Fact #171056

Andy Fernbach (owner, Jacobs Studios) : It’s a big old Georgian country residence, and the band had a wing to themselves. We have two studios here and Status Quo were in the other one doing You’re In the Army Now and I recall there was briefly a notion that Quo might play on one of The Smiths tracks, but it never happened.

Johnny Marr (guitarist, The Smiths) : I had my own little cottage (in the grounds of Ridgeway House), so I'd go off there then, making sure that what was going to happen the next day was in place. I wrote Never Had No-one Ever and Vicar In A Tutu in that cottage.

Geoff Travis (owner, Rough Trade Records) : The pressures on Johnny were phenomenal, because he had the burden of coming up with the music. I think he started to retreat. I mean, he relished it but, by the same token, it started to get to him. His lifestyle - I mean, Johnny would be up all night.

Johnny Marr (guitarist, The Smiths) : There was a feeling in the studio that we were at an important point in our career. It was so difficult. It polarized my life.

What I do remember about The Queen Is Dead was that it was the first time I started to disappear. At the end of each day, I would disappear and work on the next day's recording - honing songs and overdubs on my own. Mike and Andy and the roadies would party and have a good time or go somewhere.

Geoff Travis : And that old thing of Morrissey going to bed early, that was true really. So the hours when they met, they worked. And that was what kept them together. It was their working lives that kept them together, rather than their social lives.

Andy Rourke (bassist, The Smiths) : Morrissey liked to have his leisurely breakfast and I suppose his vocal chords were in better form in the day time, whereas we’d have a couple of bottles of wine at the evening dinner time, chill out for a while, then we’d take a few bottles into the studio and just kick into it. Johnny, Mike and I, that was our time, till about three in the morning or whenever the producer had enough. Usually it was Stephen Street going, ‘Listen guys I've got to go to bed as I've got to be up for Morrissey in the morning.’ That was definitely our time, we used to light candles, set the ambience.

Andy Rourke : Morrissey used to pop his head in and out. If he heard something that wasn't quite right he'd drag Johnny out, have a word in his ear and fine tune it.

We be thinking, ‘Shit! Does he not like the drums, the bass?’ But it was never anything major, it would be just a bigger drum roll or bigger cymbal crashes there, it was never anything horrible.

Don't get me wrong, he wasn't a total separate thing, but when it came to recording his voice he liked to be on his own, just him and the producer. We'd just keep out of his way, no distractions, that's how he liked it and it was a formula that worked.

FRANKLY MR SHANKLY (about Geoff Travis, and Morrissey’s desire to quit Rough Trade)
Morrissey : Yes I'm moaning about fame. I was reaching for the rubber but I thought, well no, I do want to complain, I do want to moan. Complaining is so unmanly, which is why I do it so well!

Johnny Marr : Frankly Mr Shankly was not one of my favourite Smiths’ songs at that time, so I went to John (Porter) and said, ‘Help me mix this track - I don’t think I can face it, really.' I was just very, very, very tired. Not catatonic or anything - no biggie. I was just really knackered.

Morrissey : There's no pleasure for me in smearing Rough Trade - I can see their dilemmas and I understand them - I simply feel that, in the final analysis, The Smiths were not looked upon as the little treasures that they actually were. I certainly feel I was the only group member who was ever treated with any respect... I don't think there was any for Johnny, Mike or Andy.

Geoff Travis : It gave me a bit of disquiet. I laughed as well — it was a mixture. I suppose it made me a little sad. If I hadn't known Morrissey as well as I did during that period, it might have really upset me. With Morrissey, everything happens on so many different levels; nothing is really that straightforward. It's just part of an interesting relationship

I KNOW IT’S OVER
Johnny Marr : On I Know It's Over, there's tons of space that you could fill with all kinds of stuff, but it hangs right. We knew where to stop.

It isn’t my favourite Smiths’ track but when I heard him sing that for the first time in the studio, it was amazing.

VICAR IN A TUTU
Johnny Marr : I'd work in the main studio till I was knackered - to one, sometimes four.

Mike Joyce : Johnny had this riff, where he and Morrissey had worked on it I don't know, but Morrissey's looking through the window and we're playing away there and Mozz is going, ‘Yep, again, again. Yep, this is it. This is the one.’ But that song's all over the place, all over the place.

NEVER HAD NO ONE EVER
Johnny Marr : That came from the mad self-absorption that we were into. I knew at that time that I had to make what was to me a great piece of art. To me there was no difference between the pressure I was under and the pressure Charlie Parker or Keith Richard or Lenny Bruce was under.

CEMETARY GATES
Morrissey : It's like famous last words. So many people's last words were so riotously memorable. Howard Devoto was telling me about - we were in a cemetery because we've decided to do a tour of London cemeteries, cheerful little buggers that we are. You know, get the Guinness and cheese butties out and head down to Brompton Cemetery - some old corporal dying, smothered in blood, having a very artistic coronary arrest and his right-hand man was saying, 'Don't be silly Charles, cheer up, cheer up, we're going to Bognor this weekend'. And he turned round to his friend and said, 'Bugger Bognor!' and 'Bugger Bognor!' actually appeared on his tombstone as his famous last words. I think that should be an LP title... 'Bugger Bognor!'.

