Not Like Any Other Love: The Smiths The Culture Show

Hello, you little charmers!

We're The Smiths - how d'you do?

This programme contains some strong language.

They're the most important, most intelligent,

most idiosyncratically English and most sorely missed

pop band of the 1980s.

If you don't agree with that, you probably think

they're the most miserable act of the era.

Each to their own.

# You shut your mouth

# How can you say

# I go about things the wrong way... #

It was 30 years ago this week that Hand In Glove hit the airwaves,

announcing the arrival of four lads from Manchester

who couldn't easily be placed in the pop pigeonholes of the day.

# Hand in glove

# The sun shines out of our behinds... #

The Smiths produced four studio albums in as many years,

crammed with 16 hit singles.

Their music made you laugh, cry and think,

and it left an indelible mark on a generation,

before taking a bow in 1987,

leaving behind an exquisite corpse of words,

images and sounds.

For me, growing up in Manchester in the 1980s,

The Smiths were my band. Morrissey was my idol.

There I am, aged 13, the budding reporter, with him -

the day I wangled an interview with Morrissey for my school newspaper.

The Smiths came to mean so much more to me than your average pop group -

and I wasn't alone.

They were IT.

They were as big and as important as The Jam and the Sex Pistols -

and The Beatles.

It was just something really refreshing,

really new, really simple... and beautiful.

You try to pass on good things to your kids, and a good thing

to pass on is The Smiths' music and what they stood for.

There's a lot of guff, romantic guff, talked about rock'n'roll.

But I do think that The Smiths were a life-changing band -

certainly changed my life.

The Smiths were the product of a specific time and place.

They formed in Manchester in 1982,

when the post-punk generation were still facing no future,

as the Iron Lady advanced on the north's traditional industries.

Unemployment topped 3 million for the first time since the 1930s,

and if that wasn't bad enough,

Eurovision was the hot ticket in Harrogate that spring.

# I could have taken one step further and I would have been there... #

Against this dismal backdrop of hardship and crap pop music,

for a lost generation, The Smiths arrived like an answered prayer.

You've got to see them, for me, anyway,

in the context of the darkest point of the long, dark night

of the northern soul, under Thatcher's

kind of one-woman social experiment

to crush the north of England underfoot.

That alienation of people in the north feeling that

the establishment was against them, the government was against them,

that was very, very pronounced.

And then you hear that sound, that sparkling, iridescent guitar sound.

And that voice, that operatic voice...

Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate...

As a way of saying to the world, "Here we are,"

it's hard to beat This Charming Man.

# Punctured bicycle

# On a hillside desolate

# Will nature make a man of me yet?

# When in this charming car

# This cha-arming man... #

When I first seen them on Top Of The Pops,

they were just so odd.

Johnny Marr looked like this classic rock star -

you know, the big, red semi-acoustic guitar

and a turtle-neck, and I was like, wow! And he had a...

the Brian Jones hairdo.

Yet Morrissey just looked like

something that had never been seen before, with the hearing aid

and flowers hanging out of his back pocket.

They just kind of exploded, didn't they?

# I would go out tonight

# But I haven't got a stitch to wear... #

The Smiths emerged into this uncertain arena

that was early '80s Britain like a fully-formed gang,

and invited you to join - to enter another world, their world.

And the invitation came directly from their gladioli-wielding leader.

I feel The Smiths create their world,

and not many groups do that.

And you can either go in,

or you can say, "No, I want Diana Ross instead."

And it's your choice.

Here was no ordinary alpha male rock front man.

Morrissey fearlessly broke the mould,

and was a beacon to all those struggling to fit

into the existing '80s stereotypes,

like market trader and aspiring fashion designer

Lancashire lad Wayne Hemingway.

# This charming man... #

30 years ago, Camden market, you were here with your first stall?

Yeah, the first stall was just over there in the corner.

Er, it was a place where...

All the club culture from all around the UK and Europe

would come here to buy their old DMs,

to buy their second-hand long coats, their National Health specs -

the whole thing of the Morrissey look.

This was the first time where the idea that you could wear

your dad's and your mum's or your grandma's clothes

and mix it with a bit of new, and mix all these different decades,

and come up with something that was different.

