A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths
Page 1
ALSO BY TONY FLETCHER
All Hopped Up and Ready to Go
Music from the Streets of New York 1927–77
The Clash
The Music That Matters
Hedonism
A Novel
Moon
The Life and Death of a Rock Legend
Remarks Remade
The Story of R.E.M.
Never Stop
The Echo & the Bunnymen Story
Copyright © 2012 by Tony Fletcher
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark
of Random House, Inc.
Photo credits: INSERT ONE 1.1: © John Gilkes (www.johngilkesmapart.co.uk); 1.2: Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council; 1.3: © Tony Fletcher; 1.4: © Rick Stonell; 1.5: © Paul Cox (www.paulcoxphotos.com), 1.6 © Paul Slattery; 1.7: © Paul Cox (www.paulcoxphotos.com), 1.8 © Paul Slattery; 1.9: © Paul Slattery, 1.10 © Barry Plummer; 1.11: © Pat Bellis, reproduced by kind permission of Rough Trade.
INSERT TWO 2.1: © Stephen Wright (www.smithsphotos.com); 2.2: © Steve Double (www.double-whammy.com); 2.3: © Barry Plummer, 2.4 © Pat Bellis, reproduced by kind permission of Rough Trade; 2.5: © Getty Images, courtesy of the Estate of Keith Morris (www.keithmorrisphoto.co.uk), 2.6 © John Featherstone, 2.7 Courtesy of Stephen Street, 2.8 © John Porter; 2.9: © Stuart “Jammer” James, 2.10 © Lawrence Watson. Courtesy of Retna, Ltd.; 2.11: © Ian Tilton (www.iantilton.net); 2.12: © Tony Fletcher
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fletcher, Tony.
A light that never goes out : the enduring saga of the Smiths /
Tony Fletcher. — 1st ed. 1. Smiths (Musical group)
2. Rock musicians—England—Biography. I. Title.
ML421.S614F54 2012
782.42166092′2—dc23
[B] 2012024784
eISBN: 978-0-307-71597-5
Jacket design by Raid71
Jacket photograph: © Stephen Wright/Redferns
v3.1
To everyone who survived the ’80s
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Photo Insert 1
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Photo Insert 2
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Notes
Bibliography
Interview Sources
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT
It takes a particular confidence for one unknown musician to pronounce to another that their first meeting has the hallmarks of legend. But then Johnny Marr, eighteen years old when he arrived uninvited at the Stretford home of Steven Patrick Morrissey one afternoon in May of 1982, had such confidence in abundance; what he did not have, and it was the reason he had come knocking on the door of the nondescript semidetached council house at 384 Kings Road that day, was a partner for his singular talent on the guitar.
Steven Morrissey, a writer of speculative merit and a singer of absolutely no repute whatsoever, managed but sporadic bursts of self-assurance. Though he had been a figure about town since punk rock had exploded in Manchester with a special vigor back in 1976, and was respected, even liked, for his quick wit and bookish intellect, he frequently retreated into a shyness that, as he later penned with devastating certitude, was “criminally vulgar.” Unlike Marr, who seemed to be on first-name terms with almost everyone involved in Manchester street culture, Morrissey could count his friends on the fingers of one hand. He lived on Kings Road with his divorced mother. He was unemployed—by choice, for sure, but unemployed all the same. He was turning twenty-three that month. By any standard measurement, time appeared to be passing him by.
Aware of Morrissey’s shyness, Marr did not show up alone. He was accompanied on his mission by Stephen Pomfret, a mutual guitar-playing acquaintance whose presence was perhaps justified by the painfully long time it took Morrissey to descend from his bedroom to the front door. But once Pomfret had made the introductions, then Marr, not known to waste his time on trivialities, announced that he was on a quest for a singer and lyricist, and Morrissey, not previously known to accept strangers into his life at first glance, promptly invited the visitors in.
The trio ascended to Morrissey’s bedroom, where, amidst a life-size cut-out of James Dean and shelves laden with books on feminism, film criticism, and crime, there stood the requisite record player and a collection of neatly filed 45s. Marr, whose encyclopedic knowledge of popular music was arguably unrivaled among Mancunians his age, immediately gravitated to the vinyl, and Morrissey, whose own outspoken opinions on the form had seen him ascend from letter writer to concert reviewer with the weekly music papers over the years, invited his guest to play something. If it was a test of taste, Marr was thrilled to take it: the singles were heavy on the 1960s girl pop that he himself had been busy accumulating on recent trips to secondhand stores, the sort of music he hadn’t dare assume anyone else in his vicinity followed with quite such a passion. Bypassing Sandie Shaw and the Shangri-Las, much though he liked the British pop star and, especially, the New York girl group, he instead pulled out a rare 1966 flop single by the Marvelettes on Tamla Motown. It was an American jukebox copy, with the center hole punched out, and it didn’t specify the A-side. So rather than play “Paper Boy,” which had the traditional uptempo Motown feel, Marr put on its flip, “You’re the One,” a slower Smokey Robinson composition, and then sang along to prove that he knew the song, that this was more than just a cute gesture. Morrissey was impressed; Marr later said that he felt that was the moment that initiated their friendship.
