Recognizing a Stones influence when they heard it, some of the older lads in Wythenshawe had also gotten into the New York Dolls, and as obsessive devotees of the British music press, they discovered that there was a lad in Stretford who shared their enthusiasm. In the Christmas 1975 edition of Sounds, a letter from Steve (no longer Steven) Morrissey of Kings Road credited the Dolls with influencing everyone from Bruce Springsteen, Kiss, and Aerosmith (spurious claims at best), on to Wayne County, the Tubes, and the Dictators—acts you could only know about if you read the music papers scrupulously, and which you could barely hear for yourself even if you made the effort. The Wythenshawe boys figured to keep an eye out for this Morrissey character.2
They got their chance in July 1976, when they made a trek up to the Free Trade Hall to see a particular local group perform in the city center for the first time. Slaughter & the Dogs had been formed out of a friendship between vocalist Wayne Barrett, slum-cleared out of Moss Side, and guitarist Mick Rossi. Each had attended St. Augustine’s Grammar, a year apart, until they were expelled (long before Johnny Marr’s time) and kicked down into Sharston Secondary Modern, where they became classic problem children of the ’70s, hanging out on the streets of Benchill and Woodhouse Park looking for trouble, and finding it. “It was fighting, mugging, stealing, that’s all there was,” said Barrett, who recalled that the Wythenshawe of that neighborhood and period “was a dump. There was nothing.”
Barrett was part of a generally rare breed of that era that nonetheless had a strong presence in Wythenshawe. He described himself as “a bootboy,” but that “at the same time I was walking ’round with platform shoes and dyeing my hair. You’d be going to the football matches, going to see Man United on Saturdays, beating shit out of the other team’s fans, and then Saturday night you’d be listening to Ziggy Stardust and taking acid pills and pyramids and uppers and downers, getting off your head and escaping from reality.” (Though too young to associate with them as yet, Marr identified upon moving to Wythenshawe with characters who were “being working-class and going to the match but having ideas about David Bowie and being freethinking—and that was incredibly liberating for me.”)
Barrett was saved from his worst tendencies by a music teacher at Sharston who recognized that his infatuation with Bowie and Roxy Music went beyond the norm, and encouraged him and Rossi to learn instruments. Picking up additional band members from school, including Johnny Marr’s future friend Howard Bates on bass, they took their name from Mick Ronson’s Slaughter on 10th Avenue and David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, and then financed the band by stealing water drains off the streets, weighing them in to illicit scrap metal merchants and using the cash to buy instruments and amps. Slowly, they built up a set based on Bowie, Velvet Underground, and New York Dolls covers and embarked on playing the local British Legion and Conservative Clubs, where their hardened teenage Wythenshawe following would strike such fear into the older regulars that they’d often be asked to leave before they’d started playing.
Having developed a local following, Slaughter & the Dogs called up a “mad hippie” who had been advertising his home recording studio in nearby Didsbury. His name was Martin Hannett, and in early 1976, he produced a demo that included a song entitled “Love Speed and Beer,” which pretty much summed up the band’s spheres of interest. (“Everyone was on pills half the time—because heroin was too expensive,” said Barrett.) Impressed, Hannett took it upon himself to cold-call the one person in the Manchester media he thought might be interested in the results, the presenter of the “What’s On” segment of local TV show Granada Reports: Tony Wilson. Of working-class Salford stock, Wilson had nonetheless made it to Cambridge University, where he picked up a plum BBC accent that aggravated as many Mancunians who watched him on TV as it fooled the guests he frequently took to task for their lack of social-political integrity. In the spring of 1976, Wilson was preparing to launch a music television show of his own, So It Goes, and at Hannett’s recommendation, he journeyed to Stockport to see Slaughter & the Dogs in concert. The sheer energy of the band and their teenage following excited him, especially as, almost the same week, he received a note in the mail from one Howard Trafford, inviting him to come see a group called the Sex Pistols that Trafford and his friend Peter McNeish were bringing up from London to play the Lesser Free Trade Hall—a smaller room underneath the main hall—in June. Wilson didn’t make it to that show; only fifty or so people did. But in July, Trafford and McNeish—now renamed Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, respectively—announced that they would be bringing the Sex Pistols back to Manchester, and that this time their own band, Buzzcocks, would be opening. Headlining, according to posters that went up around town, were Wythenshawe’s Slaughter & the Dogs.
