Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  With that admission I suspected that Mike was either really unprofessional and not a serious musician, or really ballsy and worth a shot. I decided he was worth a shot.

  The Ritz

  THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE was all about the upcoming debut at the Ritz. I’d told my family about our first show, and Claire was impressed that I was playing her favourite venue. Joe, Angie, Morrissey and I were getting busy, rallying as many people as we could to come down, and JK and Andrew had made posters that had gone up everywhere around town. It was really good to see the name ‘The Smiths’ for the first time in public. Morrissey had suggested that for the gig we invite his friend James Maker to introduce us. I didn’t know James, but I thought that being introduced for our first show sounded good, and when I discovered that he would be wearing high-heeled stiletto shoes while he did it, I liked the idea even more.

  Mike was going back and forth about whether he was going to join the group permanently or not, and he wasn’t certain he could do the Ritz gig. It was difficult as we were quickly becoming friends, hanging out in the shop or on nights out together, and it was a big dilemma for me. Morrissey hadn’t written off Si, and one day Mike would be up for playing with us and the next day he was staying with Victim. I was never impolite, but I felt that we were the best thing he had going as Victim hadn’t done anything and were thinking of packing it in anyway. There came a point a few days before the show when I reasoned with him to just do it so the band could at least get our start; I’d deal with the future later.

  The day of the first Smiths show finally arrived – 4 October 1982 – and it happened to be a Monday, which meant I had the day off from the shop and was able to get to the Ritz early to hang around and watch all the fuss. John Kennedy was sashaying around the gilded ballroom, busily directing all the members of the dance troupe who, though still fully dressed, were a total camp carnival, even at two in the afternoon. Andrew Berry was cutting and fixing the hair of all the models in his much-coveted Fiorucci shirt and impeccably placed trilby, while being one of the only people on earth who could get away with wearing jodhpurs without looking a total idiot. I flitted about the place nervously with my Gretsch in its case, smoking a lot of cigarettes while I waited for the other Smiths to arrive. Everywhere I looked, there were girls half-dressed and girls undressed and boys in vests and men in togas. Eventually the band showed up and we located ourselves on the left-hand side of the famous sprung dance floor to get our equipment ready. Mike still hadn’t made his mind up about whether he was going to leave Victim, which caused me some concern, but I’d persuaded him to take part nonetheless. Suddenly Blue Rondo a la Turk arrived, jiving through the ballroom in a huge whoosh of zoot-suited magnificence, and we watched in awe as the headliners unloaded their trumpets, timbales and congas. Some of them had pencil moustaches. When they finished their soundcheck, we gamely made our way on to the packed stage to set our gear up, and a burly roadie came up to me and Pete Hope and said, ‘You better not even think about touching any of our fucking equipment.’

  ‘What was that?’ I asked him.

  ‘You move any of our mics and you’re dead.’

  Pete and I nodded, but the confrontation sent me into an attitude overhaul of indignation that quickly spread to the others, and cured our nerves. We were ready now for whatever was going to come our way.

  Just as we were about to go on, Morrissey informed me that James Maker was going to be dancing next to us go-go style, which I thought was unnecessary but not a big deal, and after some impressive-sounding words of introduction from James in French I ascended the stairs to the stage for the very first show by The Smiths and my first official engagement as a professional musician. Thwang! What the …? A wave of cold dread rushed through me as I realised I’d banged the headstock of my guitar against the wall. It was a sign, it had to be, the moment was too significant; it meant that either all my dreams and life’s work thus far were about to expire in the next critical minute, or I had just exorcised all the bad luck I had accrued over my eighteen years with one divine bang of my Gretsch. I held the pick and looked out into the spotlight. My left hand formed the G6 chord that opened the first song and … strum … strum … it was … half and half – not totally perfect and glorious, but not too imperfect and disastrous for me not to be able to guide it and live with. Maybe it was symbolic. We got through the first couple of songs just fine, and then Mike had an issue with his snare. The interest in the audience picked up when we got to ‘Handsome Devil’ though, and in a moment of assuredness I looked over to my right and caught sight of the bass player dancing around like a four-year-old at a toddlers’ disco. Uh-oh. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I thought, and I really hoped he would stop, but no, Dale was grooving and what’s more he looked like he was really enjoying it. At that precise moment I knew we’d have to part company, and between James go-go dancing in stilettos on my left and Dale getting on down with his bad self on my right, our first ever gig was turning out to be a more lively affair than I could possibly have dreamt up. Luckily for Morrissey he was stuck out front and was unaware of the business that was going on behind him. The Smiths finished off our tentative and bizarre debut with ‘I Want a Boy for My Birthday’, to total bemusement from the crowd, and with that we descended the steps to make way for the avant-garde dance troupe. Thank you and goodnight.

