Take life at five times the average speed, like they do! 🚘 Are they moving too fast for you?
ℹ️ Tune in to Morrissey and Johnny Marr's incredible live performances as they each sing the enduring legacy of The Smiths. 🔔 IF YOU LIKE THIS CHANNEL, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO SPREAD THE SMITHS MUSIC! 👍🏻 If you have five seconds to spare... like, share, and comment on the videos. ❗ IMPORTANT: I own none of the content. I provide these videos on RU-vid because I believe The Smiths are the most important band in the music industry (past, present, and future).
I remember writing it, it was in preparation for a John Peel single. I wrote it the same night as 'Pretty Girls Make Graves' and 'Still Ill'." - Johnny Marr on "This Charming Man", Guitar Player, January 1990
So strange, like a paradox, to hear Johnny sing this, but I love it. I wanna hear Morrissey and Marr duet it. Now THAT would be very.. very strange. "Is it really so strange?"
"My favourite song on that LP now is 'That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore'. I think Morrissey is incredible on that, the end is brilliant." - Johnny Marr, Record Collector, November/December 1992
"The whole idea of womanhood is something that to me is largely unexplored. I'm realising things about women that I never realised before and 'Some Girls' is just taking it down to the basic absurdity of recognizing the contours to one's body. The fact that I've scuttled through 26 years of life without ever noticing that the contours of the body are different is an outrageous farce!" - Morrissey, New Musical Express, 7 June 1986
"Are you still ill? asks Linder, as we meet our weekly meet at Kendals rooftop restaurant, and while a song is born, so too is a lifelong friendship fortified and not weakened by time." - Morrissey, "Autobiography"
"Are you still ill? asks Linder, as we meet our weekly meet at Kendals rooftop restaurant, and while a song is born, so too is a lifelong friendship fortified and not weakened by time." - Morrissey, "Autobiography"
"The very last Smiths' sessions at Streatham we recorded two songs that turned up as B-sides: 'Work Is A Four Letter Word' (a cover of a Cilla Black song), and one called 'I Keep Mine Hidden' which was the last song Johnny and I wrote together and the last song The Smiths recorded together. Now when I play The Smiths - which I do a lot - that song is always the first I play. And it's the one that makes me feel the happiest." - Morrissey, The Face, March 1990
Morrissey, when asked if he thought "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" was the perfect Smiths song: "I think it was very close indeed, and hiding it away on a B-side was sinful. I feel sad about it now although we did include it on Hatful Of Hollow by way of semi-repentance. When we first played it to Rough Trade, they kept asking, "where's the rest of the song?" But to me, it's like a very brief punch in the face. Lengthening the song would, to my mind, have simply been explaining the blindingly obvious." - Morrissey, Melody Maker, 26 September 1987
Didn't some say 'Panic' was slightly similar to T Rex's 'Metal Guru'? "Well, it was whispered somewhere in the corridors of the British Isles, I can't remember where, but... I don't know, everything has its reference points, I suppose. Like the clothes we wear have their reference points... I thought the song was extremely funny, I really did. And I thought it was extremely funny to hear it on national daytime radio on the few occasions it was actually played in the mish-mash of monstrous morbidity... I think it was quite amusing -- a tiny revolution in its own sweet way." - Morrissey, Record Mirror, 14 February 1987
"The influence of T-Rex is very profound on certain songs of The Smiths i.e. "Panic" and "Shoplifters". Morrissey was himself also mad about Bolan. When we wrote "Panic" he was obsessed with "Metal Guru" and wanted to sing in the same style. He didn't stop singing it in an attempt to modify the words of "Panic" to fit the exact rhythm of "Metal Guru". He also exhorted me to use the same guitar break so that the two songs are the same!!!" - Johnny Marr, Les Inrockuptibles, 21 April 1999
