The Smiths are very nice. They are also very bright and come armed with awe-inspiring self-belief and an unshakeable benevolence towards the human race. As if this wasn't bad enough, they come from Manchester, hereafter known as Smith City. They've been on Top Of The Pops, Round Table, The Old Grey Whistle Test. They've been in Sounds, NME, even Rolling Stone. And it all started when the Pope came to Manchester. While some of us were standing in a muddy field being catholics for the day, Johnny Marr, guitarist and all round bright spark, was looking for a singer. Someone had once mentioned Morrissey to him - a weirdo-about-town whose home address was easy to come by and whose first name, though no-one ever uses it, is Stephen [sic]. So Johnny (and this is how they tell it) went and pressed his nose against Morrissey's window.
Morrissey - who had read several books (Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde), had seen the Sex Pistols three times and knew he "could carry a tune without severe embarrassment" - let Johnny in. The bright spark with big dreams met the downbeat romantic with equally big dreams and suddenly they were songwriters. Johnny rang Andy Rourke, a bassist, and Mike Joyce, a drummer. He said to them: "You must join this group". They did. To jump forwards to the present, there are now three Smiths singles, a debut LP has just come out, Sandie Shaw has covered one of their songs ("I Don't Owe You Anything", for a single due out on Rough Trade), and on New Year's Eve they played in New York for the first time.
Morrissey, 23-year-old ex teenage depressive, does all this seem amazing to you? "It's chillingly exciting because it's the realisation of a life time's dream." What do your friends and relations think about it? "They respond with overbearing pleasure or profound resentment." What will you remember about The Early Years of The Smiths? "The release of our first single, 'Hand In Glove'. It was such a naive pleasure but it ultimately proved to be such a memorable and powerful record."
Morrissey and Marr talk big. They make sweeping, dramatic statements about themselves, about popular music, about people. They might appear to be deluded, arrogant bastards but they aren't.
The Smiths want to Communicate. Is a pop song the best way? Morrissey has no doubts. "With records like 'God Save The Queen' or 'Give Peace A Chance' you're affected so profoundly at the moment you hear it. It's really easy to confuse people. People's lives are very down to earth. The difficulty is to write something fundamentally powerful."
Morrissey and Marr write mostly love songs, sometimes just to people in general. Their songs are catchy, melancholic, bawdy, optimistic. Are they innocents in a corrupt world? Or urban hippies in disguise? What are The Smiths supposed to do to people? "The subjects for songs must be very forthright," asserts Morrissey. "It should be a way to sweep people together. We want to release people from their shackles - let them be themselves!"
Didn't the big punk groups and gatherings achieve that? "It was a very synthetic kind of energy, a collective shout. There is a sort of strength in that street-gang thing but you're not allowed to be yourself. We are really making an embarrassingly fundamental request to accept yourself and for people to display their weaknesses."
They have already proven themselves able to resist selling their souls for "a great deal of money" to large record companies and signed to Rough Trade. They are also clearly of sound mind, because despite being offered an equally large amount of money, they refused support dates with The Police. "It didn't make artistic sense," says Johnny Marr. "We're more important than The Police! We're more important than they ever were or ever will be!" He's a good lad this Marr! Apparently his Beatlesque mess of hair is a deliberate perversity, an act of defiance against all the tarted-up twerps currently corroding the tastes of young pop fans. "We're trying to encourage people to forget their cool - so much has been made of this cool thing."
Morrissey says: "We're not going to be unassailable or unapproachable." And The Smiths aren't. They create a wild, warm response. "We get letters from people saying, 'I play "Hand In Glove" 24 times before I go to school!'" At their last Hacienda homecoming the place was full of such Smith disciples. Morrissey was joined on stage by most of them. "I have a paternal attitude towards the fans, I feel protective towards them."
The big brothers Morrissey and Marr are well aware of the strangers who look to them for a kind of rescue from normality or confusion. Marr says: "When we don't feel a kinship with the people who come to see us, then we'll know it's time to jack it in." And then, with sanely lunatic certainty, he adds: "For a lot of people we're the event of the decade! We feel it would be a tragic waste not to buy our records!" Nobody believes in the potency of cheap music like The Smiths.

This article was originally published in the February, 1984 issue of The Face.
Reprinted without permission for personal use only.