The Smiths

Reel Around the FountainYou've Got Everything NowMiserable LiePretty Girls Make GravesThe Hand That Rocks the CradleThis Charming ManStill IllHand In GloveWhat Difference Does It Make?I Don't Owe You AnythingSuffer Little Children
Released in February, 1984

 

Yea-Sayers:

The coming of age of a major songwriting duo and a highly original new voice in pop. Morrissey betrays a morbid fear of sex ("Pretty Girls Make Graves", "Miserable Lie"), an ambiguous obsession with child killers ("Suffer Little Children", "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle"), and a deeply romanticised kitchen-sink fatalism. (****)
- Stephen Dalton, Uncut, 1998

Gladioli All Over


"And if you must go to work tomorrow
Well, if I were you I wouldn't bother'
Without being perjorative, there is something soporific about the sound of The Smiths. It's so easy to lapse into their languid dreams without stopping to question where precisely this man Morrissey should be placed in the infinite space between heaven and pillow.
Just how clinical and how innocent is this seducer of our imaginations? How genuine his successive (and often mutually exclusive) stances as corrupted and corruptor, reformed literary libertine and celibate gay bachelor? After contemplation of his flamboyant advances I've arrived at no conclusion as to what precisely he bears before him or what exactly he is after. What remains at the core of Morrissey's art is a mystique that has so far proved impenetrable - he affords the odd insight, but there is never enough glimpsed to dispel his fascination.
Consideration of The Smiths always ends up as attempted penetration of Morrissey's singular charms, primarily because The Smiths in plural are as average as their uncharismatic name suggests. Where Morrissey is a wielder of the archaic art of the word, his cohorts are merely competent workers in the grimy craft of pop. Musically The Smiths are little more than mildly regressive. What saves them is Morrissey's rare grasp of the myriad distortions of the pastel worlds of nostalgia. Much of the intrigue behind The Smiths is not what they have to offer but the seductive manner in which Morrissey offers it - his beguiling invitation to forget art and dance in a notion of animated camp. At this point we come to his enigma - of the uncalculated versus the contrived.
This has its opening in the cold quivering reflections of the plaintive epic of 'Reel Around the Fountain' - a picture of virtual classical proportions, with Morrissey's world weary tones washing a grey tale of innocence lost. 'It's time the tale were told,' he opens, 'Of how you took a child/And you made him old' - you have to rouse yourself from the pleasant malaise that the lazy pace induces to recall that, at the end of the song, nothing of 'the tale' has actually been revealed.
Throughout the LP he captures a set of fascinations that appeal to the current mood - the only question is how many of them are indeed his own and how many the result of long years' research in a rented room in Whalley Range. Too frequently his philosophy of pop seems all too neatly prepared to appeal - the quaint campaign against the synthesiser for example. The mass appeal lies (unfortunately) in a form of traditionalism - so Morrissey offers the fictional tradition of 'great pop' - complete this sentence in six letters. The Buzzcocks, Orange Juice, The.......
Calculation, though, can offer an aesthetic of its own and The Smiths, like Culture Club, weave an intricate web of insignia, delightful in its diversity, intriguing in its attention to detail, but finally impenetrable.
From the sexy male cover to 'Hand in Glove' Morrissey has proved himself adept at the gender identity game - another tradition of longstanding appeal. Throughout the LP he plucks at the same strings of homoeroticism: 'I'm not the man you think I am,' he intimates coyly on 'Pretty Girls Make Graves' concluding, 'I've lost my faith in Womanhood' - both of which are in fact snippets open to entirely opposite interpretations.
When he breaks the genderless rule, it is with a slyness we might expect: 'into the depths of the criminal world I followed her...," calling up a reference to Cocteau's Orpheus films (a comparison not so obscure when you consider that their star, and Cocteau's lover, Jean Marais was featured on the cover of 'This Charming Man'). Where Cocteau's Orpheus is left unable to look at his wife (perhaps he too had lost his faith in Womanhood), Morrissey ends with 'I need advice because nobody ever looks at me twice'.
For every tendency in Morrissey's scheme of things, though, there is the necessary balance, for the heaving tragedy of 'And "love" is just a miserable lie' there's the flippancy of 'I know that wind-swept mystical air/It means I'd like to see your underwear'.
It's more than just a question of balance, though, it's a problem of plausibility, and Morrissey is very believable; how convincing his aura of deceptive simplicity, how credible his imitation of the wide-eyed village boy adrift in the big city. When he claims to be 'a country mile behind the world' you believe him, largely because his view of the city is one visibly strained through early '60's films of late '50's novels - a notion of reality three times removed.
'Still Ill', for example, is a drama of flawed perfection, flickering fading values in dusty monochrome - Morrissey kissing beneath the iron bridge finds the fictional Britishness of his obsession slipping through his fingers, 'But we cannot cling to the old dreams anymore'.
What Morrissey captures above all is a notion of despair reflected perfectly in the lacklustre sound of his cohorts, a death of the punk ideals that Morrissey is quite old enough to have been closely involved in. In turn what distinguishes him from a Weller is firstly his wit, and secondly the sensitivitiy to deal in despair without resorting to preaching in desperation.
What does this suitor offer? A calculated plan, perhaps, but enough to haunt the imagination. For the moment that's enough."
- Don Watson, NME, February 25, 1984

