A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths

by Tony Fletcher

  So when a subsequent Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, chose “This Charming Man” as one of his “Desert Island Discs” on the BBC radio show of the same name in 2006, it raised not just eyebrows but questions. Was Cameron, whose party had been in opposition at this point for almost a decade to a Labour Government led by Prime Minister Tony Blair, disingenuously seeking credibility with wavering left-wingers? Or, given his age—seventeen at the time that “This Charming Man” became a hit—was he merely paying honest tribute to his youthful allegiances? The politician pleaded the latter, and when the pendulum swung back to the right and he became prime minister in 2010, he continued to bait the media with his avowed love of the Smiths. The media readily bit, especially once his government’s early proposal to triple the cost of student tuition was met by angry protests, with some 50,000 descending on London in November 2010, storming and turning over the Conservative Party campaign headquarters in the process. Left-wing columnists instantly resurrected the music of the Smiths, especially The Queen Is Dead, as a suitable soundtrack for what seemed like an overnight return to Thatcherite class war.

  As the protests (and their attendant violence) continued, Johnny Marr used his Twitter account to demand of the prime minister: “David Cameron, stop saying that you like the Smiths … I forbid you.” In the instantly inflammable age of the Internet, the somewhat flippant tweet became a widely distributed rallying call, with the unexpected result, a few days later, that Morrissey himself took to the web, publishing a letter supporting and expounding upon his former partner’s point of view—a rare sign of public affection in what has otherwise become a terminally tense relationship. If it was a mark of the Smiths’ exalted stature that, more than two decades after their breakup, the founding members’ online musings should become national news, it was a mark of even greater status (and opportunism) when, on the eve of the parliamentary vote over the tuition-fee increase, a Labour MP goaded Cameron over his taste in music during Question Time, leading to a positively surreal bantering of Smiths song titles back and forth across the House of Commons floor.

  The following day, students marched to the scene of the impending vote, at Parliament Square. There, a female protestor who looked too young to have been alive when the Smiths were first active, scaled the barricades, her hair dyed blond and cropped short in retro ’80s fashion and wearing Dr. Martens boots and workmanlike jeans as had been the style back then for a certain segment of the female public. A photographer on the front lines captured her at that instant, looming over a line of nervous riot police with the instantly recognizable phallic symbol of Big Ben looming large in the background; the writer Jon Savage subsequently compared the image to that of the Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People.

  It was, truly, a stirring picture. But the reason it ended up being discussed by rock critics, used for the cover of a Mojo magazine compilation CD itself named for the Smiths single “Panic,” and forming the welcome image to Johnny Marr’s website was due to the girl’s crowning choice of fashion statement: a T-shirt depicting the Smiths’ Hatful of Hollow LP sleeve. Back in the 1980s, the Smiths T-shirt came to serve as something more powerful than a concert souvenir or promotional device: it became the fans’ common denominator, their mark of affiliation with other self-proclaimed outsiders. At Parliament Square that day in December 2010, and in particular thanks to the widely distributed photograph in question, the Smiths were once again positioned as outsiders—or, at least, as belonging to the protestors, not the system. The prime minister was careful not to celebrate them again.3

  I recall this anecdote in such detail not only because it demonstrates the immense influence of a group that existed for such a short time but because part of my personal remit with this biography is to place the saga of the Smiths in social context. This is one reason you will find that, rather than starting the book proper with the band’s formation and then making repeated forages into the past to explain their musical and lyrical influences, I take the opposite approach. I begin with a historical journey through Manchester and take time to detail the group members’ childhoods there through the 1960s and ’70s—especially the musical developments that turned Manchester into England’s Second (some would say First) Musical City—to explain why the Smiths arrived on the scene fully formed, so complete in their thought process, already so musically and lyrically accomplished that they became Britain’s best band within mere months of their first gig.

  There is, after all, already something of an extensive library on this most literary of bands. Several of these books fulfill their goals admirably. Simon Goddard’s meticulously researched The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life explores the songwriting process and recording details behind each Smiths composition with almost impeccable exactness; it is partly because of this work that I don’t attack the individual songs and sessions in my biography with quite the same ferocity, but rather, focus on the larger narrative surrounding them. Mark Simpson’s Saint Morrissey, for all the arch grandeur of its title, is a concise, witty, yet constantly well-reasoned armchair psychoanalysis of the singer by a self-confessed obsessive. Why Pamper Life’s Complexities: Essays on the Smiths, the result of an academic symposium (itself no small mark of respect), is heavy going for those of us who are not fans of the written thesis, but it nonetheless reveals many a home truth amidst the convoluted writing. At the opposite end of the spectrum, All Men Have Secrets enabled fans to offer personal memories of the Smiths songs that most greatly affected them. In the vast expanse in between these extremes, the reader can decipher the Smiths’ story through books on the history of the Manchester music scene or that of their record label, Rough Trade; they can garner tidbits from memoirs by such diverse singers as Sandie Shaw and James Maker; they can read visual chronologies and sizable magazine tributes, cultivate yet more fiction and memoirs inspired by or related to the group, and even purchase a self-guided tour of the Smiths’ Manchester roots.

