Limited edition of The Queen Is Dead for Record Store Day

A 10″ limited edition of The Queen Is Dead will be available for purchase at select stores in the UK to celebrate and promote independent record stores on Record Store Day, 16 April 2011. Johnny Marr talks about the importance of records with Laura Snapes for NME.

All the bands I’ve been in have wanted the same things as the fans, which is important releases, not just tracks. And to this day, I don’t consider the songs I write to be tracks – they’re always records in the making, or being made. The Smiths wrote records. When we wrote the songs, the first thing on our mind was to get to the studio and record it, and we did that in a way that I’ve not seen any other band do.

Almost immediately as the last chord was written, the studio was booked, the sleeve was being glued together on Morrissey’s kitchen table, and the titles were being considered. It was all one big activity, writing the songs, and it’s been well documented that a lot of our songs were written specifically for people like us to go out and buy as soon as possible.

The Smiths really thrived on non-album singles too.
Yeah, that’s one of the reasons we wrote them in batches of three – the a-side, the b-side and the extra track for the 12″! It wasn’t exclusively like that, but that was often the way. So we always felt that we had this discourse, a communication between our audience and the band, and the records for me were what it was all about, even more than the hows, to an almost pathological degree!

NME
Record Store Day UK
Record Store Day
“In Praise Of Independent Record Stores” by Johnny Marr