Set the Boy Free
Page 13
Joe cleared out the basement of the Portland Street building to make room for the new shop. At first I was going to stock it with the current Crazy Face items, but then I put in second-hand clothes from my friends’ shops that they thought I could sell. We decorated the place with film posters and some original black-and-white framed press shots of Marlon Brando and Bo Diddley that Joe had bought from Paris in the seventies, and I painted the musical notation to the Stones’ version of ‘Not Fade Away’ along the top of the walls, as it was one of my many obsessions at the time. Joe was very serious about his role as The Smiths’ manager. Now that we were working together, we were able to spend more time discussing things and getting more ideas, and he moved his office into the adjacent room so he and I were in close proximity.
We were in the Manhattan after work one night when he brought up the idea that we should do something at the Haçienda to change the sterile atmosphere of the place. ‘We could bring in a lot of flowers, cheer the place up and get away from the Factory vibe, make it our own.’ It sounded like a nice enough idea, but I didn’t give it much more thought. I was more excited about the fact that working in Crazy Face meant I was able to get my own bespoke jeans made up for me. Up until then I would beg a black pair from Kate in the wholesale department, and because I was so small I’d get a size eight from the children’s range. Then I’d customise them by taking a pin and fraying the end of the seams, or sewing a strip of blue suede around the bottoms as turn-ups. A very big thing for me was discovering the photos of Stuart Sutcliffe with The Beatles in Hamburg. I thought he was the hippest thing I’d ever seen, and the fact that his look was post-1950s rock ’n’ roll but pre-Beat Boom beatnik said something to me at the time. I scoured the second-hand shops and found an old pair of white Johnson’s shoes that I dyed navy blue, and then added a white polo-neck sweater and a low V-neck that I bought from Marks and Spencer. I showed the Stu Sutcliffe pics to Kate in the factory and asked if she could make me some black jeans with a V cut into the side of the leg, and when I had all of that down I dug out my Ray-Ban Wayfarers from X-Clothes.
My days would go like this: I’d wake up in my room at Shelley’s at nine forty-five after staying up writing songs or hanging out with Ollie. I’d get dressed in a hurry and dash down three flights of stairs and out the door to run to the train in time for work. I’d keep hurtling down the street until I got to the girls’ school, then I’d slow right down and try to look cool and not totally flustered as I sauntered past nonchalantly. Once past the school, I’d pick up speed, career into Altrincham train station and buy a Cadbury’s Caramel chocolate bar and a small bottle of Schweppes lemonade for breakfast from the waiting vendor, before jumping on the train just as it left at five past ten. I’d get into Manchester with about three minutes to get to the shop, which was ten minutes away. I always arrived around ten forty-five, when Joe would be sat at his desk on the phone. He’d finish his call and roll a joint and put on a cassette of John Lee Hooker or something relating to whatever music we were talking about the day before, and then we’d talk about what was happening with the band. When it got to around eleven thirty I would wait for an appropriate pause in Joe’s thinking, then suggest taking down the shutters from the door and opening the shop. Every day went this way, unless I’d slept on the floor of Mike’s flat, which was closer to town and in which case I would get the bus, but I would still manage to be ten minutes late. The rest of the day would proceed in a similar fashion, with friends dropping by and me pretending to be selling clothes. When it got to around five in the afternoon, Morrissey, Mike and Andy would arrive and we’d get into the service elevator and take it to the giant factory floor at the top of the building where the machines cut the Crazy Face fabrics, and we’d rehearse the set or learn a new song.
