BBC Arts & Culture - The Smiths: Not Like Any Other Love 10 May 2013 Last updated at 20:32 By Tony Law BBC Arts & Culture The Smiths released their first single, Hand in Glove, on 13th May 1983. Four years later the group was no more. Why do this band from Salford who sang about "complete loneliness" still inspire such devotion in the fans who followed them? Hand in Glove, The sun shines out of our behinds, No it's not like any other love, This one is different because it's ours  End Quote Hand in Glove A Culture Show Special, Not Like Any Other Love: The Smiths, is broadcast on BBC Two on Sunday, 12 May, at 11pm, and will be available for seven days on BBC iPlayer. Singer Stephen Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr formed The Smiths in Salford in 1982, later recruiting Mike Joyce on drums and Andy O'Rourke to complete the line-up. The song Hand in Glove was written between their second and third live gigs, in a couple of hours. Morrissey, aware that this would be the band's first recorded work, wanted there to be "something searingly poetic... yet jubilant" about the song. The Queen is Dead, the band's third and penultimate studio album and musical high point, was released in 1986. A year after that Marr left and, shortly afterwards, The Smiths were disbanded. That story has already been told. Over the course of four studio albums and 16 singles, The Smiths had become iconic to fans hooked on the many facets of the band: the look, the words and their meaning... and the music. It's time the tale were told, Of how you took a child, And you made him old. Fifteen minutes with you, Oh, I wouldn't say no, Oh, people see no worth in you, Oh, but I do.  End Quote Reel Around the Fountain Poet and Smiths fan Simon Armitage says, "The moment I start listening to them, I'm transported back to '83 or '84... I don't think I realised it then, but it was the language. I remember listening to Reel Around the Fountain, not quite sure what it was about, but thinking, 'nobody else is this smart'. It's such a peculiar song, it starts with a confession - almost an allegation - then it develops into this slightly subversive celebration of sexual awakening and loss of innocence. Like a lot of the great Smiths songs, it's a fantasy, it never actually happened, it's about imagining what something would have been like. And on that level it's hugely appealing to anybody who's ever felt any kind of loneliness or that they're on the margins. The Smiths identification with the grit of Northern life gave them a harder, darker edge than their chart contemporaries. They joined a long tradition of British literature, theatre and film, epitomised by the British New Wave cinema of the 1950s and '60s. A shoeless child on a swing, Reminds you of your own again, She took away your troubles, Oh, but then again, She left pain. End Quote This Night Has Opened My Eyes Simon Armitage says, "The North figured large in these songs; they're shot through with a sort of Manchester melodrama. These were lyrics just full of the details of everyday domestic life. Writer and BBC 6Music DJ Stuart Maconie says, "Morrissey particularly was immersed in Kitchen Sink drama, those black and white movies like Billy Liar, Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, and in particular A Taste of Honey." A Taste of Honey was written by Salford playwright Shelagh Delaney when she was 18 years old. Delaney's treatment of issues like race, gender, homosexuality and simply how working class Northerners were depicted in drama was radical at the time. The film adaptation brought Delaney national recognition. Morrissey's admired Shelagh Delaney intensely. He condensed the story of A Taste of Honey into the song This Night Has Opened My Eyes. Morrisssey said, "I've never made any secret of the fact that at least 50 per cent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney. Her writing was a magnificent confession of life as it was commonly lived in her hometown of Salford, with all of its carefully preserved monotony. She was attacked for immorality, which, then as now, is proof that you have hit on something. Stuart Maconie says, "They came from these streets (Salford) and they sounded like it, they talked about the bleakness of it and the lack of opportunities. But they also talked about the joy - they made it beautiful. That bleakly beautiful atmosphere infused all aspects of The Smiths, and it was visualised in their distinctive covers for their singles and album covers, hand-picked by Morrissey himself. Jo Slee, of The Smiths' record label Rough Trade, oversaw the design process: "I would receive... a full diagram (from Morrissey) with notations of every single thing that he wanted, including the Pantone colours and the typeface." The albums and singles covers formed an intimate scrap-book of pin-ups that Morrissey wanted to share with the world. The cover stars fell into two camps: tough Northern female characters and cool male icons. Jo Slee says, "He had a fantasy about what Northern Realism was about, and about the real loving background (these women) portrayed. I always had the feeling that he somehow hadn't had that. So there's a kind of nostalgia for something that was never really there. You can call (the male icons) homoerotic, but for me there was more to it than that. It was perhaps representative of who he longed to be, what was in his heart. And that's another thing that makes them beautiful, they're all about what Morrissey used to call his 'unusable heart'. Morrissey: "We feel that popular music should be used in order to make serious statements. So many groups sell masses of records, and don't raise people's level of consciousness in any direction and we find that quite sinful. If The Smiths were anti-anything it was the entire British establishment, particularly the Royal Family and the Thatcher government. Designer and Smiths fan Wayne Hemingway says, "What the Smiths brought was politics that you could actually completely understand... Meat is Murder, anti-cruelty, anti-Thatcher. It was just a brilliant approach to politics really. Their 1986 album, and its title song The Queen is Dead, was their state of the nation address. Labour MP Kerry McCarthy says, " I think musically (The Queen is Dead) is one of their most powerful songs, and has a sort of anger bubbling below the surface. " Few bands since The Smiths have so openly attacked the state. And their oppositional stance is still used as a stick to bash the powers that be. Even if those powers profess to be fans themselves. The Smiths will always be remembered for courting controversy. But for many fans Morrissey's political posturing and even his literary lyrics were mere dressing for the real art produced by the band. Noel Gallagher, who wrote the songs for his band Oasis, says: "My love of most things musical is strictly for the music. (What's happening) around it is irrelevant. Morrissey was going on about poetry and vegetarianism. Johnny Marr was going on about The Rolling Stones, T-Rex and The Stooges. I've seen (Johnny Marr) do things in the studio that are so simple; yet so difficult at the same time... he invented this style, which I'd never heard before. He's a true original. The conductor Charles Hazelwood says, "Johnny Marr somehow uses the guitar like an orchestrator uses an orchestra... The song There is a Light That Never Goes Out appeared on The Queen is Dead, and is often cited as a favourite of both critics and fans. Simon Armitage says, "I have wondered how many times people have taped, or burnt, or downloaded, or written out the lyrics of that song and sent it to someone else. It's just a beautiful, brilliant, all-purpose, pro-forma love song. The Smiths could have perhaps only have appeared when they did, wedged in that window between punk and the dance music explosion of the late-1980s. People who missed out on punk embraced their music, lyricism and outsider cool. Watch Not Like Any Other Love: The Smiths Culture Show Special on BBC Two on Sunday 12 May at 11pm, and afterwards for seven days on BBC iPlayer.