As with many artists who have passionate fanbases, The Smiths’ die-hards generally don’t rate the band’s still widely-popular breakthrough single This Charming Man in their hallowed upper chambers of favourites.
But, regardless of taste, the importance of this undeniably infectious single was immense. When it burst into the charts during the dying months of 1983, it served as an introduction to a different kind of rock offering. The Smiths might have been wildly out-of-step with what was then going on in both the alternative and the mainstream, but before long, they'd become indie’s foremost act.
Set off by Johnny Marr’s chirping riff, This Charming Man’s pulsing momentum indicated that this Manchester four-piece had a singularly distinctive musical palette. Marr’s lithe and precise guitar work was backed by Andy Rourke’s robust yet nimble bassline and Mike Joyce’s tightly-controlled beat. Above it all, Morrissey delivered a tale of illicit temptation in his trademark baritone.
The Smiths had crafted a sound that hinted at a jigsaw of half-remembered, ghostly influences. Familiar, yet also something entirely new.
As the band’s second single, released before their eponymous 1984 debut hit shelves, This Charming Man's arrival was the moment the Smiths’ journey into the annals of history truly began.
First forming as a result of a now-fabled doorstep meeting between 18-year-old guitar wunderkind Johnny Marr and former punk turned reclusive wordsmith Steven Patrick Morrissey, the Smiths had worked hard to build something that could go all the way.
In Morrissey, Marr had found the perfect intellectual foil for his ambidextrous guitar melodicism, and in Marr, Morrissey finally had the vehicle in which to frame his increasingly elaborate lyrics.
“Morrissey and I had started our partnership” Marr remembered in his autobiography, Set the Boy Free. “Whatever it was that we had it was ours and it was totally unique. We were two people who had already dedicated most of our young lives to becoming what we wanted to be. We’d both worked obsessively on what we were doing in a way that no-one else around us could come close to, and we recognised in each other the same commitment and emotional need to follow our visions.”
Morrissey and Marr, despite their wildly different personalities, were bound together by their shared goal. Before long, Marr’s friend Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce rounded out the rhythm section of the band that would become known as The Smiths (by all accounts, this was the least-disliked option out of three distinctly ‘ordinary’ names suggested by Morrissey).
“I’d never heard anyone or anything like Johnny before. It was unique,” said drummer Mike Joyce in his autobiography, The Drums. “He sounded like four guitarists all at once. I’d never drummed to music like this before. It had a mystery to it, like it was a secret waiting to be unlocked.”
As with all hopeful bands of the period, gaining traction depending upon endless gigging and maintaining a high bar when it came to songwriting, all in the hope of attracting a label.
Having been turned down by both Manchester’s iconic Factory Records and EMI, upstart independent label Rough Trade (who’d previously broken one of their acts, Stiff Little Fingers, into the top 20) decided to take a punt on this intriguing (and persistent!) new band, eventually releasing their first single Hand in Glove on May 13th 1983.
Although the band knew they’d written a gem, and the song was popular on the local scene, it sadly failed to even get within touching distance of the main UK singles chart.
Back in the days when guitar bands had a legitimate chance of becoming the next big thing, it was a disappointing start. But it served as a major lesson for The Smiths. To be in with a chance at consistent radio play, the next single would need to be something altogether poppier. Something much more welcoming, but no less alluring…
Around this point, Marr had heard other Rough Trade signings Aztec Camera’s sublime and peppy Walk Out to Winter, and felt in it a suggestion of what the Smiths’ direction of travel should be.
With positive press attention for the band building, and a vaunted BBC John Peel session rapidly approaching, Johnny settled in for one of the most prodigious evenings of his entire songwriting career, wherein he wrote the basic shape of This Charming Man alongside future Smiths’ debut album cuts Still Ill and Pretty Girls Make Graves.
“My competitive urges kicked in. I felt that we needed something upbeat and in a major key for Rough Trade to get behind. That's why I wrote it in the key of G, which to this day I rarely do,” Marr recounted to Mojo magazine in 2008.
Going into greater detail in Set the Boy Free, Johnny explained his thought process during the writing of This Charming Man…
“I’d noticed our label mates Aztec Camera were getting a lot of radio airplay, and I wondered if it might be because their songs were more breezy and upbeat. The sun was coming through the window, and I picked up my guitar and strummed a chord sequence that conjured the feeling I was trying to evoke,” Johnny stated.
“After a minute of playing, another sequence appeared under my fingers from nowhere, and after following that for a while I had what I thought was a song.”
