It couldn’t have lasted—a flame burn­ing twice as bright, and so on. One of the best bands to emerge from the explo­sion of British new wave and post-punk in the 1980s, The Smiths built a tem­plate for thou­sands of mope-rock bands who fol­lowed. Long­stand­ing ani­mos­i­ty has meant that their brief time togeth­er con­tains their total lega­cy. No reunion shows or albums—despite rumors over the decades since they broke up in 1987; no ersatz ver­sion of the band, miss­ing key mem­bers but limp­ing ever on.

Live albums, com­pi­la­tions, and box sets may have appeared over the years, but they all con­tain music writ­ten, played, and record­ed between 1982 and 1987, a peri­od dur­ing which the song­writ­ing duo of Mor­ris­sey and Marr had as much cre­ative ener­gy and pur­pose as any of the famous song­writ­ing duos of twen­ty years ear­li­er. Love them or hate them—there seem to be few peo­ple in-between—The Smiths’ impor­tance to alter­na­tive and indie rock is inescapable.

Like many oth­er huge­ly influ­en­tial bands in pop­u­lar music, the mythol­o­gy can eclipse the com­plex­i­ties. Unmen­tioned in many a glow­ing account, for exam­ple, are the unsung one­time-mem­bers who played bass or gui­tar at points in the band’s short life—most sig­nif­i­cant­ly gui­tarist Craig Gan­non, some­times called the “fifth Smith.” Gan­non played on such sem­i­nal hits as “Ask” and “Pan­ic” before being let go from the band before they played their final con­cert, an Artists Against Apartheid ben­e­fit at London’s Brix­ton Acad­e­my on Decem­ber 12th, 1986. See it above in a fan-record­ed video.

Delayed after Marr was in a car acci­dent, the con­cert shows them back to their core four line­up, reunit­ed with fired, then rehired (then arrest­ed) bass play­er, Andy Rourke. They play “Shoplifters of the World Unite” from their upcom­ing final album, 1987’s Strange­ways, Here We Come; they play The Queen is Dead’s “Some Girls Are Big­ger Than Oth­ers” for the first, and last, time live onstage; they end the night where they began, with their very first sin­gle, “Hand in Glove.” No one knew at the time that it would be their last gig, includ­ing the band.

They con­tin­ued on for the next few months, record­ing, mak­ing TV appear­ances, and pon­der­ing a major label move. Dif­fer­ences per­son­al, legal, and cre­ative soon drove the four mem­bers apart. They have all con­tin­ued to con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the direc­tion of alter­na­tive rock, as sup­port­ing play­ers, super­star indie gui­tarists, and, well, Mor­ris­sey. We might wish for a more pol­ished doc­u­ment of their last show, but so it is. Fans are extreme­ly unlike­ly to ever get chance to see it hap­pen again.

“Yes, time can heal,” wrote Mor­ris­sey in his often embit­tered auto­bi­og­ra­phy. “But it can also dis­fig­ure. And sur­viv­ing the Smiths is not some­thing that should be attempt­ed twice.” We should count our­selves lucky—those of us in the love-the-Smiths camp—that they sur­vived as long as they did, pro­duc­ing jan­g­ly, gor­geous, snide, maudlin, and mor­bid­ly hilar­i­ous indie-pop gems from the very begin­ning to the very end of their maybe-per­fect­ly-con­cise career.

See the full setlist below:

Ask
Big­mouth Strikes Again
London/Miserable Lie
Some Girls Are Big­ger Than Oth­ers (only live per­for­mance)
The Boy With The Thorn In His Side
Shoplifters Of The World Unite
There Is A Light That Nev­er Goes Out
Is It Real­ly So Strange?
Ceme­try Gates
This Night Has Opened My Eyes
Still Ill
Pan­ic
/The Queen Is Dead
//William It Was Real­ly Noth­ing
//Hand In Glove

via Son­ic More Music

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the 50 Best Post-Punk Albums of All Time: A Nos­tal­gia-Induc­ing Playlist Curat­ed by Paste Mag­a­zine

Stream 935 Songs That Appeared in “The John Peel Fes­tive 50” from 1976 to 2004: The Best Songs of the Year, as Select­ed by the Beloved DJ’s Lis­ten­ers

