In hindsight, the band's debut plays like an inverse of their final album.
"Article published in Slant Magazine. Author: Lewie Parkinson-Jones."
The sort of platitudes that often accompany many retrospectives on classic albums, describing heroic narratives in which scenes are burst onto and names are cemented in history books, don’t necessarily fit the Smiths’s 1984 debut very well. Prior to the release of The Smiths, the band had already been voted Best New Act by NME readers. The band’s early singles received radio play from tastemakers like John Peel, and their live sessions for BBC proved so popular that they were rebroadcasted several times.
Frontman Morrissey was becoming a star in his own right, developing a reputation as a colorful interviewee and an unlikely trendsetter. The position of “voice of his generation” was up for grabs in the aftermath of Paul Weller disbanding the Jam, and this entirely new kind of pop personality—a melancholy shut-in from the economically depressed north of England, with Wildean affectations—was more than happy to take on the mantle.
As one might expect from all of this, The Smiths was a commercial success. But many of the people who’d been most excited for its release—not least of all the band members themselves—were disappointed with the finished product. Johnny Rogan, writer of Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, summed up the general feeling among contemporary listeners: “The production seemed strangely leaden and the performances unpolished…What the album offered was solidity and immense promise, rather than the sound of greatness achieved.”
Today, the production’s shortcomings are still apparent, but what’s most baffling about the album’s presentation is the sequencing. Why was the muscular and memorable “What Difference Does It Make?” buried three tracks from the end when it had been released as a single a month prior to the album’s release? And though it’s largely a moot point now, “This Charming Man” should have been included in the album’s tracklisting from the start. It was, after all, one of the best singles of 1983—vibrant and essential, a delectable pop treat. It was later wedged in at the end of Side A on subsequent pressings, and the transition from “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” to “This Charming Man” is jarring to say the least.
Had “This Charming Man” been on the album to begin with—say, after “Reel Around the Fountain”—it could have been positioned to better serve the material around it. Clearly, some energy was needed after six minutes of Morrissey wallowing in his tale of romantic woe and corrupted innocence. The bouncy “You’ve Got Everything Now,” with Johnny Marr’s disco-tinged verses and stirring power-chord choruses, serves that function, but it’s another rather shapeless composition, with Morrissey filling out Marr’s melody with excessive wailing.
Morrissey, of course, has had no scruples about laying the blame for the album’s failings squarely at the feet of producer John Porter. Writing in his autobiography about the third track, “Miserable Lie,” he opined: “Our live firebrand…is choked to death and boxed in…[The production] pulls the song back to a plod and makes the falsetto sound breathless and futile.” The song does sound like a particularly limp demo recording. At four-and-a-half minutes, it feels interminable. And the fact that it was recorded for the album at all, while early gems like “Handsome Devil” and “Jeane” continued to languish as B-sides, is somewhat puzzling.
In hindsight, The Smiths is like an inverse of the band’s final album, 1987’s Strangeways, Here We Come. That album was able to elevate its weaker material (mostly found toward the end) with stylish production and confident performances. The Smiths undersells its songs with a flat and bloodless sound, but does redeem itself somewhat with a strong second half, including “Still Ill” and the chilling “Suffer Little Children.”
Marr credits Porter with showing him how to make a record, and helping him to realize his dream of a “guitarchestra” sound, in which as many as 15 guitars are tracked onto the same recording, variously tuned and processed to create a Phil Spector-style wall of sound, layered like a symphony. First attempted on “This Charming Man,” this arrangement method would become absolutely integral to the Smiths sound as it evolved.
However dismayed Morrissey might have been with the way that some of the songs on The Smiths ended up sounding, Porter continued to produce for the band for the remainder of 1984. The Smiths released two non-album singles that year—“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” another of the band’s signature tunes, and the atmospheric masterpiece “How Soon Is Now?”—while The Smiths still lingered on the U.K. charts. With a bit more time to focus on each song, and with production duties handled by the band themselves, the quality of the group’s recordings improved, and arguably so did their songwriting.
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