Yea-Sayers:

Single of the Week
"Originally this appeared on the flip side of the 'William...' 12-inch, but now assumes its rightful position as single. Morrissey and co have once again delved into their Sixties treasure-trove, and produced a visceral power capable of blowing the dust off Eighties inertia. The majestic ease of Morrissey's melancholic vocals are tinted with vitriol, as they move through vistas of misery with plaintive spirals around the pulse of Johnny Marr's vibrato guitar. The string's muted strains conjure wistful signs that bridge the schism between crass sentimentality and callous detachment. Each repeated phrase intensifies the hypnotic waves, with results that outflank anything since 'This Charming Man'. Catharsis has rarely been tinged with so much regret, and shared with so much crystalline purity."
- Unknown Reviewer

"Nice mournful guitar I say, and I'm a non-fan. That being so I rang RT to trace the origins of this 45 by their top act. It took 'em ten minutes to find out that it comes from the 'Hatful Of Hollow' album. The Smiths are hot, Rough Trade are not. Don't be surprised if they lurch toward Babylon on a major in '85."
- Unknown Reviewer

Interlude: Normal Business
"Whether Morrissey is questing romantic or bruised archangel is a matter I leave to your own musing. I prefer to hear the work of J. Marr as the real spirit of The Smiths. 'Hand In Glove', to these ears their one real masterpiece, could be about legwarmers and stirrup pumps for all the difference it makes - with that crimson flush of guitars and rhythm any words would do. Marr's hand in 'How Soon Is Now' is again the real life of The Smiths, a tremolo mantra (nicked from Can's 'I Want More') powering the song against The Odde Fellowe's groaning and other tictacs of guitar trickery. Sounds like an acid song."
- Unknown Reviewer

Nay-Sayers:

Short Odds
"Oh worra rip-off! Correct me if I'm wrong, but as well as being on the last LP wasn't this pained pulsating piffle on the last single too? You wouldn't mind so much if the song was half-way decent, but it's just the sort of awesomely yawnsome lament that gets dubbed 'hypnotic' by snivelling Smiffs apologists - and that of course translates from sycophancy-speak as 'soporific'. Complete with lyrics that rival 3-2-1 for their insight into the human condition, this maudlin dawdling is nothing more than Leonard Cohen for the post-punk bedsit generation. And let's not forget they've lifted that coming 'Meat Is Murder' slogan from Conflict."
- Unknown Reviewer

"For the most part, Morrissey is the Hilda Ogden of pop, harassed and hard done-by. I guess what seems like meat to one man sounds like murder to another."
- Gavin Martin, New Musical Express, February 9, 1985

Smiths-Speak:

"It's hard to believe that 'How Soon Is Now' was not a hit. I thought that was the one..."
- Morrissey, Creem, 1987

"John Porter and Johnny pretty much did 'How Soon Is Now?' in an all-night session in a studio. I remember really liking it. I think it took us a few weeks to realise how good it was. Obviously it came out as a single in its own right later. Maybe you could say we made a mistake not releasing that as the A-side (of William)."
- Geoff Travis, Q, January, 1994

"'How Soon Is Now?' was the international hit that should have happened. It would have changed everything. It was without question the most universal-sounding Smiths record that anybody could identify with"
- Scott Piering, Q, January, 1994

"That's where it all, sadly, started to fall apart. We did it at Jam Studios in Finsbury Park. Everybody was a bit hungover from the night before. I don't know what had gone on. They had 'William (It Was Really Nothing)' basically together, so we put it down very quickly. And Johnny played me a little chord sequence which I thought was kind of interesting, but very pretty. And I seem to remember saying to him, 'Play what you think is "That's All Right"' - you know, the old Arthur Crudup tune. 'Play your impression of that.' So he did. So I said, 'Right, now play your chord sequence two octaves down from where you've done it, and let's bolt it on to this other part.' And that sort of happened. They did three takes. It was a Saturday. I don't think Morrissey was there. I posted it, or somebody posted it, through Morrissey's letterbox that night and then he came in the next day with his book and sang possibly one or two takes. And it was done. I thought, 'Right, well, now we're starting to move into second gear. Now we've got something that we can sell in America. Now we've got a band that could be like R.E.M. are now.' We were all really, really excited. In the evening I called Scott and Scott came down. He loved it. He said, 'Yes! Fantastic!' He took the tape. Went back to Rough Trade. And Geoff was kind of... he didn't really like it. Which rather deflated me. And subsequently they just put it out as a fucking B-side. I mean, they murdered it."
- John Porter, Q, January, 1994

