Sign with Rough Trade and release ‘Hand in Glove’

Marr and Rourke visited London to hand a cassette of their recordings to Geoff Travis of the independent record label Rough Trade Records . Travis agreed to cut their song ” Hand in Glove ” as a single. For the cover, Morrissey insisted on a homoerotic photograph by Jim French which he had found in Margaret Walters’ The Nude Male . The single was released in May 1983, and sold well for the next 18 months, but did not chart in the UK Top 40 . Among the audience at the Smiths’ second London concert, at the University of London Union , was John Walters , the producer of John Peel ‘s BBC Radio 1 show: he invited the band to record a session for the programme. Peel said: “You couldn’t immediately tell what records they’d been listening to. That’s fairly unusual, very rare indeed… It was that aspect of the Smiths that I found most impressive.” Following this radio exposure, the Smiths gained their first interviews, in the music magazines NME and Sounds .