Tag: the smiths

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten, Six Of The Best

Phone Scrolls, Drum Rolls

Craig McAllister

I’m a sucker for a music biography (heck, I’ve written at least one) and so found myself at the Mike Joyce book event in Glasgow last week. The most bizarre thing happened before it had even started.

A couple of guys came in and sat in the empty seats beside me. With nothing happening on the stage as yet, they did as we all do – they took out their phones and began scrolling through social media. Five minutes later, the guy next to me started Googling ‘Mike Joyce’ (I wasn’t really being nosy; being of a certain vintage, the text on his screen was massive – there’s a guy who sits about three rows in front of me at the football and half the crowd can read the texts his wife sends at full-time too – it’s clearly a common thing if you fall within a certain demographic.)

Very soon my neighbour alighted on the interview I did with Mike eight or so years ago, where I asked him to chat about his favourite Smiths tracks. I watched side-eye as the stranger beside me read the lot, desperate to say something to him, but too timid to acknowledge it. I then did as any self-respecting ‘like’-hungry social media user would do, and stealthily updated my Facebook status with my phone held very close to my still-thumping chest as I typed. Weird and strange, but pretty cool.

Held in the Glee Club, the event was, as it turned out, the perfect fit for a venue more in tune with comedy events than music or literature. Interviewed onstage by Scottish radio legend Billy Sloan, Mike Joyce was funny, engaging and extremely lucid, singing drum parts and guitar riffs and offering up tasty morsels of Smithsian trivia – direct despatches from a constituent part who’d fought the good fight from those unique and idiosyncratic trenches.

With a mixture of significant and less consequential events from the pop landscape of 40 and more years ago pouring rapidly and freely from the affable drummer, many being told for the first time, he offered a unique insight into the deft workings of the Morrissey and Marr song-machine. Over two halves of a night, he had a quietly rapt audience, and even when the questions from the floor at the end turned serious – he weeps softly when talking about Andy Rourke – and then tediously obvious – ‘Will The Smiths ever reform?‘ (puh-lease?) – he answered them all with gracious dignity and a sense of humour that stopped it all getting a bit silly.

Mike, as it turns out, is the biggest Smiths fan of them all. ‘What’s it like selling out the Albert Hall?’ he asks himself in the intro to his story. ‘It’s unfathomable’, he answers simply. He can’t quite believe the things that happened to him, from hearing the first mind-blowing Smiths recordings, to playing Top of the Pops, to having Mick Jagger dancing side-stage in New York, he and Johnny mid-song and gape-mouthed at the ridiculousness of it all. Mike’s Smiths years were a blur of ‘pinch me’ moments that, even nowadays, he can scarcely fathom. He spent little more than half a decade in The Smiths, yet Mike’s entire life since has been defined by those years. And now, it seems, is the time to tell his story.

Joyce, as you may know, divides opinion in the Smiths community. On the one hand, he’s a quarter of one of our most individual and exciting groups. On the other, he’s the bandmate who refused to settle for ten percent, the traitor who took the group’s principal members to court for a greater share of what he felt he was owed. It’s all a bit murky and eugh, really.

But yet, while he briefly/bravely refers to this, Mike prefers instead to focus on what made The Smiths so great; the ridiculously high watermark of consistent quality across their catalogue, the riotous gigs, the in-band humour and the tight-knit ‘us v them’ stance that got them through it all. The Drums, he says, should be approached as a celebration of the times rather than a warts ‘n all story. It is. I’m halfway through and it’s a very easy and rapid read. I think you’d like it.

To bookend the show, something else happens.

At the show’s mid-point, Billy Sloan had spotted me from the side of the stage and had come over. ‘Don’t leave at the end,’ he implored. ‘Wait here.’ (I know Billy a wee bit, it’s not as if he has a habit of picking random strangers out of a healthy crowd). At the end, he’s back over. ‘Did you buy a book? D’you want it signed? You’re not waiting in that queue – look at the length of it…‘ and he points to a couple of hundred folk snaking their way up the side of the venue and up to the mezzanine where the signing table is set up. ‘Follow me. Quick!‘

We’re backstage, Billy fussing over my bag. ‘Get your book ready, take the record out of its sleeve, d’you have a pen?‘ And then… a classic Sloanism. ‘Mike! This is my good personal friend, Craig, He’s a great writer and you should meet him.’ And Mike Joyce is there. He’s easy to chat to, but all the things you might want to say, he’s heard them all a thousand times. I don’t even think to mention I’d interviewed him in the past (and I actually think that interview played a small part in this book being birthed.) Instead, I play it cool.

“Thanks for the music, Mike. It’ll play forever.”

“I know it will,” he winks.

He signs my book, he signs my 7″ of Hand In Glove, drawing a wee snare drum above the place where Johnny signed it a decade ago and we chat, of all things, about how shite it is to lose musical allies and friends to cruel and unforgiving illnesses.

Not yr average Wednesday night.

The Smiths – This Night Has Opened My Eyes (demo)

Mike Joyce ‘The Drums‘ is published by New Modern and is out now.

Gone but not forgotten, Live!

There Is No Culture Is My Brag*

Craig McAllister

There’s no gig goer on the planet whose live music experience isn’t enhanced by the headline act using a piece of classical music to herald their entrance to the stage.

Back at a Cult show in 1987, the Barrowlands lights went down and instantly Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries played at deafening volume. Strobes flashed, silhouettes of road crew and band members were frozen in position momentarily on-stage and the crowd, already at fever pitch, swirled and heaved as one giant organism to the booming classical music while the flickering group members strapped on their instruments and took their spots. The unmistakable outline of Astbury-as-Morrison leaned into the mic. The backline lights swept upwards to bathe the room in technicolour. Valkyries ended and the drummer (one of a series of revolving Cult sticksmen of the era) twirled his sticks as Billy Duffy, shrouded in dry ice and adopting a leather-trousered legs apart rock pose, picked the opening riff to Nirvana. It’s even louder than the intro music, it’s theatre and it works. Apocalpyse now!

