The Miracle of the Smiths

btw, I saw the Smiths on their first US tour in NY... which one of you geeks is jealous? :)

If not, no need for jealousy here.

>>> For some reason (and I was actually thinking about this before I knew this thread existed!), I associate "Madchester Rave On" outselling "Ouija Board Ouija Board" five to one in Manchester HMV with the fall of Communism and the emergence of MTV Europe

Put that way, it sounds odd - but I think your overall generational point is valid.

>>> shortness of "Panic" / classicism [60s]

This is a fine point, which goes for other Smiths records too, of course.

>>> Peter Hitchens was, perhaps for the only time in his life, spot on when he said that traditions can be destroyed just as effectively when you leave the buildings there but chip away at the ideas and feelings that gave them meaning, as when you tear down the buildings themselves.

Hm... but was he 'wrong' at the same time as being 'right'? I hope so.

Dr C:

>>> but the single biggest cause of the decline HAS to be the fact that Kill Uncle was so spectacularly awful.

I agree - but Stevie T will tell you, I think, that it was 'Ouija Board' which summarized decline !

>>> (By the way, except for the singles, I really don't like Viva Hate either).

I do. I agree that a balance has been lost, but that record is close enough to the Smiths - close enough to the flow - to retain much of what what M had then, I think. (I still think it the best solo record.)

>>> Working with hacks like Street, Langer and Nevin couldn't have helped much either.

This is true. Actually there is a whole separate discussion to be had re. the influence of Langer & Winstanley on the records of Morrissey, Costello and... Lloyd Cole!!

D Nick: you are very, very on the money - loads of money!

>>> What I was going to ask was 'what does this song MEAN?' Or more specifically, what do the chorus and verses have to do with one another?

This was what preoccupied me after I'd left the thread yesterday. And I realized that I had let myself forget my original sense of the song. What happens in the song - let D Nick take up the point again -

>>> it struck me as a perfect example of Morrissey's (Smiths era) approach to songwriting- so many self-contained lines/notebook fragments/twisted aphorisms that somehow end up constituting a lyric... but he never really lost his predilection (knack?) for opaque, ambiguous, cut and paste lyrics (torrents of words falling over themselves) until a little way into his solo career.

This is terrific stuff - so basic, yet so little recognized (it often seems). Anyway: Panic seems to me to be a *yoking of 2 ideas*:

1. REVOLUTION IN THATCHER'S BRITAIN - it's happening all over, kids! The miners' strike may have failed, but look at this fantasy! Violence is the only answer to our rulers!...

2. WE DON'T LIKE DISCOS / DANCE MUSIC - extended to 'burn down' idea, this seems like the same idea as #1. But really it's a much narrower Morrisseyesque fantasy.

In yoking the two he left the impression that the whole song was really about #2 (which emerges halfway through); whereas really I feel that #1 (very 80s, very Red Wedge pushed to extreme, in a way) is the key, and drags #2 in its wake.

Corroboration of a sort: Steven Wells made Panic his 45 of the week (July 86) cos it was Politickal, like. (Nothing to do with anti-disco sentiment, which would have repulsed him.) Think about it (as annoying people say).

>>> A thing that rarely gets mentioned: Mick Middles' book (yes, I know it's terrible) insists that when Morrissey & Marr started out, their plan was to become a songwriting team, not a band. Does anyone know if that's true?

No... I don't even recall seeing it. Anyone else?

Hopkins:

>>> I think PF's urge to put the strangeness down to such a simple synthesis is perhaps an oversimplification.

Fine. You're probably right. I was only being 'heuristic', or something. There is still a point there. I am not convinced, I think, that OJ were into that *particular* synthesis.

In return, I think your post is perhaps tainted with (by?) your perpetual post-1983 antipathy to the Smiths. To me, OJ sound (yes) original and different in the way you say - but also less fun than the Smiths (perhaps cos so original and different).

Dods mentions Bowie - I wonder whether my whole fixation on 'strangeness' misses out the idea that Bowie had done all strangenesses before? But no, I think, not quite. (Strange Pop Bowie = other thread.)

What does it mean to live vicariously through the Smiths? That you fantasize about being a miserable closeted neurotic?

When he made the comments I quoted, Hitchens was to me "wrong" because, on the whole, I don't think the traditions he cherishes were worth preserving, but also "right" because I thought he put his argument over very well *even though I disagreed with it*. Certainly, on a personal level, Hitchens is more interesting to me than any other journalist of the right, and there are some fundamental truths he has grasped about the anti-traditionalism (despite appearances) of Thatcherite policies, but I wonder how much of his interest to me is down to the endless amateur sociology *and* amateur psychology you can get out of the contrast between him and his brother.