The Smiths will quickly and justifiably become giants. This, their first album, is as fresh and colourful as the newly picked daffodils that wordsmith Morrissey likes to wave about onstage. Counteracting just about everything else around at the moment, without necessitating any hostilities, the Smiths seem to be responding to a desire for frankness in music. Indeed, the very name is suggestive of their down-to-earth approach.
Without the need for confusing or complicated lyrics, Morrissey manages more than adequately to comment on life's little tricks and to expose its cruel contradictions. Sometimes the songs may evoke particular sadness, but human nature can often find humour in most tragedies and Morrissey has sufficiently grasped this notion to enable him to install a new 'emotion' into modern music.
Labelled 'Sixties revivalists,' the tag is as uncomplimentary as it is inappropriate. There was never a band in the Sixties that played like this. The only common denominator (aprt from the flowers) is that, as with the great success stories of that era, the Smiths could be capable of transcending generation as well as gender. The marvellously melodic 'I Don't Owe You Anything' certainly suggests that they may be destined for the dizziest of heights.
Compulsive listening, the songs are instantaneously enjoyable and yet endlessly thought provoking. And while Morrissey's effortlessly novel deliverance of 'the words' obviously warrants discussion, mention must also be made of Johnny Marr's invaluable contribution in writing the music.
This album will be tremendously successful for them because they have dared to make it so. With personal songs such as these, they left themselves vulnerable, but the conviction with which they carried out the recording has ensured that it's the listener who is due for the shock! And who knows, maybe Morrissey will be able to make honesty a fashionable commodity.
- Mike Wrenn


 

Nay-Sayers:

Judging by reactions to an appallingly foul debut by the Smiths (voted 1983's Best New Band by readers of Britain's pop music weekly, New Musical Express), the rock press's stock may be plummeting to an all-time low. How else can one explain English critics quoting Nietzsche to summarize the sexual politics of a record that promotes pederasty (sample lyric: "I once had a child/It saved my life... There never need be longing in your eyes/As long as the hand that rocks the cradle is mine")? How else to understand Creem magazine citing one of the songs as condoning child molesting, then rendering a final judgement on "The Smiths" as ambiguous as the ambisexual lyrics this quartet generally deals in?
Forget the music, a watered-down cop of the R.E.M./Echo and the Bunnymen style of jangly, "new psychedelic" guitar/bass/drums. Ignore singer/songwriter Morrissey's canny self-promotion - he uses just one name, presumably stolen from filmmaker Paul Morrissey, a scene from whose Andy Warhol's Flesh graces the album cover. Neglect the fact that Morrissey can't carry a tune. Skip the simple charms of the acclaimed single, This Charming Man, which only proves no British band to be above plundering the Motown catalog for a surging bass line when necessity so dictates. Instead, focus on a quotation from Reel Around The Fountain. "Fifteen minutes with you," the singer tells us, recalling the particularly apt Warholian dictum about stardom and the quarter hour, "well, I wouldn't say no." When it comes to The Smiths, I would.
- Wayne King, High Fidelity, August 1984

"The frenziedly-awaited debut LP disappoints, thanks to elephants-ear production (grey and flat), and ludicrously overblown expectations."
- Danny Kelly, NME, August 8, 1987

"I liked this record quite a bit initially. Lead singer Morrissey's memories of heterosexual rejection and subsequent homosexual isolation were bracing in their candor, and Johnny Marr's delicately chiming guitar provided a surprisingly warm and sympathetic setting. The candor remains admirable: whether recalling the confusion of early sexual encounters ('I'm not the man you think I am') or the sometimes heartless exploitation of the gay scene, Morrissey lays out his life like a shoe box full of tattered snapshots. And some of the Smiths' music (the U.K. hits 'Hand In Glove' and 'This Charming Man' and the animated 'What Difference Does It Make?' which reprises a venerable garage-punk riff) still works. But Morrissey's sometimes toneless drone becomes irritating and the music is too sketchy and restrained to counteract it. An intriguing curio, but not necessarily a keeper."
- Unknown Critic, Rolling Stone

