IF IT'S NOT LOVE THEN IT'S THE POLL THAT WILL BRING US TOGETHER - ILM Artist Poll #72 - THE SMITHS - RESULTS THREAD

There was a big spread of no.1s, 40 songs had at least one no.1 vote

Occurred to me that over the many years I've barely spent time with any album as such save "Queen." Most of my listening has been to five or six comps. Hmm.

Re: Barbarism, amazing what influence the Go4 had on even effete/weedy/wimpy/whatever bands like REM and the Smiths.

Bought the Goddard book. Surprised but not Surprised how many Moz lyrics are responses to the press or fans or otherwise superficial stuff of the moment.

http://i.imgur.com/oul1mAz.jpg

39. BACK TO THE OLD HOUSE (B-side of 'What Difference Does It Make?')
391 points | 18 votes

I'mm not as enamored of HOH as most of you but this is one version I prefer.

Yeah, the Hatful version is one of their most beautiful tracks. The Louder than Bombs one not so much.

wow at 40 different #1 songs. over half the total catalogue getting #1 votes is a record that's unlikely to be challenged.

"Back to the Old House" is just sublime. Really affecting track, musically and lyrically. My #5.

yeah, that's insane. xp

but completely understandable. even the songs i don't like as much almost always have a memorable line that stands out and makes you do the "hmph!" face

Co-sign the praise for the images and the effort spent tabulating all this. Wishing I'd brought the iPod to work today to cycle through each track as it appears, but love how easily each comes to mind.

my suspicion is There is a Light is gonna get number 1 just by virtue of appearing fairly high on the most ballots

^^That's my token "Cut It Because Everybody Else Is Gonna Vote For It" for this poll.

I didn't vote for it either, but then 1/4 of what i voted for has already placed, so

http://i.imgur.com/Gysghnf.jpg

38. RUSHOLME RUFFIANS (Album track from Meat Is Murder)
393 points | 18 votes

I didn't vote for this, but it might be my favorite of their stabs at rockabilly.

i might have voted for all their rockabilly stabs

My god, I love "Rusholme". So evocative. One of their sharpest 'I've been there' songs for me.

the grease in the hair
of a speedway operator
is all a tremulous heart requires

^ fav morrissey lyric when revisiting the discography last week

I nearly put this as my #1, specifically the version from Rank. I always think of it as a cousin of 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out', they remind me of teenage feeling of going out somewhere and being around lots of people and feeling 'this is finally it, my REAL LIFE is beginning!', also combination of love + sex + violence + death, and of this giddy exuberance that's could spill over into despair at any moment. and it's so shameless in that it's basically the lyrics from Victoria Wood's '14 Again' + the music from 'His latest Flame', but they manage to make something totally new from it! the bit on the Rank version where the band shifts from 'His latest Flame' to the more raucous opening to 'Rusholme Ruffians' might be my favourite single moment from any Smiths track

http://i.imgur.com/VzzXU2b.jpg

37 (TIE). A RUSH AND A PUSH AND THE LAND IS OURS (Album track from Strangeways, Here We Come)
395 points | 20 votes | 1 first place vote

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http://i.imgur.com/9lC1cWv.jpg

37 (TIE). LAST NIGHT I DREAMT THAT SOMEBODY LOVED ME (Single A-side | Album track from Strangeways, Here We Come)
395 points | 19 votes | 1 first place vote

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http://i.imgur.com/NV13iPY.jpg

37 (TIE). PAINT A VULGAR PICTURE (Album track from Strangeways, Here We Come)
395 points | 15 votes | 2 first place votes

ok lol

RR made my Top 25 but not my final ballot. Love it

the strangeways trio

i voted for the latter two. love the way "paint a vulgar picture" never seems to resolve, and of course the unbelievable sustained mood of "last night."

"a rush and a push" is a lot of fun

"A Rush..." was on my shortlist but didn't make it onto my ballot.

these are all too low

high five to other PAVP #1 voter

I would like to hug the person who voted Last Night #1. It was my #2. It really holds up ... the production is beautiful.

All great songs, although I only voted for "Rush". Such a brilliant arrangement, nothing else in their catalog sounds quite like it. In trying to describe it all I can think of is the phrase "mystical time zone" from the opening lines.

"Paint a Vulgar PIcture" is another example of how Strangeways boasts some of Marr's best guitar tones and worst songs. I do like the song, particularly the nylon string solo

i was listening to my tape of strangeways in the car yesterday, and the thing that gets me about most of the songs is how they seem to be a vocal melody (or non-melody) and lyrics just *plopped* on top of a backing track.

that's... most Smiths songs?

OTM

no, not really.

Yeah I mean, the melodies meander on TQID but also follow a strong pattern/template that feels better integrated with the music than most of what you get on Strangeways, which reads at times a little like Morrissey sat down to workshop wandering melodic line creation with Robert Smith but got bored 5 minutes into the conversation and wandered out of the room.

DJP otm

Shortlisted "A Rush..."--it has this cool European folk song influence not found as easily elsewhere in the catalogue.

The meandering Moz melodies are partly what makes the songs so interesting. I mean, the music is generally air-tight, but the vocals go all over the place, not just in terms of pitch/key but also in terms of when/if he repeats lines and where, how the songs are structured, etc.

to my ears the vast majority of Smiths songs, right from the debut onwards, involve Morrissey abandoning any sort of standard lyric/melody-writing structure - he doesn't stick to meters, he regularly crams in too many syllables or stretches out too few, his phrasing and arrangement of melodic lines is really odd, almost untethered to what Marr is doing. Instrumental sections that a more conventional vocalist would treat as an opportunity for a hook he might just let go by entirely; or instead of a repeated refrain he'll abruptly switch to some wordless caterwauling.

and yeah this is not a bad thing, it's really interesting!

I did not het around to vote in the end but "Last Night..." would have been my #1 or #2, fwiw

I'm shocked it is so low.

high five to other PAVP #1 voter

That would be me. I'm an unapologetic Strangeways fan, and this song is the peak imo. Great memories also of hearing it live during Morrissey's '97 concert, along with Shoplifters.

I wouldn't really say that Moz wanders around in different keys, at least not on studio recordings

I'd also say that unless you are talking about the poetic use of meter rather than the musical use, he absolutely 100% sticks to meter on every single song I can think of at the moment (although I invite someone to post something where he is doing, for example, a cross-meter 3 relationship against the foundation that the musical arrangement is giving him)

yeah I'm referring to poetic meter - the way his lines don't conform to standard patterns of syllables-per-line, that kind of thing

I just last night watched a thing on Youtube about his solo career and pretty much every one of those collaborators expressed surprise at how he mapped out his lyrics over the musical structures they submitted too. Bless.

on a lot of the strangeways songs his parts are so meandering and loose, it doesn't go against the musical meter but it doesn't really fit either

In Morrissey's recent (by recent, I mean last 20 years I guess) solo stuff he's really got to grips with regular meter and more conventional melodies, and that's partly why a lot of it sounds so dull. His songs almost always follow a straight verse-chorus-verse-chorus pattern, to their detriment.

I've often though that Morrissey approaches his melodies like someone who doesn't know which part was intended to be the verse, the chorus etc. To this day I'm sure that the Marr didn't actually write the verse part of 'The Headmaster Ritual' as the verse.

*thought

I would like to hug the person who voted Last Night #1. It was my #2. It really holds up ... the production is beautiful.

― sarahell, Friday, March 4, 2016 12:33 PM (56 minutes ago)

C'est moi.

I guess Smiths fans would know, but did Marr ever do scratch vocals for demos of his songs before Morrissey got his hands on them. I'd be fascinated to hear something like that.