Why The Smiths changed my life

So, as the occasional facetious correspondent has pointed out, it's been a while.

Well, what can I say? I do a beyond full-time job, and between you and me I mostly love the work, but at the same time my late 30s self still clings to those adolescent notions that I should do creative things alongside. The longer I've gone on, by the way, the more I've become convinced that the purpose of any creative act is not to win approval of or even find an audience; the primary point of creation is surely to give fulfillment to its creator. The act is all that matters, even if it is performed in a void. I believe it’s enough, although of course it may just be that I never really found an audience anyway.

Regardless, this is the time that gets squeezed when work takes over, as it has done lately, and only gets resumed when some chance conversation, usually with someone who is both younger and a woman, fires me into believing that I need to get going again. So I found myself disinterring something I started back in the cool, short days of February and never quite had the belief to complete.

The starting purpose of this website, albeit too often hamstrung by the sporadic nature of its contributions, is mostly to celebrate the new and exciting, to wax briefly and enthusiastically about something from the week that has made me smile, or excited me, or moved me in some way, before the next glinting, shiny thing comes along. But sometimes I must uphold the right to bang on about something of the past which somehow helped to make me whatever it is I am today.

My musical abiding love is, of course, and always will be, The Fall. They remain a guiding light, a magnetic north. They weren't my first love, though. The first shoots of a lifelong interest in music were provided by early 80s two-tone bands, and then lots of bands on a spectrum of electronic to new romantic, some of them good, like the pioneering Sheffield bands, and most of them so unspeakably bad I hesitate to recall their names. But then The Smiths came along, and after that everything was different.

They were the first band I got obsessed with. I mean, really obsessed. I would go to Manchester and in my head construct elaborate narratives where I would bump into Morrissey and floor him with carefully prepared, off the cuff bon mots. We’d bond; become friends. Maybe I’d guest on a b side.

Although when I say obsessive, I should make clear I stopped some way short of stalker status. I wasn't ever quite the gladioli wielding, hearing aid wearing acolyte. I don't do identity cults, have never believed in wearing the badges. Apart from a brief, ill-advised attempt to look like a young Bobby Gillespie, I cling to civilian clothes. I like to retain the option of passing unremarked in a crowd. And I was usually a chunky boy, whereas you needed to be slim-hipped and androgynous to get away with the Morrissey look. But there was a time, 15 or 16, lonely, vulnerable, and not yet having had my mind duly opened or softened by the discovery of girls and alcohol, when nothing mattered more to me than this band.

Of course it was singer Morrissey who I idolised. More than anything it was about the words, the ones he wrote and uttered. They were playful and pretentious, but self-undermining, smart but insecure, educated, obscure and iconic. They were words for any kid who though they were cleverer than the rest of the class but still desperately wanted to be part of the gang.

The Smiths looked, too, provocatively, deliberately, like outsiders. They stood apart. Even the record sleeves, with their cataloguing of obscure, often fallen, small celebrities were different, resembling nothing else, forcing you to do your own research. Then there was the name, with its deliberate anonymity: so right.

Imagine the impact on this white trash kid from a failed family in a small and isolated northern town where everything taught you to conform and accept your lot.

Occasionally, and usually when I've had a little too much to drink, I will insist to the unwilling listener that The Smiths changed my life. Said listener will assume I exaggerate.

It's impossible to convey, in an era of instant access to everything, and people thinking they're part of a community because they've joined an online group, quite how stranded you could be in the mid 80s. The occasional samizdat, roughly photocopied fanzine could give you a hint that people like you were out there somewhere, beyond the physical boundaries of your designated town. But you couldn’t find them, unless you had someone common to follow. And how to convey the drabness, the lack of glamour, the sheer defeatedness of post-miners' strike small town northern England, collapsed, redundant, bypassed by the pinstripe and braces yuppificiation of big cities and the south? We were Thatchered, and we had no response. Plus, as kids, we grew up members of a pre-millennial death cult, brought up on horror stories about nuclear winter and convinced, as Reagan made jokes about bombing Russia, that an armageddon was not only inevitable but imminent, so what was the point of an education, or even forming close relationships? Thatcher's adopted children, as compared to those born in her wake, were an unusually fucked-up generation. The consequences, as we became parents, we live with today.

