There are significant similarities between the creation of The Smiths’s anthemic 80s “How Soon is Now?” and previously featured New Order’s dancefloor masterpiece “Blue Monday.” Not that they sound at all alike (they do not), but both tracks were openly developed with some of their best tidbits being nicked from other artists. And not unlike a common criticism of AI, there should be little illusion that what any of us creates is entirely new. Our ideas are arguably mere recycling of previously gleaned knowledge mixed up with our own inherent twists. So, while neither of these works resulted in much more than a passing percentage of outright borrowed gems, it is safe to say that just how these reflections were selected and utilized made a massive difference in each song’s eventual popularity.

“I am the son and the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son and heir
Of nothing in particular”

Prior to the creation of “How Soon is Now,” lead singer Morrissey had been badgered by the critical press over his clandestine use of small passages from famous literary works buried within his lyrics. He would counter this on The Queen is Dead track “Cemetary Gates” acerbically asserting, “If you must write prose and poems, The words you use should be your own, Don’t plagiarize or take ‘on loan’.” Clearly giving less than a fuck about their collective opinions, he would then pluck the song’s title from a question asked in his most ransacked early source, feminist film essay “Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream” by Marjorie Rosen, specifically the line “How immediately can we be gratified? How soon is ‘now’?” The song’s opening lyric would, perhaps for good measure, be cleverly adapted from a line in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” “To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular.”

“You shut your mouth, how can you say
I go about things the wrong way?
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does”

.

However, it may be surprising to learn iconic guitarist Johnny Marr would, in fact, do the majority of the snagging on “How Soon is Now.” The track’s initial version, known simply as “Swamp,” would be inspired by the groove in “Run Through the Jungle” from L.A. post-punks The Gun Club’s remake of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song and the high-pitched harmonic guitar line that occasionally appears throughout the song is a tribute to New York rapper Lovebug Starski’s keyboard riff on his track “You Gotta Believe.” Said Marr, “(‘Swamp’) didn’t have the tremolo figure on it (yet), but it had the slide part … It was quite a pretty figure, but only hinting at what it became. It was still quite passive, nowhere near as intense as it got.“

Yet unquestionably, the song’s most recognizable feature would have to be its tremolo effect, that distinctive opening guitar wobble and shudder used throughout, with inspirations taken from Hamilton Bohannon’s “Disco Swamp,” Bo Diddley’s “Mona,” and Krautrock demigods Can’s “I Want More.” Marr would later remark, “This sounds incredibly egotistical, but with ‘How Soon is Now” 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.“

“There’s a club if you’d like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you”

Marr and producer John Porter had to create their tremolo effect manually on traditional analog equipment, taking Marr’s unvarnished original guitar part and patching it into four Fender Twin Reverb amplifiers, each with its own vibrato tremolo switch. Stated Marr, “John was controlling the tremolo on two of them, and I was controlling the other two, and whenever they went out of sync, we just had to stop the track and start all over again. It took an eternity.” Finally, they would overdub the mesmerizing slide guitar on the end, which Marr would say was what gave it “the real tension.”

Once Marr had finished the demo, the band (sans Morrissey) tried to record it. Drummer Mike Joyce recalls the session, confessing, “We just took all the lights out in the studio and put red bulbs in and got, well, stoned. Off our tits. That was it, really.” “We were always stoned,” laughed Porter. “Vast quantities of hashish were consumed, and weed and whatever else we could lay our hands on. At first, I told them to play for as long as they needed, a good four or five minutes. We did it, and I got two good takes and cut out the bits which weren’t so good, then chopped them together. That’s why it ended up as long as it did (nearly seven minutes).“

“I was really pleased and really excited about it,” recalled Porter. “I felt we were breaking new ground. I remember calling up Geoff Travis (Rough Trade’s founder and head honcho at the time) on the Sunday night and saying, ‘We’ve just done this great track, you’ve got to come down’, so he did. I could tell Geoff didn’t like it very much. He just kept looking at me constantly, and I could sense him thinking, ‘What the fuck is this?’” As such, the track would end up relegated to the B-side of the 12-inch single release of “William, It Was Really Nothing” and later included on the band’s gorgeous Hatful Of Hollow compilation before finally being released as a castrated three-and-a-half minute radio-friendly edit that was a disappointment to fans less than enthusiastic about “old rope” they had previously purchased in its vastly superior full-length form. Sadly, it would never reach above number 24 on the U.K. Singles Chart.

“So you go, and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home, and you cry
And you want to die”

Still, tracks “How Soon is Now” and “Blue Monday” would go on to become massive 80s club anthems, both popular with large segments of the population even today. Both bands brilliantly exploited the best bits of their acquired knowledge to devise the greatest art they could conceive of. Correspondingly, in Austin Kleon’s seminal book “Steal Like An Artist,” he posits, “You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life,” further advising, “You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.”

“When you say, ‘It’s gonna happen now’
Well, when exactly do you mean?
See, I’ve already waited too long
And all my hope is gone”

~

HOME | APPLE | SPOTIFY | INSTAGRAM | FACEBOOK | LYRICS
LABEL: ROUGH TRADE RECORDS

Previously featured Smiths song “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before“
Sources used: “Songs That Saved Your Life: The Art Of The Smiths 1982-87” by Simon Goddard and Trash Theory’s “‘How Soon Is Now?’ – The B-Side That Defined The Smiths“
Cover Art “oft-times” © 2024 – disturbedByVoices – All Rights Reserved