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

by Tony Fletcher

  By coincidence so perfect it could have been by design, Johnny Marr made his own entry into pop music obsession with the same act. He did so just a few months before Steven Morrissey saw T. Rex in concert, and from a mile or so up Hyde Road, where his family had moved, early in Johnny’s life, from Hayfield Street to Brierley Avenue, a short cul-de-sac of two dozen ancient, narrow “two-up and two-down’s” just off Higher Ardwick. Back in the early nineteenth century, nearby Ardwick Green had been the most desirable residential area in Manchester. It was home to the likes of “merchant prince” John Ryland, considered the city’s first multimillionaire, and George Wilson, chairman of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and also, as chairman of the Anti-Corn Law League, partly responsible for the construction of the Free Trade Hall. The green itself had become the city’s first public park in 1867, adorned with ponds, fountains, and a bandstand, but by that point, as rows of terraced housing extended southward from the inner city to accommodate the ever-increasing number of factory workers, so the wealthy had already begun moving even farther south to escape them. Ardwick’s population had peaked at the turn of the century and been in steady decline ever since. The area around the green became an entertainment center instead, with four cinemas (the vast Apollo among them), billiard halls, music halls, and swimming pools attracting the ruffians from across the city. The old mansion houses were run-down or knocked down, and the terraced side streets, like Brierley Avenue, still lacked, even in the late 1960s, for indoor toilets, let alone telephones. But it was, in many ways, an improvement on Hayfield Street, especially because, as had been the case for the Morrisseys in Queen’s Square, the Mahers and Doyles were now living more or less alongside each other.

  Marr was eight years old when he was given permission—and money—to buy his first 7″ single. Growing up surrounded by music—when she wasn’t listening to it with him, his mother would stick him in front of the radio while she went about her cleaning—he already knew which hits were out there. So, when he found, languishing in the half-price box of his local record shop, a copy of the most recent T. Rex hit, “Jeepster,” it wasn’t that he needed to hear it, because he already knew what it sounded like: it was that he couldn’t stop looking at it. Singles generally came in paper sleeves, though occasionally they’d be deemed worthy of a colored bag instead. Labels were almost always generic. Not this one though. One side of the label was artfully handwritten, with a massive hand-drawn fly up top—Fly being the name of Bolan’s boutique label within EMI—and that was unusual enough. The other side was taken up by a soft-focus, full-color picture of Bolan and his musical partner, Mickey Finn, almost effeminate in their flowing long hair, the neck and body of a guitar (a Gibson Les Paul) just about visible across the bottom. Johnny was sold. He left the store with that copy of “Jeepster” in hand, knowing that he would not, could not be disappointed.

  As with his future partner Morrissey, Marr immediately threw himself in to the camp of Marc Bolan. It was futile to do otherwise; Bolan was omnipotent at the time, as popular with the boys as the girls, exuding sexuality in a way that even an eight-year-old could somehow sense. His electric boogie was almost impossibly simple—essentially, just a two- or three-chord riff repeated ad infinitum—and yet it was not necessarily simplistic; it aimed somewhere higher than the surface level of most pop music, and when it got there, it kept right on going. That would explain why, when “Metal Guru” came out in the spring of ’72, it was, for Marr, the greatest thing he had ever heard. Bar none. “It was a feeling I’ll never forget,” he told Martin Roach, “a new sensation. I got on my bike and rode and rode, singing this song. It was a spiritual elevation, one of the best moments of my life.”

  In 1986, when Marr and Morrissey decided to rehire their first proper producer for a new Smiths single, “Panic,” he asked if they had any reference points in mind. “Metal Guru,” they said. In the spring of 1972, it had said everything to them about their lives.

  It is striking just how many similarities existed between Morrissey and Marr’s respective upbringings. We know, already, the shared experiences of their parents’ generation. But it’s worth noting too how their classically large Irish Catholic families (Morrissey had a dozen bloodline aunts and uncles, Marr some seventeen) shrunk to a more “Protestant” size once in Manchester: the Morrisseys had just the two children, the Mahers a grand total of three, Johnny’s brother Ian born another seven years after Claire. Both Steven Morrissey and Johnny Marr, then, grew up in the company of a sister only two years apart in age, and each looked up to their youthful mothers in a similar fashion, as much as a friend, mentor, and surrogate older sibling as a matriarch. At the same time, they were somewhat remote from their fathers, whose work and social lives kept them away from such constant engagement.

