It was 25 years ago today…
… that The Smiths first appeared on national television. Yes, it was 24 November 1983 on the BBC’s Top Of The Pops, that Morrissey sang ‘This Charming Man’ into a bouquet of gladiolas, a stylistic affectation made possible by the fact that TOTP was entirely mimed.
Well, here it is:
I wish I could say I witnesed the moment, or was in some way a part of the moment, or has even the vaguest memory of it… but of course, in 1983, I was 15, in sunny Cape Town and probably memorising Catullus for a Latin exam, about as far away from the dank bedsit world of Stephen Morrissey as it was possible to get.
In 1983, I’m pretty sure most of my school friends were either into reggae or Duran Duran. I, on the other hand, had just got my first acoustic guitar (which I was attempting to make sense of) and worshipping at the altar of Neil Young, while dreaming of the day I could leave school, grow my hair and… well, I think that was about it. Ah, avoid the army, that was the other thing.
It would be at least a decade before I first heard The Smiths. I really don’t know why it took that long. By that stage I had gone through Joy Division and The Cure already. How The Smiths stayed under my radar, I have no idea.
My friend Brett Collings, the drummer in one of my bands, first introduced me to them. I liked some of the songs and went out to buy a CD, but the 2nds hand CD shop I used to frequent didn’t have any. So instead I came home with ‘Viva Hate’. I don’t know why it didn’t do it for me, because I love the album today, but it stayed on the shelf for years.
A decade later, I’d settled in England. And for some cosmic reason, it all started making sense. But what’s more, it started making retroactive sense, so much so that How Soon Is Now, There’s A Light That Never Goes Out and indeed This Charming Man now seem painfully biographical. I often think “Jesus, that was my life!”
Perhaps in my little queer world, sunny Cape Town wasn’t that far from damp and danky Manchester after all. The Smiths didn’t provide the soundtrack from my teens and young adulthood, but bizarrely, listening to their records now is like opening a diary.
So here’s to a quarter century of those charming men. Dis you see the original broadcast? What are your memories?
Comments
| 24 November, 2008, 3:53 pm |
I didn’t see that broadcast, but I do remember watching TOTP a year later, when Morrissey tore open his shirt while singing William it Was Really Nothing to reveal the words “Marry Me” scrawled in lipstick
It was an electric moment.
Are there any TV moments that crackle with static anymore?
| 24 November, 2008, 11:58 pm |
There is a surprise, David T commenting on a post about The Smiths; who would have thought it?
| 25 November, 2008, 2:15 pm |
I probably saw this as it went out. I was fairly glad something guitary was capable of getting in the charts iirc but it wasn’t my cuppa and sarcastic miming wasn’t really as clever as morrisey appeared to think. Pretty sure I’d been hearing the smiths for months or years already on the radio anyway.
| 26 November, 2008, 10:52 am |
I saw this broadcast not long after I had turned down an offer to go and see them live on a drizzly night in Huddersfield, I had hardly heard of them at the time and I prefered to spend my money seeing The Sisters of Mercy and the Skeletal Family instead…
Of course the ersatz gothic gloom was ditched immediately for the pinpoint, provincial black and white telly, canalside bittersweetness of the Smiths, which said everything to me about my life.
| 27 November, 2008, 1:03 pm |
I remember seeing it at the time (I would have been 12 at the time) and it changed my (musical) life.
Still the best song they ever recorded.
| 1 December, 2008, 1:38 pm |
I was 17 and living in Portishead and spending most of my time staring out to sea or messing around with my friend Antony, who later came out and later still became Ananga. Did I see the performance? Possibly. But I do remember the excitement of reading about The Smiths in the NME and then discovering the music was as good as the hype. I saw them later at the Bristol Colston Hall and they were the soundtrack of my univeristy years.
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