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What difference does it make? Jackie Kay on her Morrissey-backed survey of real-life Smiths

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What’s it like to have Britain’s most common surname? To find out, poet Jackie Kay went on a quest round Salford – and met a bedridden tarantula-keeper and a woman kidnapped by her own husband

Morrissey once told an interviewer that he chose to call his band the Smiths “because it was the most ordinary name”. It was “time that the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces,” he reasoned. More than 30 years later the singer has given his blessing to a special project celebrating people with the surname Smith in his old stomping ground.

Jackie Kay, chancellor of Salford University and Scotland’s national poet, has spoken to 30 Smiths living in Salford, the Greater Manchester borough where Morrissey, Johnny Marr et al posed outside the Lads’ Club for their 1986 album The Queen Is Dead. The resulting interviews will be mixed into a soundscape with three Smiths tracks – Panic, This Charming Man and What Difference Does It Make by the Sheffield-born musical artist and DJ Oberman Knocks.

There are stories of hospitals nearly performing operations on the wrong Smith

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