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Johnny Marr knew instantly that the riff was special. The 19-year-old been messing around on his little brother’s guitar at his parents’ house, and was so excited by what he’d played that he asked his girlfriend (now wife) to borrow her dad’s car so that he could show it to his songwriting partner, Steven Patrick Morrissey, immediately. Within an hour, he and Morrissey had recorded a basic demo of the song in the singer’s bedroom, and the following day Morrissey called him up at home to inform him that the new song would be called Hand In Glove. At this point, The Smiths had only played two gigs, but the two young musicians knew that this song would take their band to another level.
The following month, The Smiths recorded a full band version of their new song during a one day session at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. And two months after that, on a Friday morning in April 1983, Johnny Marr and Smiths bassist Andy Rourke travelled down to London on a mission to get a cassette copy of the song into the hands of Geoff Travis, the founder of their favourite independent record label, Rough Trade. When Marr spotted Travis emerging from his office at the distribution warehouse, he pounced.
“I just grabbed him and said, ‘Hey Geoff, uh, hi, my name’s Johnny. I’m in a band from Manchester and you won’t have heard anything like this,” the guitarist told the Daily Mail in 2013. “That’s what just came out! Anyway, he was pretty gracious, gave me the brush-off – but he took the tape.”
“Johnny was an interesting-looking kid, like a young Keith Richards,” Travis remembers in a new interview with The Times. “He came into the kitchen, gave me a tape and said: ‘Listen to this. It’s not just any tape’. It was Hand in Glove. That was a Friday and I must have played it over the weekend more than 20 times. On Monday I called the number on the tape, on Tuesday all four Smiths came down and we cut the single.”
Hand In Glove, The Smith’s debut single, was released by Rough Trade in May 193, and reached number three in the UK indie charts, introducing The Smiths to the world. They would not look back.
In later years, rumours circulated that The Smiths only landed their deal with Rough Trade after being rejected by Manchester’s own Factory Records, co-founded by TV presenter and impresario Tony Wilson. This, Johnny Marr insists, is a “crock of shit”.
“If you were a musician in Manchester at that time, it was almost the law that you went on your hands and knees and begged Tony Wilson for his papal blessing to stick you in the studio, and I wasn’t about to do that,” Marr told NME in 2014. “The Smiths would have signed to Factory over my dead body… I didn’t want to be assimilated into the Factory aesthetic.”