From their September 1984 tour of the UK onwards, The Smiths famously took to the stage to the high drama of Prokofiev’s March of the Capulets, the signature piece from the Ukrainian composer’s score that would accompany the ballet of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The Smiths – Intro Music, Irvine Magnum Centre 22.9.85

You’ll be more than familiar with old Sergei’s tune these days, Smiths fan or otherwise, due maybe to its inclusion in the Roman orgy-fuelled Caligula (another tenuous Smiths reference there), but certainly to its ubiquity on The Apprentice, where it soundtracks Alan Sugar’s every arrival in the boardroom. The piece of music’s sense of foreboding and knives-out tension is perfect for a pre-sacking amuse-bouche. It’s over-played these days to the point of pantomime, but back in 1984, to hear this booming out of The Smiths PA must have been genuinely thrilling. The increasing tension of Prokofiev’s score giving way to the euphoria that accompanied Morrissey’s rasping “hallo!” – it’s this that upsets me most about missing The Smiths in concert. Not the songs they’d play. Not the sense of communion. It’s that sense of anticipation of what is to come, and it’s Prokofiev’s music that does this.

A good musicologist would point to the semitones involved in the music’s refraining opening bars (dum-dah, dum-dah – see also ‘Jaws’) and the heady combination of dynamics and dissonance, of hellraising brass and high sweeping strings that simultaneously jangle the nerves and set the heart a-flutter, but to these ears it’s just a perfect piece of dramatic music, the ideal fanfare for a band steeped in spectacle and highbrow culture.

There’s a lighter section, all butterfly flutters on delicate strings and a suggestion, perhaps, of respite or even just a glimmer of hope on the horizon, before the brass blows its wicked way in again and the whole thing tramples all over you. In Romeo and Juliet, there’s no doubt that those Capulets are truly marching and totally unstoppable, and you fairly get the sense of this in Prokofiev’s attention-grabbing score.

In an interview I did with him a few years back, Mike Joyce told me that, even now when he hears it, the hairs on his arms stand to attention.

“…and I still know the exact part of the music when we’d turn to one another, nod and begin our walk onto the stage. The roar of the crowd as their anticipation is realised, becoming deafening as I take my seat and then Morrissey’s opening line before it all kicked off. Doing that every night never got boring, let me tell you.”

Smiths trainspotters can no doubt point to the exact version of March Of The Capulets used by The Smiths. That’d be the Philadelphia Orchestra recording from 1982, as conducted by Riccardo Muti, of course. Rake long and patiently and you’ll maybe find it at the back of a box of classical records in your local British Heart Foundation shop. That’s where I found mine.

Suite No. 2 from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64ter: I. The Montagues and Capulets

Philadelphia Orchestra cond. by Riccardo Muti

Smiths trainspotters can also undoubtedly point to the group’s show in Gloucester on the 24th September 1984 as the first time their group would enter the stage in such giddy fashion. In keeping with his persona of the time, Morrissey welcomed everyone with a  ‘hello, you little scallywags‘ before Johnny led the others into Hand In Glove.

Now, that’s how you start a show!

*That headline? The Classical, innit. If y’know, y’know. And I know you do.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

The Story Is Old, I Know

Craig McAllister

But it goes on.

It begins, most unSmiths-like, with a near-two minute piano prologue; a doom-laden, melodramatic affair of dark, clanging minor chords and suspenseful apprehension, Johnny’s delicately elfin fingers stretching out for notes he hasn’t yet found and ghostly, wafty sighs from a far-off Morrissey with one keen eye already on a solo career, the intro’s violent and disconcerting soundbed – striking miners clashing with police – creating the perfect tension before the release of that crashing E minor and the new dawn shining light on what would be the group’s swan song. All great bands need to go out in style and grandeur, and with Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, The Smiths constructed the finest curtain closer and epilogue on a recording career that lasted barely five years.

The Smiths – Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me

From its title in, Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me is nothing other than sensational.  It’s a very Morrissey title and the singer delivers a terrific, detractor-baiting vocal line; he gives in to no hysterics that such a title might demand, but instead delivers a slow and measured soul baring over Johnny’s repeating chord sequence before, as the strings rise and swell, he eases himself into a howl at the moon falsetto. The Smiths never ever played this in concert, but had they, a sated and spent Morrissey would’ve been bent backwards over the stage monitors as the front row tore strips from his shirt, you can guarantee that.

Just about the last track recorded for Strangeways, the song originated in the back of the band’s tour van after a show five months previously in Carlisle. Johnny arrived on the song’s chord sequence, “ecstatic…I couldn’t work out how my fingers were playing it…holding my breath in case I lost it,” and by the following Thursday evening, the three instrument-playing Smiths had forged it into a dark and brooding Gothic masterpiece. Johnny, a hundred and seventeen guitar overdubs later, shifted his attention to the Emulator, last used on There Is A Light, and gave birth to the song’s sweeping string motif. Nowadays, any indie band with a bit of clout will call in a symphony orchestra to do the heavy lifting for them. The Smiths, being both insular and skint, chose to do it themselves.

The track’s heaviness is due, in no small part, to the rhythm section. Mike Joyce attacks it from start to finish, punctuating the end of each measure with scattergun abandon, playing the verses with solidity yet swing. In  keeping with the track and its status, this may well be Joyce’s finest performance across The Smiths’ canon.

Dependable Andy weighs in with a trademark wandering yet low-key and rumbling bass line, filling any gaps in the proceedings with little octave jumping runs, always anchoring the song with root notes. Just before the second verse, he plays a lovely and subtle bass line that hints at Morrissey’s melody to come, minutae the likes of which many of you here will know of already or appreciate all the more once you spot it.

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me is perfect Smiths. From Johnny’s not forgotten chord sequence in the back of a van to Morrissey’s one-take vocal in Somerset’s Wool Hall Studios a few months later, the stars aligned…and then some. Mike Joyce himself said on these very pages a few years ago, with some understatement, that it was ‘pretty good‘. Both Morrissey and Marr are on record as saying it’s their favourite Smiths track. Even recording stars as disparate as David Bowie and Andre 3000 held/still hold it in equally high esteem.

