Johnny Marr:

"I think we really began to hit our stride mid-way through making the second album. It felt like all the grown ups had left us and let us get along with doing our thing on our own.

"At that time, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’, ‘Meat Is Murder’, ‘Well I Wonder’ and ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ all came about in the studio.

"I learnt how to put things together on the John Peel Sessions (many of which appeared on the classic b-sides/sessions compilation Hatful Of Hollow) and I had learnt a lot through working with John Porter.

"From then on, we didn’t work with a producer on albums."

Read the full 2003 interview here.

Stephen Street:

(Engineer on Meat Is Murder – also worked with The Smiths on The Queen Is Dead and Strangeways, Here We Come)

On first meeting The Smiths in early 1984, when they were recording 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now':

“They were still working with John Porter at the time, who co-produced the first album. I was working at Island Records’ studio in London, and they came in to do that song. I engineered the session, and afterwards Johnny and Morrissey took my number and said, ‘We’d love to do more work with you.’

"But then they did the next single, ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, and I wasn’t on the session at all. Very soon after that, though, I got a call from Geoff Travis, and he said, ‘The guys want to have a go at producing the next album themselves, but would like you to be the engineer?’ I said, ‘I’d love to'.

“They never stopped working. It was relentless. Apart from perhaps Strangeways, we never really did an album session all in one go. All the other albums were recorded in bits and pieces, because of the demands on the band to play dates in Europe and so forth.

"I think, though, there’s that period that most great artists go through, usually in their mid-twenties – or early twenties, in The Smiths’ case – where things really click and they’re at the height of their powers.

“And, yeah, it seemed to be very easy for them, in some ways. We never went in to record and came up against a brick wall, where there was no creative flow. Every time we went into the studio, it was like, ‘Tape rolling, let’s go'. It was very inspiring.”

Read the full 2007 interview here.

Listen to Meat Is Murder below: