'Sixteen, clumsy and shy' when I met 'The Smiths' for the second time.

My first meeting with ‘The Smiths’ was somewhere around the winter of 2002 when seeing the Charles Hawtrey ‘Greatest Hits’ cover in the Bargain Bin of Woolworths. After much thought and thinking Hawtrey was the frontman of the band, I never did purchase the album unbeknown to the effect that this band would have on me just less than a decade later.
This may come as a surprise to many that know me but I never listened to ‘The Smiths’ growing up due to the parents advice of them being ‘suicidal’ and ‘depressing.’At around the age of 15, I’d tackled ‘Joy Division’ and ‘Oasis’ and was most often seen in a green parka after being bought up on 'The Jam' and repeat viewings of 'Quadrophenia.'
But I still believed the view that I’d heard from many around me that ‘The Smiths ‘were mundane and depressing.’

It was more co-incidence that I fell into them after listening to John Cooper Clarke and reading ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.’ It was almost as if Morrissey was the George Best of gritty Northern realism but he was frequently waiting on the subs-bench. I think the first ‘Smiths’ song that I listened to was ‘Suffer Little Children’ after reading online about the backlash from the families of the Moors Murders victims and seeing the ‘Oh Manchester’ line as a Facebook status. In an ideal world, I would say that I fell instantly in love with them but this would be massively untrue. Nobody falls instantly in love with ‘The Smiths.’

In the early stages, Morrissey is almost like a temptress who you keep returning to but unsure until the fourth meeting why you actually are. For me, it’s his budding melancholy, his sense of anti-establishment, his Wildean prose and an ability to bring back the glamour of the British New Wave. I’d go as far as saying that the process of discovering your first band is as much a coming-of-age process as having your first pint, smoking your first cigarette or losing your virginity. In an article dedicating his love for Morrissey, Russell Brand adopted a similar approach in stating that turning ’15.. Puberty basically’ is when ‘The Smiths become incredibly relevant' (Brand 2010). Every Smiths song takes this new found world of experience to a greater degree than any other band from 'Oasis' to 'The Libertines' with the motif of their catalogue being focused around being 'sixteen, clumsy and shy’ is something which reaches into the weakest and most 'vulnerable of places... and glorifies it' (Brand 2010)..

For me as brilliant as the music side is, I return to ‘The Smiths’ weekly if not daily for Morrissey's lyrics. When asked why I love his lyrics to this degree, I’m often lost for words with a lump in the back of my throat, such as the case now. I’d go as far as saying why I adore his lyrics is like the British New Wave, them almost being Jacobean (a blend of comedy and tragedy). ‘Cemetery Gates’ in anybody else’s hands would be a morbid narrative of death and depression. But with Morrissey is somehow a battle between two teenagers of who can quote more Wilde and Yates. As controversial as this will be, I’d place Morrissey on the same steeple as the likes of Joyce, Wilde and Sillitoe. ‘Still Ill’ is as much for Manchester as ‘Dubliners’ is for Ireland, the underlying temptation in anything from ‘Reel Around the Fountain’ to ‘I Have Forgiven Jesus’ in his solo career could be suited to Wilde himself. Whilst every setting of every of Morrissey's anecdotes and every album cover belongs in a Barstow or Sillitoe novel.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to state that discovering ‘The Smiths’ has changed me. It’s almost like the line in Cameron Crowe’s ‘Almost Famous' in which the sister instructs her younger brother to listen to The Who’s ‘Tommy’ and he will ‘discover his entire future.’ I don’t think ‘The Queen is Dead’ showed me my entire future in a ‘Back to the Future’ sort of way but I do think discovering them changed me. Physically through  as embarrassing as this is to write, earlier this year taking a picture of Arthur Seaton (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) into the barbers and replacing the curly mop for a short quiff. Whilst also mentally through Steven Patrick introducing me to Wilde, Yates and then through mutual friends being led to Orwell, Bronte, Burgess and the list goes on.  The fact that ‘The Smiths’ encouraged me to pick up a book again and that I’ve now applied to do ‘English Literature’ at university kind of documents their capacity to influence, which I like many will be eternally grateful.  

Now for one of the greatest songs ever made in my eyes;