"And they've made several marketing disasters which have really been quite crippling to us in personal ways. For instance, the release of the last single. 'How Soon Is Now' was released in an abhorrent sleeve - and the time and the dedication that we put into the sleeves and artwork, it was tearful when we finally saw the record... And also we can discuss a video they made. It had absolutely nothing to do with the Smiths - but quite naturally we were swamped with letters from very distressed American friends saying, 'Why on earth did you make this foul video?' And of course it must be understood that Sire made that video, and we saw the video and we said to Sire, 'You can't possibly release this... this degrading video.' And they said, 'Well, maybe you shouldn't really be on our label.' It was quite disastrous - and it need hardly be mentioned that they also listed the video under the title 'How Soon Is Soon,' which... where does one begin, really?"
- Morrissey on Sire Records, Creem, 1985

"How Soon Is Now? was the one, though. I wanted to write a track with an intro that you couldn't forget, something that you knew straight away was The Smiths. In that regard it was very 'worked on'. I arrived at the studio with a demo of the whole thing, apart from the tremolo effect - though that was bound to surface on a Smiths track sooner or later, 'cos at that time I was playing Bo Diddley stuff everywhere I went. I wanted it to be really, really tense and swampy, all at the same time. Layering the slide part was what gave it the real tension. As soon as I played that bit on the second and third strings, John Porter put an AMS harmoniser on it. Then we recorded each individual string with the harmoniser, then we tuned the B string down a half step and harmonised the whole thing. The tremolo effect came from laying down a regular rhythm part (with a capo at the 2nd fret) on a Les Paul, then sending that out in to the live room to four Fender Twins. John was controlling the tremolo on two of them and I was controlling the other two, and whenever they went out of sync we just had to stop the track and start all over again. It took an eternity. God bless the sampler, 'cos it would have been so much easier! But it was just one of those great moments. When Morrissey sang the vocal it was the first time we'd all heard it. John Porter said, 'Oh, great - he's singing about the elements! I am the sun and the air...' But of course it was really, 'I am the son and the heir/of a shyness that is criminally vulgar'... A great track."
- Johnny Marr, The Guitar Magazine, January 1997

"Initially the very notion of instrumentals was motivated by me. I suggested that 'Oscillate Wildly' should be an instrumental; up until that point Johnny had very little interest in non-vocal tracks. There was never any political heave-hoing about should we-shouldn't we have an instrumental and it was never a battle of powers between Johnny and myself. The very assumption that a Smiths instrumental track left Morrissey upstairs in his bedroom stamping his feet and kicking the furniture was untrue! I totally approved but, obviously, I didn't physically contribute."
- Morrissey, NME, February 13, 1988

"Singles-wise, my favorite is 'How Soon Is Now?'... 'How Soon Is Now' was in F# tuning. I wanted a very swampy sound, a modern bayou song. It's a straight E riff, followed by open G and F#m7. The chorus uses open B, A, and D shapes with the top two strings ringing out. The vibrato sound is fucking incredible, and it took a long time. I put down the rhythm track on an Epiphone Casino through a Fender Twin Reverb without vibrato. Then we played the track back through four old Twins, one on each side. We had to keep all the amps vibratoing in time to the track and each other, so we had to keep stopping and starting the track, recording it in 10-second bursts. This sounds incredibly egotistical, but I wanted an intro that was almost as potent as 'Layla' -- when that song plays in a club or a pub, everyone knows what it is instantly. 'How Soon Is Now' is certainly one of the most identifiable songs I've done, and it's the track most people talk to me about. I wish I could remember exactly how we did the slide part -- not writing it down is one of the banes of my life! We did it in three passes through a harmonizer, set to some weird interval, like a sixth. There was a different harmonization for each pass. For the line in harmonics, I retuned the guitar so that I could play it all at the 12th fret with natural harmonics. It's doubled several times."
- Johnny Marr, Guitar Player, January, 1990