Gunnarsson The Smiths & Morrissey

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-615-8
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Ever since their debut single was released in 1983, The Smiths have influenced musicians worldwide with their jangly guitar pop, infectious melodies and front man Morrissey's passionate lyrics. During their relatively short lifespan from 1982 to 1989, the quartet released four iconic albums and a host of singles. In 1988, less than a year after the last Smiths album, Morrissey embarked on a solo adventure that's still ongoing, with thirteen studio albums and a regular supply of singles, plus several live albums.
This installment of the On track series examines this vast back catalogue in detail, from The Smiths' debut single 'Hand In Glove' in 1983 to Morrissey's vinyl single release of a live version of 'Cosmic Dancer' in 2021, which he recorded with David Bowie back in 1991 - and all the songs from all the albums and singles in-between. Combining facts and trivia with personal views and memories, this is a rollercoaster ride through the highs and lows of Morrissey's long career, making it the perfect listening guide for both old fans and discoverers of his music for the very first time.

Tommy Gunnarsson has been a music journalist for 25 years, writing primarily for Swedish publications, but is also a regular contributor to the UK based web magazine Pennyblackmusic since the early 00s. He bought his first single at the age of seven in 1985 (Limahl's 'The Neverending Story'), and he first discovered The Smiths in the mid-1990s. He attended Morrissey's first ever Swedish gig in Gothenburg in 1997, and a few years later he co-founded the Swedish and Nordic Smiths and Morrissey fan club Unloveable Boxers and was the president during its lifetime. He lives in Stockholm with his two children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gunnarsson, Tommy

Leseproben

Chapter 1

The Smiths (1984)

Personnel:

Morrissey: vocals

Johnny Marr: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, harmonica

Andy Rourke: bass guitar

Mike Joyce: drums, tambourine

Paul Carrack: piano, organ (on ‘Reel Around the Fountain’, ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’ and ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’)

Annalisa Jablonska: voice (‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ and ‘Suffer Little Children’)

Caryn Gough: sleeve layout

Morrissey: sleeve concept

Joe Dallesandro: cover star

Recorded at Pluto (Manchester), Strawberry (Stockport), Eden (London), Matrix (London)

John Porter: producer (except ‘Hand in Glove’), remixer (‘Hand in Glove’)

The Smiths: producers (‘Hand in Glove’)

Playing time: 45:36

Label: Rough Trade

Release date: February 20th 1984

Highest chart position: UK: 2

After releasing their acclaimed debut single ‘Hand in Glove’ in 1983, the pressure was surely on for the four members of The Smiths. Their label Rough Trade had extremely high hopes for their newest find, and pop fans all over the UK thought that their upcoming debut album would be something really spectacular. And they had every reason to believe so. The songs were there, the band was good, and gaining a reputation as a live act. But it didn’t turn out quite as everyone expected.

After signing with Rough Trade, the band released the debut single and were soon preparing to enter the studio to record their first full-length record. The label boss, Geoff Travis, suggested that they might use Troy Tate (former guitarist with The Teardrop Explodes, whose frontman Julian Cope would later have a few minor hits of his own) as their producer, and since the band hardly had any experience in the studio, they thought that it sounded great. Sadly, the recordings they made with Tate (fourteen songs in all) were deemed to be too bad to release – they just didn’t seem to capture the band’s energetic live sound in a good way. After a remix was considered, the tapes were thrown away – though they have been released on unofficial bootlegs every now and then. Morrissey and his bandmates instead asked John Porter (who they met while recording a session for the BBC) to save the day. While his recordings was more acceptable, the recordings are far from great. Listening to the album now, it sounds really dense, quite far from the energetic live recordings available from the same period. Even Morrissey thought that it wasn’t good enough to put out, but since the recordings had been more expensive than planned, he had no choice. Being Morrissey, however, he went on to describe the album as a ‘landmark in the history of pop’ in the promotional interviews for the record.

Keeping in the tradition of having cult stars on their covers, Morrissey chose a photo of actor Joe Dallesandro, taken from Andy Warhol’s movie Flesh (1968), to decorate the front sleeve. The picture of a topless man also helped spark the flame of his associations with gay culture that would haunt Morrissey for more or less the rest of his career. But the main controversies surrounding this album would instead involve children.

