The Pop Corporation

To say we’re not fans of The Smiths would be something of an understatement. Seeing as fans of the group fail to take the hint and keep proselytising about them, it might be time to see what the actual deal is.

Of course, these records have been listened to in the past, but in the spirit of fairness, we should at least examine our feelings about them, and see if we’ve softened on them, see if they are an island in the ’80s, and whatever else crosses our minds in 2025.

Previously, we decided to do a similar exercise with the Oasis back catalogue and there were some genuine surprises to be had there – maybe the same would happen here?

First, we had to unblock them from Spotify and it might wreck our algorithm, but what the hell – it’ll be interesting to sit down with these albums after so many years, without some annoying fan breathing down our neck and saying we’re “wrong”.

Let’s see if it’s worth divorcing the art from the artist and all that stuff – at least they didn’t release a boatload of albums, so this should be pretty easy.

Let’s go.

THE SMITHS

Where it all began. Where, if you believe some people, where British Indie music really started. While post-punk etc incorporated elements of funk, rhythm & blues and the rest, The Smiths are Year Dot for the removal of that. Of course, there were other bands around at the time that could be considered the front-foot of UK Indie like The Cure or Echo & The Bunnymen, but let’s go with the received wisdom for the sake of it, instead of getting bogged down with reasons to detract from the work.

First thing’s first – one of the things that many fans of this album like to say while evangelising about the group, is that the Smiths’ eponymous LP is a punk album – it’s really not. It opens with a fairly tuneless dirge by the name of ‘Reel Around The Fountain’, and that’s a pretty solid thread throughout the album with ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ seeping out of the speakers like cold custard. There’s attempts to be shocking, when you couple the latter with ‘Suffer Little Children’, but what we get is a feeling of two songs, when paired with the output of Joy Division, that plants the seeds that Mancunians are morose or melancholic – an accusation that the city has been plagued with ever since. It’s annoying, and this album gave birth to ‘Manchester, so much to answer for’, which is something.

There’s more uptempo numbers, such as ‘Hand In Glove’ which batters along at a reasonable rate, and of course, there’s the Indie Disco classic ‘This Charming Man’, which says “I would go out tonight but I haven’t got a stitch to wear”, which is the kind of line that received wisdom says is stock-in-trade for the group. It’s a zinger, obviously, we’re not going to deny that. ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ and ‘Miserable Lie’ up the tempo also, but the production is generally so thin and face of it so long in places, that’s it’s generally quite an irritating listening experience.

Either way, from small acorns do mighty oaks grow, and this was the first steps of a band who have one of the most devoted fanbases on the planet, so it clearly means something.

MEAT IS MURDER

If the production of the first album is a stumbling block, this one takes it a step further. Throughout the album, the bass mix sounds like someone playing a bed spring stretched over a drain pipe, and a reverb that is so desperately thin, you wonder if they’d had their head turned by a new studio gadget.

Either way, what we were looking for was some kind of development from the first LP if we’re being fair. Alas, what we found in too many instances was a Morrissey singing out of tune – not in a fun, rough-around-the-edges, DIY charm, but rather, someone who is not a good singer. There’s plenty of good bad singers in the world, but with Morrissey’s croon, it feels like a terrible choice.

We always figured that the appeal of the group lay between snarky asides, some camp, and a kind of post-adolescent sensitiveness, but honestly, on this album, it almost sounds like a group doing an impression of The Smiths, which is a weird feeling given that they’re only two albums in at this point.

The whole ‘meat is bad and girls are horrible’ schtick serve up a thin gruel and low points are ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ and the lumpy ‘Well I Wonder’. They do sound better when the brakes are off, like the jangle of ‘Rusholme Ruffians’, but even that feels terribly unfocused as it happens.

It’s an album that’s disjointed and the best thing you can say about it is the evident progression in Johnny Marr’s guitar playing – a smidge richer and more melodious. For a band that seems to have good record collections, you can’t really hear it on this album. Either way, it’s not fun enough to be pop, it’s not amateurish enough to be DIY, it’s not smart enough to be one for the heads.

Hazarding a guess, we’d assume this is a favourite of contrarians who like to choose the worst album as their favourite from a back catalogue, like Nirvana fans who say ‘Bleach’ is theirs.

HATFUL OF HOLLOW

This is a compilation, from what we understand. Should comps count? Well, for starters, ‘How Soon Is Now?’ features on it, so it’s probably worth inclusion for that alone, given it’s the band’s signature song. Besides, there’s an argument that The Smiths are a ‘singles band’, so we’re giving it the same credence as the other LPs.

As a result, it seems compilations show this group in a much kinder light. It’s hard to deny the power of ‘How Soon Is Now?’, with Marr’s guitar coming at you like an avalanche, even though Morrissey does his best to distract from that, singing “I am human and I need to be loved’ like Dudley Moore’s ‘Love Me’ song from Bedazzled!

Oddly enough, you can imagine that Morrissey might think of himself as both Pete AND Dud from ‘Bedazzled’, as Peter Cook’s Lucifer singing “you fill me with inertia” is the best line Morrissey never wrote.

