1988 09 Smiths The Catalogue
IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE CATALOGUE, FORMER WORD-SMITH AND NOW, SIMPLY, WORDSMITH MORRISSEY REELS AROUND THE FOUNTAIN WITH RICHARD BOON, A QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION THAT DISCUSSES "RANK", RANK AND WHAT RANKLES.
First the obvious: why a live album now and why this particular performance?
Could you repeat that question in Welsh, please?
Fellyr cwestiwm amlwgyn paham'r albwm yma a paham y performiad yma'n arbennig?
Ah, now I understand!
There is surprisingly little of The Smiths' performances captured on film or on tape. This was recorded by the BBC for the Auntie Pong Show and bits of it were broadcast... in... the late Sixties... or whenever it was. It is used because it is available and good... very good, although there were brighter moments. Wolverhampton Civic springs to mind, when my cardigan went up in flames. Were you there?
Sadly, no. Mind you, live self-immolation could only have enhanced your career.
Hmm... perhaps. Incidentally, when I say "Auntie Pong", I do so with a smile on my heart and a song in my lips.
Do you see "Rank" as closing the book on The Smiths, or will more of their past be unfurled in future? Are there skeletons yet to come out of the closet?
Everything The Smiths ever committed to tape has now been released. Re-released even! Apart from a hidden version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside".
As far as skeletons in closets are concerned, well, please don't ask me, I'm new here.
Before its release on Rough Trade Records, you had considered releasing "Hand In Glove" on your own label. How did the Rough Trade release come about?
As far as starting a label was concerned, well, as you know to your cost, Richard, Northerners are apt to take on such things.* It was a fleeting idea and very much Johnny and Joe (Moss)'s notion. It seemed pointless when ultimately offered the Rough Trade machinery .The original "Hand In Glove" was financed by The Smiths...representative...Joe Moss, and took a day in - where else? - Strawberry Studios ...one day in Stockport to enliven history. I re-did the vocal a week later, if only to make a point of starting as stroppily as I intended to continue.
As far as starting a label was concerned, well, as you know to your cost, Richard, Northerners are apt to take on such things.* It was a fleeting idea and very much Johnny and Joe (Moss)'s notion. It seemed pointless when ultimately offered the Rough Trade machinery .The original "Hand In Glove" was financed by The Smiths...representative...Joe Moss, and took a day in - where else? - Strawberry Studios ...one day in Stockport to enliven history. I re-did the vocal a week later, if only to make a point of starting as stroppily as I intended to continue.
The next day we took the train to London, to Rough Trade at the old Blenheim Crescent place. We waited for hours to then be told that Geoff (Travis) couldn't see us, so Johnny said, "Who Is Geoff Travis?" and someone pointed to a looming figure swarming down a corridor and Johnny raced after him and forced him to listen. Two hours later the record was cut.
After the single brought The Smiths to the attention of both the public and the industry, major labels were offering legendary sums for The Smiths, yet you signed to Rough Trade. Was it important for you to be on an independent label?
I was never aware of these legendary sums. Rough Trade's offer was the only one I ever saw. EMI had put us into the studio and we recorded "What Difference Does It Make?", "Handsome Devil" and "Miserable Lie". We presented the tapes at Manchester Square to the head of A&R at EMI... I can't
remember his name... Hugh Potty-head or something... and we were promptly rejected after one play. We were temporarily devastated, I had to sell three sheep and a cow in order to get to London, and we weren't even offered a digestive biscuit. Anyway, 18 months later one of those rejected songs made number 12 on Rough Trade, so it was a great victory and an interesting indication of how totally split the independent-major worlds were.
Were you aware of the independent sector and did it interest you at the time? Does it still?
Richard, would you please sit still.
As you know, I was not an unfamiliar face on the stairs of the New Hormones offices (Newton Street, Manchester), as a limbless teenager. It was then, very much, real independent art versus real major money and independent people were just much more my type. They watched BBC2, for instance. They knew Esma Cannon.*
Obviously, The Smiths' success both demonstrated the ability of the independent network to sell and chart product, and contributed to its increasing strength, certainly in the UK market. What changes did you observe and how would you assess the strengths and weaknesses of the independent structure?
The Smiths' success proved that the network could provide for a large, loyal, waiting audience. But I wonder how independent companies could imagine breaking a group that doesn't have a fiercely loyal audience? Is it possible?
Independents tend to shelter groups who, themselves, go out and work, work, work. I wonder why independents haven't yet produced a studio-bound TOTP-created group?