The Fall’s Mark E. Smith’s (RIP) Cre­ates a List of His Favorite Books, Films & Music, Cir­ca 1981

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Dur­ing the past few months of this year, as in those same months of any year, we’ve been hear­ing a great deal of Christ­mas music. Some of the songs in the mix — “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein­deer,” “Have Your­self a Mer­ry Lit­tle Christ­mas,” “The Christ­mas Song” — few of us have ever known a time with­out, and oth­ers make it in because of their sea­son­al­ly themed lyri­cal con­tent. But cer­tain songs just sound like Christ­mas songs, some­how, and to under­stand what, in musi­cal terms, fills those com­po­si­tions with the spir­it of the hol­i­day sea­son, watch the five-minute Vox explain­er above that reveals “the secret chord that makes Christ­mas music sound so Christ­massy.”

First we should dis­tin­guish pop­u­lar Christ­mas songs from pop­u­lar non-Christ­mas songs, espe­cial­ly ones record­ed in the past half-cen­tu­ry. “Rock ’n’ roll songs (and the sub­se­quent pop songs influ­enced by the genre) may only con­tain three or four chords, each chord usu­al­ly being just a major or a minor — the two chord ‘fla­vors’ anal­o­gous to choco­late and vanil­la,” writes Slate’s Adam Ragusea. In con­trast, a selec­tion from “the Great Amer­i­can Song­book” might “use a Baskin-Rob­bins shop full of chords and chord fla­vors — 7^ths and 9^ths, half and ful­ly dimin­ished, var­i­ous inver­sions, and more” under melodies that “tend to include a lot of chro­mat­ic notes (the black notes on the piano when play­ing in the key of C major).”

In the era when most beloved Christ­mas stan­dards were con­ceived, song­writ­ers still made much use of that wide musi­cal palette, the son­ic col­ors of which had as much to do with jazz as with pop. But since the 1960s, writ­ers of pop songs  have used these now-exot­ic har­monies “to get a ‘clas­sic’ sound. For instance, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Hap­py Xmas (War Is Over)’ includes some notes in its choral parts that I think are intend­ed to recall the har­mon­ic vocab­u­lary of those 1940s Christ­mas stan­dards.” No coin­ci­dence, sure­ly, that Mari­ah Carey’s “All I Want for Christ­mas Is You,” per­haps the only Christ­mas song writ­ten in recent decades to attain the same pop­u­lar­i­ty as the old stan­dards, uses the same com­po­si­tion­al tech­niques.

“I count at least 13 dis­tinct chords at work in ‘All I Want for Christ­mas Is You,’ result­ing in a sump­tu­ous­ly chro­mat­ic melody,” writes Ragusea. “The song also includes what I con­sid­er the most Christ­massy chord of all — a minor sub­dom­i­nant, or “iv,” chord with an added 6, under the words ‘under­neath the Christ­mas tree,’ among oth­er places.” As in Irv­ing Berlin’s “White Christ­mas,” he notes, “the chord comes imme­di­ate­ly after a major sub­dom­i­nant chord, giv­ing the effect of a ‘bright’ major sub­dom­i­nant that you might say ‘sighs’ or ‘melts’ into a ‘dark’ minor sub­dom­i­nant spiked with a ‘spicy’ extra tone (the added 6), before the songs set­tle back into their ton­ic, or ‘home,’ chords.” And so we come to the unex­pect­ed find­ing — though hard­ly a dis­pleas­ing one — that a prop­er­ly made Christ­mas song has more than a lit­tle in com­mon with a prop­er­ly made Christ­mas cock­tail.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 22 Hours of Funky, Rock­ing & Swing­ing Christ­mas Albums: From James Brown and John­ny Cash to Christo­pher Lee & The Ven­tures

Stream a Playlist of 68 Punk Rock Christ­mas Songs: The Ramones, The Damned, Bad Reli­gion & More

Hear Paul McCartney’s Exper­i­men­tal Christ­mas Mix­tape: A Rare & For­got­ten Record­ing from 1965

Gui­tarist Randy Bach­man Demys­ti­fies the Open­ing Chord of The Bea­t­les’ “A Hard Day’s Night”

The Moth­er of All Funk Chords

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.