The Peel version shuffled, but the single turned the beat into a straight four-to-the-floor, which gave Marr’s guitar – which hinted at African pop, the Byrds and so much more – greater space to shine. This Charming Man was written for the band’s second Peel session, but rearranged for release as a single after Rough Trade made the suggestion it might be a better choice than Reel Around the Fountain. This Charming Manįour songs in, and we’re only up to the second single, from October 1983. The Smiths were so good this song’s only release on record came on Hatful of Hollow – it was never recorded for an “official” album or single. Marr, meanwhile, offers a spindly version of lounge pop in the background – this is a musical prototype of Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, with none of the lushness – all precise stabs of guitar, then weeping chords. It’s a tender portrait of a young mother giving away her baby, in a lyric that reads like a kitchen-sink drama: “Wrap her up in the News of the World/ Dump her on a doorstep, girl.” The child “could have been a poet or she could have been a fool” – but the mother will never know. Proof that empathy could be part of Morrissey’s armoury came with this song, recorded for the second Smiths Peel session in September 1983. Reel Around the Fountain was arguably the Smiths at their most perfect – a band who understood the dynamics and complexities of both music and life. Again, the wit was there (though the line “I dreamt about you last night/ And I fell out of bed twice” was lifted from Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey), along with a delicious understatement (“Fifteen minutes with you/ I wouldn’t say no”) that makes love and lust and despair seem human rather than, as so often in pop, superheroic. Reel Around the Fountain – a song about the loss of innocence, and one tabloid papers suggested was condoning child abuse – was stately and mournful, but never let its melancholy topple over into self pity. Yet on this version, you’re hardly aware of chords: Marr’s guitar seems to shimmer and hover, flitting across the rhythm section, Morrissey gliding atop it all (if never the most supple of singers, his vocal here is perfectly judged). Marr discovered the melody during an attempt to play the R&B song Handyman by Jimmy Jones, when “this string of strange chord changes fell from my fingers”. Reel Around the Fountain was recorded for the group’s first Peel session, in May 1983, a few days after the release of Hand in Glove, in a take that makes the version on their debut album sound like a bad cover. The best of the sessions, and many of the remarkable number of great non-album singles and B-sides they recorded, ended up on the compilations – Hatful of Hollow and The World Won’t Listen and on their US equivalent, Louder Than Bombs. Throughout their career, but especially at its start, the Smiths would debut new songs on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show, unveiling four songs at a time. Reel Around the Fountain (Peel session version) Hand in Glove sounded like a teenager’s heart rendered in song – a staggering initial outburst.Ģ. Marr, meanwhile, raced out of the traps with that soaring, triumphant opening harmonica riff, the dramatic stop-start in the verses and the umistakable air of a man who knew his rock history and was determined to plunder it without ever repeating it. Consider the line “And everything depends upon how near you stand to me”, (actually an adaptation of a lyric from Leonard Cohen’s Take This Longing). And it displayed his gift, despite having long left his teens, for understanding the desperate, romantic solipsism of the teenager (something that would become more of a problem as he got older and as his lyrics increasingly suggested he was not so much empathetic as desperately solipsistic himself). It showed his gift for unexpected vulgarity (“Hand in glove/ The sun shines out of our behinds”). Morrissey’s was one of difference: “No it’s not like any other love/ This one is different because it’s us!” and “We may be hidden by rags/ But we’ve something they’ll never have”. The Smiths’ first single was everything one might want a debut to be: an extraordinary statement of musical and lyrical intent, in which Morrissey and Johnny Marr laid down a manifesto.

Struggle session intro songf