The Making Of The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder: “Everyone goes on about Morrissey being miserable but there was always a great deal of humour flying around.”

Recorded on an industrial estate near Liverpool, Meat Is Murder, The Smiths’ second album, was obsessed with death and the brutal Manchester of Morrissey’s youth. And while it raised the singer’s gallows humour to delightful new heights, the group’s bleakest creation also took Johnny Marr’s virtuoso musicianship to a place that defied categorisation. “Everyone realised it was their big chance,” engineer Stephen Street tells MOJO’s Pat Gilbert…

IN OCTOBER 1984. An old Mercedes saloon snakes along the M62 from Manchester to the outskirts of Liverpool, its occupants en route to Amazon, a modest 24-track studio adjacent to an MOT garage on an industrial estate in Kirkby. Despite the low, grey, autumnal sky, the mood in the vehicle is upbeat. Its passengers are looking at finished copies of Hatful Of Hollow, the compilation of B-sides, Peel sessions and non-album singles released as a follow up to The Smiths’ acclaimed self-titled debut album.

“I remember the band cooing over the sleeve and feeling really proud,” recalls Stephen Street, then a young studio engineer and fellow traveller each day in the old Merc. “And they had every right to be. It was their moment, and they knew it. They were happy times.” The Smiths’ rosy worldview had been boosted by the recordings they were making at Amazon for their second album proper, which would emerge on February 11, 1985 as Meat Is Murder.

Beginning in the first week of October, the sessions were the first to see the group assume the role of producers – a move that would transform the way the band sounded and lay the sonic foundations for their third, and arguably greatest, album, The Queen Is Dead. But, as with virtually every episode in The Smiths story, the recording of Meat Is Murder wasn’t without its murky backstage dramas and emotional travails – foremost the subtle power-play between Morrissey and Marr that ended with the dismissal of their debut album’s producer…

Stephen Street had first met The Smiths in March 1984, during the sessions at Island’s basement studio in Chiswick where the group were recording their fourth single, Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. As the in-house engineer, he had a front-row view of their working methods under veteran producer John Porter.

“They were touring so much so they were bang on it,” Street recalls. “They were always either touring or recording, but always had new songs on the go. Morrissey always wanted to record now, he was quite impatient like that.”

At Island, Street was impressed with the group’s “natural chemistry”, and the energy they applied to the creative process. “Johnny would be in the main room with the other guys, running through stuff, and Morrissey would be in the control room listening to it. He’d be murmuring away to himself, working out what he was going to sing and whether the key was correct. With Heaven, I thought, Is this going to be a single? It seemed so slow, nearly ballad-like. Hand In Glove and This Charming Man had been upbeat. But with Morrissey’s vocal it made sense, and Johnny’s chords were sublime. It was a great session.”

Street’s enthusiasm and talent didn’t go unnoticed by his paymasters, and at the end of the weekend the group took his number and said they’d give him a ring. Much to his disappointment, the call never came, and the group’s next sessions – for single William, It Was Really Nothing – went ahead without him in July. Perhaps this wasn’t entirely a bad thing, as it was during the William sessions that John Porter helped to take The Smiths’ sonic richness to hitherto unimagined heights with the layered guitar textures for the single’s B-side, How Soon Is Now?.

Together, the producer and Marr turned the track’s scratchy riff into a dark, throbbing, psychotropic wall-of-sound, with a whining slide-guitar overdub – played by Porter – that further invested the song with menacing and mysterious intent. The shimmering guitar pulse underneath, meanwhile, had been achieved by channelling Johnny’s riff through three Fender amps with complementary vibrato settings.

Such out-there experimentation may or may not have been linked to the fact that, as the session progressed, Porter and Marr were getting increasingly stoned on a succession of potent spliffs. “Vast quantities of hash were consumed, and weed, and whatever else we could lay our hands on,” explained the producer later. The abstentious Morrissey, absent for the tracking session, added his vocal the following day.

Over the summer, How Soon Is Now? began to gain recognition as an extraordinary piece of music, so it came as something of a surprise when Rough Trade label boss Geoff Travis contacted Stephen Street out of the blue in September and told him that The Smiths wished to record their second album without Porter. Instead, they wanted to helm the sessions themselves with Street as engineer.

Porter’s sudden dismissal has become one of the many unfathomable events in the Smiths story. Street feels today that it was all part of the group’s instinctive impulse to control every aspect of their art, and not to be influenced by outsiders. “I think Morrissey in particular was keen to see what they could do without a grown-up looking after them in the studio,” he ventures. “I was only 24, Johnny was only 20/21, Morrissey was about same age as me… Geoff Travis said they wanted someone they liked and trusted.”

Porter has a different take on it, one which reinforces theories that Morrissey would become unhappy when individuals working for the band formed a close relationship with Marr.

“I think Mozzer was starting to resent me because me and Johnny had become good pals,” Porter says in former Q journalist Simon Goddard’s exhaustive account of The Smiths' songs The Songs That Saved Your Life. “But the thing was, we made the records. Me and Johnny would be there 24 hours and he’d only come in for two of those… I could see that in Stephen Street he saw somebody that could be, like, ‘his guy’. Which is fair enough.”

Significantly, perhaps, Street didn’t smoke spliff and liked to work regular hours and take weekends off. It was also clear that, as a newbie, he was keen to impress the group with what he could bring to the table. But whatever the group’s motives were for employing him, in the first week of October 1984 the young engineer checked into grotty digs in Liverpool and steeled himself for the mildly daunting prospect of taping the second LP by Britain’s most important new group, who had just scored their fourth Top 20 hit with William, It Was Really Nothing.

“Amazon was on this industrial estate, a god-forsaken, bleak shithole,” Street recalls. “I was put up in a bedsit in Kirkby but only spent one night there. I thought, I can’t take this… So they put me up in Manchester, where they were staying, and it was a 40-minute drive in the group’s big, old-fashioned Mercedes. It was huge. Amazon was well-known as Echo And The Bunnymen had worked there. The monitors weren’t quite right, so I got them to sort that out. It was my first session done away from Island.”

Apart from the group and Street, the only other people present at the recording were The Smiths’ PR-cum-manager Scott Piering and Johnny’s guitar tech Phil Powell. Immediately, Street experienced the same focus, energy and calm he’d witnessed at Island’s studio six months earlier. “It’s the same with all the great bands I’ve worked with,” he explains. “Not that everyone knows their place but… just a nice balance. Mike and Andy were an incredible rhythm section – Andy, in particular, was a great musician, and Johnny was a joy to watch and listen to.”

If there had been tension over John Porter’s absence, or any other issues, it wasn’t outwardly evident. Street remembers “a lot of banter. Everyone goes on about Morrissey being miserable but there was always a great deal of Northern humour flying around. They would knuckle down, they didn’t muck about. You felt like they had the ball and they were going to run with it – it later felt the same with Blur. It was as if everyone realised that this was their big chance to do something.”

Asked if, as some sources suggest, Morrissey was aloof and communicated with drummer Mike Joyce and bassist Andy Rourke primarily through Marr, Street is unequivocal. “No. OK, Morrissey would spend more time talking to Johnny, but only because they were the ones coming up with the songs. He didn’t ignore Mike and Andy, not at all, though it would be Johnny in the main room running through the music with the other two. Morrissey would be in the control room singing along to himself. I thought they were tight-knit – Johnny and Morrissey were the leading lights but they were like a true gang.”

Pointedly, after the Porter-era’s splifffests and late-night sessions, the Meat Is Murder sessions were notable for their 11am to mid-evening working day and Morrissey remaining present the whole time. Within two weeks, most of the tracks had been laid down. Compared with their debut album and subsequent singles, the record - ings were more rounded and muscular, with Marr’s chord progressions on The Headmaster Ritual, What She Said and I Want The One I Can’t Have acquiring a powerful, polished, metallic sheen.

