Last Night I Dreamt Morrissey Loved The BBC Sound Effects Record (Volume Twenty-Three)

Pick up a Smiths re-release, one of those after-the-event Warner Bros compilations (any one will do, there's at least a hundred). Select 'Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me'. And then jump back in shock as -STNNNGG!- it crashes straight into the first line of the song, conveniently skipping over the sad, mysterious build-up that traditionally opens the track.

It feels so WRONG! This is a bloody Smiths song, and they've butchered it! But why? That, only Warner's will ever really know. Maybe for hideous 'commercial' reasons. But what did a minute or so of piano-backed crowd noise ever do to them? The crowd noise conjures up an epic picture of mass squalor, of an uprising, but one that's vaguely muted, as if it's all happening some distance away - which it IS, because then the song starts and it turns out it's all about one man's individual sadness, longing for love (for a life) while other people, somewhere else, are, for all their own hardships, just Getting On With It. The track needs that intro.

This one extreme example of censorship demonstrates just how important the production of Morrissey's and The Smiths' records are, and just how important (and relatively unsung) the non-rockist elements of these records are, especially in the way that they contribute to the overall picture or worldview they form in the collective fan mind. One of the earliest myths of The Smiths (try saying that five times fast and drunk!), and one happily propagated by the band itself, was that they were a bona fide gang. Just four lads from the North playing their way out of misery with the simple and time-honoured instruments of guitar, bass, drums and of course 'voice'. Eventually, the tensions of the group put paid to that myth, but you only have to listen to the way their records progressed in terms of production values to hear the band losing its grip on any 'one gang, four instruments' pretence of 'simple' authenticity. It's the difference between Hatful of Hollow, largely made up of tracks recorded primitively by the Beeb in a few takes, and Strangeways Here We Come, a record so dense and layered and delicate, so carefully plotted and worked-on that it took the band down with it. That the Smiths and Morrissey records we play so much have a meaning greater than the one implied purely by the noise they make, by their surface sound, is a given, but very little thought is usually given as to how/why this is. It's not just the lyrics, or Johnny's 'Super Sounds of the 60s and 70s' guitar playing, or the pored-over (and occasionally poured-over) cover artwork. There are non-rockist elements in the music, sounds other than voice/guitar/bass/drums that serve to fill in gaps, that elaborate what lyrics obscure, that colour the edges and generally hint at a more detailed worldview. It wasn't just pictures of Jimmy Dean and waspish interviews about Shelagh Delaney that performed these vital tasks!

The first handful of records The Smiths put out were, in terms of their recording, relatively straightforward and simple affairs (see above). Nary a sound effect or distorted tape warble on 'em. On the one occasion a deliberate dance remix was made, the infamous New York Mix of 'This Charming Man', it incurred Moz's wrath and a swift recall of all copies. But although Moz makes his presence felt in all of the group's dealings, the world he brings to life through his songs as they appeared on record, on the stuff people actually bought and listened to, did by necessity have to make some compromises, to meet halfway with Johnny's music (and, to an extent, the type of music Mike and Andy could/would/wanted to play). In many cases the music came first anyway, so production, the realisation of the instruments into a sound that can be captured, remains mostly a baby of the three musicians in the group. The lyrics and sleeve art were the only areas in which Moz had absolute carte blanche, so it's interesting that 'the Smiths sound' is, especially in the early years, rarely tampered with, as if Moz reluctantly allowed the other three to experiment every now and then, but not at the expense of his lyrical intentions... with one or two very notable exceptions, as we shall see.

The few occasions when this tampering does occur stand out almost freakishly, and come across as more experimental than contemporary fans could have expected. The first big attempt at doing something more with the sound comes with 'How Soon Is Now'. Its backbone isn't a recognisable rock or pop guitar/bass/drums rhythm but, well, a WEIRD sort of electric chugging. Distorted and made unusual by a variety of effects pedals, it might have started out as Johnny strumming his guitar strings, but it sure doesn't end like it.