Not so the record-buying public. Despite it being billed as ‘The Last Single’, it fell into the charts at number 34, limped its way to number 30 the following week and, seven days later dropped straight back out of existence. What the fuck were people buying instead? If you can’t have drama and existential angst in early December, when can you have it?

demo

The Queen Is Dead Annoyed At Johnny

Craig McAllister

We’re night four into a two week Vegas residency. An option for a third week has been pencilled in, but not yet committed to. The audio-visual wonderland that is The Sphere was mentioned from the outset, but by opening night we’re in the Colosseum inside Caesar’s Palace, its stage decked out in the most ostentatious floral display that can be mustered in a city not known for the understatement. 4000 hopped-up Anglophiles in cardigans and suit jackets stand on its velvet seats in a vulgar display of phoney rebellion, the turn-ups on their jeans almost as brazen as the bare-faced front of the singer they’re here to idolise.

Early reviews have been mixed, and that’s being kind. ‘Lumpen drums’, a bass player ‘devoid of the original’s flair and fluidity’ and, most damning of all, guitars that are ‘far more darkle than sparkle’. The singer too is getting it tight. His once collapsing quiff has collapsed to the point of thinning. He has a noticeable paunch, tucked into the high waistband of a shit pair of parallel jeans and his voice is gone gone gone. ‘Miserable Lie‘, a brave addition to nights’ one and two’s setlists has been swiftly dropped for the easier to reach ‘Jeane‘, but the guitar player – a hired LA rock guy and most definitely not Johnny Marr – can’t resist soloing between Morrissey’s lines. The knives are out and being sharpened by the encore. Johnny watches from across the Atlantic and shakes his head, his Ron Wood mod crop flopping in frustration. This is The ‘Smiths’ reunion and it stinks.

Back in his 2016 autobiography, Johnny Marr mentioned that he and Morrissey had met up and, over a pint or two, tip-toed delicately around the idea of a Smiths reunion. It was Johnny’s idea seemingly, and while Morrissey was initially on board, Morrissey being Morrissey then broke contact. Ghosted Johnny, as the young folk say these days.

If you’ve even half an eye on music, you’ll know that in the near-decade since, Johnny has built quite the profile. His live shows are sold out and celebratory, he pops up with a near Grohl-esque regularity – can we still mention him? – on the stages of his peers (James, Pearl Jam, The Pretenders, The Killers et al) and he’s collated a coffee table book featuring well-chosen words and arty shots of his arsenal of guitars. He’s often on hand to lend a quote on a matter of cultural or political importance. He even popped up on one particularly memorable edition of Would I Lie To You?

Johnny, should you need confirmation, is a Good Guy.

It seems that in far more recent times – in June just gone – Morrissey returned to his old sparring partner, suggesting that their previously-discussed Smiths reunion might in fact be (ker-ching!) not a bad idea after all. Corporate behemoth AEG, an umbrella company that owns multiple sports teams, the Coachella brand and many arenas across the globe had put an offer of a 2025 Smiths World Tour to Morrissey and Marr, and ol’ Moz, he of the ever-decreasing record sales and ever-increasing right wing tendencies, was quite keen on the idea.

It turns out that Johnny was somewhat less than enthused. It’s not for nothing that when asked by a fan on Twitter if he’d consider doing an Oasis and get The Smiths back together, Johnny simply Tweeted a shot of Nigel Farage. Matter closed.

Cue pissed off Morrissey and a statement.

And cue retaliatory statement from Johnny.

Until Johnny’s management released these words, the internet had been in a daft panic over the thought of a Johnny-fronted Smiths heading out on tour. Complete nonsense of course. That just wouldn’t ever happen. We both know that no Johnny or Morrissey = no Smiths. And there’s already no Andy. Mike? I’m not sure which horse he’d back in this one horse race. There’s no doubt at all that Johnny Marr had got wind of the possibility of Morrissey rounding up any old gang of bequiffed janglers and goose-stepping them across Europe and the States next year to celebrate the return of ‘The Smiths’.  Johnny, wisely, has made moves to ensure this never happens.

The tour would have come on the back of a box set and Shirley Bassey-housed Hand In Glove reissue celebrating The Smiths debut album plus that crappily-titled ‘Smiths Rule OK‘ compilation, and Johnny, as the statement goes, has put his foot down at that idea too. How many Smiths compilations does one household need anyway? (Bizarre fact – there are more Greatest Hits compilations of boy band Blue than there are studio albums by them. Reissue, revalue, repackage ‘n all that jazz.)

Look at any Smiths record, be it 7″, 12″ or LP, and you’ll recognise it as a work of art in its own right. Old movie stars tinted in turquoise and gilded in greens, heroes and heroines presented in burnt umbers and off-yellows. The fonts stately and bold, the back sleeves always listing the principle Smiths and what they’ve played on it. Never mind what they sound like, that Smiths catalogue is one of the most iconic-looking collections in guitar-driven pop.

The Smiths – This Night Has Opened My Eyes (June ’84 demo, unreleased)

In any case, the artwork for the intended new Best Of is, by any stretch of the imagination, a disaster. It just wouldn’t do. How Morrissey, with such an eye for detail and the importance of the seemingly small stuff that folk like us obsess over could give the green light to a proposed sleeve that looks like a ten minute rush job at the end of a long Friday is anyone’s guess. It’s just as well Johnny is switched on and still cares about his band’s legacy.

This might come at a cost though. With one key Smith keen to improve his already-handsome income and the other happy to ensure his group’s back catalogue isn’t tainted, that debut album box set looks set to be shelved. For obsessives that’s a bit of a disaster. The Troy Tate tapes in fabulous hi-fi. That Cookies’ cover. An early live show with the young feral Smiths stamping their mark on guitar-driven pop. Whatever was lined up for the box set may now be confined to the dusty library shelves of the archives.

That reunion idea though. Absolutely vile, as the song goes.

One last thing before I go. That third party in 2018. The one who tried to take control of The Smiths name. Who was it?