Dr C: that's sort of what I meant to say about Kill Uncle, but it got lost along the way. It wasn't just the delay: all the singles off that album were just SO WEAK: you could not imagine any of them going Top 10 for one moment. I would concur utterly with what others have said about Morrissey losing his essential ambiguity at that time, and his lyrics becoming so much more boring and uninspiring (of thoughts, of possible meanings, of anything, really).

>>> Maybe if the song *had* been longer and more fully-explained, the "REVOLUTION" element might have been given the chance, so to speak, to sound more prominent?

Yes, precisely. Also the disco stuff has been easier for people (journos, whoever) to seize on over the year - where the revolution doesn't really go anywhere. (Is this right?)

Always seemed significant to me that the 45 was released just after Queen is Dead LP: and - more so - that live, they would follow that title track with 'Panic', without a moment's break (cf Rank LP): ie. 'Panic' was an extension of the political analysis of the earlier song. OK, only a pop lyric / tune; not a terribly sophisticated analysis, and tending more to 'adolescent' espousals of rebellion vs the royals / hatred of the Tories than anything properly worked through. But still - not quite the same as the 'racism / anti-disco / reactionary' thing that has been insisted on again and again. Possibly.

>>> I wonder how much of his interest to me is down to the endless amateur sociology *and* amateur psychology you can get out of the contrast between him and his brother.

Sad situation. But CH is also odd and perverse: currently writing articles for Guardian attacking 'liberal twits' who question war / US foreign policy. He's bright and everything, but I think he slightly abuses his position by going for perversity and irritation of readership too much.

>>> It wasn't just the delay: all the singles off that album were just SO WEAK

'Our Frank' - yes. 'Sing Your Life'? Probably. But funnily enough (Nitsuh may back me up here), two non-45s are arguably the most compelling things here: 'Driving Your Girlfriend Home', and 'Mute Witness'. (Thanks to Stevie T for making party tape in June 1997 which brought latter track to my stunned attention in the middle of Covent Garden. Never since abandoned belief that track is grate, though I'm not entirely sure I've even *heard* it since.)

Also what was The Smith's legacy? Twee-core? C-86? (I think mainly not), Jarvis Cocker/Pulp?

Legacy? The Smiths were immensely popular amongst the people who would become the twee end of indie, and were a central inspiration for a generation of sensitive kids to form bands and write sensitive songs. You could argue whether that meant twee-core was the legacy of the Smiths either way. I think it's *a* legacy of the Smiths. Pulp another, without question I think.

I did love the Smiths very dearly once upon a time, but I balk at talk of them being a miracle. I can't remember thinking "that sounds like nothing I've ever heard" (except perhaps on first hearing "How Soon Is Now"). I can remember thinking that some of their records were unbearably exciting. (If this comment bears the 'taint' of my not being a raving Smiths enthusiast, PF, please feel free to ignore it).

>>> I do think the band's relationship with / musical break from punk is crucial

OK - I'll buy it, though I'm not sure I get it yet.

>>> and the reading of "Panic" which various people seem to be reaching for above can be thought of as a punk story too: in the lyric you see a wave of unspecified panic crystallise into a musical battle, the fear and confusion of the initial verses collapses into the safety / sterility of a polemic reaching no further than the DJ booth.

This is a fine argument.

Weird complicating Pulp fact = Pulp started before Smiths? - or sth absurd like that?

>>> I did love the Smiths very dearly once upon a time, but I balk at talk of them being a miracle.

I meant 'miracle' in a non-evaluative sense - which I know sounds oxymoronic. I'm sure you think that my attempt to be non-evaluative is 'tainted' by evaluation. Probably it is, and possibly you think that's OK (possibly inevitable) anyway. I don't mind balking at (talk of) miracles, but in pop terms I can't think of that many things that deserve the term better than this lot (but possibly nothing does), whether in evaluative or non-evaluative terms (assuming that either category exists).

>>> (If this comment bears the 'taint' of my not being a raving Smiths enthusiast, PF, please feel free to ignore it).

Oh, I did.

Also compare Devoto's famous "I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin" line from Magazine's "Song From Under the Floorboards" with Morrissey's later preoccupations with illness and ugliness.

I go for 'a major incident in pop history' to describe the imapct of The Smiths rather than any definition of 'miracle'. Yet, I'm still struggling to understand what of consequence, if anything, they left behind. Here's my best shot at asking the question - "What did the advent of Morrissey allow artists to now do (which no-one did before)?" 'Scuse the bad grammar.

Doc C says, what did M leave behind? - etc. It's a very good question - BUT, can't a band / artist / whatever (in any medium) be 'great' and still NOT have a great influence? (cf, as always, Eliot's review of Ulysses, on this point.)

My feeling is that he made possible a more conversational style - he opened the door to new kinds of verbal awkwardness. But that is not meant to imply that there was no conversation or awkwardness pre-M.

