The Smiths record that Johnny Marr calls “possibly our best album”
With only four records released in a three-year span, The Smiths managed to garner a gargantuan legacy. In an era sedated by synths, they stood aside the bandwagon and waited for the next double-decker bus, one that they spiritually claimed they wouldn’t mind being flattened by. These young mates from Manchester were counter to everything at the time, and they have always still offered that appeal to future generations, appearing at one point out of nowhere in your teens, tapping into some pubescent profundity.
Perhaps this meant that they were always fated to be gloriously short-lived, to remain a quixotic jaunt, transient by virtue of their ephemeral ways yet solidly part of your life, like a student house or a job in a bar. In this regard, their songs are and always have been, to use the horrid parlance of our times, a ‘vibe’. And when it comes to that vibe, Johnny Marr’s tremolo-laden guitar tones were the central pillar, providing fertile ground for flower-swinging reflection or one of the late Andy Rourke’s waltzing bass solos.
In Marr’s view, the pinnacle of the rapturous realm they created may well have come at the very end of their brief brilliance. Six years on from the release of their last album, the guitarist reflected, “Strangeways suffers because it was our last record, so people think there were arguments and horrors in making it, but there weren’t. Morrissey and I both think it’s possibly our best album.”
“That and some of The Queen Is Dead, which accepted opinion says is our masterpiece,” he told Select. “That might be true, but Strangeways has its moments, like ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Love Me’. Last time I met Morrissey he said it was his favourite Smiths song.” Marr tends to agree on this front, opining that the riff captured the spiritualism, the sort of transcendence, that he was always aiming for.
As he also cites, the period that bore such a record wasn’t some horrid squabble. “I was only 24 [when The Smiths split] and I was really fucking heartbroken,” Johnny Marr declared retrospectively to Radio X, “It was really devastating for me because I was forced into it, that’s the simple way of explaining something complicated.”
After a prolific period, and with the weight of sincere alternative culture on his shoulder, Marr was exhausted and took a break from the band in 1987. However, what started as a break quickly became something more. The guitarist had collaborated with other musicians outside of the group, and he perceived that his fellow bandmates thought he was taking steps to move on. An article appeared in NME with the heading “Smiths to Split”, and Marr believed that Morrissey had planted the story. This was the beginning of a very rapid end.
It would seem in retrospect that the break-up was an inevitability, but the two contributing hands with the most fingerprints on the scene was Morrissey’s hang-ups regarding Marr working with other musicians and Marr’s frustrations with Morrissey’s musical inflexibility. As Marr said in 1992 regarding Morrissey’s desire to cover 1960s pop tracks, “I didn’t form a group to perform Cilla Black songs.”
Nevertheless, the beauty of Strangeways at its best proves that the cracks didn’t show until afterwards; there’s just too much harmony therein. Fittingly, it captures youthful reverie with perfection, a moment frozen in time by the fickle hands of fate that the band were always set to move away from but leave a solidified mark in culture, just as the days of being 24 seem like a haze when you move beyond them, but there’s a wealth to looking back at them all the same.