So The Smiths came along and taught me there was more. They told me you could be smart, and clever, and you didn't have to hide it. You didn't have to fit in. It was okay to read books, to like art. Occasionally I think about the life I could have led: the WMC on a Friday night, bargain booze deals, knocked off fags, a tracksuit, an Ann Summers party-going wife, three mewling brats gradually being ground down, TV, a package holiday. That was what you prepared for. That was your lot.

The Smiths told me to aim higher. The irony is that the new right told us to be aspirational while marginalising our kind. It was the counter-force to this that made me aspire. I'm not always happy with my life - never feel I've done anything, know I'm never going to get more than a few thousands word into any novel I might write, and that first film will remain resolutely unmade - but I feel my horizons are broader than they might have been, that my life is more filled with art and ideas than would otherwise have been the case - and I think, in part, that was thanks to the education The Smiths provided at precisely the right moment. How can I ever not be grateful?

I leave The Smiths alone for long stretches these days. Other music crowds in. I can go years without listening to more than the odd thing. A quick blast of wilfully eccentric Shakespeare's Sister livens me, while the ultimate doomed romance of There Is A Light That Never Goes Out marks the end of an occasional compilation that the CD recipient never captures the full weight of. The songs can't always meet my expectations, when I hear them. I've made them mean too much to me. And of course I can't adequately explain this to other people.

When I do come back to them now, there are new things I hear and like. As if for the first time, I've come to acknowledge and admire Johnny Marr's exceptional guitar playing, appreciate how the tunes are neither subservient to nor undermine the words, and recognise how hard that must have been. I see now what an extraordinary, one off pairing that was. The tragedy of Morrissey and Marr is that they needed each other, and without each other, are a fraction, far less than half.

Because of The Smiths, I can forgive Morrissey everything, though I now find his persona tiresome, and care for only a handful of his solo offerings. But on each LP, the one or two semi-precious gems are enough, because of The Smiths. And while it's hard to resist the feeling that Marr has frittered away his talent in a slew of near session-musicanship, interspersed with spells of just wanting to be a regular dude in a rock and roll band, the serrated guitar of How Soon Is Now is always going to be enough

You know they're both never going to find it again, and that’s part of it. And this means they must buck the trend, must stay unique, and be the only band of any significance never to reform.

But then I never did seem them live, my gig-going days only starting when I escaped from my town to university, and carrying on pretty much ever since. So equally, as I always say, if they ever did get back together, I'd sell a kidney to be there.

What prompted this, sometime back in February, unfinished, was the issue of the two CD collection, The Sound of The Smiths, bought, in a wearying nod to my own personal zeitgeist, in some airport on the way to somewhere. It reminded me precisely how magical, how pivotal, how alchemical The Smiths were. If you don’t have this, if you don’t get it, how on earth are you going to navigate your way through the speed bumps and slaloms of the rest of your life?

Simply, find a guidebook in this.

The June Brides - 'There Are Eight Million Stories...'

There was something so right about last Friday night. By the time it kicked off, we were just about sufficiently intoxicated, via dubious South African brandy, incongruous pints of mild and, at the venue itself, red wine of a somewhat challenging nature. From beloved Hackney we made our way to the venue, a new one to us, a room above a 1960s concrete snooker hall on one of Stoke Newington's less fashionable streets. We paid our five pounds to get in, bought drinks from an impromptu, jerry built bar. The stage area was defined by two semi-circles of battered leatheresque armchairs and sofas in a distressed condition. There were two vacant chairs that we made our own. As we sat back and sipped Chateau Usine, we reflected that the evening had been pretty good already.

We don't do reunions as a rule. I have no wish, for example, to be reacquainted with former schoolfriends - even those handful who have, as yet, evaded Strangeways - from whom I have probably drifted for very good reasons. And in music, it's better, in the main, not to look back. We caught the Pixies a couple of times in the past, largely to try to compensate for missing them the first time around, and I hope The Smiths never reform, but if they do, I'll fork out ready money to be first in the queue. So there I was a few days before on the point of buying tickets for something achingly cutting-edge when some random internet pootling revealed The June Brides would be getting together for one rare night, and I knew, reunion or not, that I had to be there.