Damian - I agree re. the chronology, but not re. musicianship. Marr was very much a 'musician' - not just a three-chord hack. There is always a sense, I think, of him 'doing what's right for the record'. You may have a point re. lyric-determines-length-of-track - but then, what about all those records where that doesn't apply? = That Joke / HSIN? / Queen Is Dead etc. I don't know - your argument is good, but I think Marr *could* easily have gone on and played fabulous 5-minute outros - *and I wish he had...*

Is that YOU over there in the gloom, Pinefox?

it's presumably a glancing sideways allusion to William Wordsworth, and it says a lot about the culture Morrissey came from: romantic fantasies of pre-industrial Britain, while superficially appealing, ultimately unsettle him as much as the erosion of the Industrial Revolution legacy and its replacement by rootless consumerism, because both present a vision of a parallel universe in which the culture he came from would never have existed (Manchester is often cited as "the first industrial city" and it was certainly an irrelevant backwater before the flight from the land enabled it to rapidly become an economic powerhouse). visions of the pre-industrial world erode and threaten Morrissey's urban-socialist-collectivist past, and the creation of a deunionised Manchester where Janet Jackson is a more important cultural figure than J.B. Priestley (the mortal fear which drives the main narrative to "Panic") presents the clear message of NO FUTURE. it's as if, amid bleak premonitions of his future, he's dismissing a possible solace because of the threat it poses to his pride in his past.

why don't people focus on that line in particular? it's pretty much the epitome of a deeply conservative Old Labour mindset, as though he sort of wants to find solace in an unchanging, utopian, monocultural vision of the countryside as a place to escape his hated deindustrialisation and decollectivisation and consumerisation and all-pervasive cultural hybridisation in the erstwhile socialist heartlands from whence he came, but that very Old Labour tribalism stops him (all the neo-ruralists in the last 35 years of pop culture came from pretty middle-class backgrounds AFAIK, and I find it very hard to imagine Fairport Convention coming even from the more salubrious parts of Greater Manchester, the equivalent suburbs to the Wimbledons and Muswell Hills from whence they actually came. as for such a band coming from Sheffield or Newcastle? utterly unthinkable, certainly in that generation, before the Industrial Revolution legacy crumbled and the new pick-and-mix rootlessness set in.)

a few contenders:

Wham!, "Bad Boys"

Bros, "When Will I Be Famous"

Happy Mondays, "Step On" (also Mancunian of course so probably the most obvious)

The Brotherhood, "Punk Funk"

Clipse, "Grindin'" (Westwood: "CHEETHAM HILL MASSIVE!!!")

"Panic" is a *weird* record, isn't it? Bloody weird, to be honest. Bizarrely, its emotional extremity and call-to-arms reminds me now of Eminem's "Lose Yourself", but ***from the opposite starting point***. It's almost an anti-pop pop record, in that it's an explicit refusal of the cultural exchanges that were already, by 1986, forming 90% of the Top 40. In fact, it's probably the best possible candidate for Tom's "Berlin WHAT?" thread, not in terms of actual reference points per se, just the ethos that formed it.

I recently said (not on here IIRC) that Wham!'s "I'm Your Man" was to Thatcherism what something like Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius" was to romantic Toryism: the epitome of the ethos expressed in music. If pure Thatcherism said "fuck you, High Tories *and* puritan socialists" ... well, it was revulsion at hearing "I'm Your Man" in a thoroughly inappropriate context which inspired "Panic" in the first place, so I always imagine Prince Charles hearing Diana playing it and getting TOTALLY PISSED OFF (remember his expression when she dragged him along to see Michael Jackson at Wembley in 1988? something like that).

I'm waffling, aren't I? But "I'm Your Man" and "Panic" = the Thatcher and Scargill of pop, surely, the radical of the right and the desperate nostalgic dreamer of the left.

Hey Pine! Are you going to the ILX Christmas thing?

God ... I loved that period of ILM, even if it went over certain heads :).

oh, and Gareth to thread!

Robin C: can't seem to remember what heads you mean - not that I expect you to mention them by name.

Mick Middles' book (yes, I know it's terrible) insists that when Morrissey & Marr started out, their plan was to become a songwriting team, not a band. Does anyone know if that's true?

This may be part mythology, but according to both "The Severed Alliance" and "The Songs that Saved Your Life" Marr went and knocked on Morrissey's door to introduce himself because he was fascinated with the Leiber/Stoller story/ethos (which mentor and later manager Joe Moss introduced him to) and wanted to carry on in that tradition. Of course there was a go-between, Stephen Pomfret, who had been in a band with Morrissey called the Nosebleeds, who was at first allotted a space in the new band and then dismissed once his work was provided. Marr was five years younger than Morrissey, so they traveled in slightly different circles, though they had met once before, at a (Buzzcocks?) concert. Morrissey was also very interested in the great songwriting tradition, Brill, and especially 60s girl groups, and at their meeting Marr was sure to play up his interest in that area also. Marr later disdained Morrissey's girl pop covers as the worst things they'd ever done though. I think the thought was that, if they couldn't make it as a band (because they couldn't find the right other members), they could at least write songs for others. This is evidenced in their frequent pleas/campaign to Sandie Shaw to let them write a song for her. But it didn't seem to go much further than that.