SOME GIRLS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS
Morrissey : The whole idea of womanhood is something that to me is largely unexplored. I'm realising things about women that I never realised before and 'Some Girls' is just taking it down to the basic absurdity of recognizing the contours to one's body. The fact that I've scuttled through 26 years of life without ever noticing that the contours of the body are different is an outrageous farce!

QUEEN IS DEAD
Andy Rourke : That track was done right at the end of the sessions, wasn't it? Mozz didn't even have a title for the album at that stage...

Johnny Marr : With The Queen Is Dead, the track, I had that in my mind for a long time. To me, it was the MC5 playing I Can't Stand It. I'd always felt let down by the MC5. When I was younger, people were going ‘Oh, The Dolls, The MC5, The Stooges' - but when I heard the mc5, it felt a little too gung-ho, kind of testosterone-mad for me. I wanted to deliver what I imagined the MC5 to be. I thought it was about energy and coolness and it sounded a little bit sort of ‘rawk’ to me.

Andy Rourke : So there was a lot of jamming with the tape running. That's where the title track came from a riff Johnny had which we started jamming around. As you were doing it, it was sending a shiver down your back, You'd knew you were onto something good.

Johnny Marr : I think The Queen Is Dead is one of the best things we did. Lyrically brilliant in the true sense of the word. But I didn't feel that way... I really didn't feel that way."

Morrissey : I didn't want to attack the monarchy in a sort of beer monster way. But I find, as time goes by, this happiness we had slowly slips away, and is replaced by something that is wholly grey and wholly saddening. The very idea of the monarchy and the Queen of England is being reinforced and made to seem more useful than it really is.

Johnny Marr : It was Morrissey's idea to include (a sample of the old song) Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty, and he said, "I want this on the track". But he wasn't to know that I was going to lead into the feedback and drum rolls. It was just a piece of magic. I got the drum riff going and Andy got the bass line, which was one of his best ever and one that bass players still haven't matched.

My big memory of The Queen Is Dead is being behind the mixing desk, producing the bass track with Andy. It was about half twelve in the morning. We had all this elation going on, a real high, and it's, 'How about this on the verse, and this on the chorus?' There was also some shit going on about us being out of our Rough Trade contract.

Morrissey had been talking to a lawyer about it. This guy was the biggest cliched textbook, music biz sleazebag. We didn't like him at all. He called me up. It was a closed session, not easy to get through to us - but he managed it. He said, 'I'm working on this, Johnny, but we may be looking at an injunction on this record.' I'm a quarter of the way into climbing this mountain, and I've got this wanker telling me Rough Trade are going to injunct the record' I was like, 'Great, fantastic'.

Then the phone went about three quarters of an hour later, and it was this guy Jay from Rough Trade - who was a sweet guy - to tell me that Salford Van Hire had been on to Rough Trade, and because our roadie had brought the van back two days later than we'd paid for, they were going to sue as well, and we needed a lawyer's address. I was like, 'Jay - fuck off'. And I went back to climbing the mountain. That was the one of the first times I took a picture in my mind, and thought, 'This is insane.'

Stephen Street (engineer) : It came out really great. It was really steady and constant. Then Johnny went in and did this wild wah-wah and it was one take.

Johnny Marr : I was setting my guitar up for the track and I put it onto a stand and it was really loud. Where it hit the stand, it made that note of feedback. I did the guitar track, put the guitar on the stand, and while we were talking, it was like, "Wow, that sounded good". So I said, "Right - record that!" It was going through a wah-wah from the previous take, so I just started moving the wah-wah and it was getting all these different intervals, and it definitely added a real tension.

Stephen Street : As he was changing the pedal it kept changing tone. He played blindingly on that track.

Johnny Marr : I went in there with all the lads watching and did the take and they just went, "Wow!". I came out and I was shaking. When I suggested doing it again, they just said, "No way! No way!"

Stephen Street : It was fantastic. In fact, we recorded eight to nine minutes worth. I had to edit it down.

Johnny Marr : Then, immediately, I got on the Emulator and I put on that weird bell sound. Then Morrissey put his vocal on.

Morrissey : It doesn’t necessarily mean Queen Elizabeth. There’s the safety net in the song …that the old queen in the lyrics is actually me. So when they lynch me or nail me to the cross, I have that trapdoor to slide through. But, having said that, the song is certainly a kind of general observation on the state of the nation.

Johnny Marr : Then we had to do the intro bit. Nowadays that'd take two minutes, with a computer, but that was a lot of faffing about, synching the ‘dear old blighty’ thing to the front of the track.

Johnny Marr : I had to deal with a lot of fall-out. I don't want to be put in the position of, 'Poor little old me, he (Morrissey) caused all the troubles and I had to deal with the fall-out'. From his side, I'm sure there were a lot of obstacles that he feels he had to deal with - and did deal with. I'm sure there was a load of nonsense over artwork, nonsense over certain venues we anted to play. He dealt with a lot of the live issues; I dealt with the day-to-day realities of being on the road, and the emotional stuff and all the crap. But I don't want it to be perceived that I resent Morrissey for that.