The night of the show, Tuesday, July 20, the massive contingent that came up from Wythenshawe to support their local heroes included various of the area’s many budding guitarists, such as Billy Duffy, Stephen Pomfret, Marc Riley, and Craig Scanlon, and, among the non-musicians, Phil Fletcher and Jimmy Walsh. Buzzcocks (absent the definitive article at the front of their name) opened the bill, the first band in the north of England ever to play a set directly influenced by the Sex Pistols. Slaughter & the Dogs went on next; it turned out that the posters declaring them top of the bill had been their own hopeful handiwork. Still, they generated no small amount of teenage testosterone, and at some point after the Sex Pistols came on, it exploded, as the Wythenshawe Man United crew got into a pitched battle with the Pistols fans who had come up from London. Partially as a result of this incident, but also because of their musical, visual, and intellectual simplicity, Slaughter & the Dogs were to be largely ostracized by the artsy side of a Manchester punk scene that was otherwise promulgated into existence that night.
In the middle of it all, Phil Fletcher spotted someone off to the side, “in a multicolored cardigan, carrying the first New York Dolls album under his arm,” as he recalled. “ ‘That must be that Steve Morrissey,’ ” Fletcher said to his friends. It was.
Give him credit for knowing where to find the action, for Morrissey was among the select few who had also attended the first of the Sex Pistols’ Lesser Free Trade Hall shows, in early June. He would have known that the band’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, had only just given up trying to resurrect the career of his beloved New York Dolls, and he’d read about the Sex Pistols in the music papers, where they’d stirred up immediate (if wary) interest in their apparent preference for chaos over music. But he probably would have attended if he’d never heard of them, for the simple reason that the city was screaming out for activity. Manchester at the time, as he later recalled to author John Robb with his usual poetic sense of drama, was:
… a maze of dirty streets. Street lighting was still a very dull yellow … Violence was everywhere—and accepted. There was a spiritual darkness as well as a literal darkness: still lots of tramps in demob suits, record shops in murky buildings, city squares completely unlit, 70 per cent of city-centre buildings unused, and everything revolving around the last bus home. It was still very visibly post-war, and very industrial-ugly, discoloured with the dirt of 100 years, and rock music was a swarm of misery.
He was hardly alone in this thinking. Howard Devoto’s old school friend Richard Boon came to Manchester from Reading to help put on the Sex Pistols concerts only to find that “Manchester was structurally derelict, culturally derelict, musically derelict.” Boon took on part-time work compiling the music listings for the fortnightly New Manchester Review, but “there was hardly anything to list. You got the sense that the tide had gone out.” Manchester had a major success story in 10cc, whose wryly intellectual pop music had made them one of the biggest bands in the country, and who owned a recording studio, Strawberry, in Stockport. But 10cc didn’t represent anything other than themselves; it was perhaps indicative of Manchester’s musical malaise that its most discussed act, Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias, was viewed primarily as a comedy band.
As such, it’s ha
rd to overstate the influence of the Sex Pistols in Manchester that summer. Tapes of the first concert, at which the support group was comprised of local hippies, reveal a crowd boisterous enough to provoke Johnny Rotten into telling them to “fuck off!” at least twice—and it was the very idea of a front man insulting his audience like this that helped make the Sex Pistols so revolutionary. Morrissey felt sufficiently inspired by the insider nature of the gig to write a review that he sent to the NME in his customary form of a reader’s letter but, as is often the case when someone is subjected to something essentially new and unproven, he was guarded in his conclusions. He noted how “the bumptious Pistols in jumble sale attire had those few that attended dancing in the aisles,” but used the opportunity primarily to reference instead what he considered their elders and betters: “It’s nice to see that the British have produced a band capable of producing atmosphere created by The New York Dolls and their many imitators, even though it may be too late.”