Who did that speak to at the time,

who did that allow to come into the tribe?

Whatever persuasion you were, you know. If you were gay,

you could like the way that he unbuttoned his shirt,

and the gladioli. If you were a bit hard, you could like

the quiff, but it all kind of crossed,

and he knew what he was doing, but it was how he put it together.

That's the whole secret of cool,

is how you take things and you put it together.

He may have been down with the underground,

but Morrissey's effortless ascent to pop idol status

also won the hearts of mainstream kids in Britain.

But unlike other chart pin-ups,

Morrissey was also after their minds.

In Marsden, North Yorkshire, it was the words rather than the image

that captured the imagination of Simon Armitage.

The moment I start listening to them,

I'm transported back to, you know, '83, '84.

Did it speak to you and where you were in your life at that time?

It absolutely did. I mean, I don't think I realised it then,

erm, but...you know, it was the language.

And I remember listening to Reel Around The Fountain,

not quite sure what it was about, but thinking,

nobody else is this smart.

# It's time the tale were told

# Of how you took a child

# And you made him old... #

It's such a peculiar song. It starts with a confession,

almost an allegation, you know, "It's time the tale were told..."

But then it develops into this slightly subversive celebration of,

you know, sexual awakening and a loss of innocence.

# 15 minutes with you

# Well, I wouldn't say no... #

And it's like a lot of the great Smiths songs, it's a fantasy,

and it never actually happened.

It's all about imagining what something would have been like.

And on that level, it's hugely appealing to anybody

who's ever felt any kind of loneliness, or...

that they're on the margin somewhere.

# Oh, reel around the fountain... #

The Smiths gave you a sense of, "You're not on your own."

Well, it was like they were saying "You are on your own,

"but there's a lot of you out there."

MUSIC: "Cemetery Gates" by The Smiths

A song like Cemetery Gates in the hands of another band

would be a terrible, sort of morbid piece of work.

What you get instead is two speccy intellectuals

trying to out-quote each other.

It's the opposite of what you would expect from somebody of that age

in a cemetery writing a song.

Morrissey's songs were packed with hidden meaning for fans

to discover and debate as his fantasy worlds collided with a very

real-world around him in post-industrial Manchester.

# Park the car at the side of the road

# You should know

# Time's tide will smother you... #

The North figured large in these songs.

They're shot through with a sort of Manchester melodrama.

These were lyrics just full of the details of everyday, domestic life.

# When you walk without ease

# On these

# Streets where you were raised... #

'The Smiths joined a long tradition of British literature,

'theatre and film that can be described as Northern Realism

'and is epitomised by the British New Wave cinema

'of the '50s and '60s.'

'Morrissey particularly was clearly

'really immersed in that kitchen sink drama,'

British New Wave, those black-and-white movies like

Billy Liar and Saturday Night And Sunday Morning,

and particularly A Taste of Honey.

A Taste of Honey was first performed in 1958 and written by

Salford playwright Shelagh Delaney when she was just 18 years old.

The film adaptation, starring Rita Tushingham,

brought Delaney national recognition and won a raft of awards.

Delaney's treatment of issues like race,

gender and homosexuality and simply her depiction of

working-class northerners was radical at the time.

Dream of me.

Dreamt of you last night.

-Fell out of bed twice.

-Ta-ra!

Morrissey's admiration for Shelagh Delaney

bordered on the excessive.

In way of tribute, he condensed the entire

story of A Taste of Honey into the song This Night Has Opened My Eyes.

# In a river the colour of lead

# Immerse the baby's head

# Wrap her up in The News Of the World

# Dump her on a doorstep, girl... #

I became very interested in film about people in the North,

specifically, with their tail trapped in the door, almost,

trying to get out, trying to get on, trying to be somebody.

Trying to be seen.

And I found that very appealing.

The Smiths' identification with the grit of Northern life gave them

a harder, darker edge than their chart contemporaries and,

regardless of whether songs turn up today on movie soundtracks and

even wedding vows, they'll for ever

be anchored in those Salford streets.

They came from these streets and they sounded like it.

