"The Hand That Rocks The Cradle" original, full length (Decibelle Studios) posted on YouTube



Description:

The original Decibelle recording. Brings back so many memories. Thanks to Philipe Delcloque, one of the many unsung heroes of the late 70's, early 80's Manchester music scene.


UPDATE Jan. 1:

Additional clips added (Domu Kafe channel):








UPDATE Jan. 3:

Link posted by Famous when dead:

Listen to The Smiths’ earliest studio demo from 1982 — including isolated guitar, vocals - Slicing Up Eyeballs


Related item:
 
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FWD, where do you see that written description?
EDIT: never mind, part of my ad blocker was not allowing the description.
 
I'm not 100% certain but in Set the Boy Free: The Autobiography by Johnny Marr, Marr takes if not full credit nearly full credit for all baselines & baseline arrangements. Marr basically implies Andy was no more than a studio musician playing what he's told. I write "no more than" just to say that there was no, or nearly no, creative input from Andy or Mike.

I've read the book twice, and Johnny makes no such claims. In fact he has said in interviews that Andy came up with the bass parts and he "produced" them - which is open to interpretation. It was Morrissey who said after the lawsuit that Johnny came up with Mike's drum patterns.
 
I've read the book twice, and Johnny makes no such claims. In fact he has said in interviews that Andy came up with the bass parts and he "produced" them - which is open to interpretation. It was Morrissey who said after the lawsuit that Johnny came up with Mike's drum patterns.

And Morrissey never lies:)
 
And Morrissey never lies:)

:rolleyes::sleeping:

It was Morrissey who said after the lawsuit that Johnny came up with Mike's drum patterns.


If he did say that, he probably means that Johnny gave Mike an idea on how he would like the drums to go in a song, and not that Marr wrote out charts with drum notation for Mike to follow.
 
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And Morrissey never lies:)

Yes, exactly. Although on This Charming Man, the drums were programmed on a LinnDrum machine and then Mike added his tracks at the end, following the programmed drums. The same with Money Changes Everything. Maybe that's what Morrissey was referring to. As well as the sampled drum loops on The Queen Is Dead.
 
NOOOOOOOOO NOOOO!!

:handpointright::guardsman::handpointleft: would NEVER EVER LIE!!:laughing:

look up and watch the non existing comets blowin up stuff LOLLLLLL


very crafty this DramaJ..... yes Andy wrote it but (it was such a clusterflock that ) I "PRODUCED" IT!!

I PRODUCED ME DRAMAJ I PRODUCE EVERYTHING I AM PRODUCER HEAR ME ROAR!!:swear

LOL too bad he didnt think of 'producing' the caterwauling known as Comet album.doh:
 
Compare and contrast these lyrics to anything on LIHS and you wouldn't believe it was the same lyricist at work. Kinda sad.
Sad, indeed. Nigh on 30 years ago, the man himself penned this line:

“It may all end tomorrow but it could go on forever, in which case I’m doomed”. Shame he didn’t take his own words at face value.

Truer words have ne’er been uttered. ...except - perhaps - by Neil.

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

Excellent post. Thanks for sharing. Happy memories but sad times for the Morrissey fans of days past.
 
Sad, indeed. Nigh on 30 years ago, the man himself penned this line:

“It may all end tomorrow but it could go on forever, in which case I’m doomed”. Shame he didn’t take his own words at face value.

Truer words have ne’er been uttered. ...except - perhaps - by Neil.

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

Excellent post. Thanks for sharing. Happy memories but sad times for the Morrissey fans of days past.


:rolleyes:

WTF???

"NIGH"
"NE'ER"

its your cereal box that looks to be way past its expiration date FFS!!


NIGH??!!:crazy:
 
This is my favorite Smiths song of all time... it is special for me as it helped me through a very very dark time in my Life. I was sexually abused when I was 5 years old and I had a very hard time dealing with Life when I was a pre-teen/teenager which was the mid-'80s. When I first heard this song, I was 12 and it immediately spoke to me and I put myself as the object of Morrissey's child in the song and he was my "protector." I know it's silly, but this song (and the whole debut album) got me through many dark days and nights. Morrissey has said some really stupid things these past few years that have broken my heart, but I will always be thankful to him for writing this song (and many others) and for saving my Life.
 
