“I prefer the demos”: The Smiths album Johnny Marr called flawed
Indie, whatever it now means, will always be defined by Manchester’s The Smiths. Long before its “sleazy” 2000s parodies and glib, corporate imitations, indie was a natural and organic offshoot from post-punk typified by taking the choice cuts of glam and classic rock without the tired machismo and paving the way for the C86 janglers—for better or worse.
Becoming Rough Trade Records’ first alternative ‘star’, the unlikely pop appeal of frontman Morrissey’s lyrical verbiage and guitarist Johnny Marr’s artful weld of funk and folk saw their eponymous debut shoot to number three on the UK Albums chart and turn Rough Trade from a slapdash DIY label to a national music giant for the 1980s.
It’s difficult to talk about The Smiths’ voluminous and consistent high-quality without appearing like a fawning sycophant, but it’s undeniably gobsmacking the plethora of fantastic albums and stand-alone singles that were flung out of The Smiths’ creative whirlwind across four short years. It’s all there from 1984’s The Smiths—Marr’s tight but flavourful pop guitar stylings doing the heavy lifting around Morrissey’s gripping but cumbersome literary vignettes of alienation and heartache at its wittiest.
While the songs crafted during their brief tenure have never been in doubt, misgivings have been expressed about the quality of the recordings. Critiqued for its supposed thin and metallic sound, Marr shed some light on his feelings for The Smiths‘ end result.
“The first Smiths album, I think everyone knows it suffered a bit from second-guessing itself…” he told The Quietus in 2012. “…and John Porter getting wrapped up in what he thought was a ‘modern’ sound, and I was too young to have enough experience or knowledge to change that. I much prefer the demos, the original Troy Tate recordings, without a doubt, all day long”.
Sessions for The Smiths’ debut had started as early as May 1983. Suggested by Rough Trade honcho Geoff Travis, the band opted for The Teardrop Explodes guitarist Tate to oversee production and pursued an approach of organically capturing how they sounded live. Cutting 14 songs at Wapping’s Elephant studio, Travis was candid about his pangs of underwhelm upon hearing the tapes and persuaded old Bryan Ferry associate Porter to remix.
Porter instead offered to re-record the entire album, yet even three months before release and £6,000 down, there were nagging doubts over its polished quality. “I could hear myself that the mixes sounded underproduced and were not the finished article that we needed as our introduction to the world,” Marr confessed in 2016’s Set the Boy Free. “Why it was deemed necessary to scrap the album entirely rather than just mix it again I didn’t know…”
When bogged down in the minutiae of any given creative work, it’s easy to forget that 90% of the audience won’t notice. While qualms about its sonics may be fussed over among hardcore fans and audiophiles, The Smiths launched itself into an essential chapter of UK musical lore and scored the country’s alternative 1980s.
Too swept up in their confoundingly dazzling pop to care, the production trends of the day would win fans over the years and perhaps helped boost the band’s wider appeal: “Weirdly, there are people who love that ’80s sound. Seriously! Young musicians, say The Cribs for example, they love that weird sound”.
