R.E.M were my own momentous personal discovery in 1983, but I would never pretend for a moment that the music year belonged to anyone but The Smiths . They came out of nowhere and conquered hearts and minds instantly. I held my own heart and mind back for a while, unsure about Morrissey. Ultimately as time has proved, you could never be entirely sure about Morrissey but there was so much about The Smiths that was utterly irresistible from the off.
They conquered BBC Evening Radio within weeks of signing to Rough Trade and the music papers were slain immediately too. Morrissey and The NME were plainly born for each other and the latter was rechristened the New Morrissey Express by many in time. Quite rightly too although the two fought like cats and dogs across successive decades.
This Charming Man was their moment of coronation. It landed them on Top of the Pops and most got their first glimpse of Morrissey. Marr too. And Joyce and Rourke had the look and style required. They were the compete package. So many great bands from the Punk and New Wave years had imploded over the previous couple of years, but The Smiths picked up the banner and carried it forward into the fray, largely single handedly for the next few years until they too succumbed and fell.
Morrissey was never quite enough on his own, regardless of what true believers maintained. Marr was a slightly wasted talent, (it has to be said, because his talent is so vast and undeniable), though he contributed to many fine records and has made good ones of his own. Really both he and Morrissey gave the best of what they had, and they both had so much, to The Smiths. Nothing either did thereafter, considerable as it was, measured up to The Smiths. How could it?
One of my own early memories of the band came from the December '83 college trip I went on to The Soviet Union. It was a hugely pivotal moment in my life. I look back on it as my entre into adulthood in some ways, even though I was by no means an adult just yet.
The trip was sponsored by the Russian Trade Unions and we visited and stayed in Moscow and Leningrad and also stopped briefly in Novgorod over a two week period. It was a highly romantic experience, even though it stripped us all of any illusions we might have harbored that The Soviet Union was a remotely romantic place. .Darkness and the vaguest hint of unutterable bleakness are what I remember most. Even though I loved everything about the trip so much.
It introduced me to many of the people I would spend the rest of my college days with. You are never really at a place until you meet your people and I met them there. They were mostly girls, and that was good for me too. What am is saying? Not just good. Bloody wonderful. One of these girls was Clare O'Riordan, the younger singer of Cait, bassist of The Pogues and already or soon to me inamorata of Elvis Costello
Clare had a strong and firm allegiance to The Smiths, youthful as they were. I recall her singing their praises for the course of the entire trip. We also got to know each other better during that time. The group's evenings were invariably spent in the hotel ballroom. getting drunk and even drunker on a sea of vodka then up onto the hotel dancefloor to dance or rather stagger together to the house band, who generally played The Birdy Song every set and some other stuff to encourage dance from its highly inebriated audience..
During one of these drunken sallies Clare lowered her head to my shoulder, opened her mouth and bit me, really, really hard. I'll never forget it. I have no idea whether there was any romantic intention on her part to this gesture, I only remember how incredibly it hurt .It felt like an initiation into pain, love's bedfellow. I can't help feeling that Morrissey would have thoroughly approved.
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