It was not. And there was considerably less dispute about the second Sex Pistols show, in no small part because the supporting bands seemed to reflect a similar desire for musical and social change. Wayne Barrett, for example, recalled how he heard “meaning in the Sex Pistols’ words” that didn’t exist in his own. “Just watching Rotten onstage … He went completely against everything. And the filth and the edge of the Pistols, the way they were playing, their arrogance towards everything …” After the show, Barrett and Rossi, despite the fight in the audience, sat down with the Pistols and discovered they were cut from the same cloth: disaffected teenagers abandoned by a crumbling British society, but determined to make something of their lives all the same. In a heartbeat, Barrett and Rossi realized they didn’t have to imitate their superstar heroes anymore. They could do exactly what they wanted.
That feeling—that sense of complete artistic and personal freedom—took hold among almost everyone who attended the two shows. Steve Diggle, who’d left his secondary modern in Openshawe with the feeling that “there was no hope,” happened on the first gig on his way to a pub; he left as a member of Buzzcocks. Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, two twenty-year-olds from Salford, were so inspired by the June show that Hook bought a bass guitar the very next day to form a band; Ian Curtis, their future lead singer in that band, felt similarly motivated after attending the July gig. The same with Mark E. Smith, a Salford docker who figured that if the Pistols could get onstage with a singer who couldn’t sing, so could he, and formed the Fall, in which Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon from Wythenshawe would each come to join him.
Others, like Billy Duffy, for whom attendance at the July show “changed my life forever,” had to bide their time. For although it’s convenient to believe that the Sex Pistols were capable of changing the world in one night, the revolution (to the extent that there was one) moved slowly. The first season of Tony Wilson’s TV show So It Goes proved barely distinguishable from The Old Grey Whistle Test in its choice of established, respectable album-oriented studio guests, which would explain why Steve Morrissey sent Tony Wilson a cover of the New York Dolls LP (perhaps even the same one he’d been carrying around to gigs) with a note saying, “Why can’t you feature more bands like this?” (Wilson, stunned by what he saw at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, managed to bring the Sex Pistols into the studio for the final show of that series, for which he deserves eternal credit; their debut British television performance was nothing short of incendiary, and would likely have had a greater effect on British youth had its broadcast not been confined to the Granada catchment area.) Hair lengths continued to run long, and trouser legs remained fashionably wide. And few people, if any, threw out their old record collections, because other than the new music slowly emerging from New York, it wasn’t like there was anything to replace them with.
And so, if you were a twelve-year-old bedroom guitarist in Wythenshawe named Johnny Marr, you could try to relate to this thing called “punk” that had gotten some of your older friends so suddenly excited; you could join in the local mob scene that August at the Wythenshawe Forum, for one of your very first gigs, where Slaughter & the Dogs headlined above Wild Ram, a heavy local band that featured your schoolmate’s big brother, and you could find it “scary.”3 You could laugh at the fact that Wild Ram promptly changed their name to Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds, and in an alternate world, maybe you could imagine yourself following suit. But you had been brought up to believe that practice made perfect and that talent won out. You certainly weren’t about to give up all your self-taught guitar skills for a quick, tuneless thrash.
Eager to find artists he could call his own, Johnny Marr had been drawn to the blues-based guitarist Rory Gallagher: “He seemed to have a lot of integrity, and there was just something about his Irishness that I connected with.” In 1975, Gallagher released an album, Against the Grain, which, in the fashion of the era, featured the artist’s guitar as the cover star. But Gallagher’s Fender Stratocaster had been sanded down, which, although it had been done primarily to improve the sound, gave Gallagher an additional anti-image. Marr was smitten. It helped his devotion that this new hero played the Free Trade Hall at least once a year, and it helped too that the bigger lads he’d latched on to promised they could get him in to the man’s next Manchester concert—for free. (They had learned how to open the side doors of the building with an antenna conveniently snapped from a local parked car.)