Quickly tracking this network of layered guitar ideas on his TEAC-3 cassette machine, Marr was confident that it could form the basis of an attention-grabbing single.
Handing the demo cassette over to Morrissey, Johnny was intrigued to see how his blossoming songwriting partner would respond. He wouldn't be disappointed…
As would soon be typical of Morrissey, the resulting lyrics of This Charming Man were inspired by a plethora of his literary and cinematic influences, one of these was a late-night BBC screening of the 1972 British film Sleuth, which Morrissey tuned into during a break from touring.
During the film, British screen legend Laurence Olivier pointed a gun at a young Michael Caine, calling him a “jumped up pantry boy who doesn’t know his place“. Morrissey’s ears pricked up at the line, (a line that Caine repeated later in the film when the roles are reversed). The idea of a young upstart, not knowing ‘their place’ resonated with the class-conscious 24-year-old.
Another element that informed the song’s central hook of ‘I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear’ harked back to the 1961 film adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, wherein Rita Tushingham’s Jo responds to being asked whether she’s going to a dance by saying, “I haven’t got any clothes to wear for one thing.”
Morrissey could empathise…
The idea of not having the ‘right’ clothes to wear chimed with Morrissey’s own experience of living frugally, as he reported to Undress the year following its release…
“For years and years, I never had a job, or any money. Consequently, I never had any clothes whatsoever. I found that on those very rare occasions when I did get invited anywhere I would constantly sit down and say, ‘Good heavens, I couldn’t possibly go to this place tonight because I don’t have any clothes, I don’t have any shoes.’ So I’d miss out on all those foul parties. It was really quite a blessing in disguise.”
With these themes in play, Morrissey wove a narrative of trepidatious self-discovery set within the repressive constraints of working-class life.
Beginning with an image of a stranded youth alone on a hillside, breathing a sigh of relief as a car rolls up to assist, Morrissey suggests more than a lift home from this knight in shining armour:
Punctured bicycle
On a hillside desolate
Will nature make a man of me yet?
When in this charming car
This charming man
As the song unfolds, the homoerotic subtext of This Charming Man becomes more apparent. However, Morrissey’s use of terms informed by kitchen-sink drama, and the antiquated language of faded glamour echoed the ordinary, invisible longings of repressed northern life more generally.
“I didn’t think Morrissey was overtly homosexual in anything he did,” wrote Mike Joyce in The Drums. “The Smiths spoke to all outsiders, whoever you were, whatever your sexual or social persuasion. It was our great strength and our great attraction.”
Upon hearing these compelling lyrics, Marr was overawed. He knew This Charming Man was going to push the band even further.
Accentuating the brightness of Johnny's riffs with Rourke’s driving - and Motown-inspired - bassline and Joyce’s durable beat, the new song was successfully tracked at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios on September 14th 1983 for the aforementioned John Peel session (It was this version that would later appear on the band’s beloved 1984 compilation Hatful of Hollow).
To get the single laid down properly, the band decamped to Matrix Studios in Fulham, London to try and cut the definitive studio version.
Prior to this, the band had already attempted to make their debut LP with The Teardrop Explodes’ Troy Tate sitting in the producer’s chair at Elephant Studios in Wapping, London, however the band were dissatisfied with the meek sounding results.
Enter former Roxy Music bassist and production polymath John Porter, whom Johnny had met at the BBC. An able producer with an impressive CV, Porter was recruited to re-record the entire debut, and, while he was at it, properly cut This Charming Man.
Last year, John talked to us at MusicRadar about his memories of these early sessions with The Smiths, with whom he’d go on to make two iconic albums.
"They were very much a Manchester-based band and they didn't like leaving Manchester. So, I decided to go up to Manchester and we re-recorded their debut at Pluto Studios,” The Leeds-hailing John remembered.
“I felt that when I first came to London, I'd been a clueless kid from the north, and I recognised - as far as making records was concerned - that they were also clueless kids from the north. But I had a few years on them and had been doing it longer. I did have a lot of input into the arrangements.”
Despite their obvious talents, neither Marr nor Morrissey had much clue how anything worked in the studio.
“They didn’t know about overdubbing or about song structure or anything,” Porter explained to us. “Johnny would just play a riff which would go on for two and a half minutes, Morrissey would sing over it, and that was it. I tried to bring in some light and shade, because they didn't necessarily have verses and choruses as such in their songs, so I used to try and arrange the dynamics of the song. That's why we came across a sort of formula of having a guitar intro, a breakdown in the middle and a ‘re-intro’”
For the This Charming Man brief specifically, Porter and the group were not fully happy with an initial attempt to track the single, which was undertaken at Matrix Studios in London.
