad the first Smiths 45, "Hand In Glove," because it had a guy's naked butt on the cover.
MARR: I was really excited when I first heard the lyrics to "How Soon Is Now?" But I always was really excited when I first heard the lyrics of all the songs. I expected that the lyrics would be fantastic for every song that we wrote, and they always were.
ROURKE: Usually we would do a very basic run-through in the recording studio, then Morrissey would take a cassette tape and go off to his room or house or wherever and work on [the lyrics] for a day or two. We'd finish the songs, and then he would come in and do his thing over the top. We didn't know what the hell Morrissey was going to sing. It was always a great moment, waiting to see what he would come up with.
MARR: We made the record until dawn. I got a taxi home from Finsbury Park in London to Queensgate and got into bed around 8 or 9 a.m. Then I woke up, and it was dark the next evening, and I realized that we had done something that was really different. I remember thinking, Did that really happen? We just caught it in a sort of 24-hour kind of time capsule when we recorded it. The demo was what it was, but things happened in the recording session that really took it up several degrees. It was a real team effort.
MORRISSEY: When the final mix was finished, I took a tape of the song by taxi to Rough Trade Records, played it to Geoff Travis [the head of the label], and when it finished, he said, "What is Johnny doing? That's just noise!," and the song became a B-side [to "William, It Really Was Nothing"]. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Sire released it as a single, but couldn't get it on the Top 100 even though it had great radio play [on modern rock stations] and we were selling out large arenas. Also, Sire couldn't secure the Smiths a television spot anywhere! We were paralyzed by the dumbness of the times. So we did our best to change them.
STYLE COUNCIL
"Morrissey used to buy his—I was going to say 'shirts,' but they were actually blouses," Rourke remembers. "He used to buy them from a women's clothing place called Evans Outsizes that was for fat women in Manchester. These women's blouses that nobody wanted became Morrissey's trademark. He used to like tearing them up and throwing them into the crowd."
MARR: We formed the group as a positive thing to represent our generation who weren't mainstream. A lot is made of the difference between us and bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet and Culture Club. It's right to point out those differences between those mainstream groups and groups like the Smiths and New Order, who were just a different kind of people full-stop. We were independent groups from the start—the others were very much major-label groups. Pretty much everyone you see on the Band Aid record, almost all of those people, with the exception of Paul Weller, represented straight, mainstream aspirations. Those bands just aspired to be big, big pop stars. Without having to discuss it, we knew we were all alternatives, and we didn't even consider that we were all on the same page. When I say "we," I'm talking about not just the four individual members of the Smiths; I'm talking about people like Bernard Sumner and Billy Bragg too. You were either on the side of the Cure and Depeche and the Smiths, or you were on the side of the more mainstream acts.
It just so happened that some of the alternative acts got very popular. Depeche Mode got to be a very, very big, well-known group playing stadiums in America. That's the great thing about pop music: Guys with interesting ideas who might be more subversive or challenging can get into the mainstream. So if the Pet Shop Boys have huge hits across the world, it's a great thing. Because it's people who do have something to say and aren't just there purely for fame but can wrap up great attitudes and interesting politics—conceptual and social politics and ideas—in a mainstream, four-minute song. That infiltrates Middle America and the homes of people who need to wake up a little bit. We weren't mainstream people; we didn't like "jock culture," sexism, and homophobia. We didn't like all that nasty stuff, and that's what we'd like to sing about. And we assumed our audience was made up largely of people like us.
MIXTAPE: 5 Cover Versions of Smiths Songs 1. "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want," The Dream Academy 2. "Hand in Glove," Sandie Shaw 3. "You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby," Kirsty MacColl 4. "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," Act 5. Back to the Old House," Everything But The Girl
"We weren't mainstream people; we didn't like 'jock culture,' sexism, and homophobia."
ROURKE: When we appeared on TV, people saw normal people. We didn't wear fucking chains or six-foot hair and shoulder pads. They saw normal, almost vulnerable people, especially Morrissey. It screamed out to vulnerable people that they had an ally, somebody who speaks their language instead of this bullshit, plastic-fame stuff. The first time we went on Top of the Pops, we were dressed in Marks and Spencer sweaters and black jeans that our manager made for us. We went to the makeup room, and I think John Taylor was next to me, or somebody from Duran Duran who had these thick fucking shoulder pads, chains, and hair 70 feet high. The makeup woman said, "So, what are you gonna be wearing for the performance?" I was like, "This is it: I'm wearing it." She was like, "Huh?" She thought I was crazy. A lot of it was down to the fact that we were from Manchester. Someone would punch you in the face—or kick you in the face—if you dressed like that. Our shared Irish heritage also played a part. We were all good Catholic boys, altar boys. Although, I don't think Morrissey was an altar boy. I can't imagine Morrissey in a dress. In a tutu, maybe….
I met Johnny when I was 11. When we first started playing music together, we were listening to the Bothy Band and Fairport Convention—really traditional folk music. I don't know how we ended up sounding like we sounded with the Smiths. We were listening to Richard Thompson, early Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, James Williamson. Johnny loved Rory Gallagher. Speaking for myself, I got really into black funk music—a lot of the Smiths bass lines are very funky. Chic was definitely an influence.
I met Mike [Joyce, drummer] and Morrissey when we did a demo for "Handsome Devil" and "Miserable Lie." Mike was this punk drummer who was kind of brash. Johnny was the studious one who always came up with a plan. Morrissey was different, put it that way. He's a very shy and reserved person, but charming at the same time. Luckily, he became a different person when he went on the stage—he had this alter ego. After "How Soon Is Now?," he took it to a different level and gained a lot of confidence and started going crazy onstage and doing all this crazy dancing and rolling around on the floor.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
The Smiths have only grown in popularity since Marr's sudden departure in 1987, a move that led to the dissolution of the group and may have taken decades for Morrissey to get over (if he's indeed over it). He has since released nine albums as a solo artist and continues to draw arena-size crowds; he keeps the legend of the Smiths alive by including "How Soon Is Now?" and other classics in his concert set list. So does Marr, who—following a long and fruitful post-Smiths career playing with Electronic, The The, Modest Mouse, the Healers, and others—saw a brief reunion with Rourke during a 2013 tour stop while promoting his solo debut. To date, Morrissey (whose autobiography, Autobiography, was published in the U.K. in 2013) and Marr have never performed together again.
MORRISSEY: I've never felt fully present in my own life. I've always felt like a ghost drifting through. I'm not actually flesh. So autobiography is a therapeutic act of self-loyalty, even if, like me, you end up with chapters of self-disgust rather than reams of narcissism.
ROURKE: Last time Johnny was here [in New York City], he came around my house for a cup of tea, and he was on the sofa for seven hours. We were just reminiscing like a couple of old guys. There's never any animosity or anything like that. I still speak with Mike too. I think he still drums occasionally. It's a shame that I don't speak to Morrissey anymore, but I don't think anybody really does. That's his choice.
MORRISSEY: A lot of people are homesick for the Smiths, and not because everyone else is abysmal, but because the songs of the Smiths are so good. With most bands, if they have two decent songs, they end up with five-star reviews. There are so many easy victories these days for other bands, but the Smiths were never promoted and almost never received radio play, and this mystery has protected them in the long run. But a re-formation will never take place because re-formations can only work if the same spirit that made the band form in the first place still exists. But it doesn't.
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