Why this sound? Why have this weird different thing run all the way through it? We can get something like an answer by comparing the Smiths version with that performed by Moz's backing band on the 2004 tour, as captured on Live At Earl's Court. There, the backing effect is recognisable but a little... off. The second guitar sounds vaguely country'n'western, albeit slower and a little more drugged up. The effect is almost boring (and while I'm sure it's a different matter to experience that in a concert setting, I'm talking about the recorded sound here, what we have to listen back to on our iPods). By 2004 though, the audience (and the Morrissey cult) was familiar enough with the track's unique oddness for the lyrics themselves to stand in for that sense of (let's call it) a haunting, frightening fragility which That Noise provided originally. It wasn't the lyrics that made the song, or even Moz's voice - indeed, he's hardly on it! (this made things difficult for the Top Of The Pops dancers, who had to gamely act as if they were bopping away to an upbeat Madonna track, desperately trying to hide the fact they didn't know WHAT the hell it was they were dancing to or why anyone could possibly want to put it on a stage)

It's That Noise that makes the track, that makes your hairs stand on end. So one can only hazard a guess at the mixed thoughts Mozzer himself must have had on hearing the completed track. Ultimately, That Noise became one of the most recognisable signifiers associated with The Smiths in wider culture, conveniently at hand for, say, Levi ad-men looking to attract that lucrative 'alienated-youths-who-quite-like-denim' market, or BBC documentary editors after something haunting to play over footage of striking miners. It's the prime direction for the way to Smiths Land.

Having had a taste of this sort of thing, it's clear Johnny wanted more, and now Morrissey seems keen, when the right opportunity presents itself. From this point on non-instrumental trickery is a vital component of The Smiths' sound, albeit one used carefully and only after some thought. The Meat Is Murder album has a whale of a time with the sound of rainfall, used to increase that lonely, abandoned feel of 'Well I Wonder', sampled of a 1960s girlpop song. Deciding also that lyrics about slaughtered animals aren't sufficient to get his point across, Moz either suggests or agrees to a really quite incredible amount of abattoir sound effects. With all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, the soundtrack crams as much moo-ing, shrieking and buzz-saw noises into its running time as the studio tape will allow. "Do you know how the animals die?" croons Moz as we hear a gut-wrenching squeal of metal. If you didn't, you do now.

The Queen Is Dead is more subtle, even witty in its approach to non-rockist sounds. It opens, after all, not with a drumbeat or guitar lick, but a dusted-off sample from the 1962 film The L-Shaped Room. At this time there weren't the facilities that dance music eventually developed just a few years down the line, so such sampling can only have been achieved by (at least, one imagines) placing a microphone up to the speaker of a television or a movie projector. Did Moz himself provide the sample? It's tempting to picture him doing so, fast-forwarding and rewinding a film he taped off of BBC 2 on one of his many afternoons in... "Take me back to dear old Blighty!" rallies a 1940s school-marmish Joyce Grenfell type, "Put me on the train for London town / Take me anywhere / Drop me anywhere / Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham / but I don't care!"... it even sounds black and white! So, what is this telling us about the album to come, about The Smiths' current worldview before even one note of music is played, what function is it serving? Primarily there's an identification with England and Englishness, and of a jolly old-fashionedness in the face of the modern. It's saying that a ticket to Smiths Land isn't about ripped jeans, army coats or cider-and-black, but is 'about' (if only Morrissey can convince his listening public) whole universes and lifetimes existing in a speck of British dust, about feeling history behind you and not just learning from it but perhaps even fetishising some of its surface details to an extent, embracing (with a camp, knowing smirk?) elements from the past that youth movements are traditionally supposed to laugh at or reject. Compare the sample to other movie dialogue you often hear used in pop and rock, and suddenly you don't need to explain it - it makes itself obvious. (soon after, the opening track mucks around with the microphone settings, giving us a high pitched echo/whine over the drums that reasserts the ugliness and claustrophobia of British life, and a Chipmunks-style double speed Moz bleating like something from 'Watch With Mother'... "all the varied signifiers of Britain's imaginary life are here" it seems to be saying, and sure enough the album fulfils this promise, giving us double decker buses, naughty vicars, a 'Mr. Shankly' and the Carry On films)

But throughout all this experimentation a rule exists - the sounds are coming from The Smiths themselves, or are being produced by others at their behest. With Morrissey in a studio, NOBODY gets away with fiddling with The Smiths' sound before asking! We now know that Strangeways Here We Come was pulled together with almost obsessive zeal by Johnny, who was virtually living in the studio and subsisting on copious quantities of cigarettes and booze. Fans can have endless fun debating which bits are him and which are Stephen Street (his engineering with The Smiths and Moz basically being an apprenticeship for his special effects-laden work with Blur), but the rule still applies that these sounds are coming 'from' The Smiths. Things like crowd noises, childish yelps and whipcracks may hail from effects records or found sources (or local schoolkids roped in for an afternoon) but we can rest assured that the desire to use these other sounds come from within The Smiths camp, and can effectively be described as being produced 'by' them.

