How Soon Is Now?

Marr wrote it over four days at Earl's Court in June 1984, along with William, It Was Really Nothing and Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want. His demo was called Swamp, and he wanted to build a song around a single chord. The band recorded it with John Porter at Jam Studios in London that July, after a session that turned into a jam on Elvis Presley's That's All Right. One take ran fifteen minutes, and the song was cut to eight. The tremolo came from sending the guitar through several Fender Twin Reverb amplifiers with the effect set to different speeds, kept in time by hand. Guitar World describes four amps, with a harmonics line played at the twelfth fret. Porter later wrote to the magazine to say he played the slide guitar part. Marr disputes this, but credits Porter with leading the recording.

Morrissey recorded the vocal the morning after Porter put a rough mix through his letterbox, and finished it in two takes, according to Porter. The title was inspired by Marjorie Rosen's book Popcorn Venus, and the opening is adapted from George Eliot's Middlemarch. Travis thought the song too unlike the band to be a single, so it came out in August 1984 on the B-side of the 12-inch of William, It Was Really Nothing. Night-time radio picked it up by autumn 1984. The UK single in January 1985 reached 24, and the 1992 reissue reached 16. Sire's Seymour Stein called it the Stairway to Heaven of the Eighties. Marr said in 2007 that it was possibly the band's most enduring record.

Live and covers

The Smiths found the song a major problem to play live, and it has been a live staple of Morrissey's tours since 2004. Marr played it with Rourke in 2006 and 2014. Love Spit Love recorded it for the 1996 film The Craft, and it was later the theme of the television series Charmed. t.A.T.u. covered it in 2002, which Marr found silly and Morrissey called magnificent. Soho sampled the guitar for Hippychick in 1990.