  Joe came up to me immediately and was absolutely jubilant, saying that he’d never heard a guitar played that way before and that he thought Morrissey was great. I’d not seen him so excited and his reaction was exactly what I needed. I said to him, ‘We’re going to need a manager, Joe. Do you fancy being our manager?’

  After pausing for a few seconds he answered, ‘Yeah … sure. I’ve never been a manager but I’ll give it a go.’

  I instinctively knew he would say yes. I was the right person asking the right question to the right person. As far as The Smiths and management went, that would be the only time that would ever happen.

  I now knew that Dale was not right for the band. We met up at the rehearsal room a couple of nights later and I told him it wasn’t working out. He took it very well and didn’t seem particularly surprised, and then he wished me all the best, which I thought was very gracious. I also had to work out what we were going to do about the drums situation, as Mike was still not sure that he wanted to join. I had gone along with the Ritz being a temporary thing to see how it went, but then I had expected him to jump in enthusiastically. I needed to move on and find someone permanent as I’d got us another gig, this time at Manhattan Sound, and with an ultimatum of ‘now or never’ and some persuasion from his friends, Mike told us that he was in.

  We had acquitted ourselves well enough at the Ritz that people around town were suitably impressed. So much so that my friend Tony O’Connor from the students’ union at West Wythy came into the shop and asked me if I had a tape he could take to his boss at his new job at EMI. It all sounded a bit too easy but I wasn’t going to say no, and the following day Tony and Morrissey went with our demo to the home of The Beatles in London while I waited expectantly by the payphone in the shop. Tony’s boss wasn’t exactly blown away with our tape, but he liked what he’d heard enough to give us £200 to make another demo. It wasn’t A Hard Day’s Night, but it was better than nothing and we had some new songs I couldn’t wait to record.

  I knew I was going to have to get Andy Rourke in on bass. I had no inclination or desire to audition any more strangers, who I knew wouldn’t be as good. I was excited about the prospect of getting Andy in the band, but I was still angry about the heroin and I was unsure about how things were going to be resolved. I went round to his house, where I’d spent so much of my time and where I knew some of my old friends were, and they were all there in the front room, exactly where I’d left them a year before, except now they were looking several years worse. There was a bleak stillness and a dead air to the place. One former friend jumped up confrontationally to demand why I was back while the others skulk
ed in embarrassment and smug, junked-up dumbness. I wasn’t planning on staying for long, and I went into the back room where Andy was to speak to him alone. It was good to see him, and he was surprised I’d come round. He looked the same as always and told me about the job he had in a timber yard and how he hated it, but at least it meant he was working every day and I was glad he wasn’t in the same pit as the zombies in the next room. I stuck to the matter at hand and told him about the new band I was putting together, and asked if he wanted to join. I told him that it was on the condition that there wouldn’t be any heroin. I played him a tape of the gig at the Ritz, and he liked what he heard and said he would come and play on the EMI demo. I left Andy’s for the last time and I wondered if it was all going to work out, and if The Smiths was now a band. It could be perfect. I put all my faith in it, and I just hoped we wouldn’t have any problems.