You probably don't know this, but the June Brides were one of the most important groups in the history of British music. Ever. Knocking around at about the same time as The Smiths, they were also one of the groups who changed my life and made me realise there was something more out there, something a bit more interesting, something other than what I had been told was on offer. They set a template that was played with by all my favourite bands of my late 80s salad days. They were jangling, shambling, literate and nerdy, loser indie popsters and wringers of wry smiles, and on most tunes there were these ridiculous parping trumpets.

But they burned too briefly, 1984 to 1986, which crucially for me was before I left my smalltown behind and started being able to go to gigs. It has always rankled. About every two years I come back to the music. 'This Town', an achingly happy and sad almost celebration of life in an English Nowhereton, still seems to be about me. 'In The Rain' still has that meaning of life clarity you get from sitting in a pub wondering what you're doing there when everyone around seems to be having a great time. 'Sick, Tired and Drunk' probably wasn't supposed to be a manifesto for living, but that's how it seemed to turn out for me. It would be quite wrong for British music to have anything like a hall of fame, but if we did, the June Brides would need to be in it.

So a reunion should have seen them feted, makers of a black market of soaring ticket prices, diarised by thousands on last.fm. Instead we got a couple of hundred people somewhere handy for the railway station. But there was something bang on about it all. This was no Sex Pistols style latest sell-out because they need the money, man. There were reformed for all the right reasons, because it was the singer Phil Wilson's brother's 50th birthday (ironically nodded to by a Fall song the name of which you could probably guess beforehand) and he fancied seeing a gig. And for once, there was nothing wrong with seeing a bunch of blokes themselves circling a half century and of a certain thinness of hair and growing thickness of waist banging their way through a load of old numbers. Thankfully, there was little of the we have new material to try out nonsense here. In an endearingly under-rehearsed way they made their way through most of 1985's seminal LP, their only, There Are Eight Million Stories, and by the time they had shuffled off after about an hour, had performed every song you really wanted them to play.

It was a perfectly mellow evening, spent with a roomful of the mostly rotund and ageing, and therefore relatively free of the poseuring nonsense and look at me chat that bedevils many a London gig. Normally I go to gigs and look for someone old and fatter than me so I can stand beside them. Here, I found myself at least at the youthful end of the spectrum. Most of these people had been a bit older than me when they realised the genius of the June Brides. Ridiculously, our heroes where not even the night's main band, being merely the support act for some people called S/T, about whom I confess I know nothing. We hung around, hoping for something metronomically krautrocky, but after the faithful three songs rule was applied we found them wanting, not least for some Flight of the Conchordsish thing about being put on hold on the telephone, and ambled off into the night looking for a little more liquid.

You can, apparently, although I have yet to put this to the test, listen to the whole thing here.

Not really a gig review, but then we don't really do gig reviews here. Being pretty forward-looking people, we don't really do nostalgia either. Except when we really want to. I have now heard 'This Town' performed live, so there.

Wild Billy Childish and the Musicians of the British Empire - He's Making A Tape'

And speaking, as we just were, of simple, direct music, and the joys of neglected seven inchers unearthed over the post-festive fag days, here's another. At some point, you just have to give in and learn to love Billy Childish, even if you can't hope to buy or even listen to the roughly one record a week he issues of stripped-down, just getting on with it, garagey early Who homage.

This one is a bit different because for a change he doesn't sing it, leaving vocal duties to the female member of his current band, who is presumably the one who dresses as a nurse live. Hey, if you're going to dress up as something, dress up as a nurse. That's what I say. There's something hard-wired into the heterosexual male psyche which means this is always going to work. Anyway...

Right now I much love this playful, deliberately anachronistic nod to the role that home-made music compilations can play in romantic entanglements. Confess I made a few myself over the years, shy love letters concealed in the form of other people's music, their subtle sub-texts too often falling on stony ground, missed by a listener who turned out to be more cloth-eared than I hoped. But enough about me, for which of us hasn't at some point, when briefly dazed by the could-be girl of our dreams, attempted to express emotions we otherwise couldn't by crafting careful sequences of songs? And yes, it is generally boy to girl. As emotional inarticulacy usually goes hand in hand with trainspotting musical enthusiasm in us hapless guys, that's how it tends to work.