The pair talked excitedly for the next couple of hours, Pomfret fading into the background, aware that for all the talk of him as a second guitarist in their future band, he was already superfluous to requirements. Morrissey and Marr, so different in age, dress sense, social skills, and various other interests, quickly bonded over that which they had in common: music—a journey that took them from the present day back
to Patti Smith and the New York Dolls, then to David Bowie and T. Rex, to the Stooges and the Velvet Underground, and on through ’60s girl pop, to a love for rockabilly advertised by their matching retro “quiff” haircuts. As they sat there in Morrissey’s bedroom, they spoke of seeing their own names on a record label—not just as artists but as composers. That Morrissey had but a handful of half-formed lyrics currently to his name or that Marr had never completed a song to his own satisfaction mattered little; they could sense in each other a shared sense of purpose and dedication, of craftsmanship and intellect. To borrow a phrase from more of their influences—Lou Reed describing his and Andy Warhol’s work ethic with the Velvet Underground—neither of them was kidding around.
Johnny Marr had a reference point all his own for their meeting. He had recently watched a documentary that detailed how, way back in 1950, a sixteen-year-old lyricist had knocked on the door of a fellow teenage pianist with a view to forming a songwriting partnership; the pair had gone on to become one of the most successful in popular music. It was the account of this unscripted meeting that had given Marr the inspiration to visit the mysterious Morrissey in the first place. And so he couldn’t help himself.
“Hey,” said Johnny, “this is just how Leiber and Stoller met!”
Leiber and Stoller. Not Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards, though in years to come the names “Morrissey and Marr” would frequently be spoken of in the same reverential terms, just as the band that they formed out of their meeting that day, the Smiths, would similarly be hailed as Britain’s greatest since the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. No, when they first met, Morrissey and Marr looked instead to America for inspiration, where Leiber and Stoller, composers and/or producers of “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Stand By Me,” and so many more, helped turn a nation of white teenagers on to black rhythm & blues, playing a crucial part in the explosion of rock ’n’ roll and the phenomenon that was Elvis Presley. Three decades since that fateful first encounter, Leiber and Stoller were still self-confessed soul mates. Marr’s desire to emulate such an introduction was entirely understandable.
Sadly, his relationship with Morrissey would not last nearly as long. Barely five years later, the camaraderie would dissolve beneath the weight of subtle acrimonies, mutual exhaustion, and implacable musical differences. But during the time they spent together fronting the Smiths, Morrissey and Marr proved themselves every bit the contemporary rivals of Leiber and Stoller, affecting their own followers as significantly as Elvis Presley had affected his. Together, they carved out a unique place for themselves in popular music, an exposed position at the very center of mid-’80s cool, from where they proceeded to challenge expectations of what constituted an acceptable vocal, a recognizable song title, a typical chord pattern, a traditional lyric, a familiar record sleeve, a standard interview, or, to the extent that they made them at all, a normal promotional video.
Along the way, Morrissey emerged from his cocoon to become one of the late twentieth century’s unlikeliest of sex idols, and one of its greatest lyricist-poets. Alongside him, Johnny Marr became revered as perhaps his generation’s most gifted guitarist and certainly one of its finest arrangers, as well as an icon of fashion-conscious band leadership in his own right. And in Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, the Smiths employed a heavyweight rhythm section that not only looked the part—the description of them as “lads” was typically meant as a compliment—but that could wipe the floor with the best of them. “The feeling of power onstage,” reflected Morrissey after the band’s breakup, with a characteristically prosaic choice of words, “was just like having a vacuum cleaner shoved up your … blazer!”
And yet for all these attributes, the Smiths’ success—and their enduring popularity—ultimately comes down to that intrinsic intangible that lies at the very heart of pop culture’s pull on us all: their relationship with their audience. Put in the most straightforward of terms, the Smiths expressed the hopes—and just as relevantly, the fears—of a generation in a manner unmatched by any other band of their era. That they did so with such a remarkable combination of sexual ambiguity, political panache, collective confidence, and, especially, savage humor not only gained them immortality among their contemporaries but helped win them subsequent generations of equally loyal fans, for whom the long-defunct Smiths exist on a pedestal typically reserved for saints and gods.
Fortunately, the Smiths left behind a sufficiently glorious body of music to justify this quasi-religious devotion: four studio albums, as many compilations, and seventeen singles, for a total of seventy original compositions recorded in the space of just fifty-two months, an output unrivaled since the heyday of mid-’60s creativity, and a catalog that has cast an impressively long cultural shadow over the subsequent quarter century.1 Morrissey’s exquisite song titles, for example, have been used as titles for novels (Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma, Marian Keyes’s This Charming Man), memoirs (Andrew Collins’s Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now), off-Broadway plays (a 2009 production entitled How Soon Is Now?), cartoons (Andre Jordan’s Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now), and a collection of short stories (Paint a Vulgar Picture). Their songs have been covered by dance, rock, folk, and pop acts alike, some of them (most notably “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”) many times over. The Smiths even provided the inciting incident for a Hollywood movie: in the 2009 American romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer, the film’s young protagonists bond for the first time in an office elevator when the female lead, listening in on her male workmate’s headphones, recognizes “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and proclaims “I love the Smiths!” then promptly sings along to the chorus: “To die by your side, is such a heavenly way to die.”