This may be the genesis, but to me lifeless. A tired garage band version of what would become so special. Right choices were made in the end, and in the end we are left with what would become and became The Smiths.


Yep, but this has little to do with quality quest and a lot to do with curiosity. Thats all... Its usefull to the ones who are interested in knowing how the songs were made and how they developed from scratch to their final version; if there is a final version to it.
 
Today, we get the sum of the parts:
Suffer Little Children full Decibelle Demo.



MP3 available in the download forum.
Regards,
FWD.
 
Very interesting to listen to.

There are clearly some musicianship issues, but it still survives as a very powerful piece.
 
Further to today's full demo:
Suffer Little Children - full Morrissey vocals.



From his description:
Not as isolated as Cradle, it has to be born in mind that we were working with 8 tracks only, drums would have already been mixed down to stereo (2 tracks), there were two overlaid guitars (which have their own tracks), bass, vox and effects.
This isnt about quality of recording, it is a documentation of a time when 3 kids were in a band, and spent a night in a studio.
It survives for the curious, I highly recommend sticking it on headphones, sit in darkness, and transport yourself back to Decibelle xx
From memory, Johnny played this (bass) alongside Stephen, I was in the control room.
I think the vox mic picked up the bass, it was a semi acoustic bass.
The recording of the bass on this track sounds un-electified, when compared to the isolated bass track, which was D.I.'d.


MP3 now available in the download forum.
FWD.
 
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Once again it goes to show ya that Moz's lyrics were the foundation of The Smiths.
The bulb from which the flowers bloomed.
Take away the music on Suffer Little Children and ya still got somethin' there.
Take away the lyrics (and singin') and ya tangled up in jangle.
 
Incredibly interesting to hear the very earliest version of these immortal tracks. Awesome of Dale to share.

Also it seems as though the genesis of 'Asleep' was floating around since '82.
 
Imperfect as it is. It is fascinating. The vocals, flat but emotive. I miss that earnestness.
 
Incredibly interesting to hear the very earliest version of these immortal tracks. Awesome of Dale to share.

Also it seems as though the genesis of 'Asleep' was floating around since '82.

Agreed. Curious what you mean about the genesis of Asleep being around since '82?
 
Agreed. Curious what you mean about the genesis of Asleep being around since '82?
At the very end of the song you can hear a piano part which sounds very very similar to Asleep. Well it does to me anyways.
 
At the very end of the song you can hear a piano part which sounds very very similar to Asleep. Well it does to me anyways.
From Songs That Saved Your Life:

"As had been the case with ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’, Morrissey had already written the lyrics to ‘Suffer Little Children’ before forming The Smiths while Marr had also been tinkering with its innocently tuneful chords many weeks before their first writing session. Originally he’d conceived the track with a separate melancholy piano epilogue tacked onto the end as included on its first demo prototype and the Troy Tate version. Although Marr recorded this coda with Porter, it would be axed from the final edit of The Smiths only to resurface in its own right in more mature form as 1985’s ‘Asleep’."

Also:

"Having spent a whole day in early August laying down ‘Rubber Ring’, at around eight o’clock in the evening, Johnny Marr announced to Stephen Street that he had ‘a little piano thing I want to put down with Morrissey’. The roots of Marr’s ‘little piano thing’ stemmed from the very origins of The Smiths in the summer of 1982, specifically the discarded piano coda of ‘Suffer Little Children’ which had featured a similarly morose melody. Three years later, ‘Asleep’ offered a more mature arrangement of that same blueprint.
‘Undoubtedly it is similar,’ confirms Marr, ‘because that’s how I play piano, I can’t play it any other way. That was another one worked out on the upright I inherited when I moved into the house in Bowdon, the same piano I wrote “Oscillate Wildly” on. It had a pleasingly eerie quality about it. You could only play certain things on it. Weird, doomy music, which suited us fine.’"

Regards,
FWD.
 

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