  The Smiths first got together in a tiny basement with no windows and dark blue denim on the walls at a place called Drone Studios in Chorlton. Morrissey and I had been writing with a passion, and we had enough money from EMI to record three songs: ‘Handsome Devil’, ‘Miserable Lie’ and a new one called ‘What Difference Does It Make?’. There are numerous accounts from bands of how they knew things were absolutely right from the moment they started to play together, and it’s the same for The Smiths, except that in our case I knew it was right from the moment I introduced everyone to each other on the street in Chorlton that December morning. We even looked like a band.

  When we started playing the first song, which was ‘Handsome Devil’, it sounded so good to us that we did what every other band does in that situation: we started to laugh. It’s a fantastic truth and a profound irony that the very first thing The Smiths did when they got together was to start laughing uncontrollably.

  We got into things quickly and Andy was great on bass. He and I picked up where we’d left off in the last band, playing off each other, and we all knew he was the right man for the job. The day then got a little strange when Mike informed us that he could see Dale looking in through the window in the kitchen upstairs. I assumed our drummer had been taking mushrooms again, but when I went to check it out I saw Dale myself, loitering in the garden and peering in through the window. I went out to say hello and see why he was there, and he went to great lengths to convince me that he just happened to be taking an impromptu look at the studio on the day we were in there recording. I was curious about why he wanted to check out a studio from the garden, but I gave him my best and left him to it.

  The rest of the session went smoothly and things got really good when we heard ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ coming back through the monitors. It’s a good sign when your best song is also your most recent; you feel like you’ve taken a step up. We tried out a saxophone on ‘Handsome Devil’, because I was listening to a lot of Little Richard, and a nice man came in and tried his best, but The Smiths and the saxophone were never meant to be and I was OK with that. When the three songs were finished, we gave a copy to Tony O’Connor to bring to EMI. I didn’t have too much expectancy that they would go for it, and when they came back to us to say that they ‘couldn’t hear anything in it’, neither Morrissey nor I were particularly surprised or crestfallen. I focused on trying to get us more shows and writing another song as good as ‘What Difference Does It Make?’.

  My job at X-Clothes was starting to get difficult. I loved being in town every day, but I wanted to spend all my waking hours on the band, a fact that was duly noted by my boss. I was meeting up with Joe at Crazy Face more often and was getting back from lunch later and Lee didn’t like it at all. He also disliked the fact that I seemed to be just hanging about, talking to everyone about my band and treating the place like a nightclub when I was supposed to be working, and it especially irked him that I did that while being able to sell more clothes than anyone else. It wasn’t my fault, I just had the knack. I was musing on this predicament with Joe one afternoon when he made a suggestion: ‘You should come and work here,’ he said. ‘You can open a shop in the basement.’ I knew that Joe only made decisions after very careful consideration. There wasn’t too much to think about, except to be very excited and a bit nervous about the responsibility of opening a shop, but if Joe thought I could do it then I would, and I ran through town and over to Sassoon’s to tell Angie, my head spinning with it all.

  Portland Street

  THE SMITHS HAD our second show coming up at Manhattan Sound in January 1983. I was in my room at Shelley’s a few nights before and was thinking that I had to find the band a roadie. The fact that we wouldn’t be getting paid meant I’d have to rely on the kindness of someone who wasn’t a stranger, but where could I find such a friend? After musing for a while I walked across the landing to where my housemate Ollie was busy with his continued experiments in all the different ways to apply a bong. The hyper twang of his favourite funkers was blaring from his record deck.

  ‘Ollie? … Ollie!’ I yelled.

  ‘Yeah?’ he shouted back, a bit narked at being interrupted from the jazz-funk reverie.

  I went into his room and asked the giant favour through the fog: ‘The band needs a roadie, do you fancy doing it?’

  He thought about it for quite a while before answering. ‘Will I be getting paid?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘but it’ll be a laugh.’