They talked about the bleakness of it and lack of opportunities,

sometimes, and the miserableness of it,

but they also talked about the joy.

They made it beautiful, this place.

'This bleakly beautiful atmosphere infused all aspects

'of The Smiths and it was visualised in their distinctive single

'and album covers, featuring images hand-picked by Morrissey himself.

'Jo Slee worked at Rough Trade Records

'and oversaw the design process.'

Basically, I would receive something like this, so it's effectively

a very full diagram with notations

of every single thing that he wanted,

including the Pantone colours and the typeface

and whether it was bold or italic.

Is this normal for a band to send in this level of detail?

Not in my experience.

Morrissey had a kind of artistic vision

that was really unique to him.

The band themselves never appeared in their artwork.

Taking the place of the standard group shot was

a procession of moody photographic portraits.

Bound together by their grainy, duotone colours,

and minimal use of text, the gallery of famous and

not so famous faces - and the odd bum - were an intimate scrapbook

of pin-ups Morrissey wanted to share with the world.

The cover stars seem to fall into two camps.

You have your tough, Northern female,

sort of uber-Coronation Street characters.

What does that tell you?

You tell me. What does that tell you?

He had a fantasy of what Northern Realism was about

and the real loving background that they portrayed,

-but I always had the feeling that he somehow hadn't had that.

-Mmm.

So there's a kind of nostalgia for something that perhaps

was never really there.

# Oh, Mother, I can feel... #

And with the male icons?

You can say homoerotic, if you want to,

but, for me, there was more to it than that.

# And as I climb into an empty bed

# Oh, well, enough said... #

It was about... Perhaps representative

of who he longed to be,

what was in his heart, really.

And that's another thing that makes them beautiful, I think,

is that they're all about

what Morrissey used to call his "unusable heart."

SHE LAUGHS

Morrissey used the power of the visual image to send

coded messages to the outside world.

However, when it came to burning issues that were close

to his "unusable heart", he was happy to resort

to a more direct approach.

Meat is murder. A very direct political message

and I was already a vegetarian by the time that came out,

but, you know, it converted a huge number of people to vegetarianism.

Put me that way for ten years.

# This beautiful creature must die

# This beautiful creature must die

# A death for no reason

# And death for no reason is murder... #

We feel that probably music should be used in order to make

serious statements, because so many groups sell

masses and masses of records

and don't raise people's level

of consciousness in any direction and we find that quite sinful.

MACHINE SCREECHES

What The Smiths brought was politics

that you could actually completely understand.

Meat is murder.

Anti-cruelty. Anti-Thatcher.

It was just a brilliant approach to politics, really.

If The Smiths were anti-anything,

it was the entire British establishment,

particularly the royal family and Thatcher's government.

Their 1986 album and its title song, The Queen Is Dead,

was their state of the nation address.

# The queen is dead, boys

# And it's so lonely on a limb... #

The Queen Is Dead I think musically is one of their most powerful

songs and has got a real sort of

anger bubbling below the surface.

For a certain section of people,

a certain generation of people, that did have a real impact.

# A crack on the head

# Is what you get for not asking... #

Few bands since The Smiths have so openly attacked the state

and their oppositional stance is still used as a stick to bash

the powers that be, even if those powers profess to be friends themselves.

As someone who claims to be an avid fan of The Smiths,

the Prime Minister will no doubt be rather upset this week to hear

that both Morrissey and Johnny Marr have banned him from liking them.

LAUGHTER

David Cameron purports to be a Smiths fan,

but I'm very sceptical that he actually ever was.

The Smiths are, of course, the archetypal student band.

If he wins tomorrow night's vote,

what songs does he think students will be listening to? Miserable Lie,

I Don't Owe You Anything or Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now?

CHEERING

I expect that if I turned up,

I probably wouldn't get This Charming Man.

And if I went with the Foreign Secretary,

probably William, It Was Really Nothing.

LAUGHTER

Are you saying that you can't be right wing and like The Smiths?

I think maybe some people just don't listen to the lyrics.

You know, there's a lot of Tories that like Eton Rifles

and don't seem to realise that it's not their school theme song.