Gradually we begin to pull out of Smiths Land and onwards to Morrissey World. Compromise is now no longer an issue, so with Moz alone paying the wages of a hand-picked crew he is free to dictate how his songs can be presented and performed. Among this new working approach is a noticeable increase, indeed an emphasis, on non-instrumental, non-rockist elements. Evidently confident that these worked well with The Smiths' latter recordings (he proclaimed Strangeways to be their best album and finest achievement), he can now use them more often, and to much more specific ends. Viva Hate flirts with this idea, offering us high-pitched wails and tape tampering on the opening track (for mood), plus an extravagantly violent swish of a guillotine in its closing moments (for taking the thrust of the lyric to an even more brutal, and blatant, level). Bona Drag, however, or at least the singles that would go to make up Bona Drag, ups the ante nicely. If Smiths Land was an idea of a place, a semi-mythical 'dear old Blighty', then Moz World starts becoming a much more physical location, almost real, a space where not just characters but real people can -and do - live, a grouping of places that can be plotted on a map.

"No no no," a cockney (Suggs from Madness) informs us in 'Piccadilly Palare' (note the place name), "you can't get there that way. Follow me...". Later, a comedy music hall audience pops up at the end of 'Disappointed' to shout out their verdicts on Moz's promise to end his career ("Yayy!") and then his changing his mind ("Awww...!"). This is something new - a Moz record that illustrates worldviews outside that of just the singer/narrator's, a Moz album as pseudo-interactive experience. The cockney cabbie has been interpreted by many fans as a Fagin, albeit one with seedier intentions than even Dickens ascribed. This voice fleshes out the ideas introduced in the lyrics, so not only do we get to hear the narrator's viewpoint about life as a rent boy, we get the pimp's/customer's too ('Don't go with him, Moz!' one is tempted to shout, pantomime style). And the music hall boos at the end of 'Disappointed' is the first sign that Moz is aware of his (perceived) failures in the eyes of certain audiences. Usually content to be self-deprecating in a lyrical "I have no real life or love" way, here the sound effects open up the possibility that "shit, there are people out there who hate this kind of thing, and hate me!" All of a sudden, the 'VILE' hat in the 'November Spawned a Monster' video starts to make sense.

Ah, 'November Spawned a Monster'. Hands up anyone who was wondering when I'd get around to this track?... (counts)... thought so! This track poses a problem. Quite simply there are not enough adjectives in the English language to adequately describe the extraordinary (well, there's one at least) vocal performance that interrupts, nay, hijacks the song two thirds of the way in. The lyrics attempt, with a high degree of success, to build up a benign outsider's view of somebody decidedly Other (in this case, a woman with some form of extreme physical disability, a "poor twisted child" with a "frame of useless limbs"). And then, an exotic flute weaves itself into our hearing, introducing... a voice. Of sorts. Kind of. At first it really doesn't sound like a (human) voice at all, but some strange, uncanny, animalistic torture. On first hearing (and cast your mind back to when you first heard this song) this was just one of the weirdest, most baffling, most disturbing things one could ever have expected to hear in a pop song. If electronic sound effects have hitherto attempted to 'make strange' the channels flitting through our ears, then here at last is something genuinely Other. Even more than that, this is completely and totally alien. Until now Morrissey has shown himself to be an artist who uses traditional forms of pop music to convey his ideas, working within established and more or less clearly defined structures. Even That Noise in 'How Soon Is Now' is still a mere (albeit highly original) 'effect' over a recognisable narrative-based pop track. But this... this thing, this wailing, this supernatural screaming and spluttering of unbridled human frustration goes way, way beyond anything conventional British pop has dared attempt before. It is epic. It is Munch's 'The Scream' made audible. It isn't pop: this is opera. Big and dramatic and other-worldly.

And importantly it isn't something Moz could have done on his own. Mary Margaret O'Hara steps into the recording booth at Moz's request because he knows damn well the effect he wants to produce is beyond his capability, and beyond the reaches of fancy modulated effects (the recorded version of this, and the live concert one on the Live in Dallas DVD, where his guitarist yelps a few times into an echo-rigged microphone, makes for a somewhat pitiful contrast). His oft-quoted remark that he asked her "to just give birth" is telling, suggesting that he had a very clear idea of the kinds of sounds he wanted to capture - expulsive, painful, natural, but with an urgency and passion, life, to it. The "poor twisted child" isn't just letting us into her mind here (no 'but inside I'm dancing' cliché), she's reminding us that life is inherently strange, violent, wild and confusing - it's just that she isn't "allowed" the luxury of covering this up with the fanciful and fake cares (being 'rich or beautiful') that we regularly employ.

