The song Johnny Marr called an “evergreen staple”
There’s something about The Smiths – something about their jangly yet joyless sound that has endeared them to generations of tote bag-slinging indie kids. Even the most stringent haters of The Smiths may find it difficult not to sway along to ‘This Charming Man’ when it comes on shuffle, left desperately resisting the urge to give into Johnny Marr’s mastery with a guitar and Morrissey’s elongated laments.
The enduring nature of The Smiths’ sound seems to stem from the dichotomy placed at the centre of it. Morrissey’s lyrics were dry and dismal, complaining of bad memories and bad luck. “Oh please, don’t drop me home,” he begs on one of their biggest hits, “Because it’s not my home, it’s their home and I’m welcome no more.”
If you read Morrissey’s words before hearing their accompanying instrumentation, you might assume that the soundscape would match their dejected feeling. Instead, The Smiths’ co-songwriter Marr opted to adorn Morrissey’s melancholy with synthesised strings and optimistic strums, juxtaposing jangly guitars with sorrowful vocals. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.
This songwriting style came to define The Smiths’ sound, as they mixed catchy melodies with lyrical melancholy. Fellow post-punk icon and New Order vocalist Bernard Sumner even picked up on this element of their songwriting, describing it as “bittersweet”. When NME prompted Marr to respond to this descriptor, he suggested that it was essential not just to The Smiths, but to great writing more generally.
“For me, the best writers and novelists have got that,” he stated, “The Smiths were exactly like that – musically, for my part. There’s plenty of New Order and Joy Division music that has got that human beauty in it.” Between Morrissey’s gloomy tales and Marr’s more hopeful melodies, The Smiths had certainly perfected that balance.
Beyond his own work with The Smiths, there was one classic song that Marr picked out as an example of channelling that sorrowful, human beauty: ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed. Released in 1972 on Reed’s iconic sophomore solo offering, Transformer, the track became one of his signature songs.
The song starts out small, with a lonely piano and a consistent beat, while Reed sings of a perfect day, of drinking sangria in the park and feeding the animals at the zoo. The keys become more and more potent, while strings come to the fore, as Reed declares, “Oh it’s such a perfect day, I’m glad I spent it with you, oh such a perfect day, you just keep me hanging on.”
The weighty instrumentation is offset by picturesque lyrics. Though many have interpreted the song as alluding to addiction, to dependency on something or someone for a perfect day, Reed himself dismissed this. Still, the song holds a certain eeriness to it, a strange melancholy beneath the surface.
It’s a far cry from the jangly guitar offerings of Marr and Morrissey, but it does contain that same emotional juxtaposition. “That’s an evergreen staple,” Marr enthused, “and you’d have to be made of stone to not like that song, but is it a happy song? I’m not really sure.” Despite the foreboding feeling of the song, it has resonated with audiences for over half a century now.
Perhaps Marr’s suggestion that great, timeless writers must walk the line between dark and light is true. Between ‘Perfect Day’ and The Smiths, it seems like a surefire way to maintain an enduring effect on audiences.
