The Smiths: "How Soon Is Now?"

2 September 1992

"It rockets off with the braces of every other effort here, leaving a proverbial "trousers-down" situation in Current Pop Music."

— Sian Pattenden

There's a stiff price to paid from enjoying Morrissey's music and that is having to be a fan of Morrissey. My knowledge of him was minimal growing up in Canada and this proved to be advantageous. It's obvious listening to even his best work that he probably isn't a great human being, which is only confirmed when you come upon an interview with the man. And forget about his problematic views for now, Morrissey is such a antisocial turd that I can't fathom anyone thinking he has any redeeming qualities beyond his considerable talents as a singer and songwriter (and maybe as an armchair music critic).

And this comes from the man's solo career which was already kind of patchy. The Viva Hate album was good enough but 1991's Kill Uncle was poor and forgettable and Your Arsenal from the following year was a supposed return to form that was nevertheless blighted by few genuinely brilliant moments. The only thing by him I treasured was the Bona Drag compilation of singles and select B sides, especially the peerless trilogy of 45's "Suedehead", "Everyday Is Like Sunday" and "The Last of the Famous International Playboys. Just as his old band — more on them soon — put out the popular comps Hatful of Hollow and Louder Than Bombs, which many rightly think are better than their actual albums, Moz's answer to them proved that he was still capable of churning out some wonderful singles even as his LP's kind of sucked.

So strong was Morrissey as a solo artist that his old band was already in danger of becoming an afterthought. Even compared to artists who were much more popular this is difficult to believe. George Michael and Sting may have been superstars but no one had forgotten that they had been launched by Wham! and The Police respectively. "Paul McCartney was in a band prior to Wings?" was a corny joke you'd sometimes hear but no one actually believed it. Yet, Morrissey seemed to have escaped the shadow of the once-mighty Smiths.

Not that I knew much about what he had previously been up to. Sure, I was aware that he had been in a group called The Smiths but I couldn't tell you anything about them. Okay, I knew that their guitarist was Johnny Marr who had subsequently been a member of The The and Electronic. The point is, I didn't know any Smiths' songs and I was strangely uninterested in correcting this lapse of mine.

One issue was that there wasn't much available in the early nineties. The racks of CDs and tapes at some of my regular record shops only seemed to have the horribly-titled Rank, which I discovered was a live album. Their studio albums (the outstanding self-titled debut, the patchy Meat Is Murder, the overrated The Queen Is Dead and the mostly great Strangeways, Here We Come) never seemed available. Though I wasn't to know it at the time, it probably helped that his solo material wasn't a whole lot different to his stuff with The Smiths (albeit mostly of inferior quality).

"How Soon Is Now?" has served in all capacities for The Smiths. It was originally a B side, and even then it was only made available on the 12" of "William, It Was Really Nothing" (whose real flip side has already been written about in this space). It then appeared on the superlative odds and sods comp Hatful of Hollow. American label Sire liked it and had it issued as a single in its own right in the US. Though it struggled Stateside, it would soon come out on its own back in the UK. North American editions of the Meat Is Murder album included it as well. While it didn't exactly set the charts alight, it did manage to appear as part of two separate Top 30 singles and on a pair of Top 10 albums.

It's generally highly regarded; I would imagine that among people who profess to hate The Smiths that it's the exception. Johnny Marr's presence had always been a benefit in terms of their critical reputation: hacks may have loathed Morrissey but they'd still give the group's extraordinary guitar hero his due. Fans of The Smiths also regard it highly, though they may place it just a notch below beloved faves like "This Charming Man" and "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out". But for all the acclaim it has rightful earned, "How Soon Is Now?" isn't the greatest entry point into one the finest groups of the eighties. As the closest they ever came to a stadium rock anthem, it hardly represents their jagged take on good old jangle pop. Morrissey's words are scattered and lack any semblance of a narrative. (Turns out, he just added various chunks of lyrics he had jotted down which explains why the "there's a club if you'd like to go..." section doesn't quite fit)

The Best 1 and Best 2 compilations ended up being flawed (songs like "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" and "Nowhere Fast" have no business being on any kind of 'Best of The Smiths' sets) but they got young fans of Morrissey and/or current alternative rock into one of the great indie bands of all time. Those of us who had looked up to Moz were astonished to discover that this earlier period was even better than his solo work; people who didn't care all that much for him could look past his many flaws (and, I dare say, some of their own prejudices in some instances) due to the star guitarist and rather underrated rhythm section that could churn out some sublimely intricate recordings and could even be something of a live powerhouse. At best, the albums were adequate samplers and The Smiths wouldn't be compiled well until 1995's essential Singles, which was my jumping off point into their back catalog.

