The Smiths: Classic or Dud?

Well, Sundar dear, 15 years of reading the British music press certainly helps, you don't have to study a band you are almost force fed (even my favorite book on music, 'Blissed Out', starts with an Mozzer interview ). But is it really so hard to believe that you only meet one Smiths fan all your life? :)

It's hard for me to believe that you've only met one fan because everyone who I've played The Smiths for who wasn't primarily a death- metal fan has really liked them. (With the death-metal folks, it was an 80% dislike/20% like divide.)

*Sigh* [you know I get every reply in my mailbox :)] What do you want me to say that I don't hang out with saddo anglophiles who are stuck in the 80s? You want me to say it, don't you? ;) You know what the typical anwser is when somebody returns 'Blissed Out'? "Yeah, good book, but what's with the friggin' Morrisey interview, i don't want to read about that shit."

As for the Korn connection, Tom gave a very clear response. There's a kind of narcissistic self-loathing with that singer that somehow reminds me of Mozzer, although instead of a hearing-aid he has a bagpipe and really crap hair (I'm almost certain that if you ask him he'll say 'The Queen is Dead'is one of his favorite albums). Actually Reynolds made a far bolder claim recently by comparing Eminem and Moz. He's right by the way.

If Omar knows one Smiths fan in real-life, then that's one more than *I* know. I'm not sure someone who you played the records to once and who liked it qualifies as a fan.

as i said the smiths are the benchmark of GOOD taste. So no omar, you are not cool by my definition. Myabe jon davies is atempting to be mozzer, but a mozzer for the "noughties" but he cirtainly isn't doing a very good job of it. I'd rather be force fed Smiths than force fed Coldplay and sodding Starsailor!

I think the Morrissey bits in Blissed Out stand up better than a lot of it. The sound-as-sound aesthetic being pushed in that book felt revolutionary when I first came across it but seems - dare I say it - a bit dated now. The bits I enjoy most now are those where Reynolds is skewering the stuff that was wrong with music then, not going on about AR Kane.

Still calling people chronic wankers because they don't like a particular band is a bit like calling someone a racist cunt for not liking hip hop in other words: a bit stupid.

To echo Tom E: who on earth thinks that the Morrissey interview at the start of Blissed Out is the bad bit that nobody wants to read? It's the *only* bit of that book I've ever read. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

I have sometimes spent the night at Stephen Troussé's house.

I was re-reading Blissed Out recently and Reynolds is still so in awe with Moz there, it's almost cute :) Which doesn't mean it isn't a good article. I find those Pop-schemers essays a bit dated now. My favorite bits start after the Noise article (all of the dreampop stuff, esp. the descriptions of AR Kane ;), the Wasted Youth essay and all of the house stuff).

The 'on the cusp of techno's breakthrough' stuff towards the end of _Blissed Out_ is most interesting in retrospect, but yes, Tom's right -- the bile Reynolds and David Stubbs heap on the mainstream eighties is worthy and utterly hilarious.

And I did always like the Moz interview -- I also really liked the amusing bit at the beginning regarding how lyrics come up with in a semi-drunken haze get taken as tablets of truth by fans. So true, so true!

pretty hard to believe, yeah. aside from "how soon is now?" and "this charming man," they didn't chart in a big way here but are very well known and liked among alternative rock (what term to use?) fans. you would have met at least a couple fans.

no, i said they are wankers OR THEY JUST HAVE VERY BAD TASTE. I cannot think of one person i know who has respectable music taste who doesn't like the smiths.

I'm sure a Smiths fan or two who didn't identify themselves as such must have been part of my acquaintances at one point or another. But right now, unless some of my co-workers are closeted Smiths fans, which isn't entirely impossible, pretty much everyone I know is into soft-rock, or U2, or dance-pop, or not into music at all. I don't really know anyone into alt-rock besides people who might have heard a couple Green Day or Soul Asylum songs they liked and bought the album once.

pinefox: Hold on here, the Marr guitar parts may sound basic but they are nowhere near standard fare. Unless you're familiar with chords like G#/Dsus6 and A#5dim, you're on the wrong planet. To a novice, a C chord sounds deceptively similar to Cmajadd5, and so on. I've been pursuing Marr's guitar tactics for almost 15 years now and to play the songs the CORRECT way is downright fingertwisting. Don't forget the open chord tunings either. Sure, there are a few easy ones thrown in there for novices to strum along with, but on the whole, they're terribly difficult.

Ahem. Mr. Baier, are the senior members of your family familar with the intricacies of egg-sucking?

i would have thought any of the regular contributors would have realised that the pinefox *is* in fact on the wrong planet, which is why we love him :)

All these comments and not one mention of the rhythm section?? Much like entwistle and moon, joyce and rourke's contribution is often overlooked (and not just when it comes to royalties). Anyway, classic, that was the question wasn't it?

