Fact #159553

Scott Piering (radio plugger, Rough Trade records) : How Soon Is Now? was the international hit that should have happened. It would have changed everything.

John Porter (producer) : That's where it all, sadly, started to fall apart. We did it at Jam Studios in Finsbury Park. Everybody was a bit hungover from the night before. I don't know what had gone on. They had 'William (It Was Really Nothing)' basically together, so we put it down very quickly. And Johnny played me a little chord sequence which I thought was kind of interesting, but very pretty. And I seem to remember saying to him, 'Play what you think is That's All Right' - you know, the old Arthur Crudup tune. 'Play your impression of that.' So he did. So I said, 'Right, now play your chord sequence two octaves down from where you've done it, and let's bolt it on to this other part.' And that sort of happened. They did three takes. It was a Saturday. I don't think Morrissey was there. I posted it, or somebody posted it, through Morrissey's letterbox that night and then he came in the next day with his book and sang possibly one or two takes. And it was done. I thought, 'Right, well, now we're starting to move into second gear. Now we've got something that we can sell in America. Now we've got a band that could be like R.E.M.are now.' We were all really, really excited. In the evening I called Scott and Scott came down. He loved it. He said, 'Yes! Fantastic!'

Johnny Marr (guitarist, The Smiths) : How Soon Is Now was in FNo tuning. I wanted a very swampy sound, a modern bayou song. It's a straight E riff, followed by open G and FNom7. The chorus uses open B, A, and D shapes with the top two strings ringing out. The vibrato sound is fucking incredible, and it took a long time. I put down the rhythm track on an Epiphone Casino through a Fender Twin Reverb without vibrato. Then we played the track back through four old Twins, one on each side. We had to keep all the amps vibratoing in time to the track and each other, so we had to keep stopping and starting the track, recording it in 10-second bursts. This sounds incredibly egotistical, but I wanted an intro that was almost as potent as Layla - when that song plays in a club or a pub, everyone knows what it is instantly. How Soon Is Now is certainly one of the most identifiable songs I've done, and it's the track most people talk to me about. I wish I could remember exactly how we did the slide part - not writing it down is one of the banes of my life! We did it in three passes through a harmonizer, set to some weird interval, like a sixth. There was a different harmonization for each pass. For the line in harmonics, I retuned the guitar so that I could play it all at the 12th fret with natural harmonics. It's doubled several times.

Geoff Travis (founder, Rough Trade records) : John Porter and Johnny pretty much did How Soon Is Now? in an all-night session in a studio. I remember really liking it. I think it took us a few weeks to realise how good it was.

Scott Piering (radio plugger, Rough Trade records) : It was without question the most universal-sounding Smiths record that anybody could identify with.
John Porter (producer) : He took the tape. Went back to Rough Trade. And Geoff was kind of... he didn't really like it. Which rather deflated me. And subsequently they just put it out as a fucking B-side. I mean, they murdered it.

Geoff Travis (founder, Rough Trade records) : Obviously it came out as a single in its own right later. Maybe you could say we made a mistake not releasing that as the A-side (of William).

Mike Joyce (drummer, The Smiths) : I remember Geoff Travis saying to Johnny at some point, 'Stop writing A-sides, you'll burn yourself out.' But how can you say that to somebody like Johnny, who was in, as far as I was concerned, the most prolific time that I've ever heard?

John Porter (producer) : And strangely enough, that was the last thing I did with them for about a year. I got fired after that.