  The two boys were each required to wear a uniform to their Roman Catholic primary schools, Johnny going to St. Aloysius around the corner from Brierley Avenue five years after Steven started attending St. Wilfrid’s in Hulme. Despite—or perhaps because of—the insularity of their families, neighborhood, and schooling environments, both boys recalled being subject to external racial slurs. “I was called Paddy from an early age,” said Morrissey; “In the early ’70s, we were called Irish pigs quite a lot,” said Marr.

  And both of them enjoyed frequent, pleasurable holidays in the Ireland of their parents’ childhood. “We’d go back to Crumlin,” said Morrissey, “and of course I saw it with a child’s vision, but the people seemed happier and more carefree and Crumlin seemed so open—certainly more so than the confines of Hulme.” Marr’s trips to Kildare, which would sometimes take up the whole summer holiday, involved a greater exposure to country air, to live music (he talked of “a very hip uncle who wore suede Beatle boots and played a Gibson acoustic”), to drinking, and to the wild behavior that was a natural byproduct of all this. He recalled how, one time, “very, very late after a party, a few of the men got in a couple of cars and went racing round the country roads with the lights off. And these were the adults!” (In 1903, partly because it had the straight, flat roads for it, Kildare had hosted the first ever international motor race in what was then still part of the United Kingdom; the Mahers were merely continuing a fine tradition.)

  Each was, not surprisingly then, acutely attuned to his roots. “My Irishness was never something I hid or camouflaged,” Morrissey told the Irish Times. Though this was equally true of the Maher children, they were also encouraged to embrace the land of their birth. “It was a particular bug bear of my parents’ that they’d go out for a night and come back complaining that someone had been sitting there boozed up just slagging off England,” recalled Marr. “And my mum’s thing always was that ‘If it’s so great back there, why don’t you just go back home?’ The message I was getting was: ‘It’s great to be here. This is the greatest city in the world.’ ”

  But that city, even as it expanded geographically to incorporate any number of former satellite mill towns and modern suburbs, was going through enormous upheaval during Morrissey and Marr’s childhoods, and it would affect each of them directly, leading to a major diversion in their previously parallel lives. The housing that had been built for the working classes during the Industrial Revolution, much of it of inferior quality to begin with, was now falling apart: in 1945, the City of Manchester’s planning commission admitted that some 68,000 houses—slums, as they were commonly known—were officially unfit for human habitation, and that number was only set to increase. But a lack of funding meant that improvements on existing buildings were rare, and it wasn’t until after a 1961 development plan that the decision was made to bulldoze the slums instead. From there, it was as if the city were intent on making up for lost time by wiping out as much of old Manchester as possible. St. Wilfrid’s, of which the pupils’ only complaint was that part of the upstairs was haunted, was torn down in 1969 and a new, single-story, modern glass building erected in its place. But at least there was still a St. Wilfrid’s. Much else of what
used to be Hulme and Moss Side was simply obliterated. The quaintly pedestrianized Queen’s Square, where three different groups of the Morrissey and Dwyer family lived contentedly side by side? Wiped from the map. Harper Street, where Steven Morrissey spent his first few years of life? No longer exists. Stockton Street, where the marriage between Peter Morrissey and Betty Dwyer had been celebrated with that twenty-four-hour party? Reduced to the shortest of cul-de-sacs, the rest of the residential grid of side streets having completely vanished. The route that Steven Morrissey took to primary school would be impossible to follow now without wings, Upper and Lower Moss Lanes having been all but eradicated.

