The Smiths – Romance, riffs and English melancholy

Stretford 1982 to Strangeways 1987: four albums, one argument

In May 1982 Johnny Marr walked up to Steven Morrissey’s door in Stretford with a proposal and a pile of records. Manchester already had noise. What it got, within months, was a band built on Marr’s bright chords and Morrissey’s lonely boasts. Andy Rourke’s bass and Mike Joyce’s drums locked in behind them. The name was plain on purpose. The Smiths. Four people, no costume except the flowers Morrissey would later swing, and a refusal to sound American.

Rough Trade released Hand in Glove in May 1983, a single that smelled of bedsit urgency and already had the whole argument: Marr’s bright chord, Morrissey’s lonely boast. “This Charming Man”, that October, produced by John Porter, put the band on British television and made the riff famous before the album existed. The debut, The Smiths, arrived in February 1984. Hatful of Hollow, in November, gathered the radio sessions that many fans still treat as the real first record. The songs were short. The feelings were not.

Meat Is Murder, February 1985, went to number one in the UK. The title track is a sermon. The rest of the album is more dangerous because it is catchy: “The Headmaster Ritual”, “Barbarism Begins at Home”, a band that could write a hook and then use it to indict a school. Morrissey’s vegetarian stance was not a pose glued on. It was the same refusal that ran through the lyrics, a dislike of cruelty dressed as ordinary life. Marr’s guitars stayed melodic, which kept the sermon from becoming a lecture.

The Queen Is Dead, June 1986, is the record where the contradiction peaks. The title song is a sprint. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is a death wish sung like a valentine. “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”, “Cemetry Gates” with its misspelling left intact: Marr and Morrissey, with Stephen Street at the desk, made an album that is funny, grand and heartbroken in the same bar. English melancholy, in their hands, was not vague gloom. It was a riff with a punchline.

Strangeways, Here We Come came out in September 1987, after Marr had already left. They had recorded it in the spring as if the partnership still had a future, and the songs, “Girlfriend in a Coma”, “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”, “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish”, sound like people who know the door is closing and keep writing anyway. It is the last studio album. It does not sound like a defeat. It sounds like a band that had run out of ways to be in the same room.

The split was ugly in the way splits are when the songs are that good. Morrissey opened a solo career with Viva Hate in 1988. Marr played with Electronic, with The The, later with Modest Mouse and The Cribs, a guitarist who refused to become a museum of one band. In 1996 Mike Joyce won a High Court case over royalties against Morrissey and Marr. The music did not care about the judgment. The songs kept being learned by people who had not been born when “This Charming Man” was a new 12-inch.

Andy Rourke died on 19 May 2023. The bass lines, once the thing reviewers mentioned third, suddenly sounded like the spine they had always been. Joyce’s drumming, Rourke’s melody, Marr’s harmony guitars, Morrissey’s diction: the four parts only worked because none of them agreed to be background. That is the romance: not the flowers or the quiffs, but a pop group this tense writing songs this tender.

What remains is a short catalogue that still travels. Five years, four studio albums, a pile of singles, and a way of sounding English that later bands borrowed and could not quite fake. The melancholy is real. So is the riff. Drop the needle on the first bar of “How Soon Is Now?”, Marr’s tremolo guitar, and you know exactly which band you have walked into.