John Porter is the British record producer responsible for work on a wide range of classic material, including Bryan Ferry, Billy Bragg, Missy Higgins, Killing Joke, The Cat Empire and, of course, The Smiths. Below, Porter describes the exacting –and ocassionally tense – work that went into recording The Smiths’ classic song How Soon Is Now?
How did How Soon Is Now first come about?
We were in JAM Studios [recording William, It Was Really Nothing and Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want]. By that time, we had a good process. Johnny [Marr] and I had a musical connection, a good short-hand. It didn’t take us long to get things into shape.
We still had another day or two, so I said, ‘Well what else you got?’ He played this little lick that was very similar to William, high and kind of fast. Now I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this, in that all of their songs tended to have lots of chord changes, whereas I was into black music, James Brown and The