The same crowd—including Billy Duffy before his epiphany with the Sex Pistols, and Robin Allman, who lived almost opposite Marr’s estate, on Altrincham Road—had turned Marr on to the folk-rock group Pentangle, specifically the finger-picking guitar playing of Bert Jansch and how it interacted with second guitarist John Renbourn. This would exert an enormous, clearly audible influence on Marr’s own future style: one of the future Smiths guitarist’s most notable traits was his use of the plectrum to pick his way back and forth across individual strings, creating a melody in the process rather than simply strumming chords. At the time the Smiths came along, however, the likes of Pentangle were unfashionable; Marr would not talk publicly about Jansch in hallowed terms until many years later (enabling a sense of himself as a wunderkind in the meantime for those unaware of Pentangle’s period of creative influence).
Marr proved marginally more vocal about his love of Neil Young and Nils Lofgren. Like Gallagher, Young oozed credibility and musicianship and yet was not, in Britain, a superstar, which made him an ideal mid-’70s cult hero. Lofgren, meanwhile, released a debut LP in 1975 acclaimed not only for his incredible guitar playing, the kind that Marr could only dream of emulating, but for the standout song, “Keith Don’t Go,” a plea to the Stones guitarist to keep his drug abuse in check. To complete the circle, Lofgren also appeared on the record and accompanying 1975 tour for Young’s Tonight’s the Night. As a token of his good taste, Johnny got himself a Tonight’s the Night button badge and wore it on his school blazer, uniform requirements be damned. Badges were large in those days, and hard to ignore. And it was for this reason that Johnny Marr came to the attention of Andy Rourke.4
CHAPTER
SEVEN
All my life I had this feeling that I wasn’t going to live long. So I never really made any plans beyond twenty-five, twenty-six. I didn’t think I would still be here. I just kind of wing it every day.
—Andy Rourke, December 2010
Of the four Smiths, Andrew Michael Rourke was in many ways the odd one out: the only one not of pure Irish stock, the only one raised even vaguely middle-class, the only one without a female sibling. He was also the youngest, born January 17, 1964. His father, Michael, came from a family that had emigrated from Ireland several generations back, and had remained sufficiently devoted to Catholicism as to have initially planned a career in the priesthood. But after Michael met his English wife, Mary Stones, and they married as teenagers, that plan was forgotten, and the couple had four children in less than ten years: Christopher, Phillip, Andrew, and John. They settled into a four-bedroom house at
the end of Hawthorn Lane in Ashton-upon-Mersey, between Stretford and Wythenshawe. Christopher and Phillip went on to the best of Catholic secondary schools, St. Ambrose and De La Salle, but when it looked like Andy, as he was always known, was set for the non-denominational Stretford Grammar, his mother had the local priest put in a good word with Monsignor McGuiness at St. Augustine’s. Despite the fact that the journey required up to four buses over the course of a two-hour commute, Andrew started at the Wythenshawe-based Catholic school the same week as—but in a different class from—Johnny Marr.
Much like Marr, Rourke had proved quick in infancy to pick up on his mother’s love of the Beatles and the Stones. He, too, then became a typical child of glam rock, in his case soaking up more populist acts like Wizzard and Slade and Suzi Quatro. And again like Marr, he sought to emulate his icons by asking for a musical instrument as his annual gift. A progression through plastic trumpet and electric organ culminated one year with the Christmas gift of a plastic guitar—and upon Andy’s insistence that real guitars were made of wood, then with a birthday gift, three weeks later, of a proper classical model.
Lessons followed, somewhat begrudgingly, though Rourke later recognized that they taught him some of the “dexterity” for which he would later be so admired. “The revelation,” he recalled, “was when I realized I could play along to a record.” He soon found that he could accompany every song on his mother’s Beach Boys compilation—“and then I just used to put the radio on and try and play along to whatever song came up.” With two older brothers, Andy was an easy sell for the rock music of the era—which is why he struck up a conversation at school with Johnny Marr over Neil Young. The fact that he was carrying his own guitar invited more than a passing response, although the initial exchange was guarded, Marr seemingly concerned that someone else his age should share anything like his own musical knowledge.
A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths Page 11