"The Smiths were only around for five years in the mid-eighties, but to this day the sentiment their music evokes is strong."

From 2016:

Meat Is Murder: Morrissey at The Palace, 09/20/2016.

Check out the set list, and join me in appreciating a man who genuinely merits the description of icon. It was money very well spent for us.

From 2013:

Johnny Marr.

The Smiths and anti-Thatcherism are so closely intertwined that even this Hoosier hick knows about it. On the other hand, I imagine few of today's know-nothing Republicans remember Maggie, anyway. They were too busy drooling over the staged blather of a trained actor, Ronnie Raygun.

And also from 2013,the video:

Not Like Any Other Love: The Smiths (The Culture Show on BBC2; May, 2013)

It's 30 years since Manchester four-piece The Smiths changed the face of British pop with their debut single Hand In Glove. In this half-hour Culture Show special, fellow Mancunian and lifelong fan Tim Samuels sets out to find out why The Smiths have such a special place in the hearts of a generation of Brits. The Smiths were only around for five years in the mid-eighties, but to this day the sentiment their music evokes is strong. Samuels pays visits to a variety of dedicated fans including fashion designer Wayne Hemingway, poet Simon Armitage, Labour MP Kerry McCarthy and Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher to analyse the look, the lyrics, the issues and the riffs that made The Smiths Britain's first, and arguably best ever, indie rock band.

The Smiths on my birthday, and a Soviet recollection.

Yesterday was my birthday, and a whole slew of Facebook friends wished me a good one. For these greetings, I'm sincerely grateful.

Clint Ackerman set the tone by providing a song by The Smiths: "Heaven Know I'm Miserable Now, " and that was enough to send me diving into the back catalog. The video above obviously isn't the original of "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out," but it's a favored cover by Neil Finn and Friends, including Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr.

A weekend spent listening to The Smiths was a very good thing, and some of the 1980s memories dislodged are quite remarkably fresh, like the story of how I first heard of the band.

My 25th birthday dinner in 1985 was taken with Mark, an Australian, one of a couple dozen fellow travelers on a four-day tour of Leningrad USSR (not Moscow, as I previously misstated on Facebook). He'd decided that a birthday should be celebrated the right way, and so we bribed our way into a restaurant. In typical fashion, the food was an afterthought, and the main course was limitless vodka.

Before Mark ebbed away into some deep cups (how did we get back to the hotel?), he was telling about his adventures working his way across the Commonwealth, and time he spent bartending in the UK, where fashionable new music was on the rise. Trying to explain what The Smiths sound like without any of the music handy for listening is about as useful as it (doesn't) sound. But at least he tried, and in the years to come, I learned about The Smiths.

Thanks again to all my birthday well-wishers.

"Frankly Mr Shankly" by The Smiths.

I'm not sure why this song has been in my head all week, although "flatulent pain in the ass" might have something to do with it.

Johnny Marr.

It seems the phenomenon of conservative politicians painfully unaware of the lyrical content in songs they promote is not reserved to America.

The Smiths and anti-Thatcherism are so closely intertwined that even this Hoosier hick knows about it. On the other hand, I imagine few of today's know-nothing Republicans remember Maggie, anyway. They were too busy drooling over the staged blather of a trained actor, Ronnie Raygun.

By the time of my introduction to the Smiths in 1988 by way of the British periodicals I was abstracting at UNI-Data Courier in Louisville, the band was finished, but the music press wasn't through with them. So it has remained.

As a latecomer, there would be no Smiths live performance for me, although I caught Johnny Marr + the Healers at a WFPK indie radio showcase at Headliners circa 2003, and Morrissey a couple years after that at the Palace. As the interview makes clear, don't look for a reunion any time soon; just invest in "The Smiths Complete" for hours of rewarding listening.

Johnny Marr on the Smiths, Morrissey and putting politics back in pop, By Dave Simpson (The Guardian)

... "We invented indie as we still know it," says Marr, the debt ceremoniously acknowledged in the 90s when Oasis's Noel Gallagher played Marr's guitar.

But the guitarist was equally taken aback by the reach of the Smiths' non-musical impact: the amount of people that turned vegetarian because of Meat is Murder, or became politically motivated through Margaret on the Guillotine. "We were of that generation that came after punk and post-punk," he explains. "We're grateful for the revolution, but there was a bit of homophobia there, and sexism. There wasn't in indie. People don't talk about it now, but it was non-macho. If you were an alternative musician, you were political, because of the times [Thatcherism and the Falklands war]. It was taken for granted that the bands you shared a stage with had the same politics. I'm not sure you could say that now."