The Smiths: engulfed in hysteria, sweat and crushed bodies

The Herald Scotland

24-05-2025

The band played 18 Scottish gigs between 1983 and 1986 – five in Glasgow (three of them at the Barrowland Ballroom) and the rest in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Inverness, Dundee, Irvine and Lerwick.
Their first Scottish concert was at Night Moves, in Sauchiehall Street, in June 1983, just as Margaret Thatcher was celebrating her second general election triumph. Today, a poster on a hoarding that fronts a gap site lists that concert among the many 'legendary concerts' that took place at the venue between 1981 and 1985 (it says the Smiths visited on June 10, though other sources have it down as the ninth).
In a 2013 Daily Record interview, Marr recalled: 'Our first gig was at the Ritz in Manchester and the Night Moves gig was about our fifth or sixth gig.
'It was in Sauchiehall Street and I remember it well. It was quite terrifying because the furthest I had ever been was Prestatyn. I remember standing on the stage playing to that enormous audience of 11 people. It was an amazing gig because it was amazingly empty.
'Honestly, at that Night Moves gig, I felt like they had better be the kindest 11 people in the world or this was going to be the shortest set you'd ever see,' he added. 'That's how I felt but the truth of the matter was very different.
'When you are starting out and playing to tiny crowds you can turn it into a real thing between you and them. I have stood in a crowd of a few people and you really feel for the band. I remember thinking the few people who were at Night Moves were probably the most clued-up people on the planet'.
In March 1984, just after the debut album – Miserable Lie, Pretty Girls Make Graves and the audacious Suffer Little Children among its 10 songs – had gone on sale, the Smiths played several Scottish dates, including one at Glasgow's Queen Margaret Union (QMU) on March 2.
In a Facebook post on March 2, 2020, the QMU said the band had been 'booked by a group of students and what followed was one of the most iconic gigs in our history. Recorded live for Clyde 1, the rebellious group from Manchester tore up the QMU whilst the rest of Scotland were able to listen to one of Glasgow's hottest ever gigs through the airwaves'
Many fans have fond memories of that night. 'I remember all the flowers hanging out of [Morrissey's] back pocket', writes one fan beneath the QMU post. Writes another: 'The place smelled like a florists' ship with all the flowers lying about'.
Other Smiths gigs that March included Coaster's in Edinburgh, Fusion in Aberdeen, and Dundee University.The band were back in Glasgow that June for a show at the Barrowland.
The Glasgow Herald's David Belcher was in the audience, notepad in hand.'In less than a year', he wrote in his review, 'The Smiths have grown effortlessly from being vaguely defined cult figures, the critics' favourites, to mass acceptance, identifiable objects of desire. Their last date in Glasgow, at a students' union barely three months ago, brought them polite and informed adulation and a gentle hail of flowers. Last night they were engulfed in hysteria on a large scale, sweat and crushed bodies.
'Their problems may be just beginning. Singer Morrissey has previously tempered lyrical self-obsession and an unhealthy arrogance with a healthy self-parody – sloppy shirts, flowers hanging ridiculously out of his back pocket, gawky, thoroughly unsexy movements – but from now on he is going to have to be totally selfish, perhaps stopping giving the crowd what they think they want, to avoid becoming merely a parody'.
The crowd rained spittle upon the band, Belcher added – 'meant as a sign of affection but still lethal when combined with electricity. Morrissey leaves the stage, guitarist [Johnny] Marr and bassist [Andy] Rourke sit and glare. Order of sorts eventually prevails'.
Over the next few nights, the quartet moved on to the Caley Palais in Edinburgh, Dundee's Caird Hall, Aberdeen's Capitol Theatre and Eden Court Theatre in Inverness.
When the Smiths released their second studio album, Meat is Murder, in February 1985, it went straight in at number one in the UK, dislodging Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA in the process. The subsequent tour took in England, Italy, Spain, United States, Canada, and, in September, Scotland.
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The latter dates got underway at Irvine's Magnum Leisure Centre, with the indie band Easterhouse in support. Tickets, priced at £5, were still available two days before the show. The setlist included material from the two studio albums.The band also took in the Edinburgh Playhouse, the Barrowland Ballroom, the Caird Hall, Lerwick's Clickimin Centre, Aberdeen's Capitol and the Eden Court in Inverness.
The tour programme, 'The Smiths in Scotland', contained Q+As with all four band members. A sample of Morrissey's responses: Ambition in life? 'Immortality'; High point of career? 'Not meeting Royalty'; Dislikes? 'Meat, cigarettes, breakdancing, fads, videos, modern pop stars, cowards, sexism'. Another page was given over to the handwritten lyrics to the second album's title track, Meat is Murder.
David Belcher, again, was in the Barrowland audience, and in his review he noted that the band had declined to appear on Terry Wogan's TV show. 'To we hipsters the Smiths head a very short list of utterly essential British groups of the last five years; they are the living embodiment of the facts that contemporary music has nothing to do with Wogan and even less with Radio 1, and that, at its best, most vital, most naive, this pop stuff belongs to people who don't belong anywhere else – non-standard people with non-standard responses, arrogant, off, with a talent to provoke both thought and dislike.
'On Wednesday chief odd-ball Morrissey drove himself and his musical awkward squad, Marr, [Mike] Joyce and Rourke, through an urgent, harsh programme of stripped-down songs and sardonic asides, mannered vocals, mannered perspectives, ill-mannered observations on audiences, journalists, life itself.
'The success that their talents would warrant has been conspicuously absent in the past six months and so the Smiths' air of anger would seem justified, and yet, the success of the night was an eerie Meat is Murder, an accusatory diatribe on the evils of meat-eating, the least successful the small, bitter parody of Frankly, Mr Shankly'. The band, he concluded, had momentarily lost their way.
The Smiths' very last Scottish show was at the Barrowland, on July 16, 1986, a few weeks after the release of their third studio album, The Queen is Dead.The group broke up in 1987, before the release in September of the last studio album, Strangeways, Here We Come.
* Morrissey plays the O2 Academy, Glasgow, on June 4 and 5.
RUSSELL LEADBETTER