  He thought for a moment longer before giving me his verdict. ‘OK then,’ he replied, and that was that, we had a roadie. Ollie was a mate.

  There was a buzz around town about our second show. This time we would be headlining, and we’d play on the dance floor while a film of the drag queen Divine was projected on the wall next to us. Once again flyers went up around town, and we heard that the place was sold out, which was heady stuff for us and something I hadn’t really expected. There was a lot riding on the second show as not only were all the fashionistas there who knew me and Angie, but we had piqued the interest of the Manchester old guard, who had known of Morrissey from being around gigs during the punk days. I had been given the impression from different sources that my new partner was a serial hermit with absolutely no friends, but he introduced me to quite a few people, one being Linder Sterling, who I knew of from seeing her band Ludus and who was always interesting, and another being Buzzcocks’ manager Richard Boon. I liked Morrissey’s friends, and he never introduced me to anyone that wasn’t really supportive of the band. Meanwhile, our friend Tony Wilson offered to introduce us onstage, and New Order manager Rob Gretton and the rest of the Factory crowd were coming too. It seemed that people were starting to notice us.

  We played the same set as we had at the Ritz, but added ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ and a couple of other new ones, including the first of our sad and pretty compositions, called ‘What Do You See in Him?’, which I loved. We were still playing ‘I Want a Boy for My Birthday’, but in the light of the songs Morrissey and I were now writing the song felt redundant and a bit contrived. Having the right line-up made it very obvious that we really didn’t need a go-go dancer, so it would be our last with James Maker, and it may have been the new songs or the sense of occasion, but it was at the Manhattan Sound that I first recognised that we were a band with a singer who was not only a unique lyricist but a unique presence onstage. He was made for his audience, and we were made for our audience. Now we just had to get them to find us.

  I was hanging out at the Haçienda on the nights when there was nothing better to do in town, which meant most nights during the week. It was an industrial-looking space so echoey and vast that on the rare occasion when there was a crowd it still seemed like it was empty. I would often go on a weeknight with Angie and the two Petes, and just about the only other soul in the club besides us would be the DJ, playing electro music to the very bored bar staff. We would stand around on the balcony, looking down on the empty dance floor, and watch the stragglers wandering round while two huge video screens opposite played Eraserhead, a film everyone was talking about b
y the weird new director David Lynch. I was happy enough to be there – it was somewhere to go where you wouldn’t get any hassle, and I could wander in and get free drinks at the bar. Andrew Berry had a job as a DJ, and I could hang out in the booth playing whatever records I liked, such as ‘Ghost on the Highway’ by The Gun Club and ‘Shack Up’ by A Certain Ratio.

  In spite of the complaints about the sound and the gripes by the members of some of the Factory bands, there was a feeling in the early days of the Haçienda of being right on the cutting edge. It may have been overambitious and a commercially naive venture, but it was fantastically idealistic and it gave alternative people in Manchester the most modern place to go in the world. New Order were the undisputed centre of the whole scene. There were always rumours about how much money the club was costing the band, and they appeared to be playing there every week to keep it going. I knew a lot of people at Factory Records, and even though we weren’t working together we were of the same mindset, which was to escape the constraints of the straight world and try to get on doing something creative. No one was chasing commercialism, it was too boring and too uncool, and obtaining it didn’t seem like an option for any of us anyway. I respected New Order, not just because they were successful, but because they were successful on their own terms.

  The person I knew best at Factory was Mike Pickering. He was a real music expert and was usually with New Order’s manager Rob Gretton. Mike was a catalyst on the Manchester scene, and it was through him that we got our first show at the Haçienda supporting the Factory band 52nd Street. It would definitely be a step forward for us, and when I saw the posters around town for the show I decided that it was time to take Joe up on his offer to open a new shop. I handed in my notice at X-Clothes, and on the last day I got my leaving pay and treated myself to a pair of black Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses.