Much as most of us would hate to admit it, our opinions of bands can sometimes be swayed by the prevailing sentiment of the time. When I first fell in love with music, in the early nineties, The Smiths had been gone long enough to be old news, yet not long enough to be rediscovered. The Britpop bands that were popular in my youth mainly looked back to earlier influences from the Sixties and Seventies, even if there was the odd band, like Gene, who proclaimed their love for The Smiths proudly. The Eighties revival hadn’t yet happened and, due to my somewhat limited musical knowledge, there seemed to be a desert between the post-punk of the early Eighties and the grunge, hip-hop and electronic music of the end of that decade.

At this point Morrissey was just an annoying bloke who would occasionally appear in the NME, and put out mediocre singles like Dagenham Dave. Johnny Marr was working with various bands, but his profile was relatively low, as was also true for Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce. Nothing particularly made me want to seek out the music of The Smiths, and I rarely heard it on the radio, or elsewhere.

Given Morrisey’s reputation as a misanthrope, and the band’s reputation for being adored by depressed teens, it was perhaps ironic that it was only after I stopped being a depressed teen that I started to take an interest. Living in Manchester in my twenties, The Smiths were harder to escape, it being their home city. This Charming Man was played at every indie disco, and I had to admit it was pretty good actually. More and more bands started to cite The Smiths as an influence, especially the emo and post-metal bands I was interested in at the time, and I started to become, if not a fan, at least an interested observer.

It was when I met my wife that I truly began to appreciate the band though. We were in a long distance relationship for the first year, and used to send each other mix CDs in the post (love CDs as my wife’s co-worker mockingly, but accurately, described them). One from my wife included ‘Ask’ which I liked, and another included ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ which I absolutely adored. The song was everything I had been told The Smiths were not, it was romantic, it was light, it was even funny.

In fact, realising Morrissey’s lyrics were often supposed to be funny was a big turning point for my relationship with The Smiths. People, understandably, take Morrissey to be unbearably dour, but a line like “I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now” is actually pretty hilarious when you realise it’s partially poking fun at himself. Reel Around The Fountain takes it’s humour from the kitchen sink dramas of the 1950s and 1960s that Morrissey loved so much. Sometimes directly so, with “I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice” coming from the film ‘A Taste of Honey’

Reel Around The Fountain is also one of those songs that makes you realise how hard it can be to capture a song in the studio. The version I love is the Peel Session version which can be found on Hatful of Hollow, the stunning compilation of early singles and b-sides. The version on the first Smiths album seems plodding and dull in comparison, the Hollow version delicate and nimble, thanks as so often to Johnny Marr’s intricate guitar work.

As I grow older, I often wonder how a man like Morrissey could write a song like Reel Around The Fountain. How could a man so arrogant, so lacking in empathy create a song so generous, so beautiful? It’s nothing new for an asshole to create great art of course, but his personality seems explicitly contradictory to the qualities shown in the song. Perhaps he has changed through the course of his life, become a different person to the man he was when he wrote this song. It was after all, one of the earliest songs in his career.

The more I read about Morrissey though, the more I think he was always the man he is now. Perhaps there is no explanation, no answer. We will never truly know the man, who he was, who he is now, what he was thinking and feeling when he wrote these words. All we can do now, for the 6 minutes of Reel Around The Fountain at least is try to separate the art from the artist, and remember that this beauty of this song will last much longer than the man who wrote the words.