Johnny was a joy to work with, he was the musical leader,” says Street. “He’d work out some of the layered guitar stuff on a 4-track at home. Or he’d come into the control room and experiment with moving the capo down the neck and trying out different inversions of the chords. Later on, it was more a case of, ‘What shall we do with it next?’ I always had a reverb or delay he could play off. I tried to make sure I had the tools at my fingertips to help inspire him.”

Musically, nothing seemed off limits. Rockabilly and skiffle rhythms underpinned Nowhere Fast, Rusholme Ruffians and What She Said, while the heart-rending ballads Well I Wonder and The Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore possessed a genuine sense of loss and sad - ness, far more real and affecting than that summer’s comparatively lightweight hits Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now and William, It Was Really Nothing.

The funky Barbarism Begins At Home and intense, dirge-y title track both clocked in at over six minutes, underscoring Street’s assertion that, “We had a licence to do any - thing we liked. It was less straight-ahead than the four-piece band playing live, it was more soundscape-y.

“Meat Is Murder, the track, is quite a weird beast,” he adds. “I used to have a Lexicon reverb that had ‘infinite reverb’ on it. I’d add notes from either Morrissey’s voice or Johnny’s guitar so it would hang in the mix and sound like strings. It was a way of getting synth sounds without using a synthesizer, as they were definitely a no-no! It wasn’t about recording stuff straightforwardly anymore. Johnny plays piano on that.”

Morrissey, meanwhile, could be found honing his lyrics in the control room. Research by Goddard has revealed the influence of texts like Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept and even a Victoria Wood poem, Fourteen, on the words. Whatever their inspiration, each new Morrissey vocal would have the group – and Street – spell - bound, whether he was singing chuckle - some couplets like “I’d like to drop my trousers to the Queen/Every sensible child will know what this means” or heartrending, mortal lines like “their only desire is to die” or “this beautiful creature must die”.

Elsewhere, the singer would paint vivid, witty caricatures of grim Northern life, filled with exquisitely observed characters like the girl in What She Said who required “a tattooed boy from Birkenhead to really really open her eyes”. Then there was the sadistic teacher in The Headmaster Ritual who wears the “same old suit since 1962” and sexually assaults the narrator in the showers during gym time.

“You’d be sitting there wondering what the next verse would bring,” remembers the engineer. “Morrissey was a lyrical genius – and I don’t use the word ‘genius’ lightly.”

After three weeks, “Morrissey had had enough”, but following a short break the sessions continued at the residential Ridge Farm studios near Gatwick airport, before final mixing took place back at Island. It was around this time that the atmospheric sound effects that lend the album a cinematic quality were added. “I had these Sound Effects LPs, which were always being delved into,” says Street. “Rusholme Ruffians had the fairground noises, then there was the coin dropping, the animal noises, but you had to work hard to make that work in the context of the album. They didn’t have that kind of thing on the first LP. We were stretching out and trying new things.”

The finished album, as Street suggests, was a dramatically different creature to The Smiths, a darker, more powerful and layered work, where meditations on death and suicide permeate almost every track, and the menacing and brutal Manchester of Morrissey’s youth – one of fairground stabbings, violent schools (and that’s just the teachers), despairing souls, teenage murderers, domestic abuse – looms large. And, of course, Meat Is Murder, the song, ends the record with a haunting, emotive plea for vegetarianism.

On its release, Meat Is Murder was seized upon as a major step forward for the group – though there was concern at Rough Trade that it contained no obvious single. Yet Morrissey and Marr’s unshakeable belief in the record was justified when it shot to the UK Number 1 spot. The singles chart, meanwhile, was graced in the early months of 1985 by two non-album singles, How Soon Is Now? and the rollicking rockabilly of Shakespeare’s Sister. “I thought the fact there wasn’t a hit on the album would reflect badly on me,” says Street. “But you can’t make Morrissey write a pop single. He had to get off his chest what he wanted – and at the end of the day, that worked out well for everyone.”

This article originally appeared MOJO The Collectors' Series: The Smiths Hand In Glove 1982-1987.