1984 Music: The Smiths, The Smiths and Hatful of Hollow

 

Release dates: 20 February and 12 November 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Not in 1984. I acquired a copy of Hatful of Hollow in about 1987, and The Smiths at university in the early 90s. 

There are plenty of songs about heartbreak in the canon of pop music, but before The Smiths there were few songs about those who felt themselves excluded from love – and life – entirely. The classic 1960s pop song asserts the singer’s teenage identity against those who don’t understand him (or, less frequently, her) – but that usually means parents or authority figures, or, later in the decade, ‘squares’, the representatives of conformity. The Smiths occasionally approach this territory (e.g. ‘The Headmaster Ritual’), but members of an older generation are just as likely to be kindred spirits (‘Vicar in a Tutu’), and for Morrissey the real threat comes from one’s peers. 

Love, desire, infatuation, the misery of rejection: these had all been familiar emotions in pop music. But embarrassment, boredom, impotent frustration – these all came in with punk, and reach their apotheosis here. 

The teenage songs of an earlier era relied on a shared identity and appealed to shared experience for their impact – their loyalties were tribal as much as individualistic – but here the only shared experience was that of imagining other people might feel as alone as you did. Above all, the characteristic emotion is disappointment: crushing, humiliating bathos. ‘I look at yours, you laugh at mine, And “love” is just a miserable lie’. 

 Or in one of the group’s most famous moments from ‘How Soon is Now?’: 

There's a club, if you'd like to go 

You could meet somebody who really loves you 

So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own 

And you go home and you cry and you want to die 

The succession of ‘and’s really sells this: the misery is familiar, expected, never-ending. And Marr’s guitar shimmers and shivers and grinds our faces in it. 

Stereotypically, The Smiths were a student band, and certainly the world of work is only present here as a source of oppression: ‘I was looking for a job, And then I found a job, And heaven knows I’m miserable now’. But none of the band actually went to university, and the ‘exams’ mentioned in several songs were likely O-levels (certainly the weird 1984 tabloid accusations of paedophilia directed against ‘Reel Around the Fountain’ and ‘Handsome Devil’ assumed this). So the songs don’t actually describe the student experience. Rather, they are situated in the places the group’s student fans had escaped from: northern, provincial, urban, lower middle class or upper working class. Council houses, but not tower blocks. Clubs, sometimes, but not pubs: little alcohol in general, and no drugs, which Morrissey disapproved of (bassist Andy Rourke was later temporarily sacked when his heroin addiction was discovered). The threat of violence as a public crime outside in the street, but, interestingly, not usually in intimate settings behind closed doors (except in 'Barbarism Begins At Home' on Meat Is Murder). 

Sometimes this milieu has quite precise geographical and historical markers – the Manchester suburb of Whalley Range, the names of the victims of the Moors murderers – but mainly it’s defined by more general social, economic and cultural details: patios, disused railway lines, houses with doorsteps on the street, the News of the World, the end of the pier, kissing outside under iron bridges (presumably because there's nowhere else you can go), trips to the countryside on bicycles with punctured tyres; and so on. The frequent literary references and occasional archaisms (‘a jumped-up pantry boy’) situate this world in a tradition, but not primarily that of pop music, although both Morrissey and Marr were fans of 60s girl groups in particular, and helped to resurrect the career of Sandie Shaw. Instead the tradition is that of Middlemarch, Shelagh Delaney and the kitchen-sink novels and films of the 50s and 60s. 

Most of this is noted in the group’s early music-press coverage, though both the albums under discussion here are rarely considered definitive in the context of the group’s longer career: The Smiths, their debut, had been delayed and then re-recorded from scratch, and perhaps shows some fatigue at that process. To me, it feels a little forced and tired in some of the performances. Hatful of Hollow, released later in the year, was actually a compilation album, including several singles and associated tracks, and versions of songs recorded in session for Radio 1, many of which actually predated The Smiths –and a few of which also appear in different versions on that album. I think it’s generally assumed that the release of Hatful of Hollow was a tacit admission that the first album didn’t quite work, and although much of the compilation was never intended to be definitive (radio sessions, recorded fast and cheap, are by definition works in progress) it is for me one of the group’s best albums. 

Having said that, Allan Jones in Melody Maker had no reservations at all about the first album. Here he is on 25 February (note once again the ubiquitous Velvet Underground references, shoehorned in whether or not they belong): 

These songs, this music, The Smiths themselves, seem to owe nothing very much to anyone: they appear to exist without convenient contemporary comparisons. For music as lean and urgent, as passionately articulate and eerily beautiful as the most haunting episodes on this record, you have to refer back to the stark emotional lyricism of the Velvet Underground’s third album, and the decisive genius of songs like “What Goes On”, “Some Kinda Love” and “Pale Blue Eyes”. 