From now on, Morrissey's hand in the production side of things becomes more obscured. Ever more determined to break out of the potentially self-parodying "Morrissey" straitjacket, he turns to numerous record producers and musicians in an effort to find new ways of working, new ways of making music. The rockist elements of his material from hereon in are wildly differing in themselves, never mind the non-rockist ones. Was the decision to use atmospheric crackling radio transmissions on 'Seasick Yet Still Docked' one made by Mick Ronson alone? Did Moz suggest the spacey electro noises over the end of 'Last Of the Famous International Playboys', or was this a whim of Stephen Street's? And just who the hell was it that arranged the whole of 'The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils' around an extravagant Shostakovich sample? We'll probably never know (and if you do know, please do not write in on a postcard to this address).

On a few occasions though, the speculative fan can infer Moz's presence in the end sound of some key album tracks. 'Asian Rut' from Kill Uncle constitutes the nexus of the infamous "is he a racist?" controversy of the 90s (and it was a controversy). Unlike the apparent playfulness of 'Bengali In Platforms' (where an outsider to Britain's shores is partly defined by the 'obvious' signs of his alien-ness such as ankle stars) or the in-quotation-marks idiocy of 'National Front Disco''s chorus, the lyrics of 'Asian Rut' offer what sounds on first listening like a passing of judgement, a disparaging view (from a safe distance) of an entire group of people and their fiery-tempered way of combating prejudice. Now, the for and against debate of these lyrics is something for another article entirely, but essential in the understanding of 'Asian Rut' is its unique musical composition. The percussion plays a muted role, one far less rockist than that which it performs in surrounding tracks. Straight away we're in downbeat, even death-like mood. Moz does not want us to think lightly of this song. This is dirge-like, serious. And added to that is a violin that sounds piped in from another world entirely. Alien in the way that it genuinely echoes an Indian/Eastern sense of musicality as opposed to a British/Western one, the violin glides up, down, across in slow dreamlike movements, and you realise you're not listening to any old pop track but, as with 'November...', an opera. And specifically the kind of populist opera honed and defined by Kurt Weill, the musical - an instantaneous, multicultural grab-bag of storytelling and music. 'Asian Rut' basically is an excerpt from a musical, sound-tracking as it does a specific event in the lives of characters whose life before this track, this act, we've unfortunately missed. The violinist being utilised thus is one Nawazish Ali Khan, whose importance to the Moz canon has been glibly and inaccurately attributed to the fact he himself is Asian. His importance comes not from the fact that he is the first non-white performer on a Morrissey record (as suggested idiotically by Q magazine), but from the fact that Morrissey has sought him out to contribute a genuinely Asian musicality to a song that is attempting to understand something of the Asian (specifically Anglo-Asian) experience. (Think how racist this song may have sounded if the backing track had been a purely rockist affair! 'National Front Disco' without those quotation marks...) Instead, however clumsy or obscure the lyrics may be, the music offers, again, a different worldview, a sense that Morrissey World is composed of different places, different characters, different settings. (Effectively, the side of the 'racist' debate that attacked this song was arguing it constituted the Morrissey World version of a non-white ghetto. But again, that is for another article to discuss)

Again on Kill Uncle we can discern Moz's guidance. 'The Harsh Truth of the Camera Eye' is undoubtedly an experiment. It has no obvious backing track to speak of, consisting instead of the whirring and clicking of camera shutters, which with some treatment in the studio take on an added and disturbingly fractured dimension. It's Moz's own flirtation with the avante garde, a whirling audio-sensory tempest of claustrophobia where his fans usually expect to find a cut and dried guitar/bass/drums rhythm. We know Moz is singing (or in this case, pretty much just speaking!) from the heart, and the use of cameras as a motif clearly stems from his own experiences with the cameras of the press, his combination of vanity and insecurity. But it would be wrong to think Moz is guiding just the lyrics of this track. His own musical tastes, after all, are wide-ranging, and include not only the simple pop joys of Sandie Shaw and T-Rex but also the experimental sound-artistry of Ludus and Klaus Nomi. It is very easy indeed to picture Moz describing this song to his studio engineers as him wanting to do something conceptual. The fact it was hated by massive chunks of his contemporary fan base is quite sad. Inevitable, predictable, but sad. He never tried it again, but in terms of production, 'The Harsh Truth...' is the centrepiece of his most complex and ambitious work to date.