How was the intro to 'Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me' done? Andy Rourke: "It's the sound effects of a crowd noise from the BBC sound effects library, isn't it? I think it was a strike or something, outside a pit." Mike Joyce: "Good intro, that, isn't it? When it all goes, Baaah... That's a pop-in, though. We didn't all go (quietly) one-two-three-four. It's just spliced in." - Select, April 1993
"With 'Bigmouth Strikes Again', I was trying to write my 'Jumping Jack Flash.' I wanted something that was a rush all the way through, without a distinct middle eight as such. I thought the guitar breaks should be percussive, not too pretty or chordal -- I wanted a cheap, Les Paul sort of sound. The main riff is based on an Am shape, with a capo at the 4th fret. I buried this one little guitar part in just the right place, so it sounds like overtones of the main part, but it's really there. On the first of the two breaks, I'm playing slide through an AMS harmonizer, really high. For the second one, I used a Gibson Les Paul Black Beauty and a Rickenbacker together, playing a regular Em shape, but it's sampled and triggered off the snare drum roll. We credited the background vocals to 'Ann Coates,' but that's a joke -- it's the name of a place in Manchester. It's really Morrissey's voice, speeded up." - Johnny Marr, Guitar Player, January 1990
"I didn't realise that 'There Is A Light' was going to be an anthem but when we first played it I thought it was the best song I'd ever heard. There's a little in-joke in there just to illustrate how intellectual I was getting. At the time everyone was into the Velvet Underground and they stole the intro to 'There She Goes' - da da da-da, da da-da-da, Dah Dah! - from the Rolling Stones version of 'Hitchhike,' the Marvin Gaye song. I just wanted to put that in to see whether the press would say, Oh it's the Velvet Underground! Cos I knew that I was smarter than that. I was listening to what The Velvet Underground was listening to." - Johnny Marr, Select, December 1993
"'The Headmaster Ritual' was a favourite of mine for a long time just because I'm really pleased with the guitars on it and the strange tuning... For my part, 'The Headmaster Ritual' came together over the longest period of time I've ever spent on a song. I first played the riff to Morrissey when we were working on the demos for our first album with Troy Tate. I nailed the rest of it when we moved to Earls Court. That was around the time when we were being fabulous." - Johnny Marr, Record Collector, November/December 1992
Lyrics On the day that your mentality Decides to try to catch up with your biology Come 'round 'Cause I want the one I can't have And it's driving me mad It's all over, all over, all over my face On the day that your mentality Catches up with your biology I want the one I can't have And it's driving me mad It's all over, all over, all over my face A double-bed And a stalwart lover, for sure These are the riches of the poor A double-bed And a stalwart lover, for sure These are the riches of the poor And I want the one I can't have And it's driving me mad It's all over, all over, my face A tough kid who sometimes swallows nails Raised on Prisoner's Aid He killed a policeman when he was 13 And somehow that really impressed me But it's written all over my face These are the riches of the poor These are the riches of the poor I want the one I can't have And it's driving me mad It's written all over my face On the day that your mentality Catches up with your biology And if you ever need self-validation Just meet me in the alley by the railway-station It's all over my face
"It was the first time the group played it together and we just switched the tape on and didn't take it terribly seriously. And I just fell onto a piano and began to bang away. We kept the tape because it had some unnameable appeal." Interviewer: "And people kept the piano away from you after that?" Morrissey: "People kept away from me after that!" - Morrissey on "Death Of A Disco Dancer", Sounds, 18 June 1988
"The favorite lyric I have written appears in a song called 'Hand In Glove'. The lines which are most precious to me are: 'The good people laugh/Yes we may be hidden by rags/But we have something they'll never have'. I remember vividly the night I wrote 'Hand In Glove'. It was just over a year ago. I just wanted to use the theme of complete loneliness. It was to be our first record and it was important to me that there'd be something sparingly poetic in it, in a lyrical sense, and yet jubilant at the same time." - Morrissey, Star Hits, 1985
