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

by Tony Fletcher

  Salford would come to greater prominence in the months after the BBC’s brief profile on Delaney, due in large part to the cinematic adaptation of A Taste of Honey, though it did not go unnoticed that the city had also birthed Albert Finney—whose starring role in the 1961 movie adaptation of the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was perhaps the greatest of all working-class performances of this era. But Salford’s most famous contribution to British popular culture was to introduce itself not at the movie houses but on the small screen, at the very end of 1960, when Manchester’s independent television network, Granada, launched a new twice-weekly drama series. Coronation Street was officially set in a fictional town called Weatherfield, but the program was named for the street in Salford on which stood the Lads Club, and most viewers never imagined it otherwise. Coronation Street championed recognizable working-class characters speaking in regional dialect, and focused on the terraced streets and corner pubs, the social gossip and failed romances and broken dreams that were the very stuff of life for the vast majority of British people—and, as with A Taste of Honey, it focused less on the “angry young man” than the domineering northern woman. Quickly defying its early critics to become the most popular (and eventually the longest running) soap opera on British television, Coronation Street represented nothing less than a seismic shift in British viewing values.

  This “kitchen-sink realism,” to use the most appropriate umbrella term for the groundbreaking plays, novels, movies, and TV shows of the very late 1950s and early 1960s, was to have a vigorous effect on Steven Morrissey. In 1986, he proclaimed “I’ve never made any secret of the fact that at least fifty percent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney,” a comment only partly prompted by the fact that so many of his early lyrics had by then been traced back to specific lines from A Taste of Honey. As the Smiths’ lyricist, certainly, Morrissey set out to incorporate and revive the imagery, the plots, and often the direct words of Delaney and her fellow playwrights and screenwriters, rightly seeing their cultural contribution as equal to the revolution that took place in the popular music of the era: “For the very first time people were allowed regional dialects, were allowed to be truthful and honest about their situation,” he explained along the way. “And regardless of what color the truth is, it’s always gratifying to have it.”

  As the Smiths’ artistic director, Morrissey celebrated the stars of these plays, TV shows, and movies, as well as other musical entertainers and figureheads that had come to prominence in (or before) his very early childhood, by placing them on the front of Smiths record sleeves in lieu of the traditional band shot. Delaney, of course, received the honor. So too did Rita Tushingham, who played Jo in A Taste of Honey with phenomenal vigor for an unknown seventeen-year-old; Tushingham’s fellow Liverpudlian Ronald Wycherley, himself just eighteen when Larry Parnes transformed him into Billy Fury; Pat Phoenix, who became famous as Coronation Street’s Elsie Tanner; and, twice, Viv Nicholson, who was but a struggling young Yorkshire miner’s wife when she won the football “pools” in 1961 and famously proclaimed her intent to “Spend, spend, spend,” sadly succeeding in this ambition in record time and confirming the firmly held belief—by some—that wealth was wasted on the working classes.2 And although Albert Finney never made it onto a record sleeve, it was not for lack of trying; the group eventually settled for a photo session outside the Salford bookmaker’s shop founded by his father, also named Albert. Morrissey said later that he was “completely handcuffed to” Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, citing, in particular, Finney’s role as the philandering, bruising, and ultimately self-loathing young lathe operator Arthur Seaton. “I can’t describe the poetry the film has for me.”

  “It was part of our aesthetic,” confirmed Morrissey’s future partner, Johnny Marr, years later, of this glorious period in British cinema. “I liked the camera shots, and the clothes, and the dialogue. I loved all of that. But for me, only as entertainment and art. I, having lived through that, didn’t want for life to go back to that. Really wouldn’t want to go back there. It was a world that me and my family had managed to work our way out of.”

