 |
|
at a glance...
Hometown:
Manchester, England
Year Formed: 1983
Personnel:
Morrissey: vox
Johnny Marr: guitars, keyboards
Andy Rourke: the bass guitar
Mike Joyce: drums
In the Family :
Morrissey, Electronic, Johnny Marr and the Healers, The The, Julian Cope
Notes:
Legend has it that young guitar prodigy Johnny Marr had to make several pleading visits to local eccentric and NME letters-page-botherer Steven Patrick Morrissey's home in an effort to convince the retiring aesthete to join his new band. One wonders what might have happened had his entreaties been unsuccessful: would Morrissey have continued a life of solitary bedsit moping, a legend in his own mind? Would Marr have gone on to make pleasant if unremarkable pop music (as he has for most of his post-Moz career) instead of changing the very way guitar bands thought about their craft (as he did with The Smiths)? A few things seem certain: the miserable adolescents of the '80s would have had only The Cure and other Goths to turn to, and the rest of the world would have been deprived of the most unique-sounding rock group of the post-punk era. The Smiths' early singles and eponymous debut album caused quite a stir in Britain, despite the fact that the latter was a slightly overproduced and under-realized affair (a fact borne out by the brilliance of early singles and b-sides comp Hatful of Hollow). Marr's ridiculously unfashionable trebly guitar sound and understated virtuosity made The Smiths an intriguing musical proposition; Morrissey's outlandish personality and Wildean lyricism made them a sensation. Second LP Meat Is Murder solidified their fanbase but The Smiths were rightfully considered a singles band until 1986 tour de force The Queen Is Dead. Another ungodly run of singles (collected on U.S.-only comp Louder Than Bombs) followed, but the pressures of newfound fame drove a wedge between the band's songwriting duo and difficult fourth album Strangeways, Here We Come proved to be their last. The band split in 1987; surprisingly, Morrissey went on to make occasionally brilliant, Smiths-y pop for another eight years before being overcome by irrelevance. Marr worked in near anonymity as sideman to Matt Johnson (in The The) and Bernard Sumner (in the occasionally excellent Electronic). Marr finally emerged with his own band in 2003 - the surprisingly hard-rocking Healers.
|
|
 |
|
The Smiths
The Queen Is Dead
Rough Trade/Sire, Released 1986
|
|
|
 |
|
A journalist once asked Johnny Marr what it was like to write songs with Morrissey. Marr offered an anecdote by way of explanation. "I remember finishing this beautiful, sublime, roaming piece of guitar-led music. Two days later it was called 'Some Girls Are Bigger than Others.'"
Anyone looking for help understanding why Marr allowed his genius to suffer Moz's absurdity need look no further than The Queen Is Dead. Ridiculous as it is, "Some Girls ... " is a perfect coda to an album that captured the unholy Morrissey-Marr union on its most vicious form: blazing with ideas, ambition, wit and a self-awareness that no-one had really made music like this before.
For openers "The Queen Is Dead" tears brazenly out of the gate, the band indulging in a rare bit of noisy rock (with the bass turned down, mind you) and Mozzer plotting to kill the Queen and get Charles cross-dressing on the tabloids' front pages. At six-plus minutes it's by far the longest thing this economy-conscious band ever released, evidence of their confidence in the material.
And confident is how The Smiths sound here: confident enough to follow that opening salvo with "Frankly, Mr. Shankly's" jaunty piss-take of Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis; confident enough to backload the album's strongest tracks in a sprint to the end of the record; confident enough to let the Other Two actually play a little throughout; confident enough to record the same song twice ("Never Had No One Ever" and "I Know It's Over") and put them right next to each other on the album. The Queen Is Dead isn't the most essential Smiths purchase (rival single comps Hatful of Hollow and Louder Than Bombs can both make that claim), but it is the high water mark of The Smiths' confidence in their own sound, the place where they felt most comfortable taking risks and succeeded most often.
"Cemetry Gates" is almost weightless: Marr chording and arpeggiating and inventing The Sundays' career while Moz waxes literary and self-critical. It's also comically concise, its 2:39 whizzing by in what seems like 14 seconds, and its effortless perfection stands in stark contrast to the difficult end that would come to the band within a year. "Bigmouth Strikes Again" is the minor-key flipside to that piece of sunshine, and Morrissey rises to the occasion, turning up the self-hate and burning himself at the stake (with his Walkman on, of course).
Somewhere between those two pieces of perfect pop you'll find both "The Boy With the Thorn In His Side" and "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out." If you've only heard a handful of Smiths songs, it's likely that these two are among them, and for good reason. If not the best they're probably the most quintessential Smiths songs: complex, many-hued instrumental tracks topped by Morrissey's wordy, sexually disorented poetry for struggling adolescents. It's difficult to imagine intense young students making it through university without these songs. Hopefully they'll never have to.
If you like The Smiths, check out:
The Smiths Meat Is Murder
The Smiths Louder Than Bombs
Morrissey Bona Drag
-- Jesse Fahnestock
Ink Blot Home
about | archives | contact | links
|
|
 |
|
|
