“I don’t care too much for being down-to-earth”: How did The Smiths write great riffs?
The idea that anyone else in The Smiths was as pretentious as their gladioli-waving narcissist of a frontman is utterly ludicrous. Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, unfortunately, made a colossal mistake by leaving a man who learnt all the wrong lessons from Klaus Nomi and Oscar Wilde in charge of vocals and lyrics, leaving the work they were doing as a band kneecapped by a moron, warbling often questionable poetry all over it. This is a crying shame because the work they were doing was sensational from the word go.
Seriously though, look beyond the quiffed frontman (important to do for your own mental health) and focus on the music being played by the rest of the band. What you’ll find is an incredibly talented group of musicians who completely defy the idea that indie bands, as instrumentalists, make the Ramones look like Yes. We won’t even start with the blindingly obvious option here because Rourke and Joyce deserve their flowers too.
As a rhythm section, they were tight, propulsive and versatile, the way you’d want any rhythm section to be. It’s their telepathy that makes ‘This Charming Man’ skip with so much pep, and ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’ shows just what a wonder Rourke was on four strings. However, there really is only one person to point to when you talk about instrumentalists in The Smiths and in indie rock in general. Of course, it’s a cliché to talk up Johnny Marr as arguably the best and most creative guitarist of his age, but it’s just so damn true!
Even a song as seemingly simple as ‘Never Had No One Ever’ from The Queen Is Dead contains moments of startling creativity. This probably came from the sheer pressure the band put themselves under to come up with something that wasn’t just great music but great art in general. In a 1993 interview with the erstwhile Select magazine, Marr talked about ‘Never Had…’ as a song that summed up that attitude better than any other.
In the interview, he said the song “came from the mad self-absorption that we were into. I knew at that time that I had to make what was to me a great piece of art”.
He added: “To me, there was no difference between the pressure I was under and the pressure Charlie Parker, or Keith Richards or Lenny Bruce was under. Which might sound pretentious for someone who’s supposed to be a down-to-earth Manchester lad, but I’ve never been that down-to-earth. I don’t care too much for being down-to-earth.”
Quite right, too. The fact that The Queen is Dead is one of the most respected and influential rock albums of the 1980s shows just how justified they were in treating it like it was great art. However, the point Marr makes goes a little deeper than that. It’s telling that, by and large, it’s only working-class musicians who are put down for being “pretentious” or not being “down to earth enough”.
When the Rugby school-educated likes of The Horrors or the Leighton Park-educated Laura Marling talk up the esoteric, high art influences that go into their music, no one bats an eyelid. However, when the Manic Street Preachers—a bunch of working-class kids from a mining town in South Wales—comes onto the scene sampling Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, everyone loses their minds. I wish there was a modern example of this phenomenon, but that would involve any record label actually taking a chance on a working-class rock band in the past 15 years.
The Smiths proudly took their artistry intensely seriously, which is arguably how we got the best of their music. On the other hand, the sheer virtuosity of the band’s instrumentalists is also how we got the worst aspects of their music, but that’s beside the point.