As Sian Pattenden says, "How Soon Is Now?" exposed just how weak the current pop landscape had become — and this was even the case when it came to the current indie scene. But it also began to expose the weaknesses of Morrissey's own output. Your Arsenal had been tipped to be his best album yet but it suddenly seemed of little consequence when held up against his old band whose brief existence had been all peak. He had spent the first four years of his solo career proving that he could live up to The Smiths only for it all to come crashing down when we finally got to listen to them.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

ABBA: "Dancing Queen"

1992 did produce a number of quality singles but to my mind only five albums from that year are worthy of my time. They are Automatic for the People by R.E.M., Nonsuch by XTC, ABBA Gold, Divine Madness and A Life of Surprises: The Best of Prefab Sprout. Two big takeaways: (a) you can't go wrong if you happen to use initials in your band name and (b) it was a good year for greatest hits packages. (I actually prefer More ABBA Gold myself but there's no arguing with the likes of "Knowing Me, Knowing You" and "One of Us" even if I still don't know why everyone makes such a fuss over "The Winner Takes It All") As much of a classic as "How Soon Is Now?" but with the added feather in the cap of also having been a monster hit way back in its day, "Dancing Queen" didn't quite hit as hard fifteen years later though it did really start to solidify its place as a wedding dance staple just as people were beginning to realise that ABBA wasn't the guilty pleasure they had initially thought.

Kim Wilde: "Child Come Away"

14 October 1982

"Add Kim's strong vocal performance plus a piccolo-headed arrangement that nudges into the realms of folk-rock and you have a Rak track that will ensure standing room only throughout Kim's current tour. Outstanding."

— Fred Dellar

A little girl is growing up in a small town. Everything about her life is normal: she goes to school, plays with her friends, argues with her brothers and sisters and refuses to eat anything with onions in it. She spends her pocket money on sweets and is disappointed that her parents still won't relent and get her a puppy. Then she learns about the abduction of a girl close to her age and her world is turned upside down.

"Child Come Away" is a song about two girls: the one who gets snatched and left for dead and the one who is privy to the unraveling of everything around her. Innocence ends up being yanked away from both. Obviously the former is put through so much more but the lingering affects are left as a burden on the former: not knowing quite what happened (much less how or why), learning little snippets of detail but being denied the full story by parents and a town that doesn't want to discuss it, living in fear that she could be next. Fred Dellar mentions a "town filled with terror" but I suspect there's more to it than that. The community is in denial, perhaps even complicit, as to what's been going on.

That the Wilde family was able to come up with this gripping four-minute thriller is absolutely remarkable. Having already trotted out a pair of sorrowful yet superb singles with "Cambodia" and "View from a Bridge", they were well positioned to deliver yet another tragic piece and "Child Come Away" is their zenith. Kim seems to have toned down the vocal frostiness that worked such a treat on her early records, leaving room for a sweetness that captures the childlike wonder and confusion going on. I don't know if I agree with Dellar that the "piccolo-headed arrangement" moves the song into the realms of folk-rock but it is effective. I have to wonder if it's intended as a Pied Piper-esque tool to symbolise a child being lured away, while other children are being shuffled off to the side and told to go and play and stop asking so many bloody questions.

It's as a piece of writing, however, that "Child Come Away" truly shines. The lack of clarity in the story may seem strange at first but that's precisely the point. What exactly happened to this girl in the sand? What kind of appalling state was she left in that everyone in town — including the judge at the trial — turns away from her now? Has she been cast aside by the community as much as her captor/torturer ("I saw her face in the back of the car / As they were speeding out of this town")? We aren't to know, just as the other young girl in this song isn't to know. And we can look at this situation and gasp the heartlessness of the townsfolk but that's how close-knit communities often deal with these situations. How was this not used in the TV series Broadchurch?