  And yet despite this apparent cottage industry, there has only been one solid biography of the Smiths until now: that by Johnny Rogan, twenty years old at the time of my writing. It is partly the lack of a subsequent study of similar length and depth that inspired me to take on the task for myself. (That and my own love for, empathy with, and contemporaneous experience of the band’s music, which will hopefully prove evident throughout, and which is explained anecdotally in some of the endnotes.) Rogan’s detective work on Morrissey’s family background and adolescence was impressive, and he wrote with comfortable expertise about the music business. But he could only write of what he knew, and at the time that he set about his book, the dust had yet to settle from the Smiths’ breakup to provide any kind of clear picture as to their long-term reputation. Two decades’ subsequent passing of time hopefully affords me that perspective.4

  There are plenty other reasons for my taking on this subject matter. The aforementioned (and other, unmentioned) books all have something in common in that they were written in Britain and published initially or exclusively in Britain, and as a result there is often a parochial quality to them that can find them mired in an analysis of British chart positions, album reviews, and BBC airplay (or lack thereof) as if every act of the group’s brief drama were played out only on the British stage. (Interestingly, the exceptions, Marc Spitz’s How Soon Is Never? and Joe Pernice’s Meat Is Murder contribution to the 33 1/3 series on classic albums, both of which capture the Smiths’ appeal to wayward American youth of the 1980s, are each works of fiction.) There is, as such, a perceived notion of the Smiths as archetypally British.

  To be fair, the Smiths embodied a definite view of their (dis)United Kingdom. They launched one album, named (perhaps) for the royal family, with the chorus from a World War I patriotic song, “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty”; they titled another after Manchester’s Strangeways Prison. They sung of how “England is mine, it owes me a living,” and part of what made the single “Panic” so triumphant was how it rendered temporary gravitas on
the decidedly provincial Dundee and Humberside. But in each case, Morrissey was merely flexing his literary muscles, demonstrating the importance of detail to a good story. (Bruce Springsteen routinely does the same thing.) This explains why Smiths fans who couldn’t find the locale on a Manchester map still instantly understood the connotations of the “rented room in Whalley Range” as referenced in the early Smiths song “Miserable Lie.” Morrissey may have written mostly about what he knew—which was England—but the group he fronted was international through and through.

  Finally, crucially, almost every book published about the Smiths has leaned toward the cult of Morrissey. Simpson’s Saint Morrissey, Len Brown’s Meetings with Morrissey, and Gavin Hopps’s Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart make no excuses or apologies for doing so, and given their titles, nor should they. But even Rogan’s biography, Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance, neglected to mention the band in its title and depicted only the singer on its cover. Only Goddard’s studio analysis could claim neutrality in this regard, and yet he subsequently used much of his research, which of all the Smiths’ studio personnel lacked only the cooperation of the singer, for the self-explanatory Mozipedia.

  One can sympathize. Any biography devoted purely to Johnny Marr, as Richard Carman’s Johnny Marr: The Smiths and the Art of Gun-Slinging reveals all too readily, is notably short on the high drama, sexual intrigue, outrageous sound bites, and overwhelming (indeed, domineering) force of character that makes up so much of Morrissey’s life story. But as mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, that life was going nowhere (and in no sort of a hurry, either) until the day Johnny Marr came knocking on his door. The beauty of the Smiths, something that most true fans appreciate and which will hopefully become apparent to the more casual reader over the coming pages, is that each of the two geniuses—and I don’t use the term lightly—needed the other to complete each other, to realize each other’s potential. For the devotion that they afforded each other during their years of creativity, for the extent to which they inspired each other to brilliance, for the solidarity they provided for each other in the face of considerable animosity and extreme pressure, theirs is one of the great love stories of our musical age. And that’s where the references to Lennon and McCartney, and especially to Jagger and Richards, come back into play. Morrissey and Marr exist on an equal plane to those greatest of Great British songwriters and bandleaders, and this book will attempt to demonstrate how that came to be, and, in the process, why it couldn’t last.

