THIS CHARMING MAN by THE SMITHS. Story by Baz Blakeney.

Canning Highway, Perth, Western Australia. 1983.

My first car was an old 1964 Volkswagen Beetle, sky blue and rust red with an engine that sounded like a woodchipper being fed broken crockery.

Nineteen-sixties Beetles had dashboard radios with five preset buttons and a tuning knob that could hunt out any AM station broadcasting within a radius of about 10 metres. The quality of sound was better than a portable transistor but not so much that you would notice.

I was not a car person in my youth, at least not like many other young men I knew. Some of them would spend entire weekends twiddling and tweaking under the bonnet.

For me, a car meant transport from A to B. And in those days, A was my family’s home in the hills outside Perth, Western Australia, and B was most often Claremont Art School.

I recall vividly being pulled over for speeding one afternoon with a half-finished painting of a male nude in the back seat of the Beetle. The traffic policeman looked at the picture, and me, with barely concealed disgust (remember, this was 1980s Perth). He gave me the maximum fine for the crime of exceeding the speed limit while transporting homosexual pornography.

Like almost every other trainee genius at art school, I played in a band. Or bands.

They were heady days. Punk rock, that noisy ejaculation of youthful nihilism, had come and gone and the music makers and buyers were splintering into sects and cults, all trying to distinguish themselves from every other branch of the faith.

The New Romantics glammed up, electro popsters warbled in sync with their 808 drum machines, Joy Division consecrated despair, ska and soul and even funk were being rethought.

Style, musically and sartorially, was loose. All of it seemed interesting, all of it meant something, all of it was a small piece of the big picture, although none of us were sure what the big picture would look like when fitted together.

Perhaps no generation does.

I cannot remember being a “fan” of any particular band of the era. I tasted it all but nothing held me for long, nothing drew me back again and again, enthralled, expectant, addicted.

Then, one day.

It was late afternoon, in summer I’m fairly certain. The windows of the Beetle were down.

I was driving along busy Canning Highway, radio tuned to a student station transmitting from John Curtin University.

A pop song tinkled out of the tinny radio. A guitar chinked metallically for two bars, then there was the snap of a snare drum on the 4 1/2 beat followed by a torrent of bass and drums. Then above it all, the sylvan voice of a forlorn fop lost on a desolate hillside, his bicycle tyre punctured. Would nature make a man of him yet?

I pulled the Beetle over to the kerb, heard the song out and waited for the announcer to tell me I had just listened to the Smith’s new single This Charming Man. I drove immediately to a nearby record shop, bought the album it was on, Hatful of Hollow, and spent the rest of the day playing it over and over, filled with wonder at every jangle of Johnny Marr’s Rickenbacker, every bittersweet Morrissey whimper, the inspired weft and warp of bass and drums.

This Charming Man was not even the best song on the record, not by a long shot. But it was beautifully crafted pop, full of melancholy and longing and homespun philosophy. Hummable, whistleable, unforgettable.

A day later, I met other members of my band and enthused about the record.

“It’s like some Northern England punks have rediscovered Motown,” I said. In hindsight, it was a poor description, but it sounded right at the time.

That record became a touchstone for our band. We never wanted to sound like The Smiths but we did aspire to their attitude, their spirit, their disregard for the sneering macho posturing of so much power-chord hero rock. For my part, I had found a band to love, not just enjoy.

My love of The Smiths is not as great as it was. It has not diminished so much as it has been diluted by my growing intake of other music, jazz mainly and modern classical and various branches of folk.

And Morrissey, the man, has lost some of his allure as he gads about trumpeting his Little Britain xenophobia and militant veganism.

But whenever This Charming Man rips out of a radio speaker in a shop or supermarket, I get a tingle. I feel and smell warm Perth air, I am young, free, fearless, the future is mine. I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear.

Stereo Story #776