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

by Tony Fletcher

  We know now that Kilbride, Bennett, and Downey, along with sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade before them, had been enticed from the city streets by Ian Brady and his girlfriend, Myra Hindley, sexually assaulted, and brutally murdered, the bodies buried in shallow graves on nearby Saddleworth Moor. We know because in October 1965, seventeen-year-old Edward Evans, who lived just off the Oxford Road, was picked up outside Central Station after a night on the beer, invited to Hindley’s home in the overspill suburb of Hattersley, and there, in front of David Smith, Hindley’s brother-in-law, beaten with an ax and then strangled with an electrical cord. Brady had intended for Smith, also just seventeen, to become an accomplice, but the teenager confided instead in his equally young wife, and the next morning the couple called the police. Within days, Brady and Hindley had taken on infamy, and a new identity, as the Moors Murderers.

  At their trial in Chester in April 1966, Brady and Hindley were found guilty of murdering Kilbride, Downey, and Evans between them; the death penalty having only just been abolished, they were sentenced to life imprisonment. (Two decades later—at which point Morrissey and Marr’s Smiths were at their peak, and no strangers to the controversy surrounding the Moors Murders—Brady confessed to the additional killings of Reade and Bennett; though the former’s body was found on Saddleworth Moor, the latter’s has never been recovered.) The horrific story cast a pall over Manchester arguably more damning than the Peterloo Massacre, the assembled ranks of childhood fatalities brought on by disease in the city’s nineteenth-century slums, or the Munich Air Disaster. The Glasgow-born Brady was a career criminal and surely a psychopath, and Mancunians could readily disown him. But Hindley had been born and raised in Gorton, the neighborhood that overlapped with the Mahers’ own Ardwick; the abduction of Pauline Reade had taken place in a typical Gorton side street. The residents of Manchester so desperately wanted to believe that Brady and Hindley’s awful deviance from basic human decency, their sickening betrayals of childish trust, and the appalling sexual abuse and murderous violence they cultivated were genuine aberrations of normal behavior, and as such, that they could have happened anywhere. But the fact was, they had happened there, in the heart of Manchester, and no matter how much they tried to ignore the awful truth, the city had to answer to it.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  We were quite happy to ghettoise ourselves as the Irish community in Manchester. The Irish stuck rigidly together and there’d always be a relation living two doors down, around the back or up the passage. It always struck me as quite odd that people who had lived 20 or 30 years in Manchester still spoke with the broadest and the sharpest Pearse Street accent.

  —Morrissey, Hot Press, May 1984

  It was very loving but quite a heavy, oppressive background. There was a lot of wild talk, a lot of wild behavior, and a lot of drinking. But at the same time as being quite intimidated by a lot of wild, young Irish kick-ass guys, it wasn’t half exciting for me and my sister.

  —Johnny Marr, March 2011

  Early in the 1960s, the Morrissey family moved out of Harper Street and into a terraced house on Queen’s Square, at the eastern tip of Stretford.1 This was a significant step up the social ladder: the two-story houses were set somewhat grandly behind brick arches and opened onto small front yards, some of which boasted basic gardens. Better still, the “square” in front of these gardens was a pedestrianized side street, vehicular traffic blocked by concrete bollards. At the eastern end of the square, over the line into Manchester proper, stood the famed Loreto College, founded back in 1851 by nuns from the Blessed Institute of the Virgin Mary to educate the city’s then-underserved Irish Catholics. It stands there still, now proudly multiethnic as befits modern Manchester, but its mission no less steeped in firm Catholic values.

  It was at Queen’s Square that the Morrisseys—or, to be more precise, the Dwyers—came closer together than at any time since growing up in Crumlin. Betty’s parents lived on one side, her sister Mary’s family on the other. A number of Steven Morrissey’s other aunts and uncles were dotted within walking distance all across Stretford and Trafford, Hulme, and Moss Side. Primary school—St. Wilfrid’s, firmly Roman Catholic and fondly regarded by all who attended—was a short walk away, over the Stretford Road. No surprise, then, that Morrissey would later reflect how, “It was a very strong community, and very tight. Very solid. And it was also quite happy.”