Cover Versions, demo, Gone but not forgotten

Moz ‘n Rockers

Craig McAllister

The Hand The Rocks The Cradle was the first track Morrissey and Marr composed together, not long after Johnny “with my hair like a loaf of French bread” knocked on Morrissey’s door and suggested they try and write some songs. What the legend doesn’t say is that Johnny was accompanied by a pal to keep him company on his walk across Stretford, but three’s a crowd in romantic stories, and so Johnny’s pal was quickly written out of the fairy tale.

Anyway.

Johnny presented Morrissey with a looping instrumental motif with shaky origins in Patti Smith’s Kimberly and the singer surprised the guitarist by producing a set of fully formed lyrics and mumbling quietly to himself while the mercurial Marr sketched out the basis of what would become one of the key tracks on The Smiths’ debut album, still a twinkle in its fathers’ eyes and a good 17 months from its February ’84 release. Those words of Morrissey’s had been written a couple of years previously, biding their time until fate intervened and a delighted Morrissey twisted his initial melody to fit Johnny’s guitar part – a move that would prove to be something of a feature throughout The Smiths.

The version of the track which closes the first side of that debut album sparkles with woven multilayers of spring rain guitar and overdubbed acoustics, the track chrome-polished, light and airy and at odds with the heaviness of the lyric. The version you really want to hear though is this early John Porter mix from October 1983.

The Smiths – The Hand The Rocks The Cradle (John Porter monitor mix, 1983)

It’s dense and atmospheric, Marr’s 12 string Rickenbacker rarely straying from the 5th fret, his arpeggiated A chord and ringing open-strings splashing occasional light on the otherwise gothic ambience. Andy Rourke, playing foil on the bass guitar, has the space to move the root notes through the chords with typical melodic aplomb, playing his trademark hiccupping half notes between the beat yet keeping the groove steady and in time to Mike Joyce’s heavily reverbed snare drum. It takes real discipline to keep this up for nearly five minutes and resist the urge to break out a solo or rest for a bar to change the dynamics. On this track, the three musicians are locked in and playing tightly for one another, an early signpost of how great The Smiths would become.

The first thing you notice about the John Porter version above though is, unlike 99% of The Smiths’ catalogue, not the usual dazzling array of guitars but the voice. Lone and mournful yet confidently soulful, it’s the sound of Morrissey coming out of his shell with a sympathetic producer on coaxing duties. He’s great here, is Morrissey. There’s no chorus, no melodic hook, no repeated refrain, yet he draws you in, has you zooming in on those words he carefully sculpted as a teenage bedroom hermit, the group almost (almost) not mattering for the moment. Heavy on poetic cadence and alliteration – ‘a piano plays in an empty room‘, ‘ceiling shadows shimmy by‘, ‘tease, torment, tantalize‘ – the song’s title was the initial working name for the debut LP, dropped possibly only after the song’s message of protective fatherhood and adult/child relationship was open to skewed accusations of paedophilia. All nonsense of course. Much has been said of Morrissey in recent times, but not even he is capable of such horrific ideas.

*Bonus Track

Sinead O’Connor– The Hand The Rocks The Cradle (venue, date unknown)

As this piece went to (cough) press, the death of Sinead O’Connor began to filter through. In the aftermath of The Smiths, Rourke and Joyce provided Sinead with a rhythm section for a handful of shows, where they played a nice arrangement of The Hand The Rocks The Cradle in the encores, closing the show with Sinead’s favourite Smiths track. Typically, I can’t track down a version with Rourke and Joyce backing Sinead, but I did find this solo version, Sinead playing straightforward open chords to give the whole thing the feel of some ancient Irish folk song, something I imagine The Smiths, with strong familial roots in Ireland, would approve of.

Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find, Studio master tapes

When Pop Stars Die

Craig McAllister

The unexpected news of the death of Andy Rourke from cancer flooded my social timelines this morning. From his old pal Johnny’s numb statement onwards, the outpouring was long and plenty. Lauren Laverne was playing William… as I pulled into the car park at work and despite having heard its 2 min 12 seconds of pathos and sparkle a million times, I stayed put until it had played out, paying particular attention to Andy’s trebly, melodic bass runs because, well, that’s what everyone tuned to 6 Music at that point was doing. After work, catching up with the minutiae of life on my phone, the roll call of people paying tribute – fellow musicians, pals, strangers – was never ending. No one had a bad word to say, not even Morrissey, whose well-worded tribute seemed genuine and sincere and a million miles from the sneering auld grump he’s become.

It’s quite amazing that someone who was only a quarter part of a group who burned brightly but briefly for roughly just 6 years should leave such an indelible mark, but that’s the power of the formative years for you.

The Smiths meant the world to many, me included, and were a lighthouse on the rocky shores of mid ‘80s music. I wasn’t disenfranchised or marginalised or trying to find myself or any of those clichés. I just needed a break from bad hair and bad productions and jaggy guitars and what was being sold to me and my peers as essential listening. The Smiths, with their pint-sized and elfin guitar wizard and singer with funny – that’s funny, not depressing – lyrics came along at the right time. They jangled, yeah, and they wailed, but there was far more to them than that, as you well know. There was a proper toughness to their sound, driving and thuggish and tough as nails – see Handsome Devil and Hand In Glove as evidence, but there was a proper tenderness too. A real musicality. Listen to This Night Has Opened My Eyes or later tracks such as I Won’t Share You for proof. Much of this is down to Johnny’s mercurial way with an augmented chord and a hellbent mission to overdub everything with tracks and tracks of smirry, smartarsed guitar, but the bedrock for Johnny’s free form colouring comes from Andy’s solid and steady playing, a duo playing in simpatico as only old pals can. A band ain’t nuthin’ without their rhythm section and The Smiths were blessed to have Andy pinning it all to the floor.