There really isn’t much room for anything but perfection on this LP. There are moments here that float and shimmer with a spectacular inevitability, a timelessness, an opinion of their own enormous qualities that only the very best pop music can boast. And, like most of pop’s most enduring moments, The Smiths’ music is often bruisingly mordant in its preoccupation with states of melancholy, regret, an ironic nostalgia for the way things might have been, but obviously weren’t and, perhaps, were never intended to be. 

The following passage seems less convincing to me: 

Like most great pop, “The Smiths” is also consumed by an extravagant romanticism, a touching conviction that love and the act of loving can overcome the most critical of life’s squalid realities. The beguiling sensuality of songs like “Reel Around The Fountain” and the awe-inducing “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” proposes an intimacy, a sense of communication through fingers, tongues and senses – a sense of coming together, if you like – that will enable us to survive wider disasters. … When Johnny Marr’s exquisite guitar caresses the provocative melodic nudge of “I Don’t Owe You Anything”, The Smiths sound like the very definition of Marvin Gaye’s idea of sexual healing. 

Marvin Gaye! Surely the only time his vocals have been compared to Morrissey’s ‘celibate cries’ – especially given the latter’s noted contempt for Motown, an early hint of his current odious politics. It’s true that for The Smiths, intense emotional connection to a love object might offer redemptive possibilities. One may even express desire towards such an object (‘Let me get my hands, On your mammary glands’), but more usually, being the recipient of such declarations provokes paralysing anxiety or conflicted feelings. In general, it’s safer to retreat into platonic territory: ‘But I don't want a lover, I just want to be seen, In the back of your car’. The most common position here, then, is not wanting, but wanting to be wanted: ‘Girl afraid, Where do his intentions lay? Or does he even have any?’ In any case, the consummation of desire is always a mistake – always excruciating. 

Jones’s review continues: 

The world inhabited by Morrissey’s blistered imagination and Johnny Marr’s evocative melodic settings is a world that’s been betrayed: their songs describe impoverished lives, circumscribed options, limited achievements, murderous equations. Illness, corruption and death are frequently present as central images. … 

I don’t mean to make “The Smiths” sound like an exercise in cerebral bleakness: there’s a robust physical enthusiasm at work on most fronts here, a very natural sense of what makes a song work. 

I seem to have missed the NME review of the first album – surely there was one –but here’s Adrian Thrills on Hatful of Hollow from 10 November: 

It is a patchy, erratic affair and often all the better for that. A song like the maudlin epic ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ that was later fleshed out and cushioned by the softer production on the debut album is included here in raw, less ‘pleasant’ form; ‘Accept Yourself’ and ‘These Things Take Time’ from the Jensen session are thrillingly abrasive; ‘Still Ill’ and ‘Girl Afraid’ remind one of a dull, prosaic competence which marked the group’s musicianship in their early days; the wistful ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’ and the dense, relatively complex ‘How Soon Is Now’ illustrate the new heights to which they have recently aspired. 

But what difference does it make? The most staggering changes are not in Morrissey’s beguiling, ambivalent obsessions, which have remained similar throughout, but in the flowering of Johnny ‘Guitar’ Marr, that chiming man, into one of the era’s truly great instrumentalists. Compare the monosyllabic flatness of his early picking with the cascading mandolins that close ‘Please, Please, Please’ and it will be clear just how much he has come on. His role in the band is now worthy of at least equal billing with Morrissey’s, a fact acknowledged on the awesome ‘How Soon’, a track previously only available on the ‘William’ 12”: with the voice buried deep in a clammy, claustrophobic mix, Marr – adroitly supported by the two unsung grafter Smiths – unleashes a barrage of multi-tracked psychedelic rockabilly, his Duane Eddy twang destroyed in an eerie quagmire of quivering guitar noise. Magnificent! 

And so to the calculated mystique of Morrissey: the man-child has mastered the knack of giving away absolutely nothing while appearing to be the most frank, disarming and explicit wordsmith currently working in pop. But, for all their sexual ambivalence and lyrical unorthodoxy, his songs are universal in the vulnerabilities and desires they seek to express. … 

I won’t quote Adam Sweeting’s dismissive Melody Maker review of Hatful: I get the impression they chose the one person in the office certain to dismiss it, purely to prove the paper wasn’t a pushover. 

Above I’ve focussed mainly on the lyrics, but the reviews are an important reminder that there were four members of The Smiths. Marr’s guitar and melodic genius are almost as lauded as Morrissey’s words, but the rhythm section of Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke – the ‘unsung grafter Smiths’ – were also superb. Infamously, the last two were entirely excluded from songwriting credits and given only 10% of performance royalties each. And while Morrissey probably bears the greater share of the blame for this state of affairs, Marr agreed to it too. A fairer division would surely have been 10% of songwriting royalties and 25% of performance royalties: I just don’t believe that such skilled and inventive musicians contributed nothing to these songs in the studio. Or did Marr really write all the basslines and drum patterns as well as the melodies and chord sequences? 

Parenthetically, I might note that groups who make a decision to split royalties evenly from the start – notably U2 and R.E.M. – tend to have long and happy careers. In any case, they don’t end up hating each other if and when they split.