It was important that the band were tight. We wanted to be good, and we were fine with going over the songs until we felt it was right. It was often very cold on the top floor, and my guitar strings would be freezing wires. But we never slacked off, we were into it and had a work ethic, and besides there was nothing better to do. The Smiths never went to the pub, not as a band or as individuals. There had been a tradition going back years of British musicians getting together in pubs, before rehearsals, after rehearsals, before gigs and after gigs. Bands formed in pubs and bands split up in pubs, but it wasn’t our scene. We became a band through playing together. Andy taught Mike the art of locking in with the bass. It took a while to gel properly, but they persevered and worked at it until we all started to get on the same musical wavelength. A guitar string would snap and I would have to stick a safety pin on the end of it to keep it in place. We’d finish around ten, going as long as we could, and I’d take a dreary train ride back to Shelley’s and Mike would catch a bus to Chorlton. Morrissey and Andy would travel together on the bus back through Stretford and Sale. It was through these experiences that the members of The Smiths got to know each other. Most bands start out at school or in the neighbourhood. They grow up as friends and want to do something together. They have a shared history and experience of each other’s lives and backgrounds, but it wasn’t like that for The Smiths. The other three members didn’t know each other before joining the band, they became friends through being in The Smiths, which happened through me, and for this reason my role, besides playing the guitar and writing the music, was like the centre of the wheel; the band viewed me as the one who pulled things together and was resourceful. Apart from going back to Shelley’s to write and sleep, I spent most of my time in the Portland Street building. Everyone could find me at the band’s HQ. It was a good job and I was loving it.
Hand in Glove
THE UPCOMING HAÇIENDA show was a big deal. It was the most prestigious place we’d played and it was only our third appearance. Joe was saying, ‘We’ll have to get a gig in London when you’re ready,’ which I knew meant, ‘I’m listening and you’re not ready yet.’ As well as the Haçienda show we’d also managed to get ourselves on to the bill supporting Richard Hell at Rafters, which to me was really big time, and we had a few new songs to play and one new song in particular.
I’d been around at my parents’ house with Angie, absent-mindedly strumming an old acoustic guitar that I’d left there. At first I thought the riff I was playing was something like Nile Rodgers might do with Chic, but then it quickly developed into my own style, until I hit what felt like pure inspiration. There wasn’t anything at the house to record the tune on to, and the only thing I could do so Morrissey could hear it was to drive to his house with the guitar and play it to him before I forgot it. I made a desperate plea to Angie to drive me in the Beetle and we set off fast, with me playing the tune around and around on the guitar while I tried my best not to change it or lose it. On the journey Angie made what was for her a rare suggestion. ‘Make it sound like Iggy,’ she said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Make it sound like Iggy,’ she repeated, now sounding more like an order than a request.
I adapted the clipped, rhythmic approach I was using and changed the riff to a big open chord strum that I thought would be more like something from Raw Power, and within seconds it sounded really good. I kept the riff going, and when I got to Morrissey’s I prayed it wouldn’t be one of the rare occasions when he’d left the house. He opened the door to find me strumming and stuttering about a new song, and as I serenaded him on the doorstep he scampered away quickly to get his tape recorder so we could record the tune. When we got together to rehearse a couple of days later, I was eager to show Mike and Andy the new song and we had it sounding good straight away. Morrissey then took the mic and held a sheet of paper, we all went into the song for the first time together, and bang! It was called ‘Hand in Glove’ and it was the best thing we’d done. The spirit in the singing was the same as the spirit in the guitar. The song defined us and described the devotion and solidarity of a powerful friendship. It was a declaration and our manifesto. The words were perfect, the music was perfect, my lif
e was perfect.
The night of the Haçienda show finally came. Andrew was the DJ, and Ollie was dispatched to get some flowers for the night as Joe had planned. The place was so cavernous and boomy it felt like we were playing to just a handful of our friends in a big concrete room, which turned out to be exactly what it was. We made the best of it and I hoped that people liked it. Later on, Morrissey’s sister Jackie came into the dressing room to say that she thought the band was great. The Smiths had taken a necessary step on the road to recognition in Manchester and we had acquitted ourselves well enough.
