This song - which Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr described as their "most enduring record" - is about their frontman Morrissey's crippling shyness. It has since become an anthem for the alienated and socially isolated.
Musically, "How Soon Is Now?" is famous for that oscillating guitar riff that opens the song and plays throughout. It started as a rather standard guitar riff, but Johnny Marr and Smiths producer John Porter then played it back through Fender Twin Reverb amplifiers set to different tremolo speeds, adjusting them on the fly to keep them in sync. That slide guitar part was layered on top.
After they had the track completed, Morrissey assed the lyric.
The title doesn't show up in the lyric. It comes from a question posed in Marjorie Rosen's feminist film study,
Popcorn Venus, one of Morrissey's favorite books: "How immediately can we be gratified? How soon is 'now'?"
You'll recognize the song from the last lines in the chorus:
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else doesThis was a very complex song to record. Marr broke the process down to The Guitar Magazine: "I wanted it to be really, really tense and swampy, all at the same time. Layering the slide part was what gave it the real tension. The tremolo effect came from laying down a regular rhythm part with a capo at the second fret on a Les Paul, then sending that out in to the live room to four Fender Twins. John was controlling the tremolo on two of them and I was controlling the other two, and whenever they went out of sync we just had to stop the track and start all over again. It took an eternity."
The Smiths installed red lightbulbs in their London studio to create the perfect atmosphere to record this song in.
The oscillating guitar is similar to the one heard in The Rolling Stones' cover of Bo Diddley's song "
I Need You Baby (Mona)." Johnny Marr was a big fan of both Bo Diddley and The Rolling Stones, and has cited both as an influence. Another instance of him borrowing a riff from The Stones is in the song "
There Is A Light That Never Goes Out."
The attention-grabbing intro was intentional. "I wanted an introduction that was almost as potent as '
Layla,' Johnny Marr told
Rolling Stone. "When it plays in a club or a pub, everyone knows what it is."
Morrissey lifted the line, "The heir to nothing in particular," from the 19th century novel
Middlemarch by George Eliot, who wrote: "To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular."
Many of us thought the opening line was:
I am the sun and the air
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
But that first line is really "I am the son and the heir," which makes more sense, with Morrissey implying that his criminally vulgar shyness has been passed down. This is something we learned when we first saw the printed lyrics.
Their producer, John Porter, is one of those who misjudged the lyric. Marr told The Guardian: "I remember when Morrissey first sang, 'I am the son and the heir...' John Porter went, 'Ah great, the elements!' Morrissey continued, '...of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.' I knew he'd hit the bullseye there and then."
Despite being one of their most popular songs, "How Soon Is Now?" didn't always show up in The Smiths' setlists. That's because it was really hard to play live, especially the guitar section that required so much studio sorcery. Bassist Andy Rourke called it "the bane of The Smiths' live career."
Unlike many young British acts, The Smiths didn't make many music videos, and the ones they made weren't very good. "How Soon Is Now?" got a video that their record label cobbled together in hopes of getting it on MTV and breaking the song in America, but the network largely ignored it, for good reason: the song wan't getting any radio support in the US, and the video looks like something a film student would make.
A little backstory: By 1985, MTV was very popular in America and a key to promoting songs to a young audience, so Jeff Ayeroff, who was in charge of video promotion at Warner Music, parent to The Smith's US label Sire, commissioned the video. Video directors weren't easy to come by at the time unless you had a substantial budget, and Ayeroff only wanted to shell out $5,000. He hired Paula Greif, who had been designing album covers, to make the video, giving her the instruction, "Find some performance footage and put a girl in it."
Greif did just that, using footage from a show in Leicester shot in 1984 by the band's live sound engineer, Grant Showbiz. She combined this with Super 8 video she shot of a female model dancing as if she was at the show. The band had no involvement.
Morrissey told Creem magazine that he detested the video. "It had absolutely nothing to do with The Smiths," he said. "Quite naturally we were swamped with letters from very distressed American friends saying, 'Why on earth did you make this foul video?' And of course it must be understood that Sire made that video, and we saw the video and we said to Sire, 'You can't possibly release this... this degrading video.' And they said, 'Well, maybe you shouldn't really be on our label.' It was quite disastrous."
Morrissey and Marr receive 25% of the royalties for the 1990 Soho hit "
Hippychick," which interpolates this song's guitar riff.
The band Love Spit Love, which included Psychedelic Furs members Richard and Tim Butler, recorded a new version of "How Soon Is Now?" for the 1996 movie The Craft, which is about a coven of strikingly attractive teenage witches. In 1998, this same cover version was used as the theme song to the TV series Charmed, which is about a coven of strikingly attractive teenage witches.
The song also appears in the movies The Wedding Singer (1998) and Closer (2004).
The Russian duo t.A.T.u. of "
All The Things She Said" fame covered this song in 2002. Marr slammed the "silly" cover, though Morrissey called it "magnificent." Their version was used in the 2008 episode of
Gossip Girl, "Pret-a-Poor-J."
The late Jeff Buckley was utterly mesmerized by this song: "The first time I heard 'How Soon Is Now,' I can remember things changing in myself. It was 1984, in my friend's apartment in this really horrible building in Hollywood. We were there eating some sort of horrible food, with ketchup 'cause we didn't have any money, and it came on the television. The video was great, but the song completely blew everything away. It was the first time I ever heard writing like that over music like that. It influenced me because the writing was so great, because Morrissey's lyrics were so great in such a way, I don't know, like just completely freaky, unique."
"How Soon Is Now?" didn't rate with the band's record label, so they banished it to the the B-side of the "
William, It Was Really Nothing" single, which was released in 1984 a few months after their self-titled debut album came out. A few months later it was included on a compilation album called
Hatful Of Hollow, and in 1985 it was finally released as an A-side single after British radio DJs started playing it, included John Peel of the BBC, a big Smiths supporter.
By this time the song had lots of fans, but many already owned it on either the "William, It Was Really Nothing" single or on
Hatful Of Hollow, so it charted at an underwhelming #24 in the UK, much to the disappointment of Morrissey, who bemoaned to
Creem magazine: "It's hard to believe that 'How Soon Is Now' was not a hit. I thought that was the one."
It reissued again in 1992 and did a little better, charting at #16. In America, the song never charted, nor did any Smiths single. They were darlings of college radio but didn't get the promotional support needed to deliver a hit.
The single artwork was a still of the actor, Sean Barrett, from the 1958 film, Dunkirk. Barrett was praying in the image, but because he also looked like he was holding his crotch, the sleeve was deemed to be offensive and was consequently banned in the US.
The song runs a lengthy 6:44. Originally it was 8 minutes long.
"How Soon Is Now?" helped secure Morrissey's reputation for being a tormented soul, but he earned it with the Smiths song "
Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," released a short time earlier in 1984. Songs like "
That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" and "
I Know It's Over" fueled this fire, the burned well after the group broke up in 1987 and Morrissey went solo. He told
Details magazine in 1992: "I am depressed most of the time. And when you're depressed it is so enveloping that it actually does control your life, you cannot overcome it, and you can't take advice. People trying to cheer you up become infuriating and almost insulting."
You won't be surprised to learn that Moz doesn't do social media. His official accounts are run by his management.
Johnny Marr was on a roll when he wrote the music for this song; he came up with it, and also the tracks for "William, It Was Really Nothing" and "
Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want," over a productive four-day period in June 1984.
Morrissey didn't perform this song live as a solo artist until 2004 at the Reading Festival. Since then he's made it a regular part of his setlists. When Johnny Marr started touring as a solo artist in 2013 he included the song in his sets.