  And what, then, of Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce? It’s to the Smiths’ lasting shame that in a group that continually pitched itself as a band, a gang, a group of “lads” and “mates,” some members turned out to be more equal than others. It’s all the more disappointing given that Rourke and Marr had been best friends since secondary school, and that their musical and personal comradeship formed the heart and soul of the Smiths. Of course, few groups of merit survive into history without some sort of lawsuit over ownership or distribution of their valuable back catalog, but we typically expect the accused figure(s) to be the corrupt manager, the fraudulent accountant, or the unscrupulous record label, not the band members themselves. Because it was never my intent to write much beyond the group’s breakup, the details of the High Court case that embarrassed the Smiths both collectively and individually in 1996 are not examined in any more detail than on this page, but in telling the band’s story, I attempt to lay out the paper trail (or, more precisely, the lack of it) that ultimately led Joyce to sue Morrissey and Marr. (Rourke, penniless at the time and with no inclination to face his former best friend across the dock, settled out of court.) I also attempt to provide the background for why such a knowledgeable student of Oscar Wilde’s downfall as Morrissey should have attempted to verbally spar with the High Court judge as if he were but a cub reporter for a regional newspaper. The end result was not only the judge’s irreparable description of Morrissey’s evidence as “devious, truculent, and unreliable where his own interests were at stake,” but a finding in Joyce’s favor (worth more than a million pounds at the time, and with considerable additional royalties in the decades since) that the singer still refuses to publicly acknowledge. It is, I suspect, no coincidence that the two members of the Smiths who offered their cooperation with this book were those who have made their peace with the group’s financial failings. (A full list of those who participated in interviews and otherwise helped out extensively with research can be found in the Acknowledgments.)

  The Smiths’ inability to properly account for themselves in the monetary sense can be largely explained by their lack of ongoing representation. Following the departure of their original mentor and manager, Joe Moss, Morrissey and Marr proved unable between them to agree on, appoint, and then, crucially, to trust a band manager. Almost unprecedented among groups of their stature, the band was, therefore, (in)effectively self-managed at the very height of their popularity, in 1986—at which point, not coincidentally, they signed to EMI, Britain’s oldest establishment major label, despite still being contractually bound to Rough Trade, Britain’s leading post-punk independent.

  This battle for rights to the Smiths’ music provides an intriguing subplot, a fascinating insight into both the machinations of the music business and the motivations of its performers. Personally, I doubt very much that the Smiths would have enjoyed equal creative freedom—while simultaneously experiencing uninterrupted critical acclaim and commercial success—on any other label than Rough Trade, which became something of a household name as a result of successfully breaking the Smiths. And yet Morrissey saw it the other way: that it was the Smiths who took Rough Trade into the mainstream, that the label would have gone under without them, and that, in turn, the group would have been that much “bigger” in more traditionally corporate hands. It’s a hypothetical debate, perhaps, but the fact remains that because Rough Trade was known as a pioneering record store and major distribution center as well as an imprint, the saga of the Smiths has become something of a cipher for the larger independent scene that produced and nurtured them. Indeed, there is a strong argument to be made that the concept of “indie music” as a sound and a style (as opposed to a mere descriptor of the mode of distribution) began with the success of the Smiths, and that the Britpop successes of the post-Smiths “Madchester” era—when the likes of Blur and Manchester’s own Oasis sold millions upon millions of albums (on major labels)—would not have occurred without the Smiths helping pave the way on Rough Trade. The fact, then, that the Smiths broke up before EMI could even get them into the studio offers a rather vicious sting in their tale of wanderlust.

  As such, there were times during the telling of this story, when stories of the (dis)organizational machinations threatened to overwhelm those of the musical brilliance, that I felt tempted to subtitle the book How Not to Succeed in the Music Business … Except that, of course, the Smiths did succeed. And how. Out of the chaos, confusion, and high drama that passed for everyday normality in the Smiths came some of the most magical and enduring music of their generation. In other words, had the Smiths run a tight business ship, with an experienced managerial figure at the helm, perhaps on an established record label, subscribing to traditional industry values regarding the aural quality of their recordings, the timing of their releases, and the methods of their promotion, then the musical part of the story would likely have been so very, very different. And with it, the cultural impact would not possibly have been the same. That would have been their loss, for sure. And ours, for certain.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  I don’t really feel any kinship with the place. It’s just somewhere that I just so happen to live. It doesn’t mean a great deal to me. And I’m sure I’ll leave very soon—when I’m rich.

  —Morrissey, The David Jensen Show, July 1983

  We felt like every little town was our hometown. And I think that the people in Inverness and Brighton and St. Austell and Norwich all felt that
way when they came out to see us.

  —Johnny Marr, May 2011

  The story of the Smiths is intrinsically entwined with that of Manchester. And yet the group proved curiously conflicted in their loyalties to the city that birthed them—and which has subsequently claimed them as one of its most successful exports and biggest tourist attractions. It’s not just that the Smiths concluded their first album with the disparaging refrain, “Manchester, so much to answer for,” or opened their second one with the equally negative line, “Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools.” It’s not only that they packed their bags and moved to the British capital at more or less the first sign of success (though the fact that they returned to Manchester a year later suggests that they may have gained a new appreciation for their hometown in their absence). It’s also that the Smiths played in Manchester less often in the entire four years of their performing career than they played in London during their first twelve months alone.