'The Smiths will always be remembered for causing controversy,

'but, for many fans, Morrissey's political posturing

'and even his literary lyrics were mere dressing for the real art

'being produced by the band.'

My love of most things musical is strictly for the music.

The shit going on around it, that's irrelevant to me.

Morrissey was going on about poetry and vegetarianism

and, you know, Johnny was going on about The Rolling Stones

and T Rex and The Stooges and I was like...

"Hmm, yeah."

# Each household appliance

# Is like a new science in my town... #

Where does Johnny Marr's guitar playing rank for you?

I've seen him in the studio do things that are

so simple on a guitar,

yet so...difficult at the same time.

That does your head in, do you know what I mean?

MUSIC: "Nowhere Fast" by The Smiths

How hard is it to play like Johnny Marr?

It's impossible, you can't.

You know, if you're making a record and the producer's saying,

"Try some of that Johnny Marr stuff,"

you'd better get on the phone and get him,

because you can't do it.

PHONE RINGS

That's not him now, by the way.

He invented the style which I'd never heard before,

it's a true original.

Johnny Marr's riffs are a thing of legend in British indie rock, but to

credit him as simply a jangly guitar hero would be faint praise indeed.

# And when I'm lying in my bed... #

Marr is without doubt the absolute gel that binds each track together.

He somehow uses the guitar like an orchestrator uses an orchestra.

'Classical conductor Charles Hazlewood was still

'a school choirboy when he recognised

'the sophistication in The Smiths' arrangements.'

So let's say you've got, you know, a strummed semi-acoustic guitar,

which definitely is a kind of binding agent.

And then elements of lead just coming in and out.

Bits of phrase picked out, the odd note, maybe a chord here and there.

Shafts of different kinds of light being just exposed to the whole,

just to add extra elements or point something up.

It's a really, really brilliant and rare talent.

Morrissey and Marr were more Elton and Bernie than

Lennon and McCartney in the way they wrote,

Marr producing cassette tapes of musical arrangements

for Morrissey to overlay his free-form vocal melodies.

Whether they knew it or not,

the resulting sound tapped deep into our national psyche.

We're a melancholy race. We're quietly glum.

But we're sort of quietly accepting.

We've never had a revolution, after all.

There's a key element, I think, to The Smiths' musical or

harmonic or melodic style,

which I think sums this up.

Basically...

That's a consonant chord, a basic chord in root position.

Now, there's an extra note you can add to it, which is

that, which is a seventh.

Now, either in its pure form like that, or flattened,

it's right at the heart of the blues.

You know, it's the single most important kind of blue note

in the blues and it's sort of completely redolent of longing,

of a sense of sort of dissatisfaction

which you don't find in a lot of other guitar-based songs.

I mean, the Beatles were much less full

of these kinds of chords than The Smiths.

CHEERING AND SHOUTING

MUSIC: "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" by The Smiths

# Take me out tonight... #

The history of pop is littered with sad songs,

but few acts have been able to capture this emotion

and turn it into an arena-filling anthem quite like The Smiths.

# Driving in your car

# I never, never want to go home

# Because I haven't got one

# Anymore... #

I wondered how many times people have either taped

or burnt or downloaded

or written out the lyrics to that song and sent it to somebody else.

It's just a beautiful, brilliant, all-purpose pro forma love song.

# Take me out tonight... #

-CHARLES:

-A cool kind of anthemic quality that comes in the chorus,

the double-decker bus thing,

it's that moment when all these slightly murky chords...

..all with a little bit of dirt in them

and then you get that little break.

# And if a double-decker bus

# Crashes into us

# To die by your side

# Is such a heavenly way to die... #

Suddenly it's kind of like lovely, primary colour, like a...

You know, it's just a lovely phrase.

Of course people are going to wrap their lungs around that.

We're all pulled together in this kind of wonderful sense

of mass communal indulgence.

# And if a ten-ton truck

# Kills the both of us

# To die by your side

# Well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine... #

Halfway through there's, you know, 6,000 people singing it.

You're thinking, "Essentially this is a song about death!"

And yet, because it's The Smiths,

it's got a kind of spring in its step.