When I played a Smiths bootleg that I had just picked up, Gareth said, "The Smiths sound like they're all playing a different song at the same time." I had never thought of it that was, but given their background it makes sense. Marr had a dilettante background, tons of different influences, but had been most recently in a funk band with Rourke called Freak Party. And Joyce came from a punk band. These influences had to be stifled to an extent to please Morrissey. Toward the end, Marr was even fed up with their "jangly" ethos. At the time Marr was working in at X clothes shop and meeting a lot of people, creating a lot of opportunities for himself. His previous bands hadn't worked out so he set off to find himself a lead singer. Morrissey was sitting at home collecting unemployment and writing fanzine type books about The New York Dolls and James Dean. In progress were books about 60s girl groups and "Exit Smiling," a book about underrated Hollywood movie stars. These latter were shelved once the Smiths began. Apparently the songwriting process worked like this: Marr, and later his producers, would work out the tune, and then Morrissey would add music. But it wasn't that simple, if Morrissey wasn't pleased, he would ask for the melody/mood to be more like "this" and Marr was left guessing at and then striving for what would please Morrissey. One song, apparently, "Draize Train," Morrissey regarded so lightly that he could never make lyrics for it, so this was left as an instrumental. As others have mentioned above, Morrissey's very unusual phrasing would have the band revising the tune even more.

Morrissey was also apparently jealous of any of Marr's relationships outside of their own. This led to first manager and Marr friend Joe Moss leaving the group, and seemed to affect their management throughout. Morrissey didn't trust anyone in control of his business, nor was he comfortable executing the decisions himself, as much as he was making them. This left Marr in the unfortunate position of doing all of Morrissey's dirty work. Morrissey did seem to have a very crafty business head: the deal he worked with Rough Trade was 50/50 (with only himself and Marr as beneficiaries of course. He was also apparently stingy in paying his roadies. The only way Joe Moss got paid after he left was from Marr's pocket. The Smiths were virtually unmanageable, and this may explain their haphazard single/record releases. Though Rough Trade must have something to do with this also. Certain songs that should have been released as singles never were, or were too late, as "How Soon is Now," and tons of single were thrown out to the public, and then collected on a compilation to the hold the fans over until the next proper album. I don't know if this is common in the UK? This may have also reflected Morrissey/Marr's
reevaluation of the 45 as superior to the album and their belief in the themselves/desire to be foremost pop chartists. The band also had serious problems with their producers. Marr bonded heavily with John Porter, and the two of them got very into adding guitar upon guitar into the mix, which Morrissey wasn't very happy with. They were guitar geeks and spent tons of time in the studio messing around. Morrissey was a purist and wanted to tone down any technological influence, "Hand in Glove" was given it's clubby sound purely by distortion, a trick the band used to get around Morrissey's edicts. Morrissey preferred Stephen Street as a producer, who he later worked with at the beginning of his solo career, and I think Marr just learned how to be a producer himself to get around Morrissey's jealousy.

What I'm trying to get at is the all-consuming fear and loathing of women and heterosexual acts on that first record. Most explicit in "Pretty Girls Make Graves," but hinted in the squalid depiction of sexuality in "Miserable Lie" and pretty much all over the place

I think the loathing isn't specific to "heterosexual" acts, just sexual. The "Pretty Girls Make Graves" is another plundering--this time from Jack Kerouak's "Dharma Bums" and probably appropriated for its sense of futility and poetic drama rather than a specific misogyny. Morrissey was extremely "pro-feminist" as a youth -- he went to meet Patty Smith (through fanzine connections) wearing a button that said "Women's Liberation." He apparently also walked around Manchester with a button reading, "Lesbian Liberation," which could not have gone over well in those days. Morrissey was very influenced by the "Fourth Sex" regarding Jack Nichol's "Men's Liberation" as his Bible. Elizabeth Brownmiller's "Against Our Will" and similar pro-feminist books as Suzy mentioned above were also very influential. "He wanted to get beyond stereotypical male and female roles. I think "Miserable Lie" addresses the futility of relationships in general. The singer said a very interesting thing on the recent doc "Importance of Being Morrissey." This is just a paraphrase, but his interviewer asked him, "Would you ever consider living with somebody?" M.: "No, I can't imagine how that would even happen really." Interview: "Have you ever considered it?" M: "No, I don't think human beings are meant to live together. I don't think people get on really."

Side note: When Marr left the band, the Smiths asked Roddy Frame to replace him. He refused.

It is the next logical step.