  Johnny Marr’s parents, John Joseph Maher and Frances Patricia Doyle, hailed not from the big city of Dublin or its new-town suburbs, but Athy, a small town in County Kildare known for its British garrison, forty-five miles southwest of the Éire capital. (In his teens, Johnny Marr changed the spelling of his last name to avoid confusion with the Buzzcocks’ drummer John Maher, also from Manchester. For the sake of consistency, the Smiths guitarist is referred to as Marr throughout.) John was one of five children, Frances one of fourteen, and like the Morrisseys and Dwyers, when they felt the call of emigration, their families heeded it as if a clan, all the Mahers and many of the Doyles settling at once into what was left of Ardwick, not a mile southeast of Manchester city center and due south of Ancoats—the area right at the heart of Dr. Kay’s depressing reports about Irish living and working conditions back in the 1830s.

  John and Frances married upon arrival in Manchester in 1962 and set up their first home at 12 Hayfield Street, one of several tightly interlocking rows of narrow terraced houses separated only by back alleys, situated just north of the major Hyde Road. All around stood the shadowy ghosts and bustling legacies of the Industrial Revolution: to the west a car works and bus depot; to the northeast an electric substation and the old Ardwick Works; to the east, into Gorton, an old ironworks; to the north the remains of Galloway’s Boiler Works; and spreading farther all across the northern and western landscape the railway lines extending out from Manchester Piccadilly Station, and an extensive crisscrossing network of tracks that formed the train yards.

  It was on the edge of these yards that Manchester City Football Club had been formed, out of the more localized Ardwick AFC, at the Hyde Road Hotel in 1894. The Hyde Road ground had grown, piecemeal, to accommodate crowds of more than 40,000, but shortly after a fire burned down the main stand in 1923, the club moved to a new, purpose-built ground on Maine Road, in Moss Side. All that was left come the 1960s were ruins. Still, the proximity to the original ground helped explain the Maher family’s loyalties to what they considered the “true” Manchester club. (United, as City fans know instinctively, had been born farther out in Newton Heath, and did not adopt the Manchester prefix until 1904.)

  Farther south down Hyde Road, where the railway line passed over it, stood the Fenian Arch, named for the site of a mass ambush of a police wagon in 1867 carrying two Irish nationalist leaders arrested in the wake of the failed Fenian Rising. The shooting death of a Manchester policeman in the ambush (the first to die on duty) had led to the rapid trial and executions of three Manchester Irishmen whose role in the attacks was never properly identified; to this day, the arch serves as a gathering point for intermittent “Martyrs Marches,” a reminder that Irish immigration in Manchester is sometimes inseparable from the larger, more potent issue of Irish nationalism.

  The menfolk among the immigrants from Athy took manual-labor jobs, happily exchanging the prospect of working in fields for farmers for that of digging up roads for the council, as in John Maher’s case, or working on building sites for Irish contractors. The last generation to wear suits as they went about this work, they had money in their pockets and they knew how to spend it. Short-term enjoyment of the city life took precedent over any long-term planning: the families operated an open door policy that extended long into the nights, filled with laughter, conversation, and the clinking of glasses to the sound of music.

  The same way that the families had emigrated as a unit, so too did they have kids en masse—a whole number of Maher and Doyle cousins born at more or less the same time. John Martin Maher arrived on October 31, 1963, at the end of a month in which a new phenomenon had swept across the British front pages. The story had been building throughout the year: that of a Liverpool beat group of largely (Protestant) Irish descent, formed in the short-lived skiffle and rock ’n’ roll boom of the late 50s, toug
hened up by multiple residencies in the red-light district of Hamburg, popularized in lunchtime sessions at the Liverpool Cavern and nighttime gigs around the dance halls of the Mersey, and yet considered so unlikely to succeed that they signed, as a last resort, to what was for all intents and purposes the comedy-label outpost (Parlophone) of what was otherwise Britain’s most esteemed major label (EMI). That group, the Beatles, broke with convention in almost every respect: a guitar band at the point that it was considered passé, they were named not for a lead singer and his backing band but as if an inviolable unit. All four members could sing, all played an instrument, and each had a distinct personality, at least as far as the fans were concerned. More important, the Beatles wrote their own songs, and by the time of Johnny Marr’s birth, several had reached number one—the most recent of them, “She Loves You,” as the fastest-selling British record of all time. When they appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium on October 13, 1963, their devoted young fans’ hysterical reaction on the surrounding central London streets inspired the media to coin a new word: “Beatlemania.” It stuck.