Many today have spotlit Andy’s magnificently trampolining workout on Barbarism Begins At Home, an early Smiths track so packed with Chicisms and the funk, so out of step with their material that it took until album two before they’d release a recording of it, as proof of Andy’s greatness. And they’d be correct. But look, there’s not a bassline on any Smiths track that isn’t considered, clever, unique and so obviously Andy. Whether he was dripping in elasticated funk or slapping out rockabilly or meandering like McCartney around the melody, he left a mark as distinguishable as the haircut he kept for all those years. Johnny today pointed to Andy’s contribution to The Queen Is Dead’s title track, saying that as Andy recorded it, he knew it was a moment he’d remember forever. Rock solid, reliable, dead centre, a bass player who could play in the background yet step out as lead instrument when required.

Check out the Motown-by-way-of-Moss Side twang of his isolated bass runs on This Charming Man. Rubber bandy Andy.

This Charming Man – Andy’s Isolated Bass

When the news of any pop star’s passing is announced, it’s perfectly natural to feel something, especially if you’re a fan of their work. When Andy’s news gatecrashed my newsfeed this morning, a little bit of me, a little bit of every fan of The Smiths, died too. Memories of times soundtracked by The Smiths came blazing straight into sharp focus, along with the sudden realisation that while the memories remain, the principal player in creating those memories is gone. 59. No age at all, as they say.

God only knows what it’ll feel like when Johnny himself or, brace yourself, McCartney goes.

 

Alternative Version, Get This!, Hard-to-find, Peel Sessions

Murderous Thoughts

Craig McAllister

Let’s call it here and now: Meat Is Murder is The Smiths best album.

It’s certainly not the debut, the band’s unsatisfactory attempt to chase a sound worthy of the songs. Compared to the Brasso-bright, spit ‘n polish, ring-a-ding-ding of those early Peel versions, the debut album weighs heavy; lumpen, and one-dimensional. The drums sound leaden and lifeless. The guitars – it’s always about the guitars with The Smiths – sound as if someone has taken a fat thumb to their edges and rubbed the sparkle clean off. Flat and uninspiring, the production doesn’t do those fabulous riffs any justice at all. Unique, extraordinary songs, but assembled badly.

Don’t even consider The Queen Is Dead. Those songs…man, great, great songs…but whoever signed off the running order needs their head examined. The title track aside, every other song is misplaced. Side one collapses from the music hall titter of Frankly, Mr Shankly into the death doublet of I Know It’s Over/Never Had No One Ever – undeniably serious mood music pieces, yes, but totally misplaced. Stick I Know It’s Over at the end of side 1 instead and you’ve got a great closing track. Never Had No One Ever? That’s totally ripe for the graveyard slot of second last track on side 2. Pick any ten records from your collection and look at the running order and then tell me that the second-to-last track isn’t the weakest on the album. It’s certainly not where There Is A Light That Never Goes Out should be hiding. That should be sitting up front with Bigmouth… and the big boys, or maybe even afforded the honour of being the big statement closing track. Good as Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others is – and it’s one of their very best – go out on a romantic, swaying high, Smiths. Don’t relegate your best songs to the twilight zone.

Yeah, and the smart money (even Johnny’s, they say) might be on Strangeways Here We Come, but for every crashing gothic masterpiece (Last Night I Dreamt...) there’s The Smiths-by-numbers (Stop Me If You Think…), for every barely-disguised love letter from singer to guitarist (I Won’t Share You) there’s the instantly skippable Death At One’s Elbow. It’s a good album, Strangeways, probably even great, but it isn’t their greatest. That honour goes to Meat Is Murder. Here are half a dozen reasons why.

Reason 1. Little elfin Johnny, in his blown-up Keith Richards hair-do and diamante clutter, is on fire across every bit of Meat Is Murder. He runs the whole gamut of his nimble-fingered arsenal; alternative tuning on the title track…alternative tuning and Nashville tuning on the cosmic and zinging Headmaster Ritual…that fine, layered coating of acoustic liquid mercury across Well I Wonder…the Stooges Metallic KO of What She Said, the rockabilly knee-tremble of Rusholme Ruffians…the proud Chic-isms that give way to those great, ringing discordant jazz chords near the end of Barbarism Begins At Home…the clattering chatter he conjures up across Nowhere Fast‘s multiple overlapping tracks and kaleidoscope of chords…

Johnny came up with them all. On Meat Is Murder he is barely 22 and he’s not yet reached a peak that his peers, never mind his guitar-strangling lessers in bedrooms up and down the country, can only dream of.

Reason 2. Morrissey. Separating the art of the 26 year-old singer from the 63 year-old artist is necessary here. Look, not at what he’s become, but at what he was once capable of. With every lyric on the album, he’s extremely funny and articulate and political and opinionated and principled and, above all else, loveable. ‘I’d like to drop my trousers to the Queen,’ ‘heifer whines could be human cries,’ ‘belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools, spineless bastards all,’ ‘What she read, all heady books, she’d sit and prophesise, it took a tattooed boy from Birkenhead to really, really open her eyes.’

Even if he pinched large chunks of Rusholme Ruffians from Victoria Wood, no one was crowbarring lyrics like this into pop songs in 1985. Arguably, no one has crowbarred stuff as unique and searing and insightful and right-on since.

Reason 3. That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore is one of The Smiths’ finest torch songs. From its bright-as-brass-buttons opening to its layered and textured false ending, it’s a beauty. It’s the perfect marriage of Morrissey’s moping introspection and Marr’s guitarchestra, the singer identifying with those who are kicked when they are down, the guitarist going to town with studio effects and multi-layered riffs.

The Smiths – That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

Those little echoing triplets that fall from his fingers to create rippling pools on still pond water still tingle the back of my neck when they come in (around the minute mark at first, then forever after) – an ear-opening epiphany in 1985 when I realised that guitar players enhanced their electric sound with gizmos and wizardry to create the sounds they imagined in their heads. The haunting (and haunted) backwards effects he weaves through the ‘happening in mine‘ section before the fade out are ace.

Johnny has since said (OK, he told me, right?) that The Smiths never quite managed to do it justice live, but with the technology available today, That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore would have undoubtedly been the centrepeice of The Smiths live experience. We’ll never know.

Reason 4. The Smiths changed lives. Saved lives, even. Like, literally. The title track is responsible for a whole swathe of impressionable teenagers – and at least two Smiths besides Morrissey – to forego eating meat and adopt vegatariansim as a way of life.