  The use of the word “quite” sounds like a deliberately Morrisseyesque downplay—as if, God forbid, he should ever admit to having been very happy. But there were good reasons for the adult Morrissey to qualify his Queen’s Square childhood: In 1965, the year he turned six, his family was repeatedly ripped apart by tragedy. The first calamity came in March, when his paternal grandfather, also named Peter Morrissey, died suddenly, at age sixty-three, in Dublin. The second came in November, when his maternal grandfather, Patrick Stephen Dwyer, after whom he had been named and who lived next door, passed from a heart attack at the age of just fifty-two. And then, the following month, just a day after his grieving grandmother broke her leg at home and was admitted to the hospital, his uncle Ernie, one of Betty’s siblings who had followed her to Manchester, was pronounced dead on arrival at Ancoats Hospital. A postmortem revealed atrophy of the liver. The curse of the drink, something with which the Irish were so closely associated and yet something that Steven Morrissey’s father had so assiduously avoided, had taken one of the Dwyers at the ludicrously young age of twenty-four.

  Six-year-olds sense the sadness of death but don’t so readily register the permanence; it’s part of our Darwinian survival instincts that, at such a young age, we find it relatively easy to shrug off the demise of those older than us and persist merrily along with what we assume to be our personally bright futures. But the morbid atmosphere that hung over the Morrissey and Dwyer households that Christmas coincided with the arrests of Brady and Hindley and the unearthing, all too literally, of their horrendous deeds; as the murder trial came to court the following spring, dominating the national news and local emotions, too, Steven came to imagine himself as “a potential victim.” In truth, he was much younger than Brady and Hindley’s victims (six at the time the couple were arrested for the killing of a seventeen-year-old), and those abductions that had taken place on the streets of south Manchester had occurred much closer to the Mahers’ neighborhood than that of the Morrisseys. He took the prospect of his own demise painfully seriously all the same, adopting the Moors Murders as something of a personal cause. In doing so, he found a way to vicariously share in the family deaths, too.

  On a very basic level, the series of premature departures heralded a significant change in family dynamics. “I came from a monstrously large family who were quite absurdly Catholic,” Morrissey explained to the Irish music magazine Hot Press in 1984, but “when I was six there were two very serious tragedies within the family which caused everybody to turn away from the church, and quite rightly so, and from that period onwards there was just a total disregard for something that was really quite sacrosanct previous to the tragedies.”

  The disregard was, in fact, far from total: Steven Morrissey still took his first communion at St. Wilfrid’s Church just a few months into 1966, would be prepared for confirmation later during his time there, and would go on to attend a strict Roman Catholic secondary school. But the seeds of disenchantment had been sown, the requirement for attendance at Sunday Mass was gradually relaxed, and the adult Morrissey would go on to become one of British pop’s more articulate, and resentful, critics of Catholicism, railing in particular against the charge of original sin. “It is probably the worst thing you can do to a child, to make it feel guilty,” he correctly observed in the Guardian in 1997, explaining his antagonism toward his religious upbringing. “And guilt is astonishingly embedded in Catholic children without them knowing why. It is a ferocious burden to carry. How evil can children be?”

  The loss for Peter and Betty of their fathers cut deeper than
provoking mere doubts in their faith, however; it exposed cracks in their marriage, too. They had come to Manchester as not much more than kids; they were that much older now, and that much different from each other than they had been back in Crumlin. Peter’s continued preference for the night shift made him something of a distant character to his son, and though he tried to impart his love of football by taking the child to matches at Old Trafford—Manchester United successfully rebuilding their team to win the Football League again in 1967, with teenage sensation George Best at the fore—Steven never developed the devotion to the sport that was otherwise innate among British working-class kids. He preferred, instead, the books that his mother shared with him as she—a school leaver at fourteen, with no proper qualifications, no career expectations, and at a point before women’s liberation had taken proper hold—determined to make more of her adult life than the caricature of the intellectually ignorant Irish homemaker.

