Smile : The Story Of Song

Introduce to Smile

Smile is a college band founded in 1969, by an Imperial College London student, Brian Harold May. Brian also invited his high school friend at Hampton Grammar School, Timothy John Staffell. They auditioned the drummer by placing his brochure on the advertisement board of the school with the note "Ginger Baker type" drummer and a young man from London Hospital Medical College was chosen, namely Roger Meddows-Taylor.

In the same year, Smile signed a contract with Mercury Records, and had their first experience of a recording studio in that year.

The group's biggest public performance was on 27 February 1969 at the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child. Held at the Royal Albert Hall, May, Taylor and Staffell performed as a trio on guitar, drums and bass respectively. Keyboardist Chris Smith had been fired the day before, according to Staffell. (According to Smith, he was only briefly in the band and left on his own accord because he was interested in different styles.)

Smile gigged quite a bit on the London scene, according to 's listings. On 19 April, they played at the Speakeasy and on 31 May, appeared at the Whisky-A-Go-Go.

In March 1969, the band played at a venue known as PJ's, using claims to have previously been played on to secure an audience. It seems likely that the claims were fictitious, however. Shortly after they were given a one-off recording deal by Mercury Records to record three tracks, "Earth" (Staffell), "Step on Me" (May), and "Doin' All Right" (May/Staffell). These were recorded in June 1969 at Trident Studios in Soho.

Ultimately this U.S. promotional recording was never published commercially, however, in September of the same year, Mercury Records commissioned them to record three more songs: "April Lady" (Stanley Lucas), "Blag", and "Polar Bear", a "gentle song about a polar bear" written and led by May, at De Lane Lea Studios . Again, the record was not released at the time.

The band broke up in 1970, and on December 22, 1992 they reunited, Roger Taylor and The Cross brought Brian May and Tim Staffell and performed the song April Lady and If I Were A Carpenter that night.

In 2018, they reunited at Abbey Road Studios and re-recorded the song Doing All Right which became the soundtrack of the film "Bohemian Rhapsody".

Discography :

- Gettin' Smile (LP) from Japan, released 23 September 1982, on Mercury Records. The sleeve contains notoriously inaccurate lyrics and songwriting credits for the songs. This release was used for all subsequent bootlegs which contain the songs.

- Ghost of a Smile (CD) from the Netherlands, released in 1997, on Pseudonym Records. The CD booklet is comprehensive and features new liner notes by Staffell. All the tracks were newly remastered. The album also features two versions of the Eddie Howell/Freddie Mercury collaboration "The Man from Manhattan" (no relation to Smile, except that May plays guitar on it).