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Perfect 10: Smiths on 45 (and the cover stars that adorned them)

It was 40 years ago today that The Smiths released their single Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. Something approaching a maudlin masterpiece, the song would be their fourth 45 but the first to break the top ten of the British singles charts — a feat they only repeated twice more, and even then the second was a full five years after the band’s shock split. 

Taking their cues from the early Beatles and Stones catalogues, Morrissey and Marr were the masters of the one-off coupling. Like the Pet Shop Boys (“the Smiths you can dance to”, once claimed Neil Tennant), the Mardy Mancunians had a nostalgic, almost romantic view of the single. 

Led by Moz’s ’60s aesthetic (a wilful distaste for the commerciality of the pop video — not to mention the synthesizer, sorry PSB), the boys saw 45s as an entity in their own right with their own original B-sides and intriguing artworks rather than just promotional fodder to shift albums. 

As evidenced by the distaste of appearing in promotional films, The Smiths baulked at the idea of picturing themselves on the front of their records. Instead, “traditionalist” Morrissey preferred to parade his pop culture heroes instead. The very epitome of retro cool, The Smiths’ sleeves stood defiantly apart in the 1980s, and they’ve retained their timeless allure ever since. 

While a gaggle of great Smiths 45s would appear on accompanying long-players, some classic tracks made it out as standalone singles — and if we’re talking UK A-sides issued in the band’s short lifetime there are precisely ten. Perfect for a mini feature on Steven Patrick Morrissey’s 65th then. And if you’ve ever wondered who some of the characters and faces adorning those often challenging but always inspired covers were then don’t look away now. 

Hand In Glove (1983) 

The Smiths’ very first release, and a controversial one to boot. From the get-go Morrissey had very specific ideas about how he wanted the group’s artworks to appear instructed. And with Hand In Glove — which celebrated both his creative partnership with Johnny Marr and the joy of fisting — he instructed Rough Trade’s art department that the vinyl label should, in homage to the music he bought in the 1960s, have a paper centre with four vents circling the middle. 

Keen to stoke the theme of homoeroticism, Moz personally provided a buttock-baring photo of actor George O’Mara, taken from his well-thumbed book The Nude Male. The gay undertones elicited the reaction Morrissey was hoping for. Bassist Andy Rourke recalled that when he showed the record to his parents his father was “mortified. He said to me, ‘That’s a bloke’s bum’ and I said, ‘yeah’, but when he asked me why I just didn’t have an answer for him.”

This Charming Man (1983)

With that jaunty rockabilly riff opening proceedings, the equally homoerotic This Charming Man was two minutes and 41 seconds that put The Smiths on the map in chart terms, reaching a modest 25. Also in the UK, the song was included as a cassette-only bonus track on the band’s debut album in 1984, followed by additional reissue formats from the 1990s, though the follow-up, What Difference Does It Make?, is still regarded the LP’s tie-in 45 proper. 

The cover star is French actor Jean-Alfred Villain-Marais, a still from his erstwhile lover Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée (Orpheus en Anglais) in which plays the titular hero, gazing into a mirror that features heavily in the fantasy based on the Greek myth.

When a bankrupt Rough Trade sold The Smiths’ catalogue to Warners, the first thing the major label did was reissue This Charming Man. This time it reached No. 8, the band’s highest chart placing 45 to date, and all the more surprising as it came a week after an avalanche of negative publicity regarding Morrissey’s Union Jack-waving shenanigans at Madness’ Madstock festival. 

Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now (1984)

With a title that paraphrased Sandie Shaw’s Heaven Knows I’m Missing Him Now, this malcontent’s anthem made it to Number 10 in June of ’84, and contains one of Morrissey’s more intriguing lines: “What she asked of me at the end of the day, Caligula would have blushed”.

Fronting the Corrie-like back streets shot, “spend spend spend” pools winner Viv Nicholson found fame in 1961 when she found herself with roughly the equivalent of £4.5m in today’s money but squandered every penny. Naturally, her tragic trajectory was a favourite subject of Moz’s, who even swiped a quote from her memoir — “Under the iron bridge, we kissed/ And although I ended up with sore lips” — for the lyrics to Still Ill that same year. 

In 1985, an even more striking photo of Nicholson taken at Yorkshire’s Wheldale Colliery was used on the German release of Barbarism Begins At Home, as well as the programme for the Meat Is Murder tour.

William, It Was Really Nothing (1984)

While the opening lines are a rewording of “The rain is falling on the foreign town, the bullets cannot cut you down” from Sparks’ This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us, the bulk of William, It Was Really Nothing is a wry fat-shaming meditation on relationships. And it’s long been acknowledged to be addressed to a fellow closeted gay singer, the Associates’ Billy Mackenzie, who would later respond in kind with the slightly misspelled Stephen, You’re Really Something. (And I should know: when we met in 1994, the first thing Moz asked me was “Steven? With a ‘V’, I hope.”) 