As always, Joe was working on the next move, which he thought was to play in London and to find a record company. The two of us and Morrissey were trying on a daily basis to make things happen, and Morrissey and I were even daring to dream about the possibility of making a single. We had the demos from Decibel and Drone to send to the record companies, but we were evolving so fast as writers that we’d moved on from those early tapes. I’d announced that we should be on Rough Trade, and the thought of taking the conventional major company route seemed redundant and most probably ineffectual. I still liked the idea of Rough Trade, and then Joe stepped in once again and offered to put up £225 to record ‘Hand in Glove’ in Strawberry Studios. It was beyond exciting and I was ready to go.
Joe and I had already been discussing the possibility of me moving out of Shelley’s and into his house with his family in Heaton Mersey. It meant that we could spend more time working on the band and drive to and from the shop together every day. I would live with Andrew Berry in the two-room flat above Joe and his wife Janet and their two-year-old son, Ivan. I took to my new digs by writing the music for a new song called ‘Accept Yourself’ and we added it to the set opening for Richard Hell. It was cool to be playing with someone whose records I’d admired, and I considered the show to be our first real test in front of a non-partisan crowd. We had to stop the set as I broke a string, and because I didn’t have a back-up guitar I had to go through what seemed like a lifetime changing the string onstage while the band waited. When we finished playing, a very wasted Richard Hell appeared from backstage, put his arm around me and said, ‘You’re a great guitar player.’ I didn’t know at the time if he was serious or just being kind because he saw me struggling with the broken string, but either way, and in spite of him breathing lethal toxic fumes over me, it was a nice gesture and it really meant a lot.
It was good to be living with Joe’s family. Being around Janet and their son Ivan gave me a sense of domesticity and order that helped to keep me grounded. Janet was dynamic and always very busy, looking after the family and running a couple of shops herself. She understood that Joe and I were on a mission, and she adapted her family’s home life in support of it. I loved having a little kid running around. Ivan would wait for me at the bottom of the stairs if he thought I was home, and I would try to get back early some nights so he and I could play together with his toys. As tolerant as Janet was, she was also formidable, especially when it came to her family. I could get away with playing loud music and even have a cigarette now and then, but when I surrendered one night to Ivan’s request for the can of Coke I was holding she hit the roof and all I could do was hide. I wasn’t aware of exactly how much sugar and caffeine was bad for toddlers, but I knew by the time she had finished kicking off, and it didn’t help that Ivan followed me around for days afterwards asking me for a Coca-Cola.
Living with Andrew was great. Even though I had a lot of different friendships with different people, if you asked anyone who they thought my closest friend was at the time they would’ve said Andrew. I’ve always had a best mate, even from the days of Sacred Heart with Chris Milne. It sometimes worked out that because my focus was on being a musician, whoever I was close with would end up being enlisted in my band, which was how it was with Andy Rourke at school. Sometimes my relationship with a bandmate takes on a different dynamic because of the roles and chemistry in the band. We can be good friends, but it’s also work. One of the reasons why Andrew Berry and I were such good mates was because we weren’t in a band together, and as significant as my relationship with Morrissey was, having a best friend that I could confide in outside of the band was always helpful, especially when I was in The Smiths.
The other thing about living with Andrew was that we had all the records from the DJ booth at the Haçienda. In the front room were boxes of albums by Suicide, Material, James White and the Blacks, and everyone on the ZE label, as well as a whole stack of electro 12-inch singles. Andrew introduced me to a lot of club music, mostly from New York, that was brand new and completely different from the post-punk guitar music I was investigating, and it gave me an appreciation of club music that would endure. Between his knowledge of club records, Joe’s love of sixties soul singers, and my own quest for modern guitar music, the whole house was an extraordinary mix of disparate influences that somehow made total sense to me.
When the moment finally came to make my first record, it was like stepping up to destiny. I had fantasised for so long about what it would be like to actually make a record, and now that it was about to happen I was not going to get it wrong. The band and Joe made our way into Strawberry Studios in Stockport on a drizzly Sunday morning, and as we started setting up I realised that it was my responsibility to direct the recording. I was secretly nervous and when we met the house engineer, who acted as if we were a huge inconvenience, I just crossed my fingers and hoped the spirit of Phil Spector and Andrew Loog Oldham was with us.
