The Smiths' "First" bassist, Dale Hibbert, played the Smiths first demo



Dale Hibbert was at the PLY Bar in Manchester last night (Sept. 29, 2016) and an excerpt from The Smiths' first demo was played at the end of the night's event.

This is a bit of "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle" demo recorded at Decibelle Studios by Morrissey, Marr, Joyce, and Hibbert on bass.

Apparently, more of the demo will be released soon from the same sources.

Not much different from what the band ended up with on the debut LP.


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Compare and contrast the demo to now: And he says he hasn't had vocal training? LOL!

Off course he had, BrummieBoy, you are absolutely right.
Someone like Moz and almost any other singer with ambition to perform on stage has had, and sometimes still has vocal training.
And rightly so. It served him very well.
Compare the demo with his latest new version of It's Hard to Walk Tall.
Mind you, there are almost 33 years between them and experience and the years have done their bit too.
 
Off course he had, BrummieBoy, you are absolutely right.
Someone like Moz and almost any other singer with ambition to perform on stage has had, and sometimes still has vocal training.
And rightly so. It served him very well.
Compare the demo with his latest new version of It's Hard to Walk Tall.
Mind you, there are almost 33 years between them and experience and the years have done their bit too.

Morrissey claims he had 'hardly' any vocal training '... some vocalists don't, they just improve the more they sing and the more they gain confidence...
 
Morrissey claims he had 'hardly' any vocal training '... some vocalists don't, they just improve the more they sing and the more they gain confidence...

The thing is he has a very unique, personal singing voice by nature.
Directly recognizable, just like Dylan, Waits, Lou Reed and there are more off course, can't name them all.

They have, don't know how to say this exactly, a kind of authentic, authoritive voice, very individual and personal. Very persuasive.
Not many people would regard their voices as brilliant or very skilled.
It didn't really matter, they have set their own standards.

But they developed their voices and as a professional singer as Morrissey has become I can't believe he didn't do some vocal training. He is a control-freak and very critical about anything, certainty his own voice.
I think he is still very ambitious and wants to improve anything he can improve.
 
Is this audio from the event? If so, why are people ignorantly chatting amongst themselves whilst a previously unheard demo is being played?
 
Morrissey claims he had 'hardly' any vocal training '... some vocalists don't, they just improve the more they sing and the more they gain confidence...

This is total bullshit. I've had similar training & anyone watching Morrissey's breathing & his posture recognises a mix of vocal tuition techniques alongside Alexander technique stuff. He just wants to claim he's a 'natural Diva' like Piaf when the recorded record of his vocal performances sing 1983 show he's been trained to within an inch of his larynx to be the performing seal he now is. But he is a very interesting singer, some wonderful phrasing & vocal flutters. I wish he'd return to yodelling but now he's learned how to move from chest to head without breaking up he doesn't bother with his hilarious 'falsetto'. He is a great singer, but it's by design, not by accident. He still has pitch issues if his monitor is slightly awry, nothing wrong with that but he's hardly Piaf!
 
This is total bullshit. I've had similar training & anyone watching Morrissey's breathing & his posture recognises a mix of vocal tuition techniques alongside Alexander technique stuff. He just wants to claim he's a 'natural Diva' like Piaf when the recorded record of his vocal performances sing 1983 show he's been trained to within an inch of his larynx to be the performing seal he now is. But he is a very interesting singer, some wonderful phrasing & vocal flutters. I wish he'd return to yodelling but now he's learned how to move from chest to head without breaking up he doesn't bother with his hilarious 'falsetto'. He is a great singer, but it's by design, not by accident. He still has pitch issues if his monitor is slightly awry, nothing wrong with that but he's hardly Piaf!

Didn't john porter tell morrissey to go to vocal lessons or was it joe moss ? I'm sure i read somewhere that morrissey said that he detested the lessons and it was non- beneficial.. that may be complete bullshit from mozza, i agree..
I'm a vocalist too. I had vocal lessons to increase my range and to learn warming up excercises.. and it helped to certain extent.. but my point is - for a half decent singer, smiths/ mozza songs are not demmanding, they are fairly easy to sing ( i don't mean that me or you or other singers can sing the songs with the same emotion or accent or dictation and phrasing as morrissey ) i mean that the notes are not hard to reach..
In the early years , morrissey sang in a low voice because he wasn't confident in belting it out. As his confidence grew with the smiths the more he improved..
Surely as a singer you must know how much you can improve by yourself ( without training) ..
I'm not disagreeing with your post by the way..
 
It's pretty well established that Morrissey had some vocal training. I'm not aware he ever hid that fact? In the 80's and 90's his trainer used to advertise her services in the NME, listing him as a client. No big deal?
 
You see, I don't get all this his voice has been trained cobblers. He sounds perfectly good here.

And I'll repeat myself: This demo (made in August 1982, four months after Morrissey and Marr decided to form The Smiths proper) sounds incredibly close to what we got on the debut which was recorded 13 months later in September 1983. I'm still impressed.
 
You see, I don't get all this his voice has been trained cobblers. He sounds perfectly good here.

He sounds fine, but he's working within a very basic vocal range. The contrast with his outrageously brilliant vocal performance on 'I Know It's Over' is instructive. Nobody listening to the earliest songs could have imagined that such a remarkable event would emerge from what was a very basic instrument at the outset. And anyone listening to 'I Know It's Over' or 'How Soon Is Now' who has had vocal training hears just what wonders it can achieve. There is no diss in him having had vocal coaching, merely in his bizarre attempts to make out that he just floated from one state to the other. Nonsense. He was fixated on improving his voice, fixated on his career to the exclusion of almost everything else, fixated in a very 80s Yuppie way. Nothing wrong with that so why does he pretend it was/is a 'natural' voice. It isn't, and it's all the better for having been trained as surely as if it were a circus high-wire act. Which, in a way, on this song, it is....

 
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It's madness for anyone to claim Morrissey's voice didn't improve dramatically over the course of the Smith's lifetime, and indeed continued to improve in terms of range and strength well into his solo career (I'd say he actually peaked with 'It's Not Your Birthday Anymore'). Whether this is the result of professional lessons, or just the fact of performing thousands of gigs and recording dozens of albums - who knows?

It is weird though, that everyone accepts that musicians get lessons to learn their craft (actually, wasn't Mike Joyce told to get some more tuition during the Smiths early days?), but somehow vocalists are expected to just 'do it'.
 

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