Every day is the anniversary of something. When Northern Soul speaks to legendary singer/songwriter TV Smith, some nostalgic Facebook group happens to be remarking that it’s exactly 47 years since the release of Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, the sinister Top 20 hit by Smith’s punk-era outfit The Adverts.
“Really?” Smith says, wide-eyed. ”Oh God, it probably was, yeah.”
Smith went on to have a long and fascinating career. So, is it a blessing or a curse for that hit to linger as his calling card? “It is both, really. People will always remember me because of that one song. I kind of understand that and the way it works. You get one hit record, and that sort of defines you in a way.”
For a long period, Smith refused to play any Adverts songs live, let alone their hit, but it’s a stance he’s gone on to reconsider. “It was, ‘I’ve written so much other stuff, I don’t want to be tied down to that’. But actually, once I got over myself and started playing the Adverts’ songs and playing Gary Gilmore’s Eyes again…it’s always great to get to that moment in the set. Everyone jumps up and sings along. Of course it’s weird to have just one song when you’ve written 300 songs that is particularly remembered, but it is nice that people care and enjoy it still. Someone told me that Suzi Quatro was going on tour but she wasn’t going to do [her 1973 number one hit single] Can the Can, I thought, ‘what? if you go and see Suzi Quatro. she’s got to do Can the Can‘. So I can’t be hypocritical about it. I realise people want the same for me as I expect from other bands. You play your hit record, of course you do.”
Born Tim Smith in 1956, growing up in Devon his love of music was sparked by the mightiest British bands of the time.
“The Beatles and The Stones, that new era of pop music. The Beatles particularly turned me onto music. They were a pop band who I started hearing when they were doing She Loves You – yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, over just a few years, they quickly evolved into something else, something much more interesting, and way off-beam from what musicians did before. So that was an interesting musical journey for a young boy. Then I really got into the weird end of glam, like Roxy Music and Bowie. I was a massive Bowie fan. He kept on evolving and writing great new songs, never staying in one place, which I really like. You never knew what the next Bowie album was going to be like.”
At school, Smith developed a gift for writing poetry. “I was really fascinated with words and what you could do with words. I put my poems into poetry magazines and put myself up for poetry awards and things, and won a few, so that was quite encouraging. Then I started putting my own words to pop records I heard on the radio, making up my own lyrics to them, basically. I went from that to thinking of tunes that went with the poetry I was writing.”
So it was that Smith became a nascent songwriter. “The power of the music and the words together was really addictive when I found I could do that. I realised that when you put the words to the music, it’s more than the sum of its parts. You add that emotive thing to it that you don’t necessarily put across when it’s being read off the page.”
It only remained for Smith to acquire and learn an instrument (“actually, I borrowed a guitar from our local Sunday school and never gave it back”) and his music career was go. What followed was the brief flaring of The Adverts (of whose output Gary Gilmore’s Eyes wasn’t even necessarily that representative), followed by stints fronting other acclaimed bands – Explorers, Cheap – and ultimately a long, still-ongoing solo career. His latest album, Handwriting, was released earlier this year and he’s currently on tour to promote it.
Writing, recording and staying angry
If there’s a thread connecting all of Smith’s work, it’s a sense of anger – an eviscerating fury at the state of the world. It drives him still, and it isn’t something that he’s struggling to tap into in 2024 Britain.
“Yeah, I’m angry,” he says, “angry that we’re not being allowed to have the lives that we want. I love people, and everywhere I go, I see fantastic people who deserve better than they’re getting. There’s a tremendous sense of community out in the world still, which you really see at gigs and when people get the chance to get together and talk to each other and be with each other. We’re being increasingly isolated and alienated and discouraged from doing the social stuff that makes us what we are. So, yeah, I’m angry, because it should be so much better.” This in turn has fuelled Smith’s new Handwriting album. “I tried to sum up my feelings about what’s going on in the world and my fears for the future and just ladled that all into one album.”
Smith continues to write and record prolifically, and tours regularly. “I’m always doing something. I mean, it has phases of writing, recording and touring – and inevitably, promotion and designing the sleeves for the records, because I’m involved in everything I do, I don’t have management or anything. Either that or I’m booking trains or hotels to make the touring work.”
Overall, the way in which Smith has been operating his career for some time now seems forward-looking, as many music acts today take a hands-on approach to their careers. Plus, it harks back to punk’s ethics.
“It’s odd, because punk was initially all about DIY, and it’s become so difficult for musicians on my kind of level to have a life in music. People like me – record companies aren’t interested, basically. Big agencies aren’t interested. So the only way is to re-establish that DIY thing and do everything yourself.”
For Smith, the work truly never stops. His girlfriend owns a pub in Sourton. “It’s a very unusual pub called The Highwayman Inn. We help out there when we’re not out on the road.” And have any of the pub’s punters ever recognised him from his life in music? “Oh yeah, that’s happened,” he says. “That happens quite often, Every now and then I’ll serve someone their Devon Pasty and they’ll want to have a photo for Facebook.”
Given that he reckons on having written more than 300 songs, are there any among them that Smith’s particularly proud of – that he’d like to be associated with as readily as Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, say? “I’m happy to say that audiences have become a lot more broad-minded about the choice of songs I play live over the last few years. Songs like Expensive Being Poor and Lion And The Lamb are now just as much expected in the live set as Gary Gilmore’s Eyes. There are others that are important to me and I would love to play more often, for example Children Of A Dying Sun and Handwriting from the new album, but I understand that they will take a little time before they become familiar enough.”
Smith is playing Gullivers in Manchester on September 27, his second gig in the city this year alone, the first having sold out. At his live shows, he’s grown accustomed to a wide range of ages in the audience. “You get young kids coming out with mums and dads and grandads. You see three generations often now at gigs, It’s very gratifying, but it’s not just because we’re doing something right, it’s because the general music industry is doing something wrong. There’s very little music out there for kids to get their teeth into. You bite into it and it’s all soft and dissolves in your mouth, whereas a lot of punk has still got something to say, something that’s worth digesting.”
And what would the young Tim Smith, eagerly putting lyrics to songs off the radio, make of what he’s doing today?
“I guess I’d be surprised. It was never my long-term game plan and I didn’t know what I was doing. Sometimes I still think I don’t know what I’m doing. The thing is just to kind of plough forward and hope for the best. I didn’t know how to write a song. I didn’t know how to play guitar. I didn’t know how to write lyrics. I didn’t know how to get gigs or or make a record. It’s all just come from trying, and the desire to do it. And that’s still what I do, just have a go, really.”
Smith insists that he isn’t much of a planner, but nevertheless he has the distinct air of a man whose work is not yet done. “No, I’ve got plenty to do,” he says. “The work is never done.”
(with thanks to Mick Pullan)
Main image: Credit Jojo.
TV Smith plays Gullivers in Manchester on September 27, 2024, with support from The Harveys. For more information, follow this link: https://gulliversnq.info/events/tv-smith/
To find out more about other 2024 gigs, click here.
