A light that never goes out: why the Smiths are eternally influential
John Peel once described the Smiths as “just another band that arrived from nowhere with a very clear and strong identity”. Unlike other bands, he said, the Smiths weren’t trying to be T Rex or the Doors; they were simply the Smiths, a group whose aesthetic lineage was curiously hard to trace.
What they left in their wake, of course, is far easier to map out: there are few indie bands since who don’t, at least in some way, take their cues from Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Mike Joyce and the recently departed Andy Rourke. As far back as their 1983 debut, the Smiths were inadvertently shaping ideas about how indie should interact with fandom, masculinity and the mainstream music industry, and writing music that would be referenced and reinterpreted by generations to come; over the past 40 years, you can see their aesthetic and spiritual influence in everyone from the Stone Roses to Oasis and the 1975.
The Smiths’ influence is so widespread that it can be hard to pinpoint what, exactly, their specific legacy has been: even decades later, nobody really plays guitar like Marr and nobody really writes lyrics or sings like Morrissey.
Instead, there’s some kind of ineffable vibe, a sensibility that can be felt. John Reed, director of catalogue at Cherry Red Records and the compiler of Scared to Get Happy, an exhaustive compilation of 80s British indie music, says that the band “became a template – something either sounds like the
Smiths or it doesn’t. There’s maybe only a dozen other British bands who you could say that about.” Instead, it’s easier to speak to what they offered when they first debuted, and what made them go from, as Reed says, “zeros to heroes overnight”.
Tony Fletcher, author of A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths remembers that the band offered “a sense of positivity at a time when Britain felt really fucked. They were offering this sort of exuberant, joyous positivity; they were working-class lads who didn’t mind smiling.”
Although Morrissey’s lyrics, now, are seen as uniquely pessimistic, Fletcher says that at the time there was a “liberating” feeling listening to the Smiths, given the way they brought a comic, pop-focused lens to the grimness of life as a young person in the midst of Thatcher-era Britain. “Their politics were very clear, but they weren’t coming out and apologising for being working class, and they weren’t coming out with the kind of militant statements that some other bands did,” he says. “Morrissey’s line ‘I’ve never had a job / Because I’ve never wanted one’ [on You’ve Got Everything Now] – that was a seminal line early on at a time of great employment.”
The interplay of gloom and light, of Morrissey’s biting lyrics and Marr’s bright guitars, are what has made the band so enduring for successive