This brief exchange—which duly inspires a love affair that drives the remainder of the movie—acknowledges the band’s continued appeal with an audience that was not alive during the Smiths’ heyday while simultaneously accepting the “insider” nature of that following. As for the choice of song, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is not only among the most popular of Smiths numbers, but it is also (as the Hollywood producers clearly understood) the most romantic: for all of Morrissey’s self-proclaimed celibacy, an attribute that distinguished him from almost every other pop idol or rock star through the ages, it’s a love song of such perfect devotion that it could only have been written by someone who had himself experienced the boundless yearning of one human heart for another.2 Curiously, it was never a single. Neither, for that matter (at least not originally or intentionally), was “How Soon Is Now?”—the other primary candidate for most memorable or identifiable Smiths song, on which Morrissey, more to the public perception of his personality, expressed the pain of the unloved (and unlovable?) with a precision that made it an immediate—and permanent—anthem for anyone who had ever gone to a club on their own, left on their own, gone home, cried, and wanted to die.
But words alone do not guarantee a classic. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” and “How Soon Is Now?” were each impeccably arranged in the studio by Johnny Marr—one with sampled strings in the chorus tugging tearfully at the heart like the best of Leiber and Stoller’s productions for the Drifters, the other expressing its disarmingly simple statement of alienation atop a painstakingly constructed wall of guitars. Though the two songs are so distinctly different in scope, style, and sonics, the end result in each case remains impeccably and unquestionably the sound of the Smiths: as with all the most enduring of musical icons, these songs are instantly recognizable—even when heard through someone else’s headphones in an elevator.
This is not to say that the general public at large shares a mutual love and respect for the Smiths. Due to Morrissey’s untrained and limited vocal range, which he compensated for in early days with the addition of yodeling, yelping, and the occasional grunt; abetted by the politically personal stance of his lyrics, which sought to tease, amuse, comfort, and confront (though were too often dismissed by ill-info
rmed critics as merely self-medicating); aided by such a determined collective refusal to compromise that the Smiths were often misconstrued as awkward or arrogant; and confirmed by the manner in which they stood musically and visually at direct odds to the mainstream soundtrack of the mid-1980s, to all those now painfully anachronistic booming snare drums and cheap digital keyboards, to the ludicrous fashion statements immortalized in comically ambitious (yet, in hindsight, awkwardly primitive) promotional videos … for all these reasons the Smiths were either loved or hated. There was no room for mild acceptance in-between.
As such, the Smiths can be considered an archetype, perhaps even the apotheosis, of the “cult” group. That term certainly seems relevant in the States, where they experienced a form of audience hysteria on their two sold-out tours greater than anything back in Britain, and yet hardly charted. While working on this biography in America, where I moved from my UK homeland shortly after the Smiths broke up, I was occasionally surprised by how few of my neighbors, in what is considered a musical community, had ever heard of the Smiths. But that was just the older folk. Those my own age, most of us parents now, some even with angst-ridden teenagers of our own, mostly greeted a mention of the Smiths as if I were speaking of a former lover. And it’s true: the Smiths helped many an American youth of the 1980s through the growing pains of high school and college in lieu of (and occasionally, for those lucky couples who bonded over the band, in the company of) a boyfriend or girlfriend. Crucially, they continue to do so. There is not a “retro” or “alternative” dance floor in America that doesn’t resonate approximately once an hour to the Smiths; the irony that “How Soon Is Now?” has become an evergreen dance-club anthem is hopefully not lost on those who lose themselves in it.
Back in the UK, the legacy is a much more public affair. The Smiths were massive then. They are massive now. In 2002, the New Musical Express named them its Most Influential Artist ever. In 2006, Morrissey was voted by viewers of BBC2’s The Culture Show as Britain’s second greatest living icon, behind Sir David Attenborough but ahead of Sir Paul McCartney, David Bowie, and Michael Caine. And in 2011, rumors that both Marr and Morrissey were penning their autobiographies were considered significantly newsworthy as to make the national press. Yet perhaps the most extreme example of the Smiths’ cultural heritage in their homeland has been the political battle for their affections. The Smiths’ four-year chart reign—1983–87—coincided with the second of Margaret Thatcher’s three consecutive stints as the British Conservative Party’s iron-fisted prime minister, an eventual eleven-year tenure marked by strikes, riots, wars, mass unemployment, government clampdowns, and frequently violent confrontations best typified by a yearlong miners’ strike through 1984–85 that resembled a regional civil war. Beyond Morrissey’s unapologetically political lyrics (from both a personal and collective standpoint), the Smiths put their profile where their beliefs lay, playing concerts on behalf of London and Liverpool’s embattled Labour city councils, and showing up on the Labour-friendly Red Wedge tour in 1986. And in a career full of outrageous quotes frequently designed to inflame first and address the interviewer’s question later, few were more infamous than Morrissey’s opining that “the sorrow of the Brighton bombing [by the IRA] is that Margaret Thatcher escaped unscathed.”