Sixteen, clumsy and shy

National Health specs. Check. Faded indie-kid t-shirt. Check. Floppy car­digan. Check. Col­lec­ted works of Oscar Wilde. Check. Hear­ing aid. Check — sorry, did you say hear­ing aid?

I guess if there is an emin­ently appro­pri­ate moment in any week to dive into the darkest recesses of my music col­lec­tion and sud­denly redis­cover The Smiths, then Sunday after­noon would be that moment.

Yes, I con­fess. Like many people who were in the throes of teen­age life in the mid-80s, I was a Smiths fan. I have all their albums — even the odds ‘n’ sods col­lec­tions that every indie band worth their salt pro­duced at that time — but as with almost all the music I listened to back then, they were all bought on cas­sette, mean­ing that in these days of CDs and MDs I rarely play them.

Do you remem­ber when com­pact discs were first launched? I can recall TV pro­grammes in which excited mem­bers of the gen­eral pub­lic would hear the crisp, clean digital sound for the first time, and would exclaim that it was almost like hav­ing the musi­cians in the room with them. How­ever, these were also the same pro­grammes in which Michael Rodd or Kieran Pren­di­ville (am I jog­ging your memory now?) would spray shav­ing foam or arti­fi­cial cream on the discs, or coat them in jam, and then claim that they would still play fault­lessly. After almost two dec­ades with the shiny round plastic objects, we now know that both claims are less than true.

Aside: It wasn’t just lack of money that led to the long wait before I finally joined the CD revolu­tion (in 1993, which was almost ridicu­lously late). Part of the reason was due to a child­hood trauma involving my first Sat­urday job. I worked in a local TV / hi-fi / com­puter shop in my small home town, dur­ing the period when Dire Straits’ Broth­ers in Arms album was, as Amazon puts it, “usher[ing] in the CD gen­er­a­tion.” Hmm, yes. Don’t remind me. Every Sat­urday, for 8 hours non-stop, I would stand behind the counter in that shop being forced to listen to Broth­ers in Fuck­ing Arms. On repeat play. Again and again. When cus­tom­ers came into the shop, I would have to demon­strate this new digital tech­no­logy using — yep, you guessed it — Broth­ers in Bas­tard Blither­ing Arms. Even today, years later, the gui­tar solo from Money For Noth­ing still causes a crush­ing pain on my cra­nium; that jaunty coun­try rhythm from Walk of Life causes my head to spin and explode in an erup­tion of pro­jectile vomit­ing. Mark Knop­fler caused untold men­tal dam­age to one year of my child­hood, and he shall not be eas­ily for­given. I’m going to have your soul, Knop­fler; one day, I’m going to come for your soul … ahem, sorry. As I said, that album has left an indelible scar on my mind. Equi­lib­rium is now restored. Where was I? Oh yes, The Smiths.

So today, hav­ing bought this CD col­lec­tion as a present for a friend, I’m listen­ing to it prior to wrap­ping it and — in a small, rather reserved way — I’m hav­ing one of those “Wow! This sounds good!” moments, just like the awe­struck human guinea pigs on TV nearly twenty years ago. The little sil­ver sticker on the cover tells me that all the tracks are “digit­ally remastered”; I’m noti­cing once more how great these songs are, but also dis­cov­er­ing all the little touches that were pre­vi­ously hid­den because of the dread­ful sound qual­ity on mass-produced cassettes.

HMV. It would be rather fun — yes, The Smiths equals fun, you heard right — to relive vari­ous aspects of my musical youth.

Of course, like any sens­ible per­son, I still think that the major­ity of Morrissey’s solo career was unmit­ig­ated crap. No amount of rose-tinted remin­is­cing can erase that sorry truth.