  His parents’ domestic differences would be successfully swept under the carpet for the time being; well into his secondary school years, Steven Morrissey’s friends would remark on his parents, with some envy, as a thoroughly modern and handsome couple, unaware of the extent to which the marriage was troubled. Once he became famous, Morrissey was less guarded about his childhood, telling Sounds, “At the age of eight I became very isolated—we had a lot of family problems at that time—and that tends to orchestrate your life.”

  Morrissey’s inward turn was noticed by school friends and relatives alike. Perfectly likeable, clearly intelligent, and artfully witty when he wanted to be, he nonetheless started keeping himself to himself. In particular, he began to fixate on his own impermanence. Most kids struggle to get around the idea that they must die; Morrissey could not deal with Catholicism’s promise of an alternative: “It was impressed on you that you would go to heaven and live forever and ever and ever, and I always remember the very idea of living forever petrified me because I couldn’t imagine life without end!”

  He began, then, to consider the alternative. The fact that his comments on this aspect of his life came from the perspective of a (finally!) successful young adult should not be taken to denigrate the details of this childhood, which have always remained remarkably consistent. “I can remember being obsessed with (death) from the age of eight,” he said, “and I often wondered whether it was quite a natural inbuilt emotion for people who’re destined to take their own lives, that they recognise it and begin to study it.” Another time, he put it yet more bluntly: “The realization that suicide was quite appealing and attractive happened when I was eight.”

  It was a topic that Morrissey took up beyond the potentially self-aggrandizing interview quote to address in song, and more than once; of the Smiths’ many unique lyrical qualities, prominent among them was a willingness to address suicide as a credible, rather than a cowardly, option. There was never any doubt, throughout, that Steven Morrissey was “saved” from following up on his darkest desires not by religion, but by pop music. Notably, it was Sandie Shaw on Top of the Pops, singing the Bacharach-David classic, “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me,” that he cited as his earliest musical experience, at the age of just five. Only a few months later, at the record store on nearby Alexandra Road, he made his binding betrothal to the world of vinyl when he picked up his first 7″ single, “Come and Stay with Me” by another girl singer of the era, Marianne Faithfull.

  That choice could have been a one-off, a passing phase, a tentative dip into the cold waters of the shallow commercial tide before taking off for deeper and headier shores. But when it came to pop music, Morrissey’s first love turned out to be his true love. The girl singers of the 1960s, especially the British ones, said everything the young boy needed to hear in a song. And they said it—verse, chorus, middle eight, and quite likely a modulation, too—in barely two minutes. Morrissey appeared to instinctively understand that this was an art form, no less worthy than great literature or movies, and he set about collecting it with a passion that would never cease. He was helped in his obsession by the fact that, unlike many of the American girl groups—even those he came to enjoy from the Motown stable—the British female singers each had an individual story and a particular look. Faithfull was the London high-society waiflike beauty discovered by (Marr’s future hero) Andrew Loog Oldham and dragged into dangerous liaisons with the Rolling Stones; Cilla Black the Liverpudlian girl-next-door and future family entertainer found in the Cavern Club cloakroom and set up with songs by Lennon and McCartney. Lulu was the loud Glaswegian lass whose stunning rendition of “Shout” made her a pop star at fifteen and every similarly aged boy’s wet dream, Twinkle the upper-class suburban Tory councilor’s daughter turned unlikely death-song composer of “Terry.” As for Sandie Shaw, she was harder to define: the atypically casual, disarmingly forward, plaintively distinct, and yet oddly distant Essex girl whose delivery of “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me” sounded, as Morrissey delightfully described it years later, “as if she’d just walked in off the street and begun to sing, and strolled back home and bought some chips.”