‘Reel Around the Fountain’ (Morrissey/Marr)

The album kicks off with one of those controversial songs, with lyrics that were reportedly pedophilic (the B-side of ‘Hand in Glove’, ‘Handsome Devil’, was also accused of the same tendencies). Sure, the line ‘It’s time the tale was told / Of how you took a child / And you made him old’ may suggest something sinister, but the accusation seems a bit far-fetched. Morrissey strongly denied the accusation, and it blew over. While talking about the lyrics, it’s worth mentioning the line ‘You can pin and mount me like a butterfly’, which is supposedly a reference to John Fowles novel The Collector from 1963 (whose movie adaptation would provide the cover shot to the next Smiths single, ‘What Difference Does It Make?’), and also ‘I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice’, which is basically taken straight out of Shelagh Delaney’s excellent play (and later movie), A Taste of Honey (1958). Musically, the song starts off with Joyce’s steady drumbeat and then evolves into one of the slower songs on the album. The song also features one of the rare guest appearances on a Smiths record, as Paul Carrack (at that time playing with Nick Lowe, but also a member of Ace, Squeeze and Mike and The Mechanics) plays the piano and organ. Morrissey’s former girlfriend, Annalisa Jablonska, also adds some backing vocals. The song was originally planned to be The Smiths’ second single, but when the label heard the new song ‘This Charming Man’, which the band recorded for a John Peel session, they changed their mind.

‘You’ve Got Everything Now’ (Morrissey/Marr)

This, a fairly straightforward pop song, features some really classic Morrissey lyrics, ‘I’ve never had a job / Because I never wanted one’, and ‘I don’t want a lover / I just want to be seen in the back of your car.’ In interviews, he often talked about how he could never imagine working for a living (that is, having a ‘regular’ job), and this song is surely a comment on this, as well as on how he saw the world around him turning more and more materialistic, and that riches don’t make people happy (‘I’ve seen you smile / But I never really heard you laugh’).

‘Miserable Lie’ (Morrissey/Marr)

This early live favourite starts out slowly, but then suddenly changes tempo and finishes at a much more furious pace. Lyrically, songs like these were part of the reason why the journalists at the time (and the fans) started wondering whether Morrissey’s lyrics were autobiographical or not. Some of them obviously weren’t, but when writing about losing the love of your life or about the longing for love, it all seemed a lot closer to home. Lines like ‘I know I need hardly say / How much I love your casual way / Oh, but please put your tongue away’ and ‘I need advice / Nobody ever looks at me twice’ (the latter sung in a somewhat stretched falsetto – no wonder the band always used to close their live sets with this one) sure sound like something that might have happened in young Steven’s life.

‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ (Morrissey/Marr)

Taking its title from Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, the lyrics reverse a more traditional (but nevertheless sad) situation as a girl pressures her boyfriend into having sex with her, though he ends up losing her anyway: ‘Then on the sand / Another man, he takes her hand /... / I lost my faith in womanhood.’ Curiously, Morrissey then ends up quoting himself in the song’s coda, when he wails, ‘Hand in glove / The sun shines out of our behinds’. The version of the song recorded with Troy Tate later surfaced in 1987 when it was released as a B-side to the single ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’ (from the album Strangeways, Here We Come), with cello provided by Audrey Riley.

‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’ (Morrissey/Marr)

Originally meant to be the album’s title track (it was planned to be called ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’ during the Troy Tate sessions), this is another one of the alleged ‘pedophilic’ lyrics. And sure, if you listen closely, lines like ‘There’s sadness in your beautiful eyes / Oh, your untouched, unsoiled, wondrous eyes’ and ‘Climb upon me knee, sonny boy / Although you’re only three, sonny boy / You’re – you’re mine / And your mother she just never knew’ (the latter inspired by Al Jolson’s ‘Sonny Boy’) could be interpreted as being about a man who’s having deeply inappropriate thoughts about a young child. But Morrissey also writes from the eyes of a child, with a lot of disturbing images that could be taken from a horror movie – a piano playing in an empty room, bloody cleavers, wavering shadows. The song was one of the very first Morrissey and Marr wrote together and was featured on the first demo they made with temporary drummer Simon Wolstencroft in the summer of 1982 (together with ‘Suffer Little Children’) before Rourke and Joyce joined the band. It was also one of three songs played during their live debut on October 4th that same year.

‘This Charming Man’ (Morrissey/Marr)

This, one of the band’s most famous songs, was not included on the original UK release of the album, but since it was thrown in on the US release and on all the subsequent reissues, I decided to include it here as well. See ‘This Charming Man’ single for details.

‘Still Ill’ (Morrissey/Marr)

This was another one of those early live favourites, and the band kept playing it more or less to the bitter end. You could easily think that the lyrics are referring to the hypochondriac tendencies of Morrissey, and that might as well be true. But it has also been interpreted as being about him realizing that the dreams he once had were now dead and gone, and there’s also a healthy dose of the typical Morrissey pessimism: ‘And if you must go to work...