There had been the daffodils, boxes of them thrown into the crowd at gigs. Then there had been the lyrics to This Charming Man — where a rosy-cheeked young cyclist is rescued from his punture by a curiously obliging country gent — and the muscular male nude on the cover of the Hand In Glove single. however, it was when Morrissey suggested a still photo of Joe Dallesandro from Andy Warhol's Flesh as the band's debut album cover that the penny finally dropped for Mike Joyce.

"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..."

During the summer of '83, the band had a dry run for their debut album, working with Troy Tate from the Teardrop Explodes, but, says Joyce, "We weren't blown away. It didn't sound perfect." Around the same time, The Smiths recorded a Peel session presided over by one John Porter, whose previous involvement with Roxy Music and boundless passion for music saw him drafted in for the album.

Porter quickly got onto Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis and pointed out that the existing recordings were "out of tune, out of time, out of everything" — was there a budget to start them afresh?

"I know I only got £500," Porter reveals, "and I think we had five or six days to do it again. Johnny [Marr] and Morrissey were very close and had great faith in each other. They were really clueless at that stage — they were so clueless as to even ask me to manage them! The dreams and plans were wonderful, but there was a certain frisson.

"Johnny was obviously really excited about the possibilities of the studio whereas Morrissey just wanted to bang everything down in one take and go home. Maybe half of it would be out of tune; he had only a limited vocal range at the best of times. In some cases it was the first time he'd ever sung it through, but that was the immediacy he wanted."

Try as he might, however, Porter couldn't interest Morrissey in the recording process. "Morrissey was wary of my influence," he recalls. "I was totally into black music, and I think he saw that as a bit of a threat to their style. There was one famous occasion, where we were doing a vocal at Matrix in Bloomsbury. We'd got to the end of the first verse and Mozzer disappeared, so we chatted for half an hour and it was like, 'Where's Mozzer gone?' Eventually we found out he'd walked out of the studio, got on a train and gone to Manchester!

"So I grabbed all the tapes, booked a studio, got on a train, spoke to Mozzer's mum, got hold of him. He came in, did another verse, went out to get some chips — and went back to London again! We finally got the third verse sorted back in London."

Still, Marr and Porter immersed themselves in the album together. "It became like he was my little brother, we struck up a friendship," says Porter. Mostly the two of them were simply finding the right sound for tracks that had been well road-tested, like Miserable Lie and Reel Around The Fountain. Porter also helped Marr develop an unhoned riff into a secular litany about the psycho-social legacy of the Moors Murders called Suffer Little Children and, in his own words, actively "butchered" a couple of other songs.

"We used to have a version of What Difference Does It Make?," says Mike Joyce, "which was a lot more rumbly drum-wise, more of a jungley rhythm. John Porter listened to it and said, 'Try it like this,' very much straight 4s. I thought, Hmmm, I don't really like this, and Morrissey looked at me as if to say, 'No, I agree with you, Mike.' So, me and Morrissey would be sitting on one couch, and Johnny and John would be on the other, both grumbling away at the others. We tried it John's way and he was bouncing around the room, like, 'Cool, sounds more like a single!' And of course he was right — it turned out to be one of our biggest hits!"