It was 40 years ago this month that people (bar the attenders at their handful of gigs) first heard the Smiths. On 13 May 1983, they released their first single, Hand in Glove, on Rough Trade. Then, on 31 May, John Peel broadcast their first session for his BBC Radio 1 show. Before the year was out, they would have recorded one more for him, as well as two for David Jensen. A total of 14 songs were broadcast, all being heard for the first time, apart from a new version of Handsome Devil, the B-side to Hand in Glove.
The Smiths’ radio sessions were as astounding a rush of real-time creativity as pop has witnessed. When they released their first album the following year, only two of its 10 tracks had not previously been recorded for Radio 1. It was those sessions that built up their following so rapidly and so rabidly.
The late David Cavanagh wrote of the sessions, in his Peel biography Good Night and Good Riddance, that they “have given the Smiths so much momentum that an album is almost superfluous. There’s no question that the momentum began with Peel. The Smiths’ universe is at odds with almost everything happening on a cultural or commercial level in Britain’s 80s, and Peel is the arbiter of taste in the alternative society.” (The truth of that was proved by the utter lack of success of another hugely idiosyncratic but gorgeously melodic provincial indie band with an eccentric singer – Peel did not care for Felt and their career went nowhere.)
I didn’t hear Hand in Glove when it was released because I wasn’t yet listening to night-time Radio 1. A few weeks later though, I was: I had noticed that there were often heavy metal bands on Top of the Pops when Peel presented it and I wondered whether he might play any of it on the radio. (I was 13 and fondly imagined that the presenters picked at least some of the acts for Top of the Pops.) He didn’t – not at that point in time, anyway – but on one of the first shows I listened to I heard a repeat of that first Smiths session. I had never heard music that sounded like that before, and I had never heard a singer whose words – in any way at all – actually reflected my life, as a bullied, lonely kid who had no idea how to navigate the world safely, let alone confidently.
Of course, countless kids around the country responded the same way as I did. I wasn’t allowed to stay up until midnight, when Peel finished, so I would go to bed and turn the light off, then plug the headphones into the radio-cassette recorder. I had a handful of C90s that I filled with Peel sessions, one finger poised over the pause button. But it was only with the Smiths’ sessions that I would diligently transcribe the lyrics when I came home from school the next day.
And the songs! Those strange and beautiful songs. Peel described them as “a band with no obvious influences whatsoever”. Well, this is true and yet it’s false. The Smiths sounded like nothing because they sounded like so much: Marr brought Motown and the Stooges and the Patti Smith Group and Bert Jansch and Buffalo Springfield and so many more things into his writing, but because the juxtapositions were so unexpected, they went unheard, and because the influences were filtered through his playing (“fractured yet fluid”, I recall Morrissey calling it in an early interview with Sounds), the Smiths sounded only like the Smiths.
Sometimes the Smiths evolved from their sessions, and sometimes they went backwards. Reel Around the Fountain was one of the latter cases. Recorded for the first Peel session, it was a grave and stately thing, with Marr’s spectral and sparse guitar-playing draped over the song like gauze. A couple of months later they recorded it for Jensen (though this version was not broadcast for two years owing to a tabloid claim that it was a paedophile anthem), and there are acoustic guitars drowning out those spidery lead lines. The following year, on their self-titled debut album, the bassline had changed and it was no longer a strange, misty message from the ether, but a wholly conventional country-pop song. Shame.
This Charming Man, recorded for the second Peel session, underwent the reverse process. Marr wrote the track specifically for the session, trying to create something reminiscent of Rough Trade labelmates Aztec Camera, but with the bass rhythm of the Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love (and, of course, it ended up sounding like neither). But that version of This Charming Man is an unopened flower compared to the version released as a single just a few weeks later. For the single version, producer John Porter advised them to change the rhythm from that Motown bounce to a stricter, more rigid style, which foregrounded Andy Rourke’s brilliant bassline, and to introduce the sudden pauses that give the song drama. That’s how fleet-footed the Smiths were at this point: from sketch to one of the decade’s great singles in weeks.
And there were the songs that got away – the sternly empathic This Night Has Opened My Eyes, one of Morrissey’s Shelagh Delaney homages, which was never recorded for Rough Trade. “In a river the colour of lead / Immerse the baby’s head,” he sang, prompting producer Roger Pusey to stop the session to check he wasn’t about to record a song celebrating the drowning of infants.
Each of these songs arrived a few weeks apart. The Smiths were, truly, a teenage semaphore, sending out messages of hope: you are not alone. (Morrissey later remembered how Accept Yourself, recorded for Jensen, prompted a rash of letters from fans thanking him for telling them they were fine as they were). In the conflict zone that is adolescence, the songs were comfort packages. And you could get these joys simply by tuning into Radio 1 of an evening.
I rarely listen to the Smiths these days. I know the songs too well. And too many of them have been coloured by the current views of their singer. But every so often I am taken on the time machine again. In autumn of 2021, I saw Rick Astley singing the songs of the Smiths with the Stockport band Blossoms. My friends and I had thought we would be at the centre of the demographic. In fact, we were among the older people there. The teenage semaphore never stopped communicating. The miracle of the Smiths is too profound to ever truly be overshadowed.
