1987 02 28 Smiths "The World Won't Listen" NME Review

WORLD SHUT YOUR MOUTH

THE SMITHS

The World Won't Listen (Rough Trade)

WE COULD talk for a thousand years, but nothing quite explains why you just want to yell with joy when you hear the opening bars of 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' or why you so warmly purr to maudlin singalongs like 'Asleep'. Hey! Lost in music and lost for words, you'll yell or purr but all you can understand is that The Smiths are special and you'll hug them to your heart.

Take a look out there at those pop charts, those wastelands of irrelevant pap, and it's clear that we wouldn't have much if we didn't have the Smiths. The Smiths are best when they are high in the charts, when their songs are so concise and so POP in their appeal, when the B-sides are slinky, slow numbers.

And they are best up there because then they are fighting back, worrying the tabloids, providing a welcome antidote to the useless placebo of modern pop; that which serves only to decorate this country, this country so cruelly divided into tyrants and paupers. The tyrants despise the unhappy and damn the non-conformist. The Smiths answer back.

The Smiths succeed because they are a singles band and a rock band, with a weirdly wide audience, half lads and half lasses. And it's in the mix. The singer thinks they are a pop group, the guitarist thinks they are a rock band. When Johnny Marr rocks out Keith Richard grins and passes him a plectrum. And if I picked out some more bits of rock. I'd throw you the 'Metal Guru' influence in 'Panic' and the Thin Lizzy bit in 'Shoplifters Of The World Unite' (it comes just after the music stops a second, a third of the way through).

It's Morrissey, old swivel hips, who makes The Smiths extraordinary. He's widened the vocabulary of pop music, not just by what he sings about, but by the way he phrases it. He's luxuriated in words all the days of his life, and even the bleakest lyric is enlivened by the way he teases the meaning as he sings: It was dark as I drove the point home/And on cold leather seats/ Well, it suddenly struck me/I just might die with a smile on my face/After all."

There's a rough division on 'The World Won't Listen' between the wholly melancholy songs like 'Unlovable' and 'That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore', which are grouped together on one side, and the singles like 'Panic' and 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' on the other.

The World Won't Listen' is the natural heir to 'Hatful Of Hollow' except that these tracks are collected more or less straight and unadulturated from previous vinyl releases, with the exception of a version of 'Stretch Out And Wait' with different lyrics to the track on the B-side of 'Shakespeare's Sister', and a completely new song 'You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby'. There's nothing here to compare with the splendour of 'How Soon Is Now', the storytelling power of'This Night Has Opened My Eyes' or the wide-eyed desire of 'Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want'; so it's unlikely to win any new recruits to the Smiths' cause. In the context of this compilation, 'Ask' and 'Shakespeare's Sister' seem like the two weakest Smiths singles; 'Shakespeare's Sister' is a great title wasted.

But, in their finest moments, The Smiths make music that tugs on your memory and gives you great hope; the last Romantics, they provoke a more direct emotional response than any other band in the world. And it's fitting that 'Rubber Ring' should come at the end of this LP. It's an elegy for a music-filled past, a look back on the lifelines provided by the "songs that made you smile and the songs that made you cry."

We're halfway to Paradise, here, now, with The Smiths.

Dave Haslam