Records Revisited: The Smiths – The Smiths (1984)

20.02.2024
The Smiths made an album in 1984 that oozed reality. Times were tough, but that was no problem for the band. They knew they were losers and so are you—now let’s make a good record.

Reality is such a beautiful word. It cuts right into the present, knows no illusion, no pretence. Just the real moment. The Smiths, the everyman band around Morrissey and Johnny Marr from Manchester, embraced their own shitty reality in 1984 and released a début that neither wished away nor looked back.

Perhaps because The Smiths were also their own here and now. A here and now in which the last of Britain’s excavator buckets came to a standstill, the queues at the job centre grew longer and longer, but the band around Morrissey and Marr knew exactly what to do: they were losers and so are you—now let’s make a good record.

That’s a mindset that their Manchester counterparts didn’t know, didn’t have and didn’t want. The Smiths didn’t wallow in self-pity like Joy Division. They didn’t exaggerate the absurd like The Fall. The Smiths knew the world wasn’t going to get better. But hey, what difference does it make?

Guilt and atonement have always been as close as happiness and unhappiness. The next riff didn’t have to reveal that you spent the last two years crying in your bedroom. Nevertheless, many lines have been wasted over the years trying to understand The Smiths in the context of depression. Yeah, yeah, the post-punk years in the post-industrial age with Thatcher, Reagan—whatever.

The band around Morrissey and Marr knew exactly: they were losers and so are you—now let’s make a good record.

When I listen to the first Smiths album today, I can still hear the context, but no depression. Sure, some had no prospects, including a celibate patter merchant like Morrissey. But that doesn’t mean you have to smash every window you come across and draw the curtains.

The Smiths and poetry boy Morrissey probably didn’t care very much about the depression in which the class they came from lived. Johnny Marr was too good a guitarist to manage the three-chord legacy of the No-Future Kids. Morrissey had read the wrong books to hate others. What was, will be, well, you won’t find the answers in the past, or in the future. Not back then, and certainly not now.

Reality? No surprise.

So »The Smiths« assumes nothing. No knowledge of the past. No wish for anything to come. If anything, there was only a sense of the moment, an adolescent angst that everyone has at some point and then no longer has, because, the present passed by again. That’s why singles from The Smiths’ jumped straight into the charts, but never stayed there for long. They simply confirmed your own presence. You know you’re alive now, even if you’re just getting by. It could always be worse.

No other band at the time did a better job of making the aesthetics of the real world come out of their amps.

No other band at the time did a better job of making the aesthetics of the real world come out of their amps. While everyone was surprised at how terrible the world had become, The Smiths had a head start. They just sat there, shrugged their shoulders and pointed at lost love and the miserable existence of a sycophant. Regrettable, certainly! But no reason for a lifelong funeral march, my friends!

In the eighties, the big thing was to show how things really are in order to live them. Today it seems ridiculous. Reality is not what it used to be. And Morrissey has become a grumbler who says the strangest things that the journalist Ulf Poschardt likes. But he was probably like that in his early twenties and people have just forgotten. Just like we sometimes forget, until reality disappears.