The alternative Tate gallery

For years, just four years to be unforgettable... this was the story of The Smiths, "the only band that really matters" (The Clash will understand...) I said for years to all my friends. From those old Tate recordings (Dear John?) to the Strangeways misuranderstandings, it was all too brief. Almost any British band that picked up a guitar in the '80s and banished synthesizers from its sound was influenced by the Smiths, a quartet that favored street clothes to haute couture and played ringing, hook-rich songs sung by the always eccentric and outspoken vocalist. And God, what kind of songs, easy but complex, sorta many-hued instrumental tracks topped by Morrissey's wordy, sexually disorented poetry for struggling adolescents. I'm "still ill" nowadays and me only but I continue to see the band's influence as "enormous", in every other band I listen to. The '90s Britpop movement grew from the Smiths, and bands that upend traditional notions about gender and sexuality -- Suede, Antony and the Johnsons, Bloc Party, Of Montreal, the Magnetic Fields -- come from the same place. Then came the Moz adventures, but it was just a pantomime of the past, while my "guitarhero" Johnny wandered around for years ( and he's still wandering somewhere) with no apparent direction home. I can't really say how much I miss them, they were a part of my life and those were the days, if not the best, probably the most important... I was a young student at the time and it was around 1983... it's difficult to imagine intense young students making it through university without these songs. Hopefully they'll never have to...