Two weeks at number one from w/e 2nd March 1985
There’s a huge “what if?” surrounding “How Soon is Now?”. It's one of The Smiths most enduring tracks; when I was round my friend’s houses as a teen, it was there. When I was finally old enough to go to alternative nightclubs, it shot out loud and proud. When I packed up my things and went to university, it followed me, and whenever anyone mentions The Smiths in a brief piece on radio or television, it is still to this day somewhere in the background.
Very few bands are lucky enough to write songs which end up becoming slightly clumsily described as "legendary". Most amble their way through their brief careers pushing out material which is well-liked by a small section of the public, but usually left behind by radio and television a few years later, only fondly reminisced about by fans who complain you don’t hear them in public often enough nowadays.
Ironically then, nobody at Rough Trade foresaw that “How Soon Is Now?” would be so highly regarded. They worried that it didn’t sound sufficiently Smithsian and, as a result, relegated it to the B-side of the twelve inch single of their previous release “William It Was Really Nothing”. Only the growing number of fans bothering DJ’s with requests to hear it on evening Radio One shows and continued club play forced a panicked reassessment of the situation and its eventual re-release as an A-side, but by then, everyone who owned a copy of the 12” single of “William” already had it, and the new B-sides “Well I Wonder” and “Oscillate Wildly” on the reissue didn’t seem to be creating as much excitement.
The net result was the peculiar situation of a potentially huge single peaking at number 24 in the UK chart (though it managed a fairer number 5 in Ireland) and a mere couple of weeks on top of the NME indie chart. Oops.
In Rough Trade’s defence, you can understand their concerns. The group were still establishing themselves, and the previous Smiths singles had been chiming, intricate and melodic affairs. “How Soon Is Now” consists of Johnny Marr locking himself into a shimmering but dirty hypnotic groove, offering only anguished howls from his guitar as any kind of diversion or punctuation. If The Smiths other singles are restless with possibility, with Marr’s guitar lines ricocheting all over the place and unearthing a new melody every thirty seconds, “How Soon Is Now” is locked on one killer hook and trusts it implicitly. Grooves, even of the swampy, unconventional kind, were not the kinds of things Smiths records entertained prior to this point.
On top, Morrissey delivers his anguished tale of being unloved and unlovable in some of the most unusually direct language heard on a Smiths 45 prior to this point. The opening line “I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar” is probably the most poetic. The rest descends into direct emotional bloodletting which may or may not have been inspired by the singer visiting gay clubs – my lawyer has instructed me not to speculate – but nonetheless said something a lot of teenagers, whether gay or straight, wanted to hear.
As an adolescent, there’s a tendency to believe that everyone around you is either being adored by a significant other, or could be if they so chose. It’s only in adulthood that most of us look back and realise that the two 14 year olds we knew who held hands and kissed for an entire year were freaks rather than a couple to be envied, and everyone else was either being dumped and publicly humiliated by a different person every third week, or being ignored like the other 75% of the school year. Morrissey singing “I am human and I need to be loved/ Just like everyone else does” was catnip to thousands of underdeveloped brains and souls who felt that only they were missing out on tenderness, but it also became a clear message for those who were shy and awkward adults, or just plain undesirable (and there are many cruel ways people can end up “difficult to love”, often outside their control). Heard one particular way it’s a teenage whine. To another person in another set of circumstances, it’s a banner to be held aloft at a protest march society has yet to schedule.
However, despite the powerful directness of it, I have to reluctantly agree with Noel Gallagher (not somebody I often side with) when he states that some of the lyrics veer towards a much less effective kind of whininess. The ridiculously simplistic closing lines “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” feel like something that should never have left a petulant teenage boy’s secret diary and actually hollow out the power of much of the rest of the song. The rest of the track is loaded with powerful statements which stand alone; those elements come across as a wall-kicking teenage tantrum.
As for the rest, you barely need me to explain further why it works or how it works. There will be very few indie number ones throughout this project which have the same brooding power as this one.
New Entries Elsewhere In The Charts
Week One
10. Yeah Yeah Noh / Terry and Gerry - Prick Up Your Ears / Bias Binding (In Tape)
Peak position: 10
A weird split single this - one side is given over to the reliably ramshackle oddballs Yeah Yeah Noh with their reverberating and loose version of “Prick Up Your Ears”, then skiffle revivalists Terry and Gerry prop up the other with their cover version of Yeah Yeah Noh's "Bias Binding".
Terry and Gerry felt as if they were all over every programme on Channel 4 at one point in 1985, with their lively, rattling, washboard accompanied journey back to music’s least fashionable and least revisited age. I’ve never been able to work out why skiffle has been so seldom talked about nor properly revived since its demise, but the fact it reminds listeners of a period where Britain was skint and mending and making do may be part of it. Budget hardware store sounds don’t exactly exude rock and roll decadence, and when music historians want to pick apart youth trends through the ages, English kids messing about on washboards just doesn't sound as decadent or sexy as American kids thrashing guitars in massive garages. Also, whatever Lonnie Donegan’s strengths, he didn’t exude sex or mayhem, just a practical kind of kitchenware (with a small k) raucousness.
