The name would go on to define one of Britain\u2019s most influential bands of the 1980s.<\/p>\n
Morrissey, Marr, bassist Andy Rourke, and drummer Mike Joyce formed The Smiths in Manchester in 1982.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
In a 1987 interview on The South Bank Show, he contrasted the band\u2019s name with the elaborate titles of other acts popular at the time.<\/p>\n
“You\u2019ve got all these synthesising duos, really mixing metaphors, really corny as hell metaphorical lyrics with 18-syllable names,” Marr said.<\/p>\n
“And because we understood all that totally, we were involved in it to an extent and observed it, we just turned the whole thing around and called ourselves The Smiths.”<\/p>\n
Another theory connects the name to the Moors Murders, a series of child killings committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the 1960s.<\/p>\n
Morrissey addressed the murders in the 1984 track “Suffer Little Children” after reading Beyond Belief, a book about the crimes.<\/p>\n
David Smith, Hindley\u2019s brother-in-law, was a key witness who reported Brady to the police.<\/p>\n
Some believe Morrissey chose the name in part because of that connection.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.the-express.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Morrissey says the name of his former band, The Smiths, wasn\u2019t meant to be mysterious, revealing the true origin of it’s name. The singer offered an explanation during a 1984 appearance on the children\u2019s television show DataRun, where bandmate Johnny Marr pointed to him and said, “We call ourselves The Smiths, because you decided we\u2019d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2187628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[422123,352130,22860,353505,353508,338911,353507],"class_list":["post-2187627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-band-name-origin","tag-band-names","tag-hollywood","tag-johnny-marr","tag-morrissey","tag-music-section","tag-the-smiths"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Morrissey-details-the-inspiration-behind-The-Smiths-name-Celebrity.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2187627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2187627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2187627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2187629,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2187627\/revisions\/2187629"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2187628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2187627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2187627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2187627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}