Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)
THE SMITHS – Hand In Glove b/w Handsome Devil (Live) (Rough Trade, 1985)
"The sun shines out of our behinds"
“There’s more the life than books, you know, but not much more”. As soon as I heard Morrissey sing this line from Handsome Devil, I knew that The Smiths were the band for me.
When you start describing the words to the band’s songs you quickly run out of superlatives. Most have at least half a dozen quotable lines and delivered in droll Mancunian tones with Johnny Marr’s inspired guitar backing there was no-one to touch them. Imitators have come and gone since but nothing can compare to the original template.
Hand In Glove was their first single and I bought it a few days after buying This Charming Man. Every other single of their I got on 12″ on the week of release.
The cover shot and some lyrics (especially to Handsome Devil) have a fairly obvious homoerotic slant (“A boy in the bush is worth two in the hand”) but there is deliberate ambiguity too – “Let me get my hands on your mammary glands”.
No one was writing songs like this with the combination of foppish poetry and Northern plain talking. With Hand In Glove, The Smith arrived fully formed and pop music never sounded so vital.
