It’s rare that I’m so flummoxed in determining whether I love or hate a thing, but here it is: The Smithsfits.
I also rarely go in for “mash-ups” unless they are particularly well done or so transgressively stupid that they cause me to laugh. The Smithsfits, as the name indicates, a mash-up of The Smiths and the Misfits, is fairly well done and it’s definitely stupid... but I just can’t decide if this is awesome or if it totally sucks.
Five of the songs on the band’s Soundcloud are Misfits songs done in the style of The Smiths and two of them are Smiths songs done in the style of the Misfits. I’ll give them points for mixing it up a bit. The singer does a fairly decent Morrissey impression. His Morrissey is better than his Danzig.
My unclear opinions aside, this is bound to appeal to some of our readers…
Peter Solowka was the founding guitarist for the wonderful UK pop band the Wedding Present, and played with them on their first batch of releases up to and including 1991’s mindblowing and essential Seamonsters, after which he was shown the door. But during his tenure in that band, he was a mover behind one of the band’s more off-the-map projects—a series of Peel Sessions wherein TWP devoted themselves to interpretations of Ukrainian folk songs. That was a short lived phase for the Wedding Present, but it became Solowka’s career. Upon being jettisoned from TWP, he was able to devote his attention to a side project that grew from that Weddoes diversion, the Ukrainians. That band name is about as exactly-what-it-says-on-the-box as band names come: they play traditional Ukrainian folk music amped up with post-punk textures and aesthetic strategies.
The band’s somewhat narrow concept has proved remarkably durable—they’ve existed for 25 years now, and have not only been recording and releasing music fairly steadily, they are touring the UK in support of a new LP in May. But the works I’m keen to share today are two EPs, released ten years apart, that pay tribute to the music of the Smiths and the Sex Pistols. The Smiths covers EP, 1992’s Pisni iz The Smiths, is great fun while being reverently respectful to the source material. This doesn’t feel cheeky, just really robust. Even the originally dismal “Meat is Murder” kicks ass. Savour the flavour:
Born May 22, 1959, Mr. Steven Patrick Morrissey turns 55 today. You may have heard of his old band, The Smiths.
To commemorate, we offer this footage of his first solo gig, in 1988 at Wolverhampton Civic Hall, which also kinda doubled as The Smiths’ farewell. The rhythm section here is a pre-lawsuit Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke, and the guitarist is Craig Gannon, who served the Smiths as bassist during Rourke’s brief 1986 ouster from the band, and became their touring rhythm guitarist thereafter. As The Smiths split up before the release of their final album, Strangeways, Here We Come, this was the only live performance of some of that material ever undertaken by this many Smiths at once.
Admission was free to anyone wearing a Smiths or Morrissey shirt. Only half the fans who traveled to Wolverhampton made it inside the venue. Outside the queuing and organisation almost turned to chaos. The atmosphere inside was obviously very charged. There was a great deal of cheering and chanting Morrissey’s name to the English football tune. Throughout the short set many fans made it on stage, much more than for a typical Smiths concert.
Morrissey came on stage to a thunder of applause, after a long period of cheering and chanting. In the first song, “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before”, he sang “And so I drank one, or was it four?” instead of “... it became four”. He actually sang that line as it had been originally written and not as it appeared on “Strangeways Here We Come”. Before “Interesting Drug” which had yet to be released and was unknown to the fans, Morrissey started “This song is called…” but never managed to finish his introduction. In that song just like in the previous one, “Disappointed”, Morrissey missed many lines because of the mayhem with the fans on stage.
It’s true—Morrissey gets manhandled worse than Dead Kennedys-era Jello Biafra here. Having touched the garment of their messiah, I’m sure most of those kids turned out OK.
Various editions of “This Charming Man” single release (including the Francois Kevorkian remixes on the left) courtesy of Share Some Greased Tea With Me.
So there I was, casually browsing through some Johnny Marr-plays-guitar videos on YouTube, when the thought struck me that remixing the Smiths in a dub style (essentially stripping Morrissey’s warbling right back and pushing Marr and the rhythm section up to the front) would be a wonderful thing.
You see, I may rag on the Smiths a lot (to me they represent everything that can be deemed wrong about “indie” or “alternative” music) but there’s a niggly wee corner of my teenage heart that will always belong to them. Those years we spent together were beautiful indeed, around the age of thirteen or fourteen, but then I grew up a bit and discovered sex and drugs. And a whole bunch of other music that was way more exciting, dramatic and sexy.
As the years have gone by, on the odd occasions that I feel brave enough to confront my embarrassing teenage angst and revisit the Smiths, I have fallen more and more in love with Johnny Marr’s incredible playing (in direct relation to falling further and further out of love with Morrissey’s “unique” vocal style.) Hence the idea of the Smiths in dub - a silly, facetious notion for sure, taking one of the whitest bands of all time and daring to process them through a hash-clogged Black Ark desk.
You can imagine my surprise then to find out that this actually once happened.
The acclaimed New York-based dj and producer Francois Kevorkian produced two dub remixes of “This Charming Man” for a limited edition release at the tail end of 1983. Unsurprisingly Morrissey hated the mixes (“hang the dj” and all that) and apparently so did Marr (though I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt: after all he later went on to form the dance supergroup “Electronic.”)
Thanks to that miracle of the modern age, the Internet, once this was brought to my attention I was able to go online and track these elusive remixes down straight away. Both have been uploaded to YouTube by TheStaticAirwaves, who adds some more info in the description box:
In December 1983, DJ François Kevorkian released a “New York” mix of the single on Megadisc records. Kevorkian geared the song for nightclub dancefloors, and the track was intended to be pressed in limited numbers for New York club DJs.
However, Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis liked the mix and gave the release wide distribution in the UK. Morrissey publicly disowned the mix, and urged fans not to purchase copies. Travis later claimed, “it was my idea, but they agreed. They said ‘Go ahead’, then didn’t like it so it was withdrawn.” He also said, “Nothing that ever happened in The Smiths occurred without Morrissey’s guidance; there’s not one Smiths record that went out that Morrissey didn’t ask to do, so there’s nothing on my conscience.”
How exactly this record escaped my notice I don’t know. Francois Kevorkian (aka Francois K) is a legend in disco and deep house circles, both for his early remix work for the classic Prelude label, but also for his own tech -and-house productions for his own label Wave. That’s not even mentioning his legendary all-night dj sets that are a fixture of clubs around the world.
While I can’t really imagine what clubs this would have been played in at the time, I can easily see the “New York Instrumental” remix of “This Charming Man” closing a classic John Hughes 80s-teen movie that never was.
Apparently John Peel once played this version of the song at the end of his Festive Fifty (a show where the public voted on their favourite songs, and “This Charming Man” had been voted number one song of the year.) Needless to say the Smiths fans were not amused.
But then, are they ever?
The Smiths “This Charming Man (Francois Kevorkian New York Instrumental Mix)”
The Smiths “This Charming Man (Francois Kevorkian New York Vocal Mix)”
Matt Johnson, under the moniker of The The, played the Hank Williams of the 1980s. Inspired by a Throbbing Gristle cassette as a teenager, he went on to record some of the most poignant and heartfelt pop music of the decade, helping lay the groundwork for the “alternative” heart-sleeving of the 1990s.
The The’s stuff is, to my mind, just brutally honest and True about the human condition. Johnson’s albums have gotten me through some hard parts of my life… and judging from his Amazon comments, I’m not alone. The Cult of Johnson, while small, is about as rabidly dedicated as you could expect a fan base to be?