“As soon as we had recorded this song, I became a vegetarian,” Mike Joyce told me in 2017. “Morrissey’s argument was rock solid. I couldn’t even be that bullish to say, ‘…but I like meat.’ The cruelty involved is reason enough. You wouldn’t eat your cat or your dog, so why eat a sheep or a pig? Whatever Morrissey argued, you could only reply with, “You’re right, you’re right.” There was no counteract to it. It should be illegal, there’s just no argument for it. ‘Meat Is Murder’ is a sheer political statement. It shaped my life and my kids’ too, who’ve all been brought up vegetarian.

Accompanying the lyric, all sorts of magic is going on. Suitably doomy and disconcerting for the words being sung, Johnny plays around on an open D riff, cyclical and repetitive, hynpotic and ethereal.

The Smiths – Meat Is Murder

It’s matched by a jangling piano – not noticeable on first listen, buried as it is underneath the abattoir grinding and cattle cries, but it’s there, tinkling along like springtime Manchester rain while studio-treated guitars echo and scrape and scratch their way through the murk, Andy’s bass as elastic and stretchy as tendons.

Reason 5. Ah. Andy’s bass. The unsung hero of the band, the thinking man’s favourite Smith, Andy Rourke can play the fuck out of that thing. While Johnny gets all the spotlight, Andy quietly goes about creating tunes within tunes, fret-surfing melodic runs that could easily stand on their own two feet (or four strings).

The Smiths – Nowhere Fast (Peel Session, 1984)

The trampolining rubber bandisms that carry the aforementioned Rusholme Ruffians…the counterparts he plays to Johnny’s guitar in The Headmaster Ritual…the driving force in Nowhere Fast that allows Johnny to fly off-piste and back again…Andy is a key ingredient here.

The rather-too obvious track to highlight is the extreme funkability of Barbarism Begins At Home, all slap ‘n thunk, an old tune of his and Johnny’s from pre-Smiths days that wouldn’t have worked on that debut album, but here, on Meat Is Murder‘s inclusive, catholic patina, it shines brightly.

Reason 6. The Headmaster Ritual. Rusholme Ruffians. I Want The One I Can’t Have. What She Said. That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore. Nowhere Fast. Well I Wonder. Barbarism Begins At Home. Meat Is Murder.

Perfectly sequenced, perfectly pitched, it is, rare for the era, an album of few single releases; Headmaster and Barbarism in foreign countries only, That Joke in the UK (a chart-busting number 49 with a bullet). The Americans couldn’t handle an album with no hit singles though, so they crassly wedged How Soon Is Now? right before Nowhere Fast at the start of side 2. They have form for spoiling perfectly perfect albums, the Americans – look at what they did to some of The Beatles’ catalogue for proof – and while How Soon Is Now? is an undoubted Smiths classic, it should remain standing alone as the greatest 3-track Smiths single ever. But that’s an argument for another time.

I welcome your misguided outrage in the comments…

 

Alternative Version

Spending Warm Summer Days Outdoors

Craig McAllister

I see the golf’s on. The one and only time I’ve had the brass neck enough to go busking was in 1989 when the Open was in Troon, a decent couple of drives (and maybe a sand wedge) from where I’m typing. My folks were on holiday, so naturally my house became the go-to place beyond last orders on the Saturday night. ‘The band’ rose from couches and corners in the mid Sunday morning sunshine and someone had the bright idea of suggesting we grab a couple of acoustics, a tambourine and a whole load of nerve and go and busk at the final round.

Crammed onto the train to take the two stops from Irvine to Troon, we stuck out like an amateur’s hooked tee shot in a field of scratch golfers. Smiths quiffs that had only just started to collapse as I Wanna Be Adored‘s bassline had rumbled its way into our collective conscience stood side by side with those haircuts that only famous record producers and weekend yachtsmen and the comfortably-off seem to sport – foppish, demi-wave on top, greying at the temples, fluffy over the ears, longish at the back without being a mullet…you know the sort. Their pastels, their stiff crisp collars and their perfect creases made our battered desert boots and slept-in 501s look even scruffier than normal. We quite liked being the odd ones out though, our guitars and hangovers attracting puzzled glances, especially when we got off at Troon with everyone else.

We set up pitch far, far away from a bagpiper and his cyclical repertoire of tourist-trapping tartan tunes. We found a good spot next to a hedge, along a major walkway that connected two parts of the course and sat down to consider our plan. It was mobbed. The occasional thwack of a player’s club rattling the ball far into the Ayrshire sun drew oohs and aahs and ripples of echoing applause from the throng as we quietly emptied our combined loose change into one of the guitar cases – a busker’s trick, apparently, that showed your audience that you were a bona fide attraction – and then self-consciously began tuning up.

Then we sat and looked at one another.

Passing golf fans eyed us suspiciously.

It was Grant who started.

“This is ‘Ask’,” he said to a passing female golf fan who was doing her best to pretend we weren’t there. “It was written by The Smiths and sounded nothing like this.”

No set list had been discussed or considered, but suddenly we were off, the two acoustics scrubbing out a skiffly rhythm, Grant clattering his tambourine off his elbow as he sang. No-one stopped. No-one looked. No-one dropped any change into the guitar case.

Ask came to its rattling, jangling conclusion and we looked around at one another. A Chuck Berry riff flew out of my hands and onto the fretboard and suddenly we were busking Johnny B Goode.

No-one stopped. No-one looked. No-one dropped any change into the guitar case.

Tough crowd. I Wanna Be Adored wasn’t going to change things, but we played it anyway. It might just about get a nod of recognition around St Andrews this afternoon, but freshly minted and still underground in the summer of ’89, I Wanna Be Adored was unknown to the Calloway-clad squares of Royal Troon.

No-one stopped. No-one looked. No-one dropped any change into the guitar case.

We were midway through our second go at Ask when a wee boy shuffled up and dropped 20p into the guitar case. The four of us stopped and surrounded him with “Yes, wee man!“-handshakes and a ruffle of his wonky fringe. He ran off terrified. We played on like legends.