  Not surprisingly, the success of the Beatles had brought with it a craze for the sound of the band’s home city: Merseybeat. From August 1963 through the start of the following year, all but one of Britain’s seven chart-topping singles (and both the number-one albums) was by a Liverpool act; the week of Maher’s birth, it was the turn of Gerry and the Pacemakers, for the third time in as many singles, with the song that would be taken up by fans of Liverpool Football Club as their official anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

  Manchester followed close behind Liverpool in the beat boom. Like its rival, it had played host to thousands of American servicemen during the war, had developed its own system of importing records from the USA, had launched its own late-night jazz clubs, its own skiffle and rock ’n’ roll bands, had its own coffee bars, and had a particular reputation for its knowledge and love of the blues. And there were areas in which it had taken the cultural lead. In 1957, the city center’s Plaza Ballroom had launched a lunchtime “hop” to the sound not of live bands (per Liverpool’s Cavern Club) but a disc jockey—the shamelessly flamboyant transplanted Yorkshireman Jimmy Saville, who played Pied Piper to thousands of schoolkids who should otherwise have been in class. Still, it said plenty about the antiquated, London-based music business that the first Manchester “beat” band to succeed in the wake of the Beatles was Freddie and the Dreamers, whose lead singer, Freddie Garrity, was less of a rock ’n’ roll performer than a career actor and comedian, best remembered for his trademark dance, a lateral flailing of legs and arms often copied by his backing band behind him. The Manchester beat scene was more authentically represented by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, who would go on to have some memorable hits (though none of their own authorship), but it was, perhaps unfairly, best remembered for Herman’s Hermits, a group of teenagers from Davyhulme who would sweep the charts with such simplistic songs and such a wholesome image that Freddie and the Dreamers looked positively mature and risqué by comparison.

  The only Manchester beat band that truly reflected the Beatles’ influence, down to type of name and eventual songwriting acclaim, was the Hollies. In October 1963, the month of Johnny Marr’s birth, the Hollies were enjoying their first run in the top 20 with a cover of an older American R&B hit. The song was called “Searchin’,” and it had been written by the partnership of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The Hollies’ calling card at this point was less the jangly guitar sound for which they would later become renowned (and with which the Smiths would be compared) and more the depth, range, and sheer sweetness of their harmonies. In this, it was often said, they were like the Everly Brothers, and for that reason the Hollies readily appealed to John and Frances Maher, who fairly worshipped the Everlys. For, more so than the Morrisseys and Dwyers, the Mahers and Doyles were obsessed with music. And not the traditional Gaelic sound of rural Kildare. “Because they were young, they were rebelling against that,” Johnny Marr later noted. “Like a lot of Irish people they were very enamored with American culture.” The Everly Brothers represented that most American culture of all—rock ’n’ roll—but with a country lilt that had clear antecedents in the Emerald Isle and leaned heavily on the minor keys that were to become the stock-in-trade of Johnny Marr’s own future ballads. Indeed, country and western loomed large in the Maher household: their firstborn would recall growing up listening to the likes of Jim Reeves, Eddie Arnold, and “the occasional Hank Williams.”