  It was much the same story over in Ardwick. Hayfield Street, where the Mahers had first lived upon arrival in Manchester? Gone, along with many of its surrounding streets. Brierley Avenue, off of Ardwick Green? Disappeared. (The Mahers were among 199 families in five “clearance areas” wiped off the Ardwick map by a single mark of the council pen in 1970. There were so many of these “clearance areas” cited for destruction across Ardwick that the arrival of the bulldozers often followed years behind the official condemnation.) The terraced streets of Morrissey and Marr’s childhood, with their corner shops and pubs, where kids were let loose to play outdoors, where everyone knew their neighbors’ names and often even shared them, and families were in and out of one another’s unlocked houses all day long, are all but memories.

  Nobody was defending the old slums to the extent that that’s what they were. What was truly indefensible was that the city replaced them with new slums. To rebuild the area between Steven Morrissey’s Queen’s Square home and his primary school, for example, the Manchester Corporation hired the same architects whose “streets in the sky” concept had already proven such a failure in the Yorkshire steel city of Sheffield but who, clearly none the wiser, came along proposing another ludicrous euphemism: “deck access.” By saving on the number of elevators in the building process, they forced tenants to routinely walk several hundred feet just to travel from apartment to street level; that they might be carrying children or heavy shopping did not appear to have been taken into consideration. In Hulme, four long blocks of six-story housing (two floors per family) with shared “deck access” were laid out in vast crescents in preposterous imitation of the famously fashionable (low-rise) Georgian terraces of Bath. With Manchester including its most troubled council tenants among the 13,000 people who were moved there, the Hulme Crescents quickly became what twenty-first-century Britain would refer to as “sink estates,” where one problem quickly begat another.2 The police refused to recognize these crescents as “streets,” and so did not patrol them above ground level; unfortunately, nobody had thought to clear that one in advance. With no police presence, crime was effectively allowed to prosper, and the daily deliveries of milk, newspapers, and the like soon dried up due to regular attacks on the merchants. Children no longer played freely on the streets because there were none; ball games were mostly forbidden on the grassy areas; there were no youth programs or social clubs. Drug deals and fights duly became the common daily interactions instead. A damning 1978 report by the TV show World in Action compared the crescents with apartheid South Africa, stating that “Manchester’s Hulme bares all the sociological characteristics of a Bantustan reservation.”

  In Ardwick, on Hyde Road, smack in between the Maher family’s two former homes, the city similarly built a 537-unit complex of “deck access” homes using the cheapest available system, that of the LEGO-like “Bison Wall Frame.” The City named it Coverdale Crescent, but with its jutting walkways that interconnected at sharp right angles and its sense of total social alienation, the residents quickly took to calling it Fort Ardwick instead. The roofs leaked at once, and as the steel fixings began corroding almost as quickly, concrete started breaking away. Over in the Hulme Crescents, leaks compounded with an ineffective and expensive under-floor heating system meant that tenants had to decide either to go cold or live with perpetual condensation. The city spent emergency funds attempting to shore up the buildings, but the damage—to the tenants’ morale as much as to the buildings themselves—had been done. Fort Ardwick was torn down in the mid-1980s, barely ten years after being erected. (The “slums,” by comparison, had lasted well over a hundred years.) The Hulme Crescents lasted into the mid-1990s before they, too, were demolished, a monumental tribute to the worst excesses of urban planning.

  It’s worth briefly considering what might (not) have become of Morrissey and Marr had they been rehoused into the crescents that all but swallowed up their old homes. Fortunately, because it was they who had to make way for the new buildings, and needed housing in the meantime, they were spared that social experiment. But that’s not to say that Morrissey, in particular, ever bought into the validity of the slum clearance that forced his family out of Queen’s Square. “It was almost a political movement to squash this very, very strong body of people,” he said on the South Bank Show in 1987. Two years earlier, still enjoying the initial flush of stardom, he tried to go back to his old street for a short TV clip about his upbringing, but he couldn’t find it—except in a photograph at a library. “Everything has just vanished; it’s just like the whole thing has been completely erased from the face of the earth,” he said as he paced the soulless concrete concourses of the modern Hulme and Moss Side tower-block estates that had taken its place. “I feel great anger and I feel massive sadness. It’s like a complete loss of childhood.”

