Smiths

Few bands have managed, like the Smiths, to forge such a tight bond of emotional belonging and complete empathetic identification with their audience — a bond that has remained virtually unchanged (a sort of pact, or secular cult) even decades after the band's split. And even fewer groups have managed, as they did, to fully embody the complexity of a specific cultural and historical era, becoming a megaphone for the cry of an entire generation. Manchester, which had already given us Joy Division in the late Seventies, would find in the following decade a single dominant, "paradigmatic" figure: the Smiths.

The impact that the musical (and poetic) work of the band led by Steven Patrick Morrissey and Johnny Marr has had on British culture is still more than tangible today, so much so that one could almost say that, from the year of their split to the present day, the band has never ceased to be relevant (with a significant peak during the Britpop years). Not bad for a group that never chased the pretence of experimenting with the "new", instead pursuing a kind of "bel canto" capable of tapping into and preserving an existential truth free from the deceptive, treacherous masks of ideology and all-too-easy conformism.

The unstoppable success of this legend owes in equal measure to an extremely recognisable musical style built on apparently simple gestures, and to the charismatic, egocentric figure of Morrissey: singer, razor-sharp scourge of English society, and a superb writer "on loan" to music.

Their self-titled 1984 debut and the following "Meat Is Murder" had already brought out the essential traits of the Smiths: the layering of Marr's soft guitar arpeggios, cascading over Morrissey's sung words, wrapping them in a warm, crepuscular weave of airy, astonished sounds. The singer, for his part, glides lightly over the polished surfaces of his own voice, poised between the emotional tension of an operatic aria and the absorbed chanting of a cult leader.

But definitive consecration would arrive in 1986, at the end of a particularly intense and complicated phase in their trajectory. Morrissey and Marr, in fact, had to contend with grievances from the group's other two members — Rourke and Joyce — over the internal split of earnings (a dispute whose scale also sparked a row with Rough Trade). What's more, two managers were fired within the space of a few months, and the band decided to manage themselves independently.

Despite this, the band manages to record its finest album, “The Queen Is Dead”, under the supervision of Stephen Street (future britpop mainstay with Blur), who had already taken part in the “Meat Is Murder” sessions. The album hits stores in June 1986, quickly climbing the sales charts, helped along by the splendid singles that promote it, in particular the gorgeous, heart-wrenching “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”, “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, “Panic” (its famous fatwa against the clubbing crowd and their music went on to stir up the usual media hornet's nest) and “Ask”, the latter two released a few months after the album and not included on its tracklist.

The record was originally meant to be called “Margaret On The Guillotine” (yet another biting jab at Thatcher), evidence of an increasingly tragic and inevitable frustration with a country in moral and political decline. But it would be reductive to read the title and the album as a whole in purely (anti-)British terms: the crisis the Smiths are addressing is, in a sense, far more universal, alluding to the progressive and inescapable collapse of all illusions, of all the great social narratives (homeland, empire, party, the sexual revolution, God, even music itself) that had propped up and shaped the collective rhetoric of the great liberation movements of previous decades, before smashing their thundering promises against the hard, cold wall of an existence ever more fractured and dramatically left to its own individual loneliness.

Musically, the record doesn't stray too far from the rest of the Smiths' output (marked, as we've seen, by a general consistency, including in quality). The album actually earns its place in British rock history more than the others precisely because it manages, in a way, to distil what is essentially the Smiths' "signature", through a nimble selection of ten fairly distinct compositions, each stylistically well "separated" from the next. In any case, it's here that some of the most successful and convincing fruits of the Morrissey-Marr partnership can be found. From this point of view, the second half of the record comes close to pure ecstatic, vibrant perfection: while “Cemetry Gates” stays tangled in the folds of a fifties-flavoured country-rock, framed by lively puffs of bass, “Bigmouth Strikes Again” moves at an even brisker, drum-driven pace that perfectly paves the way for the timeless splendour of “The Boy With The Thorn On His Side”, built around an unforgettable melody over which Morrissey's voice (at its interpretive peak) dances, sketching out a gorgeous tribute to timeless lightness.

The Smiths' sharpest weapon seems almost to be the brazen gift of their bare fragility, as shown by the closing trio of tracks: while “Vicar In A Tutu” is a mischievous folkabilly number adding to an already fairly substantial collection of similarly built songs, “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” could go on forever, set as it is within an elegant, spare melody poised between the tradition of the more rural-souled French chansonniers (heightened by orchestral touches) and the dreamy lightness of an Elizabethan sonnet. Yet — and it's precisely in this remarkable tonal contrast that much of its miraculous beauty lies — the lyrics are steeped in bitterness and bleak pessimism. With “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” the band finds its own personal route into new wave, and Marr's darting guitar flourishes weave a cloak of shimmering, restless notes.

The tracks on the first half of the album still hold plenty of interest, though: “The Queen Is Dead” brings back the band's more adventurous, experimental side, in a composition running over six minutes and marked by several shifts and changes of scene, especially in its second half. “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” is a playful, old-fashioned stomp that seems almost to send up Sinatra, while “I Know It's Over” is another key track, steeped in velvety soul melancholy with a Motown lineage, creeping forward with a wounded, hesitant step before opening up into a more choral, emotionally charged movement. “Never Had No One Ever” echoes it in a way, through a structure that is, in some respects, very similar.

The record's resounding success, accompanied by the inevitable controversy over its anti-monarchist swipes, would mark the peak of the Smiths' arc, one destined to close just a year later with the release of “Strangeways, Here We Come”. It would fall mainly to Morrissey to keep the band's flag flying, through a long solo career that continues to this day. Johnny Marr's career, on the other hand, would bounce in the years that followed through a disorderly array of musically wide-ranging projects, from Electronic (alongside fellow Mancunian Bernard Sumner of New Order) to the short-lived Healers, by way of dozens of collaborations as co-writer, arranger or simple session player, right up to his recent stint alongside indie rockers Modest Mouse and his joining the young Cribs a few months ago.

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09/11/2006