We digress, because elsewhere, you have to laugh when you hear “your prejudice won’t keep you warm tonight”, given where Morrissey found himself in the winter of his life. On that note – a lot of independent ’80s music was cut with a delightful radicalism which we’ve yet to find in this group’s career. Instead, what we find is music that is so self-centred that you could argue it’s almost Randian – and isn’t that all a bit yuppie, just by a different flavour?

There is a line about “mammary glands” which is kinda funny, even if it does stick out like a sore thumb. That all said, away from the live recordings, bits of this comp do feel like a band in the ascendency, which to us, feels more to do with Marr’s broadening talent and his taste in music becoming more apparent on the songs. Of course, there’s a lot of wallowing to wade through if you can stomach it.

THE QUEEN IS DEAD

This is the period where Morrissey states that a “black pop conspiracy” was harming his band and that reggae is “the most racist music in the entire world.” This same year, they release ‘Panic!’ which talks about music that says ‘nothing’ about the singer’s life. That song isn’t on this album, but from this period, but it’s around this time that we’d argue is Year Dot for British rock music losing a lot of the multiculturalism that made it so vital for so long. It’s also the beginnings of Morrissey’s traceable xenophobia and more.

And it’s a shame that this group should be lumped in with all that, given that Marr’s love of disco and soul music which has been so prevalent in his life. On that note, like The Beatles when it went from being John’s band to Paul’s, ‘The Queen Is Dead’ sounds like Marr has the reins, and ultimately, the group having some of their biggest hits.

With only one album left in the tank, maybe this was the beginning of the end of the group – a creative high point that would give ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’, and ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ which appear here. Of course, the latter would become something of an anthem for disillusioned people the world over. Like Emo that would soon come, there’s a sense that the lyrical content wants you to believe the subject is the only lonely intelligent person on your street and look, if you’ve never left the house to find out that a lot of people feel the same way and have interesting things to say about how life can be, then you crack on looking wearily out of windows while you convince everyone that every minor inconvenience in your life is like some Greek tragedy. If you’re getting high on your own supply like that, then this is the album for you, even though there’s a nagging sense that any claims to be misunderstood means you’ve been understood perfectly well, it’s just that people stopped inviting your cynical arse to the pub.

Back to the music, and we see ‘Frankly Mister Shankly’ which is, hands down, the worst song in The Smiths’ back catalogue. Elsewhere though, we see some of the production crimes of previous albums vanishing, making way for better, fuller sounds and a Marr that is now playing with a good amount of swagger. Sonically a leap forward – but after the tin-pot nature of the first two albums proper, you wonder if it’s the Stockholm Syndrome talking.

It does suffer from a certain sameyness, but it sounds like the group’s actual fan-favourite, or ‘connoisseur’s choice’.

STRANGEWAYS HERE WE COME

Released after the band broke up and cemented their place as one of those bands people wish would get back together, and one where they’d finally worked out how to really mix an album. On tracks like ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’, there’s a certain baroque-pop feel to it, and it is about a lush as The Smiths get.

However, the irritating hallmarks of this group are still present, especially in ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’, with gimmicky vocal tics and corrugated iron reverb which really date the record.

Interestingly, it’s an album of two halves, with the second really falling off – and it seems Smiths fans would agree, given the streaming numbers on the closing tracks. ‘Unhappy Birthday’ is incredibly on-the-nose Morrissey miserablism. While ‘Paint A Vulgar Picture’ signposts towards the singer’s lifelong victimhood complex with record companies, with lines like “at the record company meeting, on their hands, a dead star” and “the sycophantic slags all say ‘I knew him first, and I knew him well’”.

If anything, there’s a nagging sense throughout the album that this is Marr being somewhat reserved and perhaps thinking about how working elsewhere will free him up, given the confidence of the last album. We’ve not cheated and seen what the annals say about all this, but Marr must have had his eye on the exit, given Morrissey is by his side, warbling on about people dying, murder and more.

Obviously, there’s always fun to be had with the morose and the macabre – but here, it just sounds mawkish and like the beginnings of some boring edgelord nonsense for fans of ‘Catcher In The Rye’.

On sections of this album you’re put in mind of Oscar Wilde who, when visited by a pal on his birthday, found the writer dressed head-to-toe in black, and said: “today happens to be my birthday and I am mourning – the flight of one year of my youth into nothingness.” If you’re the kind of woe-is-me teenager that likes that kind of nonsense, you’ll probably not see what all the fuss is about on the gloomy bits of this album.

However, on ‘Strangeways’, the most interesting thing about it is looking for the clues that the wheels had come off. There’s a lot to be said for a band breaking up before the rot sets in, even if you can hear the rot coming a mile off – and no improvements in production are going to hide that.

Morrissey’s fatal disillusionment is at odds with the group who have thrown drum machines, saxophones and all-sorts into the mix, which we’re going to put down to Marr. The end it seems, was inevitable, and Marr would soon go off to magpie his way around pop, rock, dance, disco, soundtracks and whatever else, while Morrissey it seems, would fall into self-parody. On this album, the signs are all there.

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