I'm sorry, I was a bit overzealous with my chord naming. I hope you all understand that I have no idea what those chords are and if they are even chords at all, I was just making shit up. The only one *I* know is C honestly. But I know many of them by ear and tab.

Anyway, you could say "nobody can play those songs quite like Hendrix played them, but the basic chords, arpeggios, etc. are easy". You could apply that to any great guitar player cause a guitar is a guitar and rock music is rock music. Anybody can learn the notes too and get 90% of the way there, but its that last little bit that seperates guys who can finger chords well from guys like Marr and Hendrix.

Btw, yes, my dad likes eggs. What's your point?

My point was that if anyone I know is completely aware of the structures of Smiths tunes, it's Mr. Fox. To point out chords to him is, I would contend, somewhat akin to teaching ones grandmother to suck eggs. Apologies if it was a bit obscure.

Some of Rourke's bass playing is pretty amazing. Bouncy and not- obvious. Didn't he play funk with Marr before The Smiths?

Yeah, a white funk band called White Dice. I think they tried to hide that fact in interviews but listening to "Barbarism Begins at Home", we know better...

Classic. I'm not going to talk about musicianship and stuff because I'm the least qualified person to do that, but I can tell you this much: for someone like me, the Smiths is a band that I can relate to: I've related to Morrissey's lyrics too often. Some of them make me laught because of their tongue-in-cheek characteristics and some of them simply choke me up.

Just read Tom's Smiths article in the archives and it's a really beautiful and poignant piece of writing. I've heard very little Smiths, but I'll deem them Classic because they inspired that article. ( and, on a larger scale, FT. And what would I do without this site? )

Since this thread has been revived:

THE VERY BEST OF THE SMITHS: CLASSIC *AND* DUD??

Yes, C and D. This endless repackaging pisses me off. Who wants this album, given that all their back catalogue including all the other greatest hits or whatever they're called.? It seems to me that the only function is to allow people to 'do' the Smiths in one CD. Do these people exist?

The cover - how long did it take them to come up with Charles Hawtrey? It's lazy,dull-witted hackwork.

The other amazing thing is the diabolical running order. Fast songs together, slow songs together, that kind of thing. The most basic understanding of how to make a tape would have precluded this.

Classic. The one group I can't ever single out a favourite album or song by because of the sheer volume of memorable, crucial output. For the music, and a lot of other reasons besides.

Okay, from 1983 - 1987 I probably had the biggest case of Smithsitis in North America. I hounded the staff of a now-defunct record store in my hometown to drive me 500 miles to see them in Chicago - they complied. I bought everything I could lay my hands on, had people make me PAL- converted videotapes of all TV stuff from the UK and augmented my film and reading lists with every single piece of Angry Young Man filmmaking and writing available to me - in many ways, this 'bands with a syllabus' thing was the Manics' province in the '90s, but it was a great ladder upstairs to places like university, especially for a lot of people who were not from comfortable backgrounds (I'd do you a great big list of European, UK and US musicians and writers but I'd be here a while). There was also a huge radical feminism component to Morrissey, which sat well with the stuff he liked oustide the kitchen sink canon. He also linked me up to Kenneth Anger, Truman Capote, Warhol everything, Derek Jarman, other Manchester bands and oddly enough, this brought me eventually to House music.

To sing (in weird half-step vocals that people like Ofra Haza would later drop into the charts) that the music on the radio had nothing to say to him about his life in 1986 was pretty spot-on considering what actually played on daytime R1 in the days before Detroit and Chicago impacted on the British charts and before the invention of MIDI. How this made a Tamla-Motown lover a racist in the eyes of the press I'll never know (it's borderline reductive to say this, but I'd never be so facile as to call my black friends who only listen to hip-hop racists because of the music they're into).And as much as he hated his one remix, at least it was by François Kervorkian!

People I know now, such as the gay A&R who signed the Smiths to EMI, agreed with me when I posited the theory that Morrissey was one of those closet cases who fancied, but never touched, the men most likely to bash him: beery lads, Latino boys, skinheads, etc. This has become more pronounced the older he's become. If you look at the reccurring fascination for those styles in the fashion world, it's also down to ageing gay creatives literally flirting with dodginess...

Since you guys are dropping Reynolds science to justify your own C or D arguments, I should maybe remind you of something he wrote for Spin in the late '80s. It was about the concept of the pernicious influence, the group a band loves that doesn't let them move forward if they try to emulate them. I seem to recall Smiths being top of the list!

And Johnny Marr? Although he's partially responsible for Oasis being here now (legs-up, same management, yucch) he made the guitar cool in the face of my favourite synth stuff simply because he played it beautifully and never once went for the cheap cock-rock option!

.....counting on my fingers & toes i'd now say that what i said about the smiths back up there was among the 50 or 60 stupidest things i've "contributed" to this board. I certainly don't HATE the smiths...can't *like* 'em but that's just 'cause i was already too old for 'em when they came along (you know, like 20 or something)...his lyrics back then i think were quite brilliant.