John remembered feeling that the rhythm section in particular should be much tighter and punchier. Luckily, he had just the right bit of then-innovative new tech to rectify the issue…
“With This Charming Man, the timing on the original track that we recorded at Matrix Studios was hard to work with. I think I'd edited between a few takes to get one good take (which was not unusual), but you did that anyway in those days,” John told us.
“I went back up to Manchester, and booked a day at Strawberry Studios [in the town of Stockport]. I’d recently got a LinnDrum [a Linn-LM-1, to be precise] and I copied Mike's drum parts from the track we'd done in London, and asked Johnny and Andy to play along with it. I overdubbed the drums last. My theory always was (and still is) if you can’t dance to it, it’s no good. So we recorded the song again - the track was a bit simpler, but the arrangement was the same. The London version had the same basic arrangement, but what we did in Manchester was a bit smoother and a bit cleaner.”
These inaugural sessions also allowed Marr and Porter to begin experimenting with widening the scope of Johnny’s guitar sounds. This first stab at a multi-tracked morass of melodies, chords and, erm, knife-on-guitar sound design, he’d later dub the Guitarchestra.
“I’ll try any trick. With the Smiths, I'd take this really loud Telecaster of mine, lay it on top of a Fender Twin Reverb with the vibrato on, and tune it to an open chord,” Johnny told Guitar Player in 1993. “Then I'd drop a knife with a metal handle on it, hitting random strings. I used it on This Charming Man, buried beneath about 15 tracks of guitar.
“[This Charming Man] was the first record where I used those highlife-sounding runs in 3rds. I'm tuned up to F# and I finger it in G, so it comes out in A. There are about 15 tracks of guitar. People thought the main guitar part was a Rickenbacker, but it's really a '54 Tele. There are three tracks of acoustic, a backwards guitar with a really long reverb, and the effect of dropping knives on the guitar – that comes in at the end of the chorus.”
“With This Charming Man, John Porter had taken what I could only dream of in my bedroom and made it a reality,” Marr later said in Set the Boy Free.
“When the sessions for This Charming Man were finally being completed, I sat behind the console and listened to our new single in awe. I was impressed by what we’d done but more than that, I was really impressed by the band. The vocal was fantastic, the bass playing was completely original and the drumming kept it all together perfectly and was right on the money… I thought my band were the best. We were eccentric and subversive, and we were about to gatecrash the mainstream.”
Porter told us that recording the single marked the start of a hugely rewarding creative relationship with Marr, which would flourish across future Smiths’ gems How Soon Is Now? and 1985 album Meat is Murder. Sadly, John was fired and replaced with Stephen Street ahead of the recording of the band’s third album, The Queen is Dead…
“I really enjoyed working with The Smiths, but Morrissey was always difficult,” remembers John. “When I first met him, he was very polite and would send me postcards saying how much he'd enjoyed it, thanking me. This quickly changed to complete disdain. I don't think Morrissey liked me. I don't think he liked my friendship with Johnny,” Porter shared with us. You can read our full interview with John here for more of his insights into his time with The Smiths and beyond.
As predicted, This Charming Man was significantly more successful than its predecessor. Backed by its stripped-down, rehearsal-room video (wherein Morrissey iconically swung a bunch of gladioli - an increasingly familiar feature of their live shows) - the song’s infectious bounce and lyrical ambiguity captivated a portion of the record-buying public.
Although only making it to No. 25 on its initial release, the song would gain popularity as the band continued their critically venerated rise, eventually muscling into the top ten via a re-release in 1992 (where it peaked at No. 8). The debut album, ably re-recorded with John Porter, was released in February of 1984, and the rest is history…
“[The release] changed my life and the life of everybody else in the Smiths,” remembered Marr in Set the Boy Free. “The record quickly went into the national charts and suddenly we were known not just in the music press but in the suburbs and schools. It felt like we had arrived from a different dimension to take over the pop scene, and because we were so different and very distinctive we got the country’s attention and everyone had an opinion about us, whether they liked us or not.”
Outside of the historical context, Marr would later share his retrospective opinion of This Charming Man as a song. In an interview with Q Magazine he said, “I wince a bit when I hear it now. It only tells the shiny side of the story, it in no way epitomises what was good about the band in the long term. But God bless it though, it seemed to catch on with a lot of people.”