A woman stopped and listened. Like, actually listened. She came closer, between Grant and myself and cocked an ear to what he was singing. When we finished, she sat down cross-legged amongst us and told us it was a beautiful song.

“Who wrote it?” she wondered.

“It was The Smiths,” said Grant apologetically. “Not us.”

“It’s lovely. Will you play it again?”

For the third time we ran through Ask, getting quite good at it by this point. “Ask me, ask me, ask me!” sang Grant as we scuffed the G to C chord change with lip-curling gallusness. “If its not love then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb! The bomb that will bring us together.”

Our new fan pulled an actual fiver from her purse and with a wee smile dropped it into the case. Twenty minutes in and we were suddenly making serious money. By the time the leader’s heading up the 18th fairway, Grant man, we’ll be millionaires!!

“Excuse me, lads,” shouted an old fella from the other side of the hedge. He had a combover and was wearing an R&A blazer. Offical looking. “Excuse me, lads. But you’re going to have to move on…we can damn-well hear you on the greens!” He waited for a reply that wasn’t forthcoming. “I mean it, boys. You must stop now. You’re disturbing play and it’s just not on.” The bagpiper up the road was still strangling The Rowan Tree from his pipes but he was clearly exempt from it all. “Pack up now, please.”

It’s not very anti-establishment, but pack up is exactly what we did. We’d made just over £6 in our short busking career and we’d later drink our proceeds in the Crown. For now though, we cut through the hedge and found ourselves amongst the final round crowds.

Unbelievably – but entirely true – the American golfer Tom Watson appeared in front of me, surveying the landscape and eyeing up a shot up the fairway.

“Can you get a toon outta that gee-tar?” he asked with a wry smile.

“Aye!” I said.

Watson nodded and went back to the task in hand. Thwack! went his club against the ball as he marched his way to a very decent 4th place (I had to Google that). Ooh and aah went the crowd. “Let’s get out of here,” said us.

The Smiths – Ask (June ’86 run-through)

Mike Joyce’s scattergun Moonisms on this were sadly missing in the final take. Johnny’s sparkling guitar was gratefully added. An interesting Smiths curio, if nothing else.

 

Alternative Version, Gone but not forgotten, Live!, Peel Sessions

Eye Opening

Craig McAllister

A Taste Of Honey was written by playwright Shelagh Delaney when she was just 19. Set in Salford in the mid 50s, it tells the story of a 17 year-old girl, Jo, and her mum, Helen – ‘a semi-whore‘ – who leaves her daughter to go and live with a younger, richer man. Jo begins a short-lived relationship with a black sailor. She gets pregnant but he is sent to sea, oblivious to the situation he has created. The girl takes in a lodger to help pay the way. The lodger, a gay man, cares for her and looks after her – “you’re just like a big sister to me!”  – and promises to be there for her at the birth of the child, until Helen storms back into Jo’s life and he is forced to take a step back.

As openers go, it doesn’t get much more scene-setting than that. The whole play is a brilliantly-written kitchen sink drama that zings along with unpretentious Northern honesty and questions class, single-parenthood, ethnicity, misogyny and sexuality. Choosing not to sweep the irregularities and complexities of life under the carpet, but to highlight that such things are in fact normal, I can only imagine that for the times it was fairly groundbreaking.

Born in Salford in the 50s, Morrissey was naturally drawn to the writings of Shelagh Delaney.

‘You told me not to trust men calling themselves Smith,’ says Jo to Helen at one point in A Taste Of Honey, and, like a flying bullet, the words leap of the page.

Seed planted firmly under the quiff, when the time came to name their band, the singer presented the group with the perfect, Delaney-influenced moniker. In an era of forward-thinking acts with multisyllabic names and the latest in musical equipment, The Smiths had defiantly set out their stall.

Morrissey would use Delaney’s image on a couple of Smiths sleeves – that’s her on the Louder Than Bombs compilation and the cover of the Girlfriend In A Coma single – and in reshaped form in the title of Sheila Take A Bow – and in the early days, the moping magpie wasn’t shy of stealing a line or two (or more) to help flesh out the narrative in his songs.

Reel Around The Fountain‘s “I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice,” for example is taken straight from A Taste Of Honey. And the phrase ‘Marry Me!‘ – scrawled on Morrissey’s skinny torso and revealed in heart crushing fashion midway through a Top Of The Pops performance for William It Was Really Nothing is a recurring phrase in the play.

Then there are key lines such as ‘six months is a long time,’ ‘I’ll probably never see you again,’ ‘I’m not happy and I’m not sad‘ and ‘the dream has gone but the baby’s real‘ – the line around which he based the entire plot for The Smiths’ This Night Has Opened My Eyes.

A Taste Of Honey, it’s fair to say, provided a rich seam of lyrical plunder for Steven Patrick.

The Smiths – This Night Has Opened My Eyes (Peel Session, Sept 83)

‘In a river the colour of lead‘, it goes, again a straight steal from A Taste Of Honey, ‘immerse the baby’s head.’ (also a reference to a line near the end of the play.) Hot on the heels of the Suffer Little Children/Moors Murderers scandal, this line caused many a management bristle when it was first heard. ‘Wrap her up in a News of The World, dump her on a doorstep, girl.’

The song is basically A Taste of Honey set to the perfect musical acccompaniment; downbeat, introspective, black and white in epoch yet technicolour in ambition. It features a prime slice of brooding, counter-melody Andy Rourke bass. Johnny’s dual lead and rhythm guitar playing is soulful and considered, mercurial and slinky yet choppy and jazzy, a zillion miles away from what most other 20-year old guitar players with a Stooges fascination might conjure up. It’s a great example of the early Smiths in action.

The Smiths – This Night Has Opened My Eyes (Hacienda, 24.11.83)

This Night Has Opened My Eyes is a bit of a mongrel within The Smiths small but perfect, imperial catalogue. An early staple of live shows, its melancholic and delicate undertones were considered a bit too fragile for the debut album. It was first magnetised to tape at the band’s second Peel Session in September 1983, just a month or two after the aborted Troy Tate sessions that largely failed in capturing The Smiths electrifying live sound.