Morrissey's other most overt piece of production advice comes in 'Spring-Heeled Jim', with sampled movie dialogue weaving throughout the song's entirety. A reliable source informs me that these snippets come from the 1959 documentary film We Are the Lambeth Boys, and it's obviously been sourced from Moz's own personal copy. Again, these samples make real what is being inferred by the lyrics, showing us something of the social world that Spring-Heeled Jim himself inhabits, something that Jim, in his myopic, ageing melancholy isn't fully able to do. "'e looks queer, dun'ee?" "They're gonna get out a team and do 'im." Surreally, the mention of 'the copper's arms' even sounds like a pub. Like 'Asian Rut' with narratives about race, and 'The Harsh Truth...' with his desire to stretch his sound, this track forms the nexus of Morrissey's interest in the world of the gangland (or at least the British gangland), of criminal underworlds, of male-dominated environments like the pool hall and the boxing ring. The London FM (?) radio broadcast that ends 'Boxers' probably also hails from Moz's own collection, a brief but significant element that identifies and places the psycho-geographical setting of the song.

And what came after? Moz finally found a backing group he could keep (well more or less, as any Spencer Cobrin fans will testify), and to an extent started leaving the production side of things to, well, the producers. Southpaw Grammar and Maladjusted have their fare share of quirks, both rockist and non-rockist, but nothing that serves a specific purpose or elaborates in any significant way anything that the lyrics or instruments aren't already telling us. In 'First Of the Gang to Die' we hear a snippet from what appears to be LA radio ("Los Angeles - you are...(?)" - and anyone who can actually decipher the last word(s) of that, congratulations), but the song describes its context (Latino American gangland) pretty well on its own. And it's nice to see that the bizarre and unexpected electro noises that popped up in 'Last Of the Famous...' make a reappearance for the end of 'Irish Blood, English Heart' (really, what is the point of those weird whoosh squelch synth noises that come after the second chorus?).

The recording studio as it existed when Morrissey first started making music with The Smiths is different to the kind of studio that existed when he first ventured into his solo career, which in turn is even more different in the early 21st century. The facilities to not just record sound, but to experiment and play and add to it, are greater and more refined than they were. And so, bizarrely, there is less of an inclination to bother trying (does the production sound of the million Will Farrell knock-offs truly constitute imaginative sound engineering? Or just fancy imitation of a now-standardised method?). Morrissey may have become comfortable with a working routine that sees him letting his lyrics more or less speak for themselves (even to the point of making do on some tracks to just having a second verse that is virtually identical to the first, a lyrical method that would have felt odd in The Smiths days of every-word-counts-because-this-track-may-be-my-last). Certainly he and his backing group know each other extremely well, having developed a working relationship that borders almost on symbiosis (a feeling of closeness that is evident to fans, hence for example the existence of this very website). Will Moz ever again want to ditch what is safe and recognisable however, and try, even for just one or two tracks, to influence a recording so that, like 'November Spawned a Monster' or 'The Queen is Dead', it adds extra dimensions to the lyrical content, or just, as with 'The Harsh Truth...', comes out sounding new and unexpected? It seems, in my opinion, doubtful. Morrissey has reached a point that very few artists reach, becoming virtually his own genre. The 2004 versions of past songs mentioned above (especially 'How Soon Is Now' and 'November...') make an effort to contain something of those strange alien audio elements that made the originals so unique, but there's no evidence that Moz has any interest in that kind of thing, beyond toying with the 'superficial-ness' of the sound (the clean, American commercial rock sound of You Are The Quarry, for instance), or, rather, letting a producer toy with it. We know now, or think we know, what Morrissey World looks and feels like, so the songs themselves act as the sole signifiers of that worldview. We don't even get the homoerotic sleeve art anymore!

Let's just be glad that Morrissey, and his close compatriots, have shown the interest in production detail that they have done, and that we have what we have. Imagine a world where Warner Bros released a version of 'Nowhere Fast' that actually has the sound of a train going by. And shudder.

Mary Margaret O'Hara photo courtesy of marymargaretohara.com