On this date in 1983, special guests in session on the Radio 1 DAVID JENSEN EVENING SHOW were THE SMITHS, (Sept 5th, 1983).
The tracks broadcast were ACCEPT YOURSELF with its sequined Motown riffs, pounding drums and Morrissey addressing his audience asking them to turn away from society’s measures of success and happiness (including his slight Shelagh Delaney steal at the beginning of the line, “Anything’s hard to find” (When you will not open your eyes), and two others: I DON’T OWE YOU ANYTHING and PRETTY GIRLS MAKE GRAVES. REEL AROUND THE FOUNTAIN was due to be aired but was pulled and was not broadcast until two years later when the whole session was repeated on Janice Long’s programme.
I DON’T OWE YOU ANYTHING, a song Morrissey and Marr would later claim they penned as a vehicle for Sandie Shaw (presciently realised a year later) would eventually have a breezy arrangement and perfectly fit the Shaw mold with its touching ‘torch song’ feel. Here in session it is decidedly downbeat and mournful. First attempted during the Troy Tate sessions and again for this BBC session, ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’ was one of the first tracks completed for The Smiths and one of the few to fully do its composition justice.
PRETTY GIRLS MAKE GRAVES made its first appearance in the Troy Tate sessions with cello adding to the sombre mood. A tale of humiliating sexual failure, with Morrissey lamenting that ‘nature played this trick on me’, it was ex-Roxy Music producer and bassist John Porter who helped to steer the original jerky rhythm to something steadier on this BBC session, as he would on The Smiths LP. Porter would also bring a more coherent melody to Marr’s originally trippy coda.
Finally, REEL AROUND THE FOUNTAIN. While the session would be broadcast on the Jensen show in early September, events of the late summer gave the band a vital but essentially unwelcome slice of tabloid publicity when The Sun newspaper began attacking Morrissey’s lyrics. The band were suddenly headline news, and while the focus was very much upon Morrissey, the misinformation and scandal caused by the controversy — based upon the lyrics of ‘Handsome Devil’ and the notion that the BBC had banned a Smiths song from its airwaves (it had actually decided not to broadcast the version of ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ for the next Jensen session) — gave the foursome a taste of things to come in terms of tabloid sensationalism.
“On our David Jensen session, one song, “Reel Around The Fountain”, was chopped simply because the word “child” was mentioned and they were frightened people might put the wrong interpretation on it,” said Morrissey in an NME interview in September 1983 following the silly furore. “But at the end of the day, the BBC turned out to be allies.”
Despite the unwanted negative attention, the BBC continued to back the band by asking them to record a second Peel session on September 14th. They also BBC Press Office issued a brief statement of support. “The Sun got it wrong again,” they informed the media.
On the video, REEL AROUND THE FOUNTAIN is rightfully reinstated as the session closer.
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