How pot influenced one of The Smiths’ biggest songs
The Smiths had a definitive style, one that favoured arpeggiated guitars and lilting rhythms. While the rest of their peers were starting to blaze the trail that would eventually blossom into the Madchester scene, The Smiths were taking their cues from R.E.M., The Kinks, and even Cilla Black. While tracks like ‘This Charming Man’ and ‘Hand In Glove’ had little bits of dancefloor energy, nothing could have prepared the world for ‘How Soon Is Now?’.
A heady and heavy cut that sounds completely different from every other Smiths song: dark and brooding in a malevolent and impossibly intoxicating way. Instead of dense stories of working-class England, Morrissey spins a tale of shyness and uncertainty that plays out in the club. You could meet someone who really loves you, but more likely than not, you’ll stand on your own and leave on your own.
‘How Soon Is Now?’ remains the most atmospheric of all The Smiths’ material, and according to Johnny Marr, substances helped aid the group in the song’s composition. “You’re from Manchester, you smoke weed till it comes out of your ears,” Marr once recalled, and the smoke was certainly wafting through during the making of ‘How Soon Is Now’.
Haziness was such an essential element of the song’s composition that Mike Joyce even recalls the band changing out lightbulbs in the studio to create the proper feel. With a hypnotising rhythm that unfurls slowly and languidly, ‘How Soon Is Now?’ continues to be one of the trippiest and most pot-friendly tracks from alternative rock’s earliest days.
Marr doesn’t really touch the hard stuff anymore. “I just got bored of it. I started to flip back to the idea that the rock’n’roll lifestyle was really quite conventional, which was an attitude that I’d had round about 16, 17,” Marr recalled to The Guardian. “And when I got into my mid-30s, drinking started to look a bit corny to me. I didn’t want my future to be the guy who turns up to his friends’ gigs and goes straight to the table with the beer on. And being who I am, and feeling I’d been put in a box labelled ‘rock’n’roll kid’, I wanted to kick against that. To be a rock’n’roll kid at 19, 20, 21, writing ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, was not something to regret. But I didn’t want to be that as a man.”
That includes staying away from weed as well. “I don’t have the time or the inclination, and I think you kind of grow out of it,” Marr states. While it might not be integral to Marr’s modern lifestyle, there’s a solid chance that ‘How Soon Is Now?’ wouldn’t have come to life had its main writer not been slightly under the influence during the song’s creation.
Check out ‘How Soon Is Now?’ down below.
