There is a light: thank God for The Smiths - they shaped my life

From an awkward, lonely teenager to Smiths super fan, Trish shares her coming of age story - including dancing on stage with Morrissey - and credits the band and their music with making her who she is

On the 31st October 1983, I walked into the Sixth Form common room at my North London Catholic comprehensive school and did something that only a few weeks earlier at the start of term and my life as an A-Level student, I would never have believed possible. I made a beeline  to the record player and put the 12-inch single I’d bought just an hour before onto the turntable, placed the needle on the vinyl and turned up the volume. As Johnny Marr’s opening guitar riff of This Charming Man blared out, followed by Morrissey’s plaintive crooning about a  ‘punctured bicycle’, all the other students turned and stared at me.

The idea of being looked at, to be the focus of anyone’s attention, was something I had spent my entire secondary school experience avoiding. Shy, blush-prone and painfully lacking in confidence, all I wanted to do was blend into the background. I didn’t want to be the popular girl or one of her acolytes; I didn’t want to be the brainy girl who came top of every class, and I certainly didn’t want to be the girl all the boys fancied (even if that had been an option). I didn’t know who I was or wanted to be, I just had to get through each school day with as little embarrassment or awkwardness as possible. 

I’d struggled to make friends and find my place in the adolescent hierarchy of the school since joining at age 11. Shyness aside I just felt I didn’t belong, I was a misfit. Part of the reason was I’d been separated from my best - and only - friend Sam, whose parents wanted her to go to the all girls convent school instead. But as each term went by, I knew it wasn’t just Sam’s absence that made me feel like a fish out of water, I simply wasn’t interested in what the other girls were into. They loved Duran Duran, fancied Limhal from Kajagoo and spent Sundays at Wembley market trying on ra ra skirts. Painfully awkward in my plump and changing body, I had no idea how to dress or style my mousy fine hair, and I didn’t know how to begin experimenting. 

At home, my parent’s Irish culture started to become a source of embarrassment, as my self awareness began to take hold. No way was I going to continue Irish dancing classes or go with them to music nights at the church social club. Again, all in a day's work for a teenager to reject and separate from their parents, we just don’t know that’s what’s happening to us at the time. Naturally, I thought I was the only one experiencing this level of self loathing and mortification, as I tried to figure out a way through the world. It seemed to me that everyone else had it sussed and knew what they were doing, but of course that can’t have been the case.

On weekends, I found refuge with Sam: we’d spend all of Saturday and Sunday together, walking between each other's houses or getting the bus into Harrow to hang around in Our Price Records. Sam had a record player and a battered old chaise lounge in her bedroom and by 15 we’d moved on from reading Smash Hits magazine to NME, Record Mirror and Melody Maker. We’d listen to albums by the bands we read about - U2, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure - and started to wear makeup we’d bought in Miss Selfridge (Iron Maiden lipstick and the appallingly named Poontang blusher!). We also tried (and failed) to punkify our hair with Country Born Hair Gel from Boots.

At 16, Sam finished at the convent school and went to a Catholic Sixth Form college - she phoned me excitedly at the end of the first week to tell me about a nice guy she’d met called Milo (just friends she insisted - and it’s stayed that way for forty years). He’d invited her to a gig in London that Sunday evening - his older brother John had bought the tickets and he had a spare one for me too. We met at Harrow Station and got the Tube into town, to the Lyceum Ballroom on The Strand. As we walked inside I couldn’t believe my eyes: there were punks, goths and rockabillys everywhere I looked and as my eyes widened my jaw hit the floor. 

Trish & her quiff… aged about 18

The first band to come on were called The Marine Girls, three punky looking young women singing over a couple of guitars. The lead singer was a goddess, but it was the girl on guitar and backing vocals who I will never forget - Tracey Thorn from Everything But The Girl. Next up was a band called The Smiths who we were here to see, the main support act for the Gang of Four who were headlining. Milo had told us all about this band from Manchester, how cool the lead singer was and promised us we would love them. At the end of their 30 minute set, it felt like my life had changed forever. Morrissey was dazzling with his slick quiff, open shirt and beaded necklace, gyrating his skinny hips across the stage. Johnny Marr was also mesmerising in sunglasses, loud geometric jumper and an equally vertical quiff. But the music… the lyrics, the guitars, the wild tempo of Hand in Glove one minute followed by the slow pulse of Reel Around the Fountain the next. At the end, hot and sweaty from dancing, I couldn’t believe what had just happened, it was like my soul had come alive to this music, and this band. Snatches of songs remained in my mind, the wit and emotional insight of lyrics like ‘I dreamt about you last night, and I fell out of bed twice’. 

It was a few weeks later that This Charming Man was released, and that common room turning point happened. From that day on I didn’t care what anyone at school thought of me, I had another life no one at school would ever know about or have access to - going to as many Smiths gigs as I could with a growing friendship group united by a love of indie music. We followed the band everywhere and living in London saw them play every time they had a gig. A couple of memorable ones: at the Institute of Contemporary Art on the Mall in London I took part in my first stage invasion, jumping up with friends at the end of the gig, with Morrissey handing us the gladioli he had been swinging around his head (the NME dubbed us the ‘Smiths Rangers’ in the review). Another time Sam and I took the train to Leeds aged 17 to see them play at the university, staying overnight with an older friend who was studying there. We’d both told our parents that we were staying at each others’ houses but somehow Sam’s dad found out and there was hell to pay the next day. But it was worth it. 

Over the next few years, live music dominated my life and I saw everyone from The Pogues to Simple Minds, Echo & The Bunnymen and The Jesus and Mary Chain. I grew my own quiff, wore second hand clothes from Oxfam and Camden market and started to like the person I saw looking back at me in the mirror. I bought every Smiths single and album and knew all the lyrics by heart (still do to this day). 

When I started my degree at Brighton Polytechnic in September 1986 I came home the following month to see them play at the National in Kilburn - by this point their walk on music was Prokoviev’s Romeo & Juliet, which still makes my heart pound with anticipation whenever I hear it. I can’t remember if that was the last time I saw them play live, their final gig was two months later at the Brixton Academy and they would split up the following year after the release of their last album Strangeways Here We Come. Given how important and relevant their music is 40 years on, it’s hard to think that it all happened in the space of just five short years, and I was part of that cultural moment for most of it. It made me feel special, smart and different, and I carried that feeling with me into adult life, channeling it whenever I doubted myself or had career or relationship wobbles, as we all inevitably do. 

I still have all the records of course, although my son has swiped them and the rest of my vinyl collection and they live in his bedroom. In exchange he bought me a book about The Smiths  for Christmas one year, but I don’t have the heart to tell him I will never read it. I don’t want to know about what went on behind the scenes or anyone else's thoughts or points of view about the band or that era because I lived it and it carries such emotional joy and thrilling memories when I think about it.

I can’t point to one song as my absolute favourite, but There Is A Light has become mine and my husband’s song. And, morbid as it sounds, it’s going to be my walkout funeral music (upbeat, funny and heartbreakingly sad at the same time - Joy Division’s Atmosphere is the walk in music in case you’re interested and I might go for Neil Young’s Harvest Moon as a little midpoint light relief). It feels right to have the Smiths with me at the end, because their music shaped my life from teenager to young woman and they’ve been with me ever since.

Do you have a favourite Smiths song? Or a band that changed your life? We’d love to hear.