tracks on LP: Reel Around The Fountain | You’ve Got Everything Now | Miserable Lie | Pretty Girls Make Graves | The Hand That Rocks The Cradle | Still Ill | Hand In Glove | What Difference Does It Make? | I Don’t Owe You Anything | Suffer Little Children
Record label: Rough Trade 60
Released: 20/02/84
Purchased: 05/05/84
So, another legend in the making. On the strength of three singles, ‘Hand In Glove’, ‘This Charming Man’ and ‘What Difference Does It Make’, Manchester’s the Smiths have already attracted the same groundswell of hope and support that turned the likes of Joy Division into a virtual deity and consequent self-parody. But the current rock’n’roll vacuum needs a band with leadership qualities and the Smiths seem to have been elected by the press and “in touch” public as the band most suitable to plug that gap.
With the self-confessed celibate and non-drinking Morrissey out front the band has a vocalist/ lyricist with the essential honesty and fanaticism to engender respect and even worship in those looking for a new religion.
On The Smiths, their first album, this charming man sings of lust, guilt, child murders and more lust with a plaintive, doleful mourn that becomes plain weary on ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ (not the way to begin an album, fellas) and ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ and real maudlin on ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’.
The band’s true talent is guitarist Johnny Marr. He believes in the beauty of simplicity and he gets that clean crystalline guitar sound that has chimed through the best pop songs from the Byrds to early Echo and the Bunnymen. When he gets the tune right and hits stride as in ‘Still Ill’, ‘You’ve Got Every-thing Now’ and ‘Hand In Glove’, then the Smiths look like having a future.
But the real strokes of brilliance occur when Morrissey and Marr hit empathy. ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ is the best up-tempo Smiths because Marr is pushing Morrissey, and ‘Suffer Little Children’ is brilliant because there’s a tragedy in the song that transcends self-pity and Marr keeps it delicate, sensitive and simple.
Advice: let the Smiths grow without the burden of unrealistic devotion. If Morrissey is one of rock’n’roll’s great individuals let him prove it don’t be so damned accepting. The truth is that The Smiths is a disappointingly good album from a potentially exceptional band. (Rip It Up, 1984)
The Smiths | The Smiths | Rough Trade 1984
THE SMITHS ‘The Smiths’ (Rough Trade RT 61) “A COMPLETE signal post in the history of popular music.” Little Stevie Morrissey’s verdict on his own work bears his usual stamp of camp immodesty — the grand gesture, the bon mot, and sometimes even true class. Only sometimes though .. .
The voyage of pop’s first celibate sex symbol has been marked, thus far, by the lushest of treasure islands — the three singles including 83’s finest moment ‘This Charming Men’ — but now, alas, the Good Ship Smith seems to have become becalmed, drifting noticeably from the course set by Midshipman Morrissey. Mr M seems too busy with the art of being ruler to actually rule. Because the Smiths LP was supposed to be magnificent. And it isn’t.
That’s not to say that The Smiths’ is in any way a poor record, it’s just not that step up to Olympian heights we might have expected (you’ll have to wait for the Prefab Sprout LP for that). When Morrissey‘s overtly literary world-play gels with a steaming Johnny Marr tune the results can be masterful but, as this record demonstrably shows, it’s a wildly hit and miss process.
When it works, they serve up sheer class like ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ and ‘Still Ill’, when it doesn’t the only direction is down, down, down into the drudgery of ‘Miserable Lie’ and the hideous ‘Suffer Little Children’.
When Morrissey gets morose and the band workmanlike the spark that we know as that elusive Smithdom is smothered, not even those eerie falsettos distancing The Smiths from the horror that is The Ordinary. Thus while five songs herein are truly great, the others are truly . . . er . . . not great! The Smiths LP would have made a majestic EP. + + + (Record Mirror, 25/02/84)
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