The Smiths

Some songs have the power to manifest themselves as epiphanies, dazzling apparitions that come to reveal a path, an itinerary of the soul whose very existence you didn't know and that you would never imagine having to or being able to travel. You'll travel it anyway; in fact you're already on your way and don't know it. Because if fate doesn't exist, chance at least does. And chance is never wrong. Music – as Kandinsky would say – is an "inner necessity", a spiritual calling that even the mere listener cannot escape. It will send its emissaries one day, but you'll only reconstruct the meaning of that encounter with the passing of time.

 

I must have been ten years old the first time I heard "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want". At that age I barely knew who the Beatles, let alone the Smiths. It was the soundtrack to a beer commercial that stuck in the collective memory for the way it managed to condense into one countdown everything worth calling life. In short, an ad designed on purpose to hit the usual, incurable bloody sentimentalists right in the heart. Without taking anything away from that wonderful editing, much of the impact was down to the music: from what abyss of the soul did that lament come, whose words I couldn't understand but which reached me like the most brutal and authentic of prayers? What kind of hell had that anonymous guitarist walked out of unscathed, to pull out harmonies so mournfully celestial they brought to mind the weeping of a thousand angels? I'd have to wait almost another ten years (be kind, British pop wasn't exactly the cup of tea of my teenage listening) to put a name to that voice and that guitar – Morrissey and Johnny Marr – and discover that the song, in fact, didn't last much longer than a commercial: a hundred and ten seconds. Probably the most moving hundred and ten seconds in the history of pop.

 

When the folks at Rough Trade received a song this short from Morrissey, they must have worn an expression mockingly similar to the one a girl might have at the end of a premature-ejaculation romp: "Hey, boy, is it over already?". In fact, what Geoff Travis's henchmen actually said to him was, if anything, even more embarrassing: "where's the rest of the song?". Luckily Morrissey wasn't the type to be discouraged, and indeed, with the brazenness of someone who knows he has a talent out of the ordinary, he allowed himself to reply point-blank that the track was as it was. No additions, take it or leave it. Rough Trade took it. "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" came out exactly as it had been recorded: with its four short verses, its barely two minutes of length and that mandolin coda – an idea from producer John Porter, brilliantly realised by Marr's inspiration – which is the shrine in which that prodigious melody is made eternal.

 

The track was first recorded as the B-side of the "William, It Was Really Nothing" 7-inch single, and later included on the compilation "Hatful Of Hollow", released that same year, 1984, which gathered the singles the English band had put out over the previous two years together with some recordings made for BBC radio sessions. "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" was placed at number sixteen on the tracklist – the last one – sealing an inexhaustible treasure chest of wonders that held, among others, such marvels as "This Charming Man", "How Soon Is Now?", "Handsome Devil" and "Reel Around The Fountain". And yet even these gems – for which anyone on songwriter earth would sacrifice their relatives up to the fourth degree – pale in the face of this majestic, fragile farewell. No song, in fact, has ever managed to challenge "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" for the title of quintessential track of the Smiths' aesthetic and poetics, to the point that musicians of every rank have lined up, ticket in hand, to draw a bit of its magic, giving rise in some cases to jarring reinterpretations (the new-age-tinged instrumental version by Dream Academy, the furious, melodramatic one by Muse), and in others to deeply "felt" readings (Clayhill's acoustic take, Slow Moving Millie's solo-piano version).

  

A few years after recording the track, Johnny Marr revealed in an interview that the melody had been shaped on the model of an old song by Bobby Hillard and Burt Bacharach"The Answer To Everything", a hit in 1961 for Del Shannon. Looking closely, the influence shows up not so much on a formal level as on an expressive one; it's not about how a melody should be built, but about how it should act on the listener's emotions. "The Answer To Everything" is a charmingly coy ballad, shaped by the sultry gait of a vibraphone, and at first listen it seems to bear no plausible connection to the Smiths song. However, if you focus your listening solely on the melodic line, isolating it from the arrangement that disguises its true mood, you can pick up on the plaintive rhythm and the languid nuances that Marr's inspiration – he wrote the music – evidently drew from.

 

Obviously Marr didn't want to redo that melody; rather, he wanted to recreate its essence, to bring back to life the spirit that had captivated his childhood sensibility when he heard it on his father's turntable. But while hit Del Shannon's song gives voice to a lover who doesn't want to be deceived by the girl he loves, "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" is the soliloquy of someone who has strangled their own voice in their throat from hoping too much, who has forced it back down through endless pleas cast into the wind. Luckily, you don't need to utter a word to express a desire, to long for a dream. It's enough to turn your eyes to the sky, which is often nothing but the reverse side of the soul: “So for once in my life/ let me get what I want/ Lord knows it would be the first time”. Dreams are like miracles: they happen inside us first. And if they finally come true, we almost feel guilty: “See, the luck I’ve had/ would make a good man/ turn bad”.

 

Some time ago a dear friend of mine – paraphrasing another Smiths song, "Rubber Ring" – sent me this message, which sounded like a kind of tender warning: "Don't forget the songs that saved your life". Certain people have a gift for becoming messengers of providence, for sending you the right words at the right moment. Just like certain songs, which, if they haven't saved our lives, have at least pointed them in the right direction, without us – still too pure and innocent to understand that every miracle, besides its wonder, carries with it the burden of safekeeping and the ordeal of bearing witness – even realizing it.