You know, it's E major. That's a nice, bright, open key.

If you're going to get killed by a ten-ton truck,

-you want it in E major, I suppose.

-I think you probably do!

And to sing along with it.

I'd like an afternoon in a hotel with some cream tea and you playing this in the corner.

HE LAUGHS

It's got to be raining outside.

We probably need to be in Manchester, as well.

# There is a light that never goes out

# There is a light that never goes out... #

The universal appeal of The Smiths' hits travelled

way beyond Manchester city limits, as a fervent following spread

amongst angst-ridden teens across the world.

In the States, a gun-toting fan once attempted to hijack

Colorado's airwaves in a bid to have back-to-back Smiths records

replace the standard top 40 fare.

# Born in the USA... #

He didn't actually make it past reception

at KRXY radio in Denver, but the incident passed into legend.

And there are battalions of other like-minded,

but, thankfully, unarmed,

high school kids across the pond whose lives have been

saved by this perversely exotic group from Manchester, England.

I grew up in the sort of Bermuda Triangle

where Bruce Springsteen meets Jon Bon Jovi.

A culture where you're expected to be a winner

and be on the cheerleading team and to be perfect and blonde and perky.

The Smiths were saying,

"You know, it's all right to be a bit of a nerd

"and wear spectacles and not have a date and be on your own."

They created a club of outsiders

and...I felt like part of that club,

even 3,000-odd miles away.

This world of Whalley Range and Rusholme

and '60s film references, did it resonate with you?

Did you have any idea what this world was?

I was desperate to decode everything.

So yes, I had to go away and find out what Tizer was

and where Newport Pagnell was and, you know, Rusholme.

But all these things were really romantic and quite glamorous.

I mean, I just thought, "If I can just get to Manchester,

"then all of my prayers will be answered."

# Panic on the streets of London... #

'Well, Amy finally did make it to Manchester,

'and settled in London, where she's now the ringleader of

'a new generation of obsessive Smiths fans.

'She's written a stage play devoted to Morrissey and, every now

'and then, she rounds up her fellow aficionados

'at events like Smithsfest

'at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts,

'to worship and celebrate their band.'

Good evening, apostles,

and welcome to Smithsfest at the ICA!

# But there's panic on the streets of Carlisle

# Dublin, Dundee, Humberside

# I wonder to myself... #

My mum was actually Morrissey's cleaner!

CHEERING

This is inside Smithsfest, a very bizarre gathering of people.

You can have your photograph mocked up outside Salford Lads Club,

or your quiff resurrected.

-Hi.

-Hi.

Let's give it a go.

# Burn down the disco

# Hang the blessed DJ... #

You are done, ready and quiffed up.

20 years since I last had a quiff.

How's it look?

# Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ

# Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ... #

Can I have a round of applause for my necklace, please?

CHEERING

# Hang the DJ, hang the DJ... #

Hardly Salford Lads Club.

But The Smiths are going to be imitated,

analysed and celebrated in there until the small hours.

If quiffing your hair up

and dressing up like Morrissey isn't your bag,

we can all celebrate that it was 30 years ago

this weekend that The Smiths invited us into their achingly beautiful,

melancholic, oppositional world.

It's a light which will never go out.

# Sing me to sleep

# Sing me to sleep

# I'm tired and I

# I want to go to bed... #

Like all the great bands, it's not something that you can sum up

in one nifty sentence and say, "It's because of that." It's impossible.

So people like you spend 30 years trying

and they'll probably take another 30 years.

We'll still come back to the same thing -

they were just fucking great.

# Sing to me

# I don't want to wake up

# On my own any more... #

There isn't a room to The Libertines like this anywhere in the world.

There isn't room to Spandau Ballet anywhere in the world like this.

I mean, whatever you think of it,

it gives you an idea of just what they meant to...us.

I was going to say "them", but us.

# Deep in the cell of my heart

# I really

# Want to go

It's easy to go, "This is a bit silly," but this is

an expression of people's love for them, know what I mean?

You and I both know when we leave here

-we're going to have our photo taken...

-Of course we are!

That's it, just there.

# Well, there must be

# Well, there must be... #

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