People say to me: 'don't have a go at Morrissey, he helped me get through my depression'. No he didn't! YOU helped HIM get through HIS depression!  ~ Jerry Sadowitz I sometimes wonder if The Smiths didn't royally fuck things up for me. At least for a while there, during my typically English, angsty adolescence when being the awkward, sullen miserable little shit came as natural as breathing. There is a sense that The Smiths, and Morrissey's words in particular, not only gave succour to my growing sense of alienation but actually gave it a certain validity, as if there was something noble or righteous in finding yourself frozen in uncertainty, locked in your own bedroom world, utterly folded in on yourself. Christ, perhaps without the songs giving me a reason to wear my fatalism like a fucking medal I would've just knuckled down and got on with getting on in life. Perhaps, perhaps not. Anyway... Sometime during the late '80s then, on a holiday somewhere in Wales - probably Borth, it usually was - I'm sitting in the front seat of a caravanette, listening to the radio as torrential rain turns the world outside the windscreen a wavering, wet blur. It's then I first hear - or at least, take notice of - The Smiths. Janice Long plays ' William, It Was Really Nothing ', " the rain falls hard on a humdrum town / this town has dragged you down ". It's one of the few times a