The Smiths

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The Smiths’ career was short – they recorded their first single in May 1983 and Marr left the group in June 1987 – but influential.

Vocalist Morrissey was socially awkward, literate, and camp, while guitarist Johnny Marr was an aspiring football player who trialled with Manchester City. The inspiration here came from a 1982 incident in which a mentally unbalanced man snuck into the Queen’s bedroom and chatted with her.The Smiths were already a singles band, too, and the album goes from "quite good" to "remarkable" halfway through, when Marr breaks into the delicious opening riff of "This Charming Man" and Morrissey finally gets laid.

That works remarkably well for "Barbarism Begins at Home", seven minutes of tense funk, but flops for the title track's tedious, eye-rollingly earnest animal-rights manifesto. Signaled by its aptly regal name, The Queen Is Dead is when the Smiths crest into their own imperial moment. my copy has these early matrix but no poster or sticker Ive owned this since week of release so perhaps only a very limited number had the poster etc - the rest of the early 1st pressings were sold with just inner sleeve? Lesser songs like the funky rockabilly of ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’ and the uneventful title track are stretched out to epic lengths. Released in early 1984 after a couple of singles (and rapturous British press) had built up a buzz around the band, The Smiths is a terrific record, and also a slightly frustrating one: It's not quite the Smiths as we know them.The next studio album, Meat Is Murder (1985), reached the top of the British charts; the only single to be released from the album, " That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" (1985), failed to break into the UK Top 40. Elsewhere, you hear the singer trying out different word-choices and phrasings: The demo of “I Know It’s Over” lacks the “oh, mother” address and its bed is “icy” not “empty. The Smiths is the debut studio album by English rock band the Smiths, released on 20 February 1984 by Rough Trade Records.

If you can't place them on any official release then surely the time has come to issue a new title as per The Who used to do with " Odds and Sods" or " Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy" ? Morrissey's shifting into his now-familiar lyrical mode of deliberate self-parody ( "Death at One's Elbow" is effectively a camped-up burlesque of "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore"); Marr's doing his best to avoid the tingling Rickenbacker picking that was the closest thing he had to a default sound. Coupled with Mark Freuder Knopfler’s questionable taste in sweatbands, Dire Straits were never cool. Marr would later claim in his autobiography that when the band heard the finished work done under Tate, Morrissey didn't like the album and the others weren't entirely happy with the results either.Instead, he worked up a different sound and technique for nearly every song in the band's discography--the breadth of his inventiveness is a good part of what's important about him.

Geoff Travis, sorely tried boss of the illustrious independent label, remarked waspishly that Morrissey seemed to believe “he had a divine right to a higher chart position. It’s now so commonplace to bracket the Smiths and the Beatles together that you forget just how marginal Morrissey and his minions were in their time. I’ve never really explored Morrissey’s solo career, mainly because I won his 2009 album Years of Refusal in a competition once, and I really didn’t like it. It doubles as both a relationship song and a commentary on Morrissey as the controversialist forever getting in trouble for his caustic quips and sweeping statements. Why it was deemed necessary to scrap the album entirely rather than just mix it again I didn't know, but I wasn't going to make too much of it.

Like Rotten in “God Save the Queen,” Morrissey knows there’s no future in England’s dreaming; the country will never move forward until it abandons its imperial legacy of deluded exceptionalism. Bien dicen que uno se enamora de alguien a primera vista, en mi caso, mi amor por The Smiths se dio a la primera escucha, aunque debo confesar que escuché al gran Morrissey Official como solista antes que a los Smiths allá por 1997. In the UK, the original LP and CD did not include it, though it was included on the 1993 CD re-release. Although his songs once saved their lives, Morrissey anticipates his fans abandoning him as they grow out of the maladjustment and amorous ineptitude in which he will remain perpetually trapped.