NME - "Life After Smiths"

LIFE AFTER SMITHS

Rough Trade this week release their first posthumous Smiths single (and reissue another), culminating a fortnight in which all the former members of the group - including Craig Gannon - have made their first, tentative, post-split moves.

Taken from the band’s recent ‘Strangeways Here We Come’ LP, the new 45 will be ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’. Its flip-sides are previously unreleased manifestations of familiar Smiths material.

The 7" will feature a version of ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’, gleaned from a 1983 session produced by Troy Tate.

The extra track on the 12" is a live run through ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’. Recorded at the Artists Against Apartheid concert at the Brixton Academy last winter, the song is apparently extended “both lyrically and musically”. The sleeve carries a shot of Avril Angers in the ’60s bonking-is-hell flick The Family Way.

Another glamorous ’60s film still - Billie Whitelaw in Charlie Bubbles - adorns the cover of the reactivated ‘William It Was Really Nothing’. Legal difficulties over that track’s original packaging led to the record’s withdrawal, and its unavailability over the past twelve months.

Both 7 and 12" will also carry the epic full-length rendering of ‘How Soon Is Now?’, while ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ will make up the number on the larger format.

Meanwhile, all The Smiths’ ex-members have been keeping themselves busy...

• Morrissey is currently in the studio, testing his new songwriting partnership with Stephen Street while working on material for his first solo releases. No concert work has been set up for the foreseeable future, though it is understood that Morrissey will be recording a Janice Long session for broadcast in early November.

• Messrs Rourke, Joyce and Gannon were also back in harness last week, joining this issue’s cover star Brix Smith for the London appearance of her Fall-out shelter, the Adult Net (see Live page).

• And finally, Johnny Marr - consipcuous by his absence from Bryan Ferry’s recent Wogan slot-will be touring America this winter as a card-carrying Pretender.