"What a great title, and the lyrics, just about a person realizing that the person they're with is so codependent that it doesn't matter who picks up their hand - if you're not there, someone else will fill your place."
- MTV's Matt Pinfield on "Pretty Girls Make Graves", Rolling Stone, 1998



Smiths-Speak:

"I really do expect the highest critical praise for the album. I think it's a complete signal post in the history of popular music."
- Morrissey, Record Mirror, February 11, 1984

"I'm really ready to be burned at the stake in total defence of that record. It means so much to me that I could never explain, however long you gave me. It becomes almost difficult and one is just simply swamped in emotion about the whole thing. It's getting to the point where I almost can't even talk about it, which many people will see as an absolute blessing. It just seems absolutely perfect to me. From my own personal standpoint, it seems to convey exactly what I wanted it to."
- Morrissey, Melody Maker, March 3, 1984

"All the elements of the Smiths are there. There's nothing lost, I'm sure of it. Our producer John Porter was the perfect studio technician for us. He got some amazing subtleties but at the same time we were putting some things down in just a couple of takes. "
- Johnny Marr, Sounds, February 25, 1984

"I must say I was never really happy with 'Reel Around The Fountain'. I don't think they ever really captured it. I always wanted to have another go at it."
- John Porter, Q, January, 1994

Does Whalley Range really exist?
"I'm afraid so. It's the little suburb of Manchester bedsit land and everyone who lives there is an unrecognised poet or a failed artist. Anyone who wishes to pursue their destiny ends up there and never gets out."
- Morrissey on the lyric from "Miserable Lie", The Face, 1984

Where did a song like 'Hand That Rocks The Cradle' come from?
"Well, that comes from a relationship I had that didn't really involve romance. So if we're talking about romance, well, I don't really know that much about it. But in other things, I'm quite capable of making an observation."
- Morrissey, Melody Maker, March 16, 1985

"I happened to live on the streets where, close by, some of the victims had been picked up. Within that community, news of the crimes totally dominated all attempts at conversation for quite a few years. It was like the worst thing that had ever happened, and I was very, very aware of everything that occurred. Aware as a child who could have been a victim. All the details... You see it was all so evil; it was, if you can understand this, ungraspably evil. When something reaches that level it becomes almost... almost absurd really. I remember it at times like I was living in a soap opera..."
- Morrissey on the Moors Murders, inspiration for "Suffer Little Children", The Face, May, 1985

"Looking back on the first album now I can say that I'm not as madly keen on it as I was. I think that a lot of the fire was missing on it and most of our supporters realise that as well. Although having said that, 'Still Ill' and 'Suffer Little Children' and 'Hand That Rocks' are all still great songs."
- Johnny Marr, Melody Maker, August 2, 1985

"Obviously most people who write do borrow from other sources. They steal from other's clothes lines. I mentioned the line 'I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice' in 'Reel Around The Fountain,' which comes directly from A Taste Of Honey, and to this day I'm whipped persistently for the use of that line. I've never made any secret of the fact that at least 50 percent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney who wrote A Taste Of Honey. And 'This Night Has Opened My Eyes' is a Taste Of Honey song - putting the entire play to words. But I have never in my life made any secrets of my reference points. Just because there's one line that's a direct lift people will now say to me that 'Reel Around The Fountain' is worthless, ignoring the rest of it which almost certainly comes from my brain. Oscar Wilde... I've found so many instances where he has directly lifted from others. To me that's fine. But because I'm so serious about writing, people are so serious about tripping me up."
- Morrissey, NME, June 7, 1986

"...loss of innocence, that until one has a physical commitment with another person, there's something childlike about the soul."
- Morrissey explains the meaning of 'Reel Around The Fountain', Rolling Stone, 1986

"John Porter (producer) suggested getting that bloke Paul Carrack in on keyboards to see what would happen, and I thought it really brought it alive."
- Andy Rourke on 'I Don't Owe You Anything', Select, April 1993

