This is probably a bizarre choice, but my favourite Smiths track has always been Cemetery Gates. I always thought that song was a perfect gem, and it just got lost as it was tucked away at the end of side one on the Queen is Dead.

I also feel that Half a Person is overlooked as well - I think it's one of their best melodies.

By the way all you Smiths fan, Moz started yesterday's Reading Festival with How Soon Is Now. First time he's played this solo.

During my typically English, angsty adolescence at university when being miserable and self-indulgent came as natural as breathing at times, there was a sense that The Smiths, and Morrissey’s words in particular, not only gave succour to my growing sense of alienation but actually gave it a certain validity. As if there was something noble or righteous in finding yourself locked away in uncertainty, in my bedroom utterly folded in on myself. Christ, perhaps without the songs giving me a reason to wear my fatalism like a fucking medal I would‘ve just knuckled down and got on with getting on in life. Perhaps, perhaps not. Anyway...

Ironically, I went to Salford University and I remember one time being in one of the university bars, with half a pint left, listening to the jukebox as torrential rain turns the world outside the windscreen a wavering, wet blur. Fairly typical Manchester weather. It’s then that I really took notice of - The Smiths. 'William It Was Really Nothing' was playing, 'the rain falls hard on a humdrum town / this town has dragged you down'. It’s one of the few times a song has made me stop what I was doing and just listened to it.

Ostensibly The Smith's music is fairly conventional, some jangly guitars - slightly sprightly for a downbeat song, interestingly - and no rough stuff, but it's Morrissey's voice that really captures the essence of the music. All mannered croon and barely in tune. At the end it’s crying out in a keening wail, “Williahh-aah-ahhm”. Never really dates does it?

What's great is that their music sounds today, as it almost certainly did back in the early eighties. The moment when Manchester bedsit misfit Morrissey made a break for freedom, the moment that dreamy loser Morrissey willed himself into being, darted from the shadows of the enclosed grey Manchester streets, and miraculously made good his escape, for the good life is out there somewhere'. Morrissey made his voice heard. And, so it goes, many were ready to listen.

I remember the 1st time I heard I Know It's Over. To hear my tightly tangled, confused and unhappy heart being given a voice and sung back to me, and saying what I couldn’t even begin to articulate, was startling but at the same time delightful but at the same time it changed me and challenged me and woke me up. All I knew was that I needed as much of this music in my life as possible.So personal, so singular and so idiosyncratic is their sound that a (world) wide appeal was surely to be unlikely. And yet... here we sit.

The songs. Morrissey is in some senses straightforward (and in other senses, bent forward), the songs on The Smiths and The Queen is Dead scored repeated direct hits on me. Unlike the band’s protegees like Belle & Sebastian and so on, The Smiths were never actually the shyly mumbling, shivering, apologetic type. Quite the contrary, bolstered by fear and fury Morrissey’s songs heralded a frustration unbuttoned.

Listen to how the ideas tumble over each other in these early songs, it’s like someone who’s been holding their breath their whole life, finally breathing out, but what I found completely staggering was the display of vulnerability. In ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’ he sings 'no, I’ve never had a job / because I’m too shy', admitting to being too shy to get a job just seemed an unusual, strangely endearing and brave. (It’s also probably worth noting that the song was written during a time of mass unemployment in Great Britain, and for Morrissey to claim he was jobless due, not to crushing Conservative policies that all the other contemporary politicised bands were moaning about, but his own feebleness - later in the song, he also says he hadn’t had a job because he never wanted one - was a perverse way of damning the Tory government and retaining some personal pride: you didn’t break me, he seems to say, because I never took part, my ruin is my own doing. Morrissey refuses to be a victim to anyone but himself.

The theme of disappointment is central to many of Morrissey’s songs, he is not quite the pessimistic conspiracy theorist like Thom Yorke of Radiohead, more the bruised idealist, the naive romantic like Oscar Wilde who sees his hopes dashed, his dreams crashed, his happiness snatched, as his future beyond the 'old grey school' turns out to be a false dawn. Life: The Big Let-Down, is what ’The Smiths', if anything, is about - though not in defeatist acceptance of the fact, instead in sharp defiance of it, the songs struggle and thrash against society’s chains, trying to make a space, to mark their own place in a falling, failing world.

Morrissey, with his anti-rockist vocals, his threadbare glam anti-fashion, his preening and his posing. A pop snob, an odd sod, Morrissey’s also a funny bugger. The charge of him being merely miserable, though, I don’t think has gone away, which is ridiculous. Okay, calling The Smiths’ fourth, and biggest, hit single ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now‘ didn’t do him any favours, but (and aside from the fact that it was a self-mocking play on the title of a Sandie Shaw song, ‘Heaven Knows I’m Missing Him Now’) I think it is worth pointing out that the title isn’t ‘Heaven Knows I Am Miserable’, it’s: ‘..I’m Miserable Now’: how compliancy to society’s regime diminishes the spirit, is the point of the song - and I feel that! Apparantly Morrissey wrote 'Hang the DJ' after listening to a Radio 1 DJ read out a newsflash about the Chernobyl disaster and then straight after launch into 'Wake me up before you go go' by 'Wham'(For all too young it's a crappy pop song with lines like 'take me dancing tonight')

But Morrissey made me laugh. Smiths defenders will always point out the humour embedded within the songs, and they’re right to do so, but the humour is just another manifestation of Morrissey’s hurt and anger, it’s a useful - and powerful - tool to hammer out his point. This is why, to me, a line like 'In my life / Oh why do I smile / at people who I’d much rather / kick in the eye?' is typical of The Smiths’ acid humour: it comes from great despair.

With The Smiths having split up way before I discovered them, I was in the curious position of finding the band through my own back with the little help of my friend Joel who's like a Morrissey and Smith fanatic as I am to Prince. They weren’t of my time so I had to go digging, so The Smiths, therefore, felt like my treasure.

I don’t need them now really. I'm a happy and content person! I’m a fan, but I’ve moved on, you have to move on. The Smiths can become a suffocating comfort blanket for those desperate enough and I was at times. I’m grateful to have had them take up space in my life.
Morrissey‘s voice still echoes in my ears from time to time though: Don’t forget the songs that made you cry / and the songs that saved your life / yes, you’re older now / and you’re a clever swine / but they were the only ones that ever stood by you.

How I love Stretch Out And Wait

All the lies that you make up
What's at the back of your mind ?
Oh, your face I can see
And it's desperately kind
But what's at the back of your mind ?

Two icy-cold hands conducting the way
It's the Eskimo blood in my veins
Amid concrete and clay
And general decay
Nature must still find a way
So ignore all the codes of the day
Let your juvenile IMPULSES sway
This way and that way
This way, that way
God, how sex implores you
To let yourself lose yourself


Stretch out and wait
Stretch out and wait
Let your puny body, lie down, lie down
As we lie, you say
As we lie, you say
Stretch out and ...
Stretch out and wait
Stretch out and wait
Let your puny body lie down, lie down


As we lie, you say :
Will the world end in the night time ?
(I really don't know)
Or will the world end in the day time ?
(I really don't know)
And is there any point ever having children ?
Oh, I don't know
All I do know is we're Here and it's Now


So ... stretch out and wait
Stretch out and wait
There is no debate, no debate, no debate
How can you conciously contemplate
When there's no debate, no debate ?
Stretch out and wait
Stretch out and wait
Stretch out and wait
Wait
Wait
Wait
Wait
Oh ...

jn2 said:

i cant believe i forgot this song!!! this is defly in my top 5.

violett said:

co-sign.

The Smiths are never gonna reunite!!!!