Disproving one of the stereotypes listed herein, I like death metal and I like the Smiths. But, proving another, I like regular metal too and I like the Smiths.

As fer the last stereotype -- when I was an undergrad (early- to mid- nineties), the IT guy where I worked was a big-time metalhead -- though he liked a lot of eighties cheesy hair-metal as well as the good stuff. Big strapping country boy from the mountains of Pennsylvania, even had a pick-up truck. The only alternative/indie/whatever band he liked was the Smiths. Go figure.

Hurray for your remarks, Suzy--you've said everything I would have liked to have said but was afraid of getting bashed for (I probably still will). I'm not out to defend or condemn, but Brits should at least realize how much Morrissey/Marr & Co. meant to certain of us Anglo-loving American types in the mid-'80s. Besides, they were perhaps the first band who made me want to laugh and cry, often at the same time. Perhaps you were with me, Suzy, at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom in 1985...

No, the Great Smiths Road Trip was in '86, to the same venue, a few weeks before I headed to New York for university - and I also had tickets my aunt's friend scored for me for the Radio City gig that never happened because Andy Rourke 'stepped on a jellyfish'. Bullshit...unless it was full of skag!

As we were driving up to the Aragon in baking late-afternoon sun the group emerged; I went all 'driver, STOP THE CAR!' and rushed over to meet my heroes. Luckily, I managed to be blasé about this despite a complete freakout in the car - and weirdly, found Morrissey a bit slow on the uptake. Johnny Marr was hilarious, though - a bit like a chipmunk on speed. Calm in the face of the experience, when I returned to Mininoplace I had to be scraped off the ceiling or forced by my friends to SHUT THE FUCK UP. But I learned:

1. People in groups are not always as clever as you want them to be - or, indeed, as intelligent as they think they are.

2. I possessed the unique ability to perfectly apply liquid eyeliner in a moving vehicle.

The gig was great, by the way.

Amusingly, considering the stuff about laddism upthread, the pointless "The Very Best Of The Smiths" is currently being advertised on the UK's most laddish radio station, talkSPORT.

The fact that John Peel does the voiceover is even more predictable than everything else. Strange to hear his voice again on the old Radio 1 medium wave frequency, though.

I think that page 193 of Jonathan Coe's THE ROTTERS' CLUB contains a deliberate proleptic allusion to the 'Caligula' line in 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now'.

Just saw that new best of on HMV.co.uk, and I'd just like to know -
Why?

Paint a vulgar picture?

Since I bought all of the Smiths albums on cassette *far too long ago*, I keep thinking of getting decent replacement copies of them on cd. It would be nice if the albums were all reissued nicely with the b-sides, etc. instead of forcing yet another illogical Best Of on the public.

I'm sure I'm not the only person to have thought of that song, Nicole ...

I shouldn't think the band are behind the best-of, it's WEA I reckon.

YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKERS!!! THE QUEEN IS DEAD IS THE BEST ALBUM EVER AND THE BOY WITH THE THORN IN HIS SIDE IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SONG EVER !!!

No, "This Night Has Opened My Eyes" is the most beautiful song ever.

Actually it's 'I Don't Owe You Anything'.

i think you'll find it is actually 'Everybody Let's Fuck'

I don't think that's been PROVEN BY SCIENCE to be a Smiths song, you know.

Discovering such a proof = URGENT AND KEY

I agree with Richard. Divert all federal funds NOW.

If you think of the Smiths in simplistic terms, they were a great band with far more top class songs than many other more recognised bands of their era. ie u2, rem. I just wish i was there at the time, morrisey is the ultimate pop star, opinionated, arrogant, bad tempered, hilarious and charismatic. Constantly sacking their managers was a masterstroke, kind of similar to spinal taps drummers...

You are obviously a pedophile and an loser. Who else sounds like them moron. Your precious house bands?

I live in Canada, but my cousin is Adam Clayton. Now there's an over-rated band. Not to mention Daft Punk, you Punky-ass bitch!

It's like a fusion of eight different board regulars as one person.

When someone has to come down to the depths of cursing a bands image or apperance, its quite obviuos that a real musical question has not been put forward. I don't think I have to answer classic or "dud"

Over written lyrics. I didn't realise there was such a thing! Morrissey is one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Without doubt the most influential artist to come from the UK in the last 20 years. Every point you've made about the why the smiths were utter shite is exactly why they contributed so largely to the british music industry. I won' even start telling you how Richie James (manics) was also on a par with poets such as Plath. As for why nobody in mainland Europe likes them? Uh they don't all speak english. I don't listen to meaningful french, german, spanish songs because i don't understand them. Simply the most dilectable band ever to grace the british music scene.

I won' even start telling you how Richie James (manics) was also on a par with poets such as Plath.

Hahahahahahaha yes, this is actually quite true!

Plath and Richey Manic are so much on the same level its unbelievable. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a candle I need to stare into.