"That was one of the very first rehearsals, and he just came in and hit us with that. It took a bit of getting used to. I remember taking a demo - before I'd even joined the band, they'd done a demo with Si Woolstencroft who drums with The Fall - and I took it home and played it to my brothers who were into the same music as I was into, Neil Young and Bob Dylan and so on, and they were going, 'Ere, what's he singing about there?'"
- Andy Rourke on 'Suffer Little Children', Select, April 1993

"Even with the sleeve, you know, for 'The Smiths,' Johnny said to me, Uh, I've got the cover of the new album. And it's a picture of a bloke going down on another bloke. So I'm like, Great! Fan-ta-stic! Hey, mam, look what I've been doing the last eight months! And I thought, well, how far do we want to take this? Because of course it's porn but straight away it starts you thinking, and that's what I mean when I say I maybe wasn't that clued in because Johnny and Morrissey were classic music fans for many years, and I'm sure they'd already been in Top Of The Pops in their heads, and they'd already thought about the things that have to be done to be creative, instead of just going blindly ahead and just falling by the wayside.
- Mike Joyce, Select, April 1993

"I didn't think it was the best debut of all time, I just thought it was the best record out at the time. I haven't listened to it for ages. I know it's a great collection of songs. It became the norm to criticise it. People echo what they've heard in the press."
- Johnny Marr, Select, December 1993

"I think we probably did it on our first two gigs. I think we were writing better stuff - that's the answer. It was always considered an album track. Maybe we had a doubt about it at the time."
- Johnny Marr on why The Smiths ceased performing "Suffer Little Children" early on, Record Collector, November/December 1992

Who did the Hindley laugh on "Suffer Little Children"?
"It was a friend of Morrissey's called Anna."
- Johnny Marr, Record Collector, November/December 1992

What was your opinion of the first album?
"I haven't listened to it in ages. I was happy that people were getting a chance to hear us, because we were better than anyone else at the time and I just thought I was happy to make a record. Just that it existed and the songs were there for people to hear was enough for me. It wasn't until people started mentioning the production that I noticed it, really."
How do you feel about the production?
"I think the only way that record could have got made was for John Porter to come in and show us how to make a record properly, which is what he did. He showed me how to make a record."
- Johnny Marr, Record Collector, November/December, 1992

"Rolling Stone cite the first album as the hidden gem. That baffles me. I thought it was so badly produced. And that matters if you're stood behind a mike singing your heart out. A great glut of Smiths records were badly produced. I remember a drive from Brixton to Derby where I listened on a Walkman to The Smiths' first album which we'd recorded for the second time and I turned to Geoff Travis on my right and John Porter on my left and said, This is not good enough, and they both squashed me in the seat and said that it cost f60,000, it has to be released, there's no going back. I had two very moist cheeks and there's an anger there that has never subsided, because The Smiths' first album should have been so much better than it was. (Laughs) Oh, how boring!"
- Morrissey, Q, April 1994

"The thing that sticks in my mind is not really liking the sound of the record. It wasn't anybody's fault, particularly - just time and budget limitations. Suffer Little Children has certainly got the atmosphere that I intended, and Pretty Girls Make Graves was probably good as it was ever going to be... whatever that means! ...a lot of the album was actually recorded with a '54 Telecaster belonging to John Porter. I used a Rickenbacker 360 12-string as well, and that was the guitar which subsequently got all the attention, but in fact it was mainly the Tele, and a bit of Les Paul. Overall, what I really didn't like about the records then was the amp, the Roland Jazz Chorus - that's the fuckin' prime suspect. Hey man, it was the '80s! They sounded fine to the player, but I think they failed out front. There seemed to be [a] big hole in the sound..."
- Johnny Marr, The Guitar Magazine, January 1997

"'Reel Around The Fountain' was my interpretation of James Taylor's version of 'Handy Man'. I was trying to do a classic melodic pop tune, and it had the worst kind of surface prettiness to it. But at the same time, Joy Division was influencing everybody in England. That dark element -- it wasn't that I wanted to be like them, but they brought out something in the darkness of the overall track."
- Johnny Marr, Guitar Player, January 1990

"What's going on in the rest of that picture is pretty interesting," says The Smiths' drummer today. "You know, with another geezer. Morrissey's going, 'This is the album cover,' and I'm like (tired resignation), Oh great, cool, whatever. After the cover of Hand In Glove, this was like, Wa-a-a-it, hold on a minute. Very cleverly he didn't tell me the picture was going to be cropped. I could imagine my parents going (Mrs Doyle voice): 'Well, that's nice, Michael.' The local priest, all my relatives..."
- Mike Joyce, Mojo, March 2000