A MANCUNIAN institution is celebrating three decades of success this week.
I speak of course of the Smiths, whose first single, Hand in Glove, was released 30 years ago this week. As you can no doubt tell from my byline picture, I’m too young to remember the band the first time round, being a mere lad of eight when they split up in 1987.
But I do remember the first time I heard a Smiths song, sometime in the early 1990s in my uncle’s Glaswegian tenement flat. It was a cassette (look it up, kids) of the album Hatful of Hollow and the tune that lodged in my mind was This Charming Man.
The jangle of Johnny Marr’s guitar in those opening few chords was extraordinary, like nothing I’d ever heard before.
And then Morrissey came in, singing about punctured bicycles on desolate hillsides, the smoothness of the leather on the passenger seat and how it was gruesome that someone so handsome should care.
For the first time in my life I felt excited by a piece of music. Not interested, not intrigued, but excited. A feeling of wonder swept over me at hearing a song which was so much richer and deeper than anything I’d ever heard before.
Marr’s solos and Morrissey’s lyrics helped me through adolescence, as they’ve accompanied millions of confused teenagers in the difficult transition to adulthood.
A few weeks ago Jenny and I happened to be in Stretford so we decided to make a quick visit to Morrissey’s childhood home. There was no blue plaque on the wall outside, nothing at all to mark the fact that one of the country’s greatest poets grew up in that nondescript semi on that anonymous suburban road.
But somehow, that lack of adulation, felt very Smiths-ish.