A year later, just as the group was recording another version with John Porter, the Peel Session version appeared on Hatful Of Hollow. It remains the only recorded version of the track to be officially released.

Quickly dropped from live shows as setlists changed to keep up with the rapid, prodigious writing talents of the prinicpal Smiths, This Night Has Opened My Eyes wasn’t played live again until, serendipitously, at The Smiths final show in 1986 – “There was a sense of resolve and closure,” relates Johnny Marr, “which is why we played that song that night. I remember when we made the decision to do ‘This Night Has Opened My Eyes’ feeling a strong sense of awareness of our own history.”

The Smiths – This Night Has Opened My Eyes (Brixton, 12.12.86)

Had they been happy with the John Porter-produced version – faster, sparkling with effervescence and slighty jauntier than the Peel Session take from the year previously (although that may just be pitch issues with the bootleg tape from whence this version was borne), it remains to be seen where This Night Has Opened My Eyes would’ve fitted into The Smiths discography.

The Smiths – This Night Has Opened My Eyes (John Porter, June 1984)

Certainly, it wouldn’t have been out of place on the debut album at all, but the next 12 months were ridiculously productive. With classic singles being frisbeed out on an almost bi-monthly basis, by the time of Meat Is Murder, Morrissey and Marr had proven themselves to be in a unique world of their own.

Perhaps, like so many of the best Smiths tracks, it would’ve been the ideal stand alone single. Maybe released between the feral and stinging What Difference Does It Make and the stellar Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, a soulful interlude amongst a peerless run of releases.

It remains though a curio that has aged well through lack of over-familiarity. Whatever, I wonder, became of the young, handsome, literate, funny, unique, quirky, lovable and worshipped Morrissey? The dream has gone but the baby’s real, you might say.

Cover Versions

It Is Indeed Over

Craig McAllister

If someone had told you back in 1985 that it would’ve been Elton John, or at a push Freddie Mercury who’d be the hip name to drop 30+ years in the future, while yer man of the moment Morrissey had slowly and painfully morphed into a paunchy, shitty-quiffed racist in bad jeans, you’d have struggled to believe them. As Elton’s position at the top table of pop is affirmatively reassessed via the Rocket Man movie and the resultant positive press, so too is old Stephen Patrick’s. The nadir, for this week at least, is Morrissey’s (at best) misguided and (at worst) dangerous decision to sport a For Britain badge on his lapel. To put this into context, even Nigel Farage considers the politics of For Britain a bit too extreme and right wing for his liking. It’s there in the paparazzi photos as he steps out of the car at the studio for an appearance on the Fallon TV show. It’s still there when he performs. And it’s still there a few days later when he’s snapped on some random Beverly Hills sidewalk or other. For all you know, it’s probably still there right now, a defiant and misguided symbol of knuckleheaded nationalism.

It’s a statement that’s led to Billy Bragg questioning the motives of the one-time king of the marginalised, disenfranchised and waifs and strays, referring to him as the Oswald Moseley of pop. As a result, we’ve also seen adverts for Morrissey’s brand new California Son album being ceremoniously ripped from the walls of Merseyrail train stations. The resultant fall out might’ve caused a lesser deity to back down somewhat and offer a hastily cobbled-together press release aimed at clearing up a ‘misunderstanding’, but, no. Seemingly, from his high horse in his house high in the Hollywood Hills, Morrissey has decided that For Britain is the political party for him and he wants everyone to know it.

Had he not had a new album to promote, it’s arguable whether we’d even be talking about the growing insignificance of Morrissey, although his continual shift to the far right will forever gurantee him a public profile somewhere in the corner of the internet marked ‘racist uncle’, so you could argue that the singer has played the press at their own game and won; new album released + controversial statement = increased profile + greater sales.

I’ve not properly listened to a Morrissey album since You Are The Quarry, these days considered a high point of his solo career (although back then I’d have placed it closer to the bottom of that particular list – it’s no Vauxhall And I, that’s for sure. And it’s certainly no Your Arsenal either) and I had no real inclination to hear his present-day take on a variety of off-the-beaten-track cover versions, even with the added ‘bonus’ of having one of Green Day duet with him on some old track or other.

An interview with Morrissey published last week – I still like to read what he has to say – had him reveal that his vocal delivery on his version of Roy Orbison’s It’s Over was “absolutely, hands down the best vocal delivery I have ever done.” Wow. Let that sink in. The man who’s very essence was etched into the grooves of some of the most heart-breaking records to escape the soul – Well I Wonder and I Know It’s Over, to name but two, considers his performance on It’s Over to be the very pinnacle of his singing career. Now, given that on those two Smiths’ tracks and many others (Vauxhall And I‘s Now My Heart Is Full, for example), Morrissey laid his life on the line, his very raison d’etre, like his beautiful, towering quiff, forever on the verge of collapse, I had to hear it.

It’s certainly dramatic. Harking back to the days of Ann Coats on Bigmouth Strikes Again, it begins with a comical sped-up Morrissey vocal. There’s nothing funny about the subject matter though. “Your baby doesn’t love you any-more,” he goes, as the band march out a funereal ra-ta-tat-tat. Strings sweep, bells toll, guitars crash. It rises, falls and rises again, a great wave of melodramatic emotion – “When she says to you, there’s somebody new, we’re through, we’re through!….it’s over!” As it reaches its climax, dogs for miles around begin to howl as the high-pitched warbling vocal in the background (Moz again, with the help from studio trickery?) threatens to take over. We’re at peak crescendo now, and then, suddenly, silence.

It’s Over.

It’s OK, I s’pose, a decent enough sign-off on a singing career that, for me, is now well and truly finished.

Now, off you run, Morrissey. And take your stupid political notions with you. We’ll always have Meat Is Murder, I guess.

It’s not a patch on the original, of course. For reverb ‘n twang and melodrama bathed in pathos and regret, Roy Orbison‘s tremulous voice cannot, will not, ever be matched. The end.

Roy Orbsion – It’s Over