  It was more than that. It was a complete loss of Manchester, its roots, its traditions, its community and culture. As the old terraced streets were replaced by soaring tower blocks, deck-access crescents, and modern council estates, and as these replacements were proven to cause more problems than they solved, and as unemployment and crime and depression and drug abuse rose accordingly, the city that had given birth to the Industrial Revolution began to look very much like it was dying. Many believed that it was already dead.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  My education in St Mary’s Secondary School in Manchester wasn’t an education. It was all violence and brutality.

  —Morrissey, Irish Times, 1999

  The vast majority of council tenants in Hulme and Moss Side forcibly relocated by slum clearance were sent to estates in Wythenshawe, south of Manchester. But because the Morrisseys lived just outside the city line, their circumstance was different, and when Queen’s Square was torn down, they were relocated westward within their native Stretford. The new family home at 384 Kings Road stood almost halfway along the street’s two-mile stretch, just before the council houses of the eastern end gave way to private property heading west. By the Morrisseys’ previous standards, these new semidetached homes were sumptuous, backing and fronting onto private gardens, with bushes distinguishing property lines; there were side entrances, and space between the buildings for those who had motor cars—which came to include the Morrisseys. They had proper bathrooms, three bedrooms, and a downstairs living room looking out to the front garden. All in all, they were the very picture of respectability. Yet all this precise niceness came at a cost. Stockton Road, Harper Street, and Queen’s Square had all been of a terraced variety typical of working-class, industrial-era England north of the Home Counties; these new semidetached council houses, though, were prevalent in every city, town, and even many villages in England from the 1960s and ’70s onward, and their heterogeneous architecture only emphasized Kings Road’s existent anonymity. Neither side street nor busy main road, neither rich nor poor, not especially violent but never exactly safe, the council end of Kings Road was, by Steven Morrissey’s own admission, “bland,” and for a child already all too aware of life’s stifling boundaries, to be relocated into such normality was an offense against his humanity. The effect of it seemed to permeate his subsequent personality.

  But that was hardly the biggest crime perpetuated against his upbringing. As with every publicly educated child of his generation, at the end of his time at St. Wilfr
id’s, Steven Morrissey sat for the exam known as the 11-plus, which determined which type of secondary school he would attend. Those who passed it had the perceived good fortune to attend their local grammar school, which received the lion’s share of funding, attracted better teachers, and theoretically treated the students with some understanding of their basic intellectual capacity, endeavoring to ensure that they would leave, with O-Levels at the age of sixteen and hopefully A-Levels beyond that, to go on to solid, white-collar jobs. Those who failed the 11-plus, on the other hand, were sent to the local secondary modern, where they were viewed as little more than fodder for what was left of the factory floor and were rarely offered more than a course of CSEs (Certificates of Secondary Education that were only introduced in the late 1960s). Disenchantment with how this system had doomed three-quarters of British pupils to an education of low expectations, the Labour Government of the 1960s had been seeking to replace secondary moderns (and, eventually, grammar schools) with totally inclusive, properly funded “comprehensive” schools. But in 1970, the year Steven Morrissey started secondary school, Labour was voted out, and the process of further educational change was promptly postponed.1

  It appears inexplicable that someone of Steven Morrissey’s evident intelligence could have failed his 11-plus. But that was the vagary of the system that reduced up to seven years of primary-school education to a single day’s IQ test: catch kids on a bad morning, in the wrong environment, at a weak point in their educational development, or just ask them the wrong questions for their aptitude, and you potentially damned them for life. According to Johnny Rogan’s biography The Severed Alliance, only three students from St. Wilfrid’s passed the exam and went on to grammar school, but at least the majority of the failures moved on together, to St. Ignatius in Hulme. Being a resident of Stretford, however, Steven Morrissey (and two classmates from St. Wilfrid’s) were sent to St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Secondary Modern. Literally the school lay on the other side of the railway tracks from the Morrisseys’ Kings Road back garden—accessed via an iron footbridge just up the road, past the shops—and attracted, if that could be considered the right word given that they had no choice in the matter, the toughest Catholic kids in all of Stretford.