Entertainment For Lively Minds
The Smiths: at the time
It's December 1983. I'm 18 and my favourite bands are Steely Dan, Pat Metheny Group and Aztec Camera. My choices reflect my personal qualities; they are clever, funny and sophisticated too, aren't they?
And what do I hate more than anything else? The Smiths, of course. Surely there could be no more whiny, pathetic and humourless individual than Morrissey? And all those idiotic wannabes in the University Union with their check shirts and flat-tops...
Except...
Now, when I listen to them, they sound fantastic. The guitars are inventive and joyous and the lyrics are literate but also funny, ironic and completely arch.
My question is this: were they always funny? Did fans at the time relish the irony or was it all real, man? Or it just the time that has elapsed that makes it seem so.
Or, perish the thought, was I just too UMOA to notice?
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They were always funny...
... and you were too UYOA to notice.
Be fair...
... it's pretty obvious that I'm taking the piss out of myself. But if you think it's necessary to join in, don't let me stop you.
Easy.
They were funny AND real.
I always believed them
to be funny and I was 18 in 1983 and I loved Aztec Camera. The song that defined them to the general public was "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" and the misery label stuck, I thinks it's their funniest song I still can't listen to it without smiling.
They said nothing to me about my life
The Cramps were funnier.
I hated The Smiths in the 1980s...
and even passed on the opportunity to go and see them at the Kilburn National (the gig that ended up on the Rank live album). This I now regret enormously, as I had a complete change of heart around 10 years ago and now consider them to be one of the greatest bands of all time.
They did attract some right muppets as fans though; when I was at university in 1988 a bloke with a long overcoat (covered in Morrissey badges) and a quiff used to walk around in the rain, revelling in his misery. He was never seen in more clement weather.
I got into them in 1986.
I was 16 & certainly 'got it.'
'Some girls' mothers are bigger than other girls' mothers...' Ah, I thought, jesting and misery (I Know It's Over) all in one neat package.
I have adored them since.
Witty, funny and surprisingly cool
with the girls at my school.
Nowhere Fast is one of many examples:
"And when I'm lying in my bed
I think about life
and I think about death
and neither one particularly appeals to me
and if the day came when I felt a
natural emotion
I'd get such a shock I'd probably lie
in the middle of the street and die
I'd lie down and die"
It's the idea of them
that I didn't like then - and still don't. I can see that Morrisey is a mordant wit and that Johnny Marr is a truly original guitarist. I can see some of the songs are great, genuinely so. Never get the urge to put them on. It's the associations. It's the miserabilism. It's the dandruff. It's kind of music for people who don't like music. And don't like Motown. Or John Coltrane. It sort of reminds me of the kind of things that depressed me about Sundays growing up. It's dowdy and dank. And any attempt to dance to it can only be in that kind of cider infused sideways slo-mo hokey cokey. There's no glamour or fun or seductiveness. And for all its assumption of poignancy - curiously no depth. I know for some people they speak volumes but they don't speak to me at all.
As usual - Bowie was a big influence.
'It's kind of music for people who don't like music'
what've you done with the real Sheev?
They loved Motown.
Morrissey is also widely quoted as choosing Third Finger Left Hand as his favourite song. As for your 'dancing' criticisms, er, there was nothing 'slo-mo' about it. Me and my mates were regularly spat on or thrown out of nightclubs circa 86 for aping Mozza - wheeling round the floor, pulling our shirts off and then rolling round half naked in the middle of the floor. Cringey and teenage? - yes. Dull? No. Fun? Good grief, there's more fun in the music, the song-titles, the interviews, the guitars, the camaraderie, the London-isn't-everythingness, the lyrics, the getting-into-the-charts-without-airplayness...etc etc etc.
And yes, Bowie was a huge influence on them. But unlike the other groups of the time, they took his originality as their starting point, not his make-up.
I kind of missed them at the time
Then I heard "Girlfriend in a Coma" and thought - that could be a Ramones song, lyrically. (And I love The Ramones.) Sly, faux-dumb. Then I saw a piece on them on the OGWT, with Johnny Marr playing a lovely green Telecaster with a Twin Reverb, and thought "Hmm, this is more like my kind of thing than I thought it was"
Each household appliance
Is like a new science
In my town
Their gigs belied the cliched ideas about their fans.
They were like Cup Finals, made Oasis' crowds look like they were at a Yo La Tengo acoustic set.
A truly great, great band.
they grew on me eventually
I liked the fact that they were true originals but I wasn't really "into them" as such at the start. I started listening to them properly around 1989 when I shared a house with some blokes in south london and one of them always played The Queen Is Dead album. I've liked them ever since, simply for Morrissey's sardonic wit, humour and social commentary in the songs as well as Johnny Marr's jangly style of guitar playing - a welcome antidote to the rather tired heavy rock in the late 80s just before grunge came along. Here is my favourite Smiths anthem. women always seem to love this track at karaoke.
For me they were funny
For me they were funny, mostly because Joy Division were real.
I was 16 in 1983, and The Smiths came at just the right time to help me realise my angst was laughable and that I could enjoy it. Billy Bragg leant a hand in that too.
There were friends of mine who took the Smiths too seriously, but they were the kids who'd arrived at it fresh-faced and burgundy-shoed from the new romantics. For those of us who'd been wallowing in Joy Division and the Faith-era Cure, The Smiths were party-time.
Half A Person
From the "Louder Than Bombs" compilation, probably my favourite song of theirs. The pause between Y...W is genius.
"And if you have five seconds to spare
Then I'll tell you the story of my life :
Sixteen, clumsy and shy
I went to London and I
I booked myself in at the Y ... W.C.A.
I said : "I like it here - can I stay ?
I like it here - can I stay ?
Do you have a vacancy
For a Back-scrubber?"