Of course, and alas, we no longer make tapes any more (although I maintain that the format will make its comeback, and in time this tune may come to be seen as prescient). It just isn't the same somehow now, putting together CDs on our home computers, where you can continually re-order and fit things perfectly to time. There was something special about the homespun glue and scissors days of the C90 compilation tape, where you had to guess what sequencing would work as you went along, trusting your simple instincts for a killer segue and hoping you got to the end of that final clinching tune, so often something by The Smiths, before the tape hissed out. When you gave one of these to people, with a hand-filled inlay card and maybe some added personal decoration, you were giving them an object of love. The modern CD is a far more clinical, impersonal and ultimately disposable affair. It can't carry the same meaning.

So when the protagonist here comes home and finds her other half immersed in making a tape for someone else, she knows he's in trouble. The relationship sounds doomed to me. I'd get out while you can, love. And, err, bring the nurse's uniform with you.

Damaged Goods are offering us this, and for that we should thank them. I bet no one ever thanks record labels, but then I am quite drunk as I write this.

Thee Vicars - 'Don't Try To Tell Me'

Okay, so for once let’s cut with the pretentious and elliptical opening paragraph and get down to it, shall we? What’s doing it for me today is this no-nonsense, straight-edged new garage classic. Thee Vicars – and I have never understood that ‘thee’ thing in band names, and expect I never will – offer us via Dirty Water Records two swift vinyl sides of fast, clean, beer-chucking thrills. You get drums, guitars turned up loud and trebly and urgent vocals, and there are times when that’s the whole package. Sure, you have to be young, dumb and full of spunk to get away with making records like this, but fortunately you have to be none of those to end up pogoing around your own living room to them. Evidently Thee Vicars come from the hole that is Bury St Edmunds, and this must be the sound of the frustration that too many Saturday nights spent there would drive you to. As it happens, they sound more like they come from our beloved North Kent Coast, as this fits firmly in with the back to basics Medway punk style pioneered by the prolific polymath Billy Childish himself.

Of course it’s been out for an age, and there’s a subsequent LP that now demands attention, but post-Christmas saw me do some valuable work cutting a swathe through the vast and tottering pile of unplayed seven inches, and unearthing an occasional gem such as this is what makes it all worthwhile.

Beyond the record, I bet this lot would kick any number of asses live, and it will become my business to catch them. I’d love to see them down the Dirty Water Club at the Boston Arms, surely London’s most democratic music venue, and one of the best, on a Friday night with far too much booze inside me. If there's anything right in this world, it will surely happen.

The Dierdres - 'Sir Michael of Aspel'

I swear, I do listen to other things. At work, where I daily clock in to toil at the coalface of pointlessness, I listen to a fair bit of African music, which it pleases some to call 'world music', and get through a lot of reggae, although reggae is one of those things I seem to fall out of love with from time to time, this being one of them. But when time comes and guilt prompts me to fill some of this vacant space in my own corner of the vast irrelevance of the internet, the only thing I want to write about is shouty, annoying, slapdash, punky music like this.

What's on offer here from this apparently seven piece band is a foul-mouthed, unhinged tribute to the legendary TV survivor, who I've always regarded as a pretty decent guy. It features a cameo appearance by the man himself, and would seem to be based on a scarcely credible 'Antiques Roadshow' encounter between the band and presenter. Can this actually have happened? In this universe, or a parallel one? In a little under two minutes, the Dierdres, or at least a number of them simultaneously, confess their psychotically complicated love for the Aspel, and if I was him, I'd be flattered but also get a restraining order.

Early Au Pairs (and try googling that) are an obvious point of reference, and there's nothing wrong with that. Basically, to slip into a little Dierdre-ease, I fucking love this record, and anyone who doesn't agree is a prick. The world is now a bit more of a better place for this.

It's on Cherryade, who are on a real roll, what with this, the Lovely Eggs and the Kabeedies, or you can download from the world's major online music retailer. Of course in vinyl form it's a b-side, which has something so right about it. Sometimes, just sometimes, it so happens that a-sides are better, but not too often.