Still, Donegan was also one of John Peel’s favourite performers, and upon receiving a demo tape from Terry and Gerry, the names of two of Peel’s wife’s friends, he thought the coincidence was too big to bypass. Plenty of evening airplay followed, followed by an appearance on The Tube (my Mum and Dad thought they were “very good”). Their style is obviously absolutely bloody nothing new in the grand scheme of things, but this cover does leave you questioning what the difference between fifties skiffle and eighties indiepop was after all. The journey from washboards to Woolworths guitars, combustable guitar amps and cheap recording studios under railway bridges didn’t feel too long.
20. The Nightingales - It's A Cracker (Vindaloo)
Peak position: 18
23. The Durutti Column - Say What You Mean Mean What You Say EP (Factory)
Peak position: 7
Tony Wilson once pondered whether Durutti Column could have a moment of success with ravers in the nineties, noting that Vini Reilly produced “great music to chill out to”. It never happened, but on records like this one, you get a sense of what Wilson means. With the occasional use of sax and smooth keyboard settings, Reilly occasionally veers close to cliches beloved of eighties library music here, but always manages to arrange each track so unexpectedly and irregularly that there’s enough to keep it on the right side of the tracks. Moreoever, nothing in the indie charts really sounded quite like anything he was doing at this point.
26. Hagar the Womb - Funnery in a Nunnery EP (Abstract)
Peak position: 10
28. Play Dead - Sacrosanct (Clay)
Peak position: 8
Play Dead’s journey was drawing to a close. The group would be done and dusted before 1985 was up, but their presence in the indie chart remained powerful. “Sacrosanct” feels like a slight mellowing of their sound, as the group pick up anthemic post-punk/gothic edges from the scene around them. There’s no abrasion here, just invitations to wave banners, which feels somewhat strange but didn’t cost them any support.
30. A Certain Ratio - Brazilia (Factory Benelux)
Peak position: 21
Week Two
5. Skeletal Family - Promised Land (Red Rhino)
Peak position: 3
Just like Play Dead, Skeletal Family go wild with those simple, screeching guitar riffs here – you know, the ones that feel as if they’ll soundtrack the group galloping across the moors on horseback to slay a demonic entity. In the video, though, they just hang around in some long grass scratching their heads and looking a bit lost.
“Promised Land” is powerful, driving and confident, though, all qualities which saw this single getting a huge cult following in 1985. Those 550,000 views on YouTube don’t lie.
9. Terry and Gerry - Clothes Shop (In Tape)
Peak position: 6
Were these lads never out of the indie chart or off the damn air in early 1985? Their second new entry in a row, “Clothes Shop” was performed on The Tube and sees them sing about their rejection of modern fashion; as if we hadn’t noticed for ourselves.
“I found myself a nightclub/ it’s alternative and free/ but every single person there/ has gone and copied me!” they dig over some steady double bass and scratchy rhythms. Unlikely really unless they were in the 2i’s coffee bar in Soho in 1956, but you get the point they were trying to make.
29. The Jazz Butcher - Real Men (Glass)
Peak position: 21
Way before they jumped ship to Creation, Jazz Butcher (ostensibly Patrick Fish and whatever wandering minstrels he could summon up at any given time) issued a number of well-received records on Glass Records. “Real Men” is one of the better examples, mocking the dubious machismo of the rugby players and arrogant swaggerers who “dominate every town”. “See them leering at the women/ See them staring at the girls/ Making stupid secret gestures/ And shouting stupid senseless words”.
The song itself has a chiming, almost skiffling quality of its own, but is a million miles away from Terry and Gerry, sounding as if everything in the recording studio bin was utilised to some melodic end. It’s both inventive and rightfully aggravated – what more could you ask for?
Peak position: 21
Week Two
5. Skeletal Family - Promised Land (Red Rhino)
Peak position: 3
Just like Play Dead, Skeletal Family go wild with those simple, screeching guitar riffs here – you know, the ones that feel as if they’ll soundtrack the group galloping across the moors on horseback to slay a demonic entity. In the video, though, they just hang around in some long grass scratching their heads and looking a bit lost.
“Promised Land” is powerful, driving and confident, though, all qualities which saw this single getting a huge cult following in 1985. Those 550,000 views on YouTube don’t lie.
9. Terry and Gerry - Clothes Shop (In Tape)
Peak position: 6
Were these lads never out of the indie chart or off the damn air in early 1985? Their second new entry in a row, “Clothes Shop” was performed on The Tube and sees them sing about their rejection of modern fashion; as if we hadn’t noticed for ourselves.
“I found myself a nightclub/ it’s alternative and free/ but every single person there/ has gone and copied me!” they dig over some steady double bass and scratchy rhythms. Unlikely really unless they were in the 2i’s coffee bar in Soho in 1956, but you get the point they were trying to make.
29. The Jazz Butcher - Real Men (Glass)
Peak position: 21
Way before they jumped ship to Creation, Jazz Butcher (ostensibly Patrick Fish and whatever wandering minstrels he could summon up at any given time) issued a number of well-received records on Glass Records. “Real Men” is one of the better examples, mocking the dubious machismo of the rugby players and arrogant swaggerers who “dominate every town”. “See them leering at the women/ See them staring at the girls/ Making stupid secret gestures/ And shouting stupid senseless words”.
The song itself has a chiming, almost skiffling quality of its own, but is a million miles away from Terry and Gerry, sounding as if everything in the recording studio bin was utilised to some melodic end. It’s both inventive and rightfully aggravated – what more could you ask for?
Number One In The Official Charts
Elaine Paige & Barbara Dickson - "I Know Him So Well" (RCA)
Dead Or Alive - "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)" (Epic)
No comments:
Post a Comment