Are your criticisms as equally applicable to the performance of major labels, in your experience?
Once again, because of having an earnestly devoted audience ready and willing, EMI have not needed to employ any desperate promotional methods in order to sell my records. I have no real criticisms of EMI thus far, but I can't imagine a young and powerlessly unknown artist being given the key to the door, as it were.
After the single brought The Smiths to the attention of both the public and the industry, major labels were offering legendary sums for The Smiths, yet you signed to Rough Trade. Was it important for you to be on an independent label?
I was never aware of these legendary sums. Rough Trade's offer was the only one I ever saw. EMI had put us into the studio and we recorded "What Difference Does It Make?", "Handsome Devil" and "Miserable Lie". We presented the tapes at Manchester Square to the head of A&R at EMI... I can't
remember his name... Hugh Potty-head or something... and we were promptly rejected after one play. We were temporarily devastated, I had to sell three sheep and a cow in order to get to London, and we weren't even offered a digestive biscuit. Anyway, 18 months later one of those rejected songs made number 12 on Rough Trade, so it was a great victory and an interesting indication of how totally split the independent-major worlds were.
Were you aware of the independent sector and did it interest you at the time? Does it still?
Richard, would you please sit still.
As you know, I was not an unfamiliar face on the stairs of the New Hormones offices (Newton Street, Manchester), as a limbless teenager. It was then, very much, real independent art versus real major money and independent people were just much more my type. They watched BBC2, for instance. They knew Esma Cannon.*
Obviously, The Smiths' success both demonstrated the ability of the independent network to sell and chart product, and contributed to its increasing strength, certainly in the UK market. What changes did you observe and how would you assess the strengths and weaknesses of the independent structure?
The Smiths' success proved that the network could provide for a large, loyal, waiting audience. But I wonder how independent companies could imagine breaking a group that doesn't have a fiercely loyal audience? Is it possible?
Independents tend to shelter groups who, themselves, go out and work, work, work. I wonder why independents haven't yet produced a studio-bound TOTP-created group?
Are your criticisms as equally applicable to the performance of major labels, in your experience?
Once again, because of having an earnestly devoted audience ready and willing, EMI have not needed to employ any desperate promotional methods in order to sell my records. I have no real criticisms of EMI thus far, but I can't imagine a young and powerlessly unknown artist being given the key to the door, as it were.
Knowing that despite the chart success of independent artists, radio play seems still to be a problem. Would you still "hang the DJ”?
Radio stations are not public services and have no duty to the Top Forty... they do not necessarily play the records that the public elect into the chart and they never ever, never ever play records on independent labels. Once you know this, you can safely get on with The Archers.
In the past, you refused to make promotional films. Since The Smiths' work with Derek Jarman, you've gone on to make videos for your solo recordings almost, it seems, as a matter of course. Is this a change of heart, or something you're now obliged to do? How do you feel about this - and how do you approach making them?
The obligation is not to make a video, but to make a video of which your record company approves.
Pop video is a very stupid genre. No one really respects it. I once said that a drunken goat could produce a Duran Duran video, and I still believe that, only these days the goat need not necessarily be alive.
When Derek Jarman made three films for The Smiths, I don't think anyone expected them to be popular - how could they be? Jarman was far too talented.
I'd sooner fry an egg than make a video. Tim Broad. who directed "Girlfriend In A Coma", "I Started Something I Couldn't Finish", "Suedehead" and "Everyday Is Like Sunday" has made things very easy for me, because he is a true artist with interesting ideas. But this is also the reason why I don't think he'll make many more "pop videos".
I didn't say that.
In the past, you refused to make promotional films. Since The Smiths' work with Derek Jarman, you've gone on to make videos for your solo recordings almost, it seems, as a matter of course. Is this a change of heart, or something you're now obliged to do? How do you feel about this - and how do you approach making them?
The obligation is not to make a video, but to make a video of which your record company approves.
Pop video is a very stupid genre. No one really respects it. I once said that a drunken goat could produce a Duran Duran video, and I still believe that, only these days the goat need not necessarily be alive.
When Derek Jarman made three films for The Smiths, I don't think anyone expected them to be popular - how could they be? Jarman was far too talented.
I'd sooner fry an egg than make a video. Tim Broad. who directed "Girlfriend In A Coma", "I Started Something I Couldn't Finish", "Suedehead" and "Everyday Is Like Sunday" has made things very easy for me, because he is a true artist with interesting ideas. But this is also the reason why I don't think he'll make many more "pop videos".