We didn’t waste any time. After a perfunctory twenty minutes or so of getting an adequate drum sound, the band went through the song a couple of times to make sure the levels would be correct on the tape and in our headphones. We saw the red light and dived into the first take, and then did a second, more confident take. It was sounding good to us already and we were enjoying the experience. By the third take, we had upped the feeling even more. Our nervousness meant that we’d played the song slightly fast, but it turned out to be a good thing as it gave the performance an impatience and enthusiasm. We captured a rush: take three could be the record. We took off the headphones and wondered what was going to transpire as we followed each other back into the control room. One of the greatest things in the world for a band is when you all stand together behind the mixing desk to listen to a performance of a song that you’ve captured in the studio. There’s an elation that’s barely contained until the end of the playback, just in case you jinx it, then a wave of joy that you all feel together in the same moment. If you multiply that by the fact that it was our first record, then you can imagine what it meant for The Smiths to hear take three of ‘Hand in Glove’. I set about finishing the track by doubling the electric guitar and then overdubbing an acoustic twice on the right-hand side. Mike played a tambourine part and then Morrissey recorded a ghostly backing vocal. It was inspired. As we were mixing the song, I wondered if there was something we needed to announce the start of the record, a kind of finishing touch. I took out the harmonica, asked everyone to bear with me in case it didn’t work, and I came up with a phrase in the corridor on my way into the live room. I recorded the harmonica and I’d made my first record.
When it was done, I went outside and the mood of the record was all there in the street. It sounded like it was from the mist of the north and from somewhere in the past. It sounded like the future too. It could even have a navy-blue and silver label.
London
NONE OF US knew exactly how we would get a gig in London, but scouring the back pages of the weekly music press it looked like the Rock Garden in Covent Garden was the place where new bands played. Pete Hope was about to take a trip south, and after offering to go into the venue to try to get us the gig, he managed to secure us our first London appearance. We would even be paid £25 for our trouble. Joe had proposed to me and Morrissey that the band should get a van in order to play gigs, and he put down a deposit on a Renault Cavalier that, once we threw in a mattress, would become our new home.
Heading down to London to play for the first time made me acutely aware of just how Mancunian we were, and I had no idea if the aliens in the capital would get it.
The Rock Garden was a little brick basement that sounded like a tin can and had the appropriate no-frills ambience referred to as ‘throw and go’. We clambered up to the tiny high stage and played a spirited set to not many people, which because we felt on trial brought out a defiance in us that we would learn to call upon in the future. The audience liked us enough to call us back for an encore, which was a first for us and made the gig feel like a victory, and then we took our victory back up the motorway, in our new home, to planet Manchester.
The activity at 70 Portland Street increased even more after we’d been in Strawberry Studios. Joe’s life was now all about the band, and everyone in the building was living with our own soundtrack, ‘Hand in Glove’. We wracked our brains for ideas about how best to get our song out on vinyl and decided that if we were unable to find a suitable record company then we would form our own label and put the song out ourselves. I liked the plan, as at least it meant a guaranteed release, but I still had my mind set on Rough Trade. There was only one thing left to do: I had to go there and ask them to sign us.
I’d stayed in touch with Matt Johnson since we’d met the year before, and I called him and asked if he could put me up when I got to London. Matt offered to let me stay on his couch, and I made my way to Rough Trade and took Andy with me for moral support. When we got to the Rough Trade offices I had no plan or strategy; it was just a matter of winging it. I asked at reception if there was someone we could see about playing our tape, but we were given the brush-off as everyone was either too busy or out of the office. We hung around conspicuously for a while and made more enquiries about when to come back, until the young guy at the desk finally gave in and allowed us to wait while he got a message to Simon Edwards, who I assumed was a Rough Trade boss. After a long wait we were eventually seen by a courteous and businesslike man who asked us the name of the band, then took the tape into a small office down the corridor, presumably to play it.