The Smiths

The coming of age of a major songwriting duo and a highly original new voice in pop. Morrissey betrays a morbid fear of sex ("Pretty Girls Make Graves", "Miserable Lie"), an ambiguous obsession with child killers ("Suffer Little Children", "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle"), and a deeply romanticised kitchen-sink fatalism. (****)
- Stephen Dalton, Uncut, 1998

Gladioli All Over
"And if you must go to work tomorrow
Well, if I were you I wouldn't bother'
Without being perjorative, there is something soporific about the sound of The Smiths. It's so easy to lapse into their languid dreams without stopping to question where precisely this man Morrissey should be placed in the infinite space between heaven and pillow.
Just how clinical and how innocent is this seducer of our imaginations? How genuine his successive (and often mutually exclusive) stances as corrupted and corruptor, reformed literary libertine and celibate gay bachelor? After contemplation of his flamboyant advances I've arrived at no conclusion as to what precisely he bears before him or what exactly he is after. What remains at the core of Morrissey's art is a mystique that has so far proved impenetrable - he affords the odd insight, but there is never enough glimpsed to dispel his fascination.
Consideration of The Smiths always ends up as attempted penetration of Morrissey's singular charms, primarily because The Smiths in plural are as average as their uncharismatic name suggests. Where Morrissey is a wielder of the archaic art of the word, his cohorts are merely competent workers in the grimy craft of pop. Musically The Smiths are little more than mildly regressive. What saves them is Morrissey's rare grasp of the myriad distortions of the pastel worlds of nostalgia. Much of the intrigue behind The Smiths is not what they have to offer but the seductive manner in which Morrissey offers it - his beguiling invitation to forget art and dance in a notion of animated camp. At this point we come to his enigma - of the uncalculated versus the contrived.
This has its opening in the cold quivering reflections of the plaintive epic of 'Reel Around the Fountain' - a picture of virtual classical proportions, with Morrissey's world weary tones washing a grey tale of innocence lost. 'It's time the tale were told,' he opens, 'Of how you took a child/And you made him old' - you have to rouse yourself from the pleasant malaise that the lazy pace induces to recall that, at the end of the song, nothing of 'the tale' has actually been revealed.
Throughout the LP he captures a set of fascinations that appeal to the current mood - the only question is how many of them are indeed his own and how many the result of long years' research in a rented room in Whalley Range. Too frequently his philosophy of pop seems all too neatly prepared to appeal - the quaint campaign against the synthesiser for example. The mass appeal lies (unfortunately) in a form of traditionalism - so Morrissey offers the fictional tradition of 'great pop' - complete this sentence in six letters. The Buzzcocks, Orange Juice, The.......
Calculation, though, can offer an aesthetic of its own and The Smiths, like Culture Club, weave an intricate web of insignia, delightful in its diversity, intriguing in its attention to detail, but finally impenetrable.
From the sexy male cover to 'Hand in Glove' Morrissey has proved himself adept at the gender identity game - another tradition of longstanding appeal. Throughout the LP he plucks at the same strings of homoeroticism: 'I'm not the man you think I am,' he intimates coyly on 'Pretty Girls Make Graves' concluding, 'I've lost my faith in Womanhood' - both of which are in fact snippets open to entirely opposite interpretations.
When he breaks the genderless rule, it is with a slyness we might expect: 'into the depths of the criminal world I followed her...," calling up a reference to Cocteau's Orpheus films (a comparison not so obscure when you consider that their star, and Cocteau's lover, Jean Marais was featured on the cover of 'This Charming Man'). Where Cocteau's Orpheus is left unable to look at his wife (perhaps he too had lost his faith in Womanhood), Morrissey ends with 'I need advice because nobody ever looks at me twice'.
For every tendency in Morrissey's scheme of things, though, there is the necessary balance, for the heaving tragedy of 'And "love" is just a miserable lie' there's the flippancy of 'I know that wind-swept mystical air/It means I'd like to see your underwear'.
It's more than just a question of balance, though, it's a problem of plausibility, and Morrissey is very believable; how convincing his aura of deceptive simplicity, how credible his imitation of the wide-eyed village boy adrift in the big city. When he claims to be 'a country mile behind the world' you believe him, largely because his view of the city is one visibly strained through early '60's films of late '50's novels - a notion of reality three times removed.
'Still Ill', for example, is a drama of flawed perfection, flickering fading values in dusty monochrome - Morrissey kissing beneath the iron bridge finds the fictional Britishness of his obsession slipping through his fingers, 'But we cannot cling to the old dreams anymore'.
What Morrissey captures above all is a notion of despair reflected perfectly in the lacklustre sound of his cohorts, a death of the punk ideals that Morrissey is quite old enough to have been closely involved in. In turn what distinguishes him from a Weller is firstly his wit, and secondly the sensitivitiy to deal in despair without resorting to preaching in desperation.
What does this suitor offer? A calculated plan, perhaps, but enough to haunt the imagination. For the moment that's enough."
- Don Watson, NME, February 25, 1984