The Smiths

The Smiths don’t sound like any other band from the eighties. Their music starts from something simple — guitar, bass, and drums — but takes it somewhere where the melancholic and the rhythmic intertwine effortlessly. Johnny Marr crafts arpeggios that seem to float above the tempo, while Morrissey’s voice drifts between whispers and restrained shouts, as if every word came from a forgotten poetry book in a corner of Manchester. They weren’t trying to sound like anyone else: they rejected the synthetic sheen of synth-pop at the time and instead revived sixties rock with a post-punk edge that still felt fresh decades later. They recorded in small rooms, with borrowed equipment, and the result was something raw and unpolished, untouched by retouching.

Everything began in May 1982, when Johnny Marr and his friend Steve Pomfret showed up unannounced at Steven Morrissey’s house in Stretford. The pretext was to invite him to form a band, but the real spark was an instant connection: both shared obsessions with literature, garage rock, and bands like the New York Dolls. Marr, then just 14, had been fascinated to learn that Morrissey — 19 years his senior — had written a book about that very group. Their first rehearsed song, “Don't Blow Your Own Horn,” didn’t impress anyone, but the next day they were already working on “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” where Marr borrowed the tempo from Patti Smith’s “Kimberly” and recorded it on a TEAC four-track recorder. They even dared a subversive cover: “I Want a Boy for My Birthday” by the Cookies, a sixties track Morrissey chose for a man to sing, defying expectations.