  Irish enthusiasm for American rock ’n’ roll and country music had, in the years between the Morrissey and Dwyer families’ departure for Manchester and that of the Mahers and Doyles, led to the development of its own musical culture, the showband. A truncated form of the larger dance orchestra (the same way that skiffle emerged in Great Britain from the bigger trad jazz bands), the showband, whose prime intention was to get a new generation of young folk dancing until they dropped, was still typically large enough to include drums, guitars, keyboards, a couple of vocalists, and maybe the basics of a brass section. After gathering momentum in Ireland, showband culture predictably jumped across the Irish Sea and took off among the emigrants. So while the coffeehouses and dance halls of central Manchester reverberated to beat bands, the Irish public houses and private social clubs shook to a very Celtic interpretation of American rock ’n’ roll and country: “Joe Dolan doing Del Shannon,” as Johnny Marr later described it. The future Smith even suspected that he was nicknamed Johnny for the famed Irish singer Johnny McEvoy.

  Frances, on the other hand, was mad for all forms of pop music. She was young—still only nineteen even when her second child, Claire, was born in 1965—and she exhibited what her son called an “exuberant idealism” that he undoubtedly inherited. Frances loved the Beatles and the Hollies in particular, and took pride in Manchester’s growing reputation as a cultural capital. On New Year’s Day, 1964, the city further laid its claim to musical fame when Jimmy Saville introduced the initial airing of the television chart show Top of the Pops from a BBC-converted church in Rusholme. As it happens, the very first performance was by a new band from London who would become Johnny Marr’s mainstay: the Rolling Stones. Twenty years later, by which time Top of the Pops had become perennially unfashionable (but remained popular and thereby powerful), the Smiths made a point of appearing on the show at every opportunity. By then, it had long since moved to London.

  The Maher home in Ardwick was filled with mementoes of Catholicism: “pictures of the Sacred Heart, harps, ornaments everywhere, crucifixes, little statues of the saints, all the iconography of Irish Catholicism and Irish culture,” recalled their older son. Prominent amongst them was a portrait of the thirty-fifth president of the United States of America: John F. Kennedy, whose youth and good looks meant nothing to the Irish in Britain as much as the fact that he was a Catholic. Years of prejudice and discrimination in Britain and America had failed to prevent one of their own from rising to become leader of the free world. In America, then, it was true: anyone could become president.

  Johnny Marr was all of three weeks old when JFK was assassinated in Dallas. In the aftermath of the president’s death, a mourning young American nation seeking some sort of positive distraction immersed itself in the British fad of Beatlemania—and the Liverpool group rose to the challenge of history, taking popular music into uncharted waters, in the process establishing the deep devotion among Americans for British music that the Smiths would successfully tap into some two decades later. Still, that first “British Invasion” of America remained months away, and the deeply disputed circumstances behind JFK’s assassination was very much on the regional front pages as well as the international ones, when another story took hold in Manchester.

  It transpired that the very day after JFK’s assassination, a Saturday, a twelve-year-old boy, John Kilbride, had gone missing in Ashton-Under-Lyne on his way back from the cinema. Crime, both petty and violent, was common enough in Manc
hester, but the abduction of a child was unthinkable. As such, the finger was subtly pointed at those who did not fit in, the Manchester Evening News noting in its first report on the search that Kilbride “was seen helping coloured stall-holders earlier in the day.” But that lead went nowhere, and by the end of the week, cadets had been brought in to comb the local moors, and frogmen to search the reservoirs and canals. No body was found, and the story eventually disappeared from the headlines.

  Eight months later, another twelve-year-old boy, Keith Bennett, disappeared on his way to his grandmother’s; he was last seen crossing the Stockport Road, one main street over from Hyde Road. His stepfather was considered the main suspect and a wider search was not undertaken; the body was never found (nor the stepfather ever prosecuted). Only with the disappearance, on Boxing Day, 1964, of ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, on her way back to her Ancoats council flat after spending the afternoon at the local fair, did it truly dawn on residents and police alike that a child killer might be living among them. The search for the missing child dominated the Manchester papers all the way into the New Year. And then, as with Kilbride and Bennett before her, the disappearance of Downey itself disappeared from the front pages. She had vanished into thin air, and after a while, that stopped being news.