The band Morrissey called “the official end of the ‘60s”
The Smiths certainly weren’t a band completely cut off from the unavoidable pantheon of 1960s British rock influences. Jangly Rickenbackers and Kinks-style kitchen-sink songs were ripe for the picking.
Still, it was pretty clear that, unlike some Manchester bands that would find stardom shortly thereafter, The Smiths were not a “retro-minded” band in any sense of the term.
“We live in a world which is unlike the way top 40 records convey it,” Morrissey told Rolling Stone in 1986. “Whatever assessments people make of the Smiths, the Smiths speak absolutely for now, singing about the way people live as opposed to the way people don’t live, which seems to be the cast-iron mode of songwriting these days.”
It’s one thing to observe the obvious and say the Smiths were offering listeners an alternative to the Duran Duran sort of vision of the 1980s, but it’s probably less discussed how little they tended to remind anybody of the Beatles or the Stones either; how disinterested they seemed to be in that sort of lineage or the Union Jack-waving nostalgia that would take hold in the ‘90s.
For Morrissey, the best thing about 1960s British music were the pristine pop nuggets, mostly sung by female vocalists, like Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw, the Marvelettes, etc. The first single he ever bought as a child was ‘Come and Stay With Me’ by Marianne Faithfull. Another of his favourites, 1964’s ‘Golden Lights’ by the popstress Twinkle, was eventually covered by The Smiths, and is still widely considered one of the worst things they ever did.
According to Morrissey, this type of first-wave Britpop was appealing because “it was very street level. You knew a group came from Liverpool because of what they were singing. . . . The two-minute, 10-second single was power. It was blunt, to the point.”
Of course, as the ‘60s carried on, things got significantly less crisp and a lot more bloated – psychedelia, hippie music, jam bands, metal, and early prog rock. This was not, suffice it to say, young Steven Patrick Morrissey’s bag.
Fortunately, as 99 per cent of Smiths fans will know, Morrissey found his guiding light out of that sludge in the form of a band he encountered on TV in the early 1970s by the name of the New York Dolls. Not merely an enthusiastic teenage fan, the Mozzer became England’s official spokesman for all things Dolls, and when he achieved fame in his own right, he seemed no less infatuated with those glam rock icons and what they represented in the grand scheme.
“For me, [the New York Dolls] were the official end of the Sixties,” Morrissey told Rolling Stone, while literally wearing a faded Dolls T-shirt backstage at a Smiths concert. “They were the first sign that there was a change, that someone was going to kick through and get rid of all the nonsense. It gave people hope.”
Considering his devotion to the Dolls, it was always a credit to Morrissey as a songwriter and performer that he never went through the usual phase of copycatting his heroes. There was no point trying to recreate the sound or looks of the New York Dolls anyway, especially if you were a bookish dweeb from Manchester living in the post-punk age.
The spirit of what the Dolls represented, however, driving to be the sound of the here and now, clearly played a significant role in what made the Smiths so compelling during their own brief existence.