  And they were not the only ones. Helen Shapiro, Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield … the list sometimes threatened to be endless, and if it was important to Morrissey’s critical persona that he did not love them all equally (he worshipped Sandie Shaw’s Eurovision Song Contest winner “Puppet on a String” despite the singer disowning the song, but could not get his head around Dusty Springfield’s acclaimed excursion into Memphis soul with “Son of a Preacher Man”), it was vital nonetheless that he cherished the entire genre: “They had the heart and soul and they were more willing to be open than, say, the groups.” That may have seemed an initially odd justification given that many of the 1960s “groups” were writing their own songs and the girl singers were not, and even a little disloyal considering that, just as he was latching on to Marianne Faithfull, Manchester’s own Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman’s Hermits, and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders were topping the American singles charts in successive order. But Morrissey intrinsically understood how the female singers, plucked from various social strata at a time when the swinging ’60s hit factory was working overtime and there was no shortage of eager replacements lined up outside the company gates, approached the material they were given with a singular passion, throwing themselves into every song with the full knowledge that their careers depended on it. It’s fair to say that their individual hits, and their equally unique personalities, have stood the test of time better than those of the Manchester bands that briefly threatened to replace Merseybeat.

  Down the line, Morrissey came to a further understanding of what made these singers, whose songs he would cover with the Smiths, and in one special case, whose career he would help revive, so attractive: they were part of the same social revolution that had brought in Shelagh Delaney and Elsie Tanner. “The grand dame gestures of the late ’50s had gone,” he wrote in a feature on the subject for Sounds shortly after he had finally “made it” himself. “The overblown icky sentiment had gone, and in its place came a brashness and fortitude: girls with extreme youth and high spirits who were to boldly claim their patch in a business which was obviously a male domain.” Of course, as his later championing of Billy Fury, the Righteous Brothers, and Elvis Presley served to confirm, the young Morrissey was devoted not so exclusively to the female voice as to “any pop singer who sang, and didn’t have an instrument, and just stood there, in front of the camera, with no musicians, nobody in the way, just you, your voice and there is the audience.” In this regard, he had already seen his vocation in the television screen. “I took pop music very seriously. I thought it was the heart of everything. I thought it affected everybody and moved everybody. It started me as a person. As a child I would sing every single night—and the neighbors would complain—because I had this insane desire to sing.”

  Steven Morrissey’s musical tastes changed little throughout his primary-school years. During his las
t term at St. Wilfrid’s, when the fourth-years were rewarded with an afternoon school disco, his classmates brought in Motown and Stax, ska, and reggae—essentially, the music of the day. Morrissey was not immune to such rhythms (several black dance hits of the era would show up on his future hit lists), but for the school disco, he brought along his beloved Sandie Shaw and Twinkle singles, and even a one-off 1962 hit by Susan Maughan, the sexually submissive “Bobby’s Girl.”

  He may have been waiting, patiently, for the right set of circumstances to come along and create a music he could (again) call his own. If so, he didn’t have long to go. Only a year or so later, youthful British rock music combined with the grand tradition of British pop to reinvent itself in dramatically camp fashion, adorned in the glitter and the baubles of female divas, but performed almost exclusively by grown men with long hair playing electric guitars. The first proven proponent of the new sound was Marc Bolan’s T. Rex, who, in the space of just sixteen months from early 1971, had four number-one singles, a run incomparable since the Beatles. The last of those singles, “Metal Guru,” had only just been dislodged from the top spot when Steven Morrissey, a few weeks into his teens, saw T. Rex play live at the Kings Hall in Belle Vue, on Hyde Road, on July 16, 1972. His memory of his first-ever concert suggested another comparison with the Beatles: he couldn’t hear the music for the screaming. It was enough to (further) convince him that this—pop music, rapture, adulation, adrenaline—was everything that mattered.