So, all that said, how did it fail to catch on, falling short of the Top 40? Being her third single on the trot dealing with dark subject matter may have turned people off, especially deejays who were content around this time to spin sunny reggae-pop by the likes of Musical Youth, Culture Club and Eddy Grant instead. (Hopefully it did indeed manage to grip audiences during Wilde's tour; I like to think that she still occasionally floors her fans with it at shows to this day) In retrospect, it's a shame it wasn't released as a double A-side with its jauntier — though still appropriately angsty — flip "Just Another Guy": come for the whiplash pop-rock, stay for the searing devastation.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

ABBA: "The Day Before You Came"

And while we're on the topic of great melancholic pop that punters and radio conspired to spurn, all hail ABBA's swansong "The Day Before You Came". Variously interpreted as recalling the last days of mundane loneliness before finding love, some sort of murder/suicide plot or the tale of a stalker, the very ambiguity of just what motivates this song's protagonist is precisely what makes it so intriguing. (I tend to lean towards the stalker theory although I'm beginning to warm to the concept that the whole thing is a delusion with 'You' never coming) Dellar mentions the amusing line about watching every episode of Dallas but I also like the fact that this lonely, aimless soul reads both the morning and evening papers, a throwback to the omnipresence of print media. Just imagine how much more miserable she would be if she spent her commutes playing nothing but Candy Crush on her mobile?

Pink Industry: Forty Five

18 February 1982

"More of this sort of thing please."
— Red Starr

One of the unforeseen pleasures of doing this blog is that it has turned me on to some brilliant records that I would never have otherwise encountered. I expected to develop a heightened appreciation for the likes of Dexys Midnight Runners and The Human League but I failed to consider the lesser knowns who have fallen into my lap. From the jazz art snot of Ludus to the ghastly but beautiful deconstructionism of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, it's clear that the eighties produced a vast array of sonically deranged geniuses who never got their due — and we've only just begun.

One of musicology's most longstanding clichés is that while few bought The Velvet Underground's debut album, everyone who did so ended up forming bands. Now I don't doubt the truthfulness of this claim — even if I've never seen any survey results that confirm it — but I have to wonder if it's as remarkable an outcome as one might think. Didn't plenty of hippies and rednecks end up putting together country rock outfits when they first heard The Flying Burrito Brothers? How many literate but disaffected young people took up poetry and confrontational performance art upon listening to Patti Smith's Horses? Weren't there an entire generation of overcoat-sporting Scots that invested in fairlight synthesisers due to The Blue Nile? Smallish, cult-like acts inspire further, even smaller, even cultier groups and so on into obscurist infinity.

Locked into this chain of influence at one point or another resides Pink Industry. Their musical heroes — the ones I can hear at any rate — weren't especially well known nor were any of the groups that came along after them. It's fine that I can sit here in 2018 and see so much of indie lush industrialists Cocteau Twins in this music — and even that's just speculation considering that Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie were likely busy ironing out their own sound while the Pinks were foisting this upon us but certainly the two groups were on to much the same audio alchemy — but naturally no one was to know who would be listening and who would be forming bands as a result back in '82. 

Red Starr prefers side B opener "Don't Let Go" for its Velvets influence and vocalist Jayne Casey's wailing but I'm partial to "Is This the End" which commences the flip side. A haunting piece, it's a curious choice to kick off an E.P. and not just because of the title. It has the feel of a track that brings an album to a bleak conclusion, not unlike "Decades" on Joy Division's Closer or "The Overload" on Talking Heads' masterpiece Remain in Light. Cinematic, powerful and rich, its sheer gorgeousness is only slightly dampened by the knotty sense that few could have been listening beyond John Peel's devoted following — and what does it matter given that they all promptly went out and formed bands. For its part, "Don't Let Go" falls into similar territory. I don't hear Lou Reed and John Cale so much as those vaguely industrial groups fronted by wistful female singers doing what would eventually be called dream pop. (And, yes, Cocteau Twins are precisely who I'm thinking of)

So, just where am I going with all of this? Nowhere really. Forty Five is a remarkable work that probably was influenced by the giants of underground music and hopefully influenced plenty of figures going forward. Few ended up buying it but those who did would have quit smiling, messed up their hair and messed about with their mates over cheap instruments. What more could you want from the periphery?

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

ABBA: "Head over Heels"

"Oh God," Starr writes, his eyes doubtless rolling as he churned out this bit of copy, "number one for weeks and weeks." Surely his mood improved when he discovered just how wrong his prediction was. "Head over Heels" was the end of the Swedes' grip over the British charts, taking just a nominal spot in the Top 30. As Starr says, it's just another decent ABBA song in a world of much better ABBA songs and the punters agreed. They might have done better, however, to flip the record over as "The Visitors" sees them firing on all cylinders for just about the last time. Good time party bands tend to keep their melancholy hidden but this epic song of aliens being baffled by the world's madness and repression might have peaked the interest of a public that no longer had much use for them.