I didn't say that.
Presentation has always been important in your work. Do you still have the same degree of control over this aspect of your activity? How far are you prepared to compromise with marketing and promotions demands and is there any pressure to do so?
I still work on all manner of artwork with Jo Slee at Rough Trade, and Jo still works with Caryn Gough who of course toiled so brilliantly over all Smiths layout. If Jo and I no longer worked together I would possibly take very heavy drugs and she would prosper remarkably.
Most artwork is presented to EMI from Jo, including press ads, so at the moment I have no worries.
Also. EMI have, much to their credit, presented absolutely no promotion demands to me, which means that I can sit around all day drinking Evian water.
Everyone knows you're a fairly demanding character yourself. Have your expectations changed in moving from an independent to a major? Have they been met?
Richard. I believe Rough Trade Japan is a lift in a small building. Is this true?
Walk into any Japanese restaurant and you'll find whale penis on the menu. They call it Takeri.
And you wonder why The Smiths never went to Japan!
Walk into any Japanese restaurant and you'll find whale penis on the menu. They call it Takeri.
And you wonder why The Smiths never went to Japan!
The last situation I expected to find myself in was... a solo artist on HMV!
Signing to EMI wasn't a financially dazzling move (are they ever?), but everyone has been very supportive so far, especially Murray Chalmers my press officer.
And what can the public expect next from you?
They can expect me to grow old rapidly and open an Animal Aid stall on Rochdale Market.
Thank you.
Goodnight and thank you.
* Morrissey is referring to an independent label based in Manchester run by The Catalogue's editor in a previous incarnation.
Signing to EMI wasn't a financially dazzling move (are they ever?), but everyone has been very supportive so far, especially Murray Chalmers my press officer.
And what can the public expect next from you?
They can expect me to grow old rapidly and open an Animal Aid stall on Rochdale Market.
Thank you.
Goodnight and thank you.
* Morrissey is referring to an independent label based in Manchester run by The Catalogue's editor in a previous incarnation.
"RANK"
Freelance journalist Nick Kent tackles and pays tribute to The Smiths on the occasion of their
first live LP. With an anthology of some of his past seminal music journalism currently due from
Faber & Faber, he is preparing to work on an authorised biography of the group.
In Manchester this summer, the first Smiths convention is held, effortlessly attracting thousands of the faithful. In London the 'New Musical Express' tirelessly trumpets every emergent possibility of a Smiths reunion, each wafer of dubious information a certain sales booster. From elsewhere in the country, the 'Daily Mirror' finds and runs a news-story in which a mother blames The Smiths for the suicide of her teenaged son ("He jumped in front of a train"... "There were Smiths records in his collection").
Little over a year after their exeunt, this force that we call The Smiths and their journey into the annals of immortality and cultural infamy continue ever upwards, categorically unstoppable. Their parting left a chillingly large hole in the pop landscape - one no rival act has shown even the vaguest dint of flair in helping to fill, and one, more urgently, that our Morrissey is having difficulty in supplanting, with his rather 'speculative' solo work this year. This is understandable, really. The Smiths were a phenomenon, after all, and like all other departed of their ilk, their very absence orchestrates an ever-spiralling 'appreciation' of the same.
Further orchestration will doubtless ensue with the availability this September of "Rank", the much-anticipated live album, recorded almost two years ago during the group's final tour. First and foremost, like all The Smiths' records, "Rank" is a 'statement'. I mean, who else in this age of compulsory technology would dare release, as their one and only live album, an undoctored tape of a single live show already broadcast on BBC Radio 1? Some may accuse them of sloth and abject indifference to the desires of their fans (more later), yet The Smiths have always been committed to presenting their music in as 'unadorned' a way as possible and "Rank", after all, simply takes that attitude to its "warts and all" conclusion.
So - what's it like? Well, it's good enough, good enough. "Rank", you see, is mostly, unabashedly, hard rock, a fact that will undoubtedly surprise many detractors who never heard them live.
By 1986 the Morrissey-Marr partnership, having already well-founded The Smiths' archetypal plangent style, seemed bent on usurping a more orthodox rock backdrop for Morrissey's lyrical persona to niftily subvert. This was apparent from much on "The Queen Is Dead" album and, particularly, the release of "Panic".