In an early interview, Morrissey proclaimed, manifesto-like, that Smiths’ artwork needed to “take images that were the opposite of glamour and to pump enough heart and desire into them to show ordinariness as an instrument of power – or, possibly, glamour.” And here’s a perfect example – William’s brooding shirtless cover image was originally used as an early eighties advertisement for ADS audio speakers.

Shakespeare’s Sister (1985)

At a paltry two minutes and nine seconds long, this chorus-free ditty struggled to get airplay, though that didn’t stop Shakespeare’s Sister getting to 26th position, or lending its name to Siobhan Fahey’s post-Bananarama pop act. The title isn’t one of Moz’s though — he purloined from a feminist essay by writer Virginia Woolf, while the lyric also tips its bipperty bopperty hat to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody with “No, mama let me go!” 

The ultimate Morrissey pin-up, legendary glamour-puss Pat Phoenix adorns the cover, in character as the formidable Elsie Tanner from Manchester soap Coronation Street. One of the show’s most celebrated characters, Phoenix portrayed Tanner on the small screen for almost 25 years, and had the unusual distinction of becoming Tony Blair’s mother-in-law on her deathbed in 1986.

How Soon Is Now? (1985) 

Originally the flipside to William, It Was Really Nothing, when How Soon Is Now? became one of the stand-outs of the odds and sods compilation Hatful Of Hollow the reception metered was good enough that the track was allowed to to stand on its own as a single early the following year, and even appeared on US editions of Meat Is Murder, despite being recorded six months earlier. 

The cover still — it’s a from the film Dunkirk of actor Sean Barrett in the middle of praying — was deemed too racy for the band’s American label, who worried that Barrett looked like he was fondling his crotch. To Morrissey’s dismay, it was replaced by a picture of the band backstage at Glastonbury, which the singer called “abhorrent”.

Panic (1986)

In the periods between Smiths album releases, Moz and Marr were productive enough to keep their indie audience engaged with these one-off singles and hotchpotch compilations, yet the T. Rex-sounding Panic was released just a month after the seminal Queen Is Dead album. 

Another mean and lean 45, Panic was inspired not only Metal Guru but by the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster of April 1986 and how incoming reports of the tragedy sat alongside the so-called trivial pop music of Radio 1 (Morrissey singled out I’m Your Man by Wham! for the bulk of his ire, even though it had been out for half a year by then).

With delicious irony, the track received, despite its “Hang the DJ” refrain, considerable airplay, garnering a Number 11 chart placing, giving the band their second best single position in their lifetime. They chose Richard Bradford to adorn the cover, in character as a disgraced ex-CIA agent turned private detective in sixties telly series Man In A Suitcase. 

Ask (1986)

A stop-gap single between The Smiths’ penultimate and final LPs, The Queen Is Dead and Strangeways, Here We Come (which wouldn’t arrive until a year later), Ask is an anti-war tribute to shyness (if there is even such a thing) and features the delectable dulcet tones of Kirsty MacColl on backing vocals.

British sitcom George And Mildred turned actress Yootha Joyce into a TV star, only the portrait used on Ask is a 1965 still from the Dave Clark Five film Catch Us If You Can instead. Does she look like a pop star? Or, rather, does a pop star look like her? Because on page 55 of their 2024 Annually publication, the Pet Shop Boys offer this not terribly flattering assessment of their Hallo Spaceboy collaborator:

Neil Tennant: “I always thought that David Bowie looked like Yootha Joyce.”

Chris Lowe: “The teeth, you mean. It was a great name. I don’t think there’s been another Yootha ever, has there?”

Shoplifters Of The World Unite (1987)

The Smiths’ final year of operation opened with this much-revered 45, which pipped another song, You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby, to the honour of A-side.

Big or small, Moz’s screen heroes tended to trump his musical icons when it came to Smiths sleeves, but Shoplifters (a thinly disguised pun on Shirtlifters, a homophobic term for gays popular in Britain at the time) bucks the trend with this portrait of Elvis Presley. One of the rock ’n roller’s earliest press shots, the photo was taken in 1955 by his hairdresser.

Sheila Take A Bow (1987)

Rising to No. 10, this stirring Spector-sounding single was – alongside Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now – the highest charting Smiths single in their lifetime, and even quotes David Bowie’s Kooks with the invocation to “throw your homework onto the fire.”

“Despite the difference in spelling, Sheila Take A Bow appeared to be another of Morrissey’s homages to Shelagh Delaney”, wrote Simon Goddard in Mozipedia. And while Shelagh also appeared on the covers of Girlfriend In A Coma and Louder Than Bombs (also both 1987), Sheila’s cover star is Candy Darling: a transgender actress who became closely associated for her work with Andy Warhol, and a source of inspiration for Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground; she’s the muse for Candy Says, among others, and “everybody’s darling” in Walk On The Wild Side”.

Sheila Take A Bow was to be the last Smiths single actively promoted by the group itself, and the day of their appearance on Top Of The Pops would be the last time Morrissey, Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce were in the same room together. Last word, as ever, to the Moz One:

“Let sleeping dogs lie is something I always in reference to The Smiths. The Smiths are never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to reunite – ever.”

Steve Pafford

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