The former's title track kicks off proceedings (after an opening salvo of Prokofiev piped over the PA as introduction) as a bracing exercise in punk clamour, Johnny Man's scowling wah-wah guitar inflections underscoring Morrissey's scathing political burlesque of a lyric. This is immediately, noticeably bravura, not that silly shallow stuff which begat the term 'rockist', but the real article; music hard, charged and self-possessed, answerable only to its own sense of unstoppable momentum. This sets the tenor of the whole album, though judged individually, some tracks are less convincing than others.
Little over a year after their exeunt, this force that we call The Smiths and their journey into the annals of immortality and cultural infamy continue ever upwards, categorically unstoppable. Their parting left a chillingly large hole in the pop landscape - one no rival act has shown even the vaguest dint of flair in helping to fill, and one, more urgently, that our Morrissey is having difficulty in supplanting, with his rather 'speculative' solo work this year. This is understandable, really. The Smiths were a phenomenon, after all, and like all other departed of their ilk, their very absence orchestrates an ever-spiralling 'appreciation' of the same.
Further orchestration will doubtless ensue with the availability this September of "Rank", the much-anticipated live album, recorded almost two years ago during the group's final tour. First and foremost, like all The Smiths' records, "Rank" is a 'statement'. I mean, who else in this age of compulsory technology would dare release, as their one and only live album, an undoctored tape of a single live show already broadcast on BBC Radio 1? Some may accuse them of sloth and abject indifference to the desires of their fans (more later), yet The Smiths have always been committed to presenting their music in as 'unadorned' a way as possible and "Rank", after all, simply takes that attitude to its "warts and all" conclusion.
So - what's it like? Well, it's good enough, good enough. "Rank", you see, is mostly, unabashedly, hard rock, a fact that will undoubtedly surprise many detractors who never heard them live.
By 1986 the Morrissey-Marr partnership, having already well-founded The Smiths' archetypal plangent style, seemed bent on usurping a more orthodox rock backdrop for Morrissey's lyrical persona to niftily subvert. This was apparent from much on "The Queen Is Dead" album and, particularly, the release of "Panic".
The former's title track kicks off proceedings (after an opening salvo of Prokofiev piped over the PA as introduction) as a bracing exercise in punk clamour, Johnny Man's scowling wah-wah guitar inflections underscoring Morrissey's scathing political burlesque of a lyric. This is immediately, noticeably bravura, not that silly shallow stuff which begat the term 'rockist', but the real article; music hard, charged and self-possessed, answerable only to its own sense of unstoppable momentum. This sets the tenor of the whole album, though judged individually, some tracks are less convincing than others.
"Panic", "Boy With The Thorn...", "What She Said" - all have received better live airings, whilst "Still Ill, the only inclusion from the first album, seems to drag slightly. "Rank"'s ascendant moments level all this out. "Rusholme Ruffians" and "London" both hail from the band's most boisterous canon of music-making, yet here the twin measures of force and focus (Marr’s high-energy guitar pop savvy; Morrissey's blunt idiosyncratic rhymes, naked hectoring persona and stabbingly acute imagery) merge into performances of epic substance. On "Rusholme" the music seems to spin faster and faster, an aural
Ferris wheel giddily threatening the same mindless violence its lyric details, whilst on "London" it hurtles along like the train in the lyric, running on fearful uncertainties and portents of doom.
"Rank'"s downside occurs when one searches for examples of the group’s more classically plangent approach. There's a fine "Cemetry Gates", the noble failure of "I Know It's Over" (the studio version will never be equalled) and, best of all, "Ask", here presented as the joyous pop "La Bamba" for the
Eighties.
It's here that serious grievances have to be aired. The Smiths were one of rock music's greatest live groups, whose ability to achieve a genuinely thrilling poignancy this live release only hints at glancingly. What this record lacks is the vital dimension of mystery and depth, that ultimate virtue in The Smiths equation.
It's this absence that rankles far more than the fan’s disappointment at being seen-off with a live broadcast most of us have long since taped and filed away.
The point is this: The Smiths were the greatest rock band of the '80s because they seemed to function on sixteen cylinders when everybody was tootling along on four. "Rank" will do the job of topping the LP charts over here for a while to come and, I'll wager, it will finally truly break them in the States, because this is good bracing rock music loaded with cranky visions and authentic weirdness, and there is nothing musically in the air to remotely threaten its worth. In other words, "Rank" is The Smiths at eight
cylinders.
It's an indictment of "Rank" that they've not allowed themselves to do better, yet still some testament to their greatness that at half their strength, they still sound so right.
Nick Kent © 1988
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