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

by Tony Fletcher

  That first year Andy was at secondary school, the Rourke family was dealt a bombshell: Andy’s mother, Mary, moved out, all the way to the Mediterranean island of Majorca, to work as a nanny for an American millionaire with whom she eventually settled down. Her departure left an enormous void in the family structure, to put it mildly, one that was exacerbated by the fact that Michael Rourke, a trained architect, was employed by a Sale roofing company that had him overseeing projects across the country. He had little choice but to leave the boys home alone, up to four nights a week, where they learned to fend—and especially, to fight—for themselves. Andy tussled most regularly with his oldest brother, Christopher, who was in his late teens already and, as befitted vaguely middle-class suburban England in the mid-’70s, smoking cannabis regularly. Under the circumstances, it was inevitable that Andy would start experimenting with drugs himself at a young age. “We started smoking weed,” said Rourke, “and then we started selling weed,” using the side door intercom and a back window to circumvent their father’s possible knowledge—which was limited, given how frequently Michael Rourke was away.1

  The domestic dysfunction carried over into school. Andy fell in with the perceived troublemakers at St. Augustine’s, among them a boy named Phil Powell. Hoping to break up the gang before it took too deep a hold, the school switched Rourke and Powell out of their class at the end of the first year, and into one whose teacher, Adrian Jessett, was a renowned disciplinarian, unlikely to cut them any slack. Their new classmates happened to include Johnny Marr, and once Rourke and Marr got over their initial wariness of each other, the firmest of all the future Smiths’ friendships, the bedrock of the band’s music, was formed. With it, too, came the foundation of the band’s touring organization, for Phil Powell would remain not only Rourke’s close friend but go on to become Johnny Marr’s personal roadie, lodger, and right-hand man.

  Marr and Rourke took to playing in the music room together at lunchtime, and then with Marr’s friend Marc Johnson on Churchstoke Walk. The budding three-piece saw themselves, said Marr, as “the junior version of Rob (Allman), Billy (Duffy), and Dave (Clough),” the local guitar heroes, who were themselves part of a band so heavily influenced by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young that they had taken their name from the act’s live album, 4 Way Street. The younger trio of Marr, Rourke, and Johnson focused primarily on acoustic versions of Neil Young’s songs. Johnson soon fell by the wayside; Rourke saw it as a falling-out with Marr, who preferred to observe instead that he and Andy “had more tenacity.” Certainly, nobody who knew him had any doubt as to Marr’s determination, or the speed at which his skills were now developing. “When I first started playing guitar with Johnny, I was a bit more knowledgeable,” said Rourke. “I would show him everything I knew. But then the next week he’d have taken it to a whole new level. He was just a really quick learner.” By the age of thirteen, said Rourke, “we knew … what we wanted to do—be in a band.”

  They talked themselves into one with two older boys, Kevin Kennedy and Bobby Durkin, part of the West Wythy youth club crowd. Marr and Kennedy were unified by their passion for Manchester City in an area that was predominantly United, he and Durkin by family associations that extended back to Ardwick. Then again, everyone knew Bobby Durkin. “Very eccentric, mad as a hatter, and good fun,” said Kennedy. “If you had to portray a drummer, with all their idiosyncrasies, Bobby fitted the bill perfectly.” Crucially, Durkin had his own kit, while Kennedy had an amplifier as well as a bass. Naming themselves the Paris Valentinos on an inspired whim, the quartet initially rehearsed at the Durkins’ house, until noise complaints from his mother led Bobby to lean instead on his father, who ran the social club that was part of Sacred Heart’s adjoined church and primary school. A deal was struck with the priest: they could use the church hall if they would play guitar at the weekly Folk Mass. For the next few months, Rourke, Marr, and Kennedy, natural-born Catholics but none of them especially devoted to religion, spent Sunday afternoons in church, trying to keep a straight face as they performed “Kumbaya” and “Peace Perfect Peace” on acoustic guitars while simultaneously endeavoring to distract the trio of more devoted female singers in front.

  The Paris Valentinos drew on the kind of no-nonsense rock that appealed to their age group at this juncture, just before punk threw the marketplace wide open: “Breakdown” by the new American band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and “The Boys Are Back in Town” by Ireland’s Thin Lizzy, who were considered honorary Mancunians by virtue of front man Phil Lynott having spent his infancy years in Moss Side, the only place his Irish Catholic mother felt comfortable raising a mixed-race boy born out of wedlock. Marr also brought in Rory Gallagher’s “Moonchild” and “Shadowplay,” and as he did so, Kennedy was blown away by his friend’s ability. “He was superb. He was very fast, his fingers were fast. Some of his riffs were really beautiful and melodic and not as harsh as what was about at the time.” Growing in confidence, observing his friends’ strengths and weaknesses, Marr then made a pivotal suggestion: that Rourke and Kennedy swap instruments.

  For Rourke, it initially felt like a demotion. He had not paid much attention to the bass in the past. “I knew that if you took it away a song would be that much different. But I was so focused on playing guitar that my ears would tune into a guitar when I listened to a song.” Almost as soon as he picked up Kennedy’s instrument, however, he realized how much he liked it and “just immersed myself in it.” He began to study the parts he heard on record; in particular, Rourke began to emulate Rory Gallagher’s bass player Gerry McAvoy, whose sound was “very punchy, plectrum-oriented.” It helped that Andy’s brother Phil Rourke also joined a band at this time on bass. For a while, they even shared an instrument. When Phil dropped his ambitions by the wayside, Andy persisted.

  The relationship between Marr and Rourke has often been viewed as one-way traffic, even among those who grew up with them both. “Andy followed Johnny,” said Bobby Durkin. “Andy wasn’t going to make it without Johnny … not a chance.”2 But for all that Rourke looked up to Marr for leadership, so Marr looked to Rourke for grounding. Marr already had a reputation for flash: in fashion, on the football field, in musical taste, in his gift of gab, and now on the guitar as well. Rourke, who sported long hair and sideburns at the time, having gravitated from glam rock to folk rock and now to the space rock of Gong and Hawkwind, was more taciturn and less outwardly ambitious. But he was contagiously funny, had an abundance of instinctive musical talent, and was unquestionably, almost uncommonly, loyal. No less so than with Morrissey later in life, Marr needed Rourke to help complete himself.

  The same week of June 1977 that the Sex Pistols had the top-selling single in the country with the Monarchy-baiting “God Save the Queen,” the Paris Valentinos played their only gig, a Silver Jubilee Street Party in Benchill to honor the queen’s twenty-five-year reign. There was no particular incongruity to this: Johnny and Andy were only thirteen, too young to know about punk political correctness. Besides, the Paris Valentinos were more of a social group than a functioning band. Their rehearsals at Sacred Heart would often end with a raid on the church hall’s stock cupboard (the key had come with that for the front door) of donated jumble-sale items, among them prized 1960s 7″ singles and not a few outrageous costumes. Then it would be time to crack open some cider or beer. In such moments, while Durkin played the merry drummer role, Kennedy would explain how he really wanted to be an actor, and the others would laugh—until he left the group to pursue his eventual career. A few years later, he would become a national icon, as famous as Morrissey in his own right for a while, as “Curly” Watts, the first truly 1980s character on Coronation Street.

  In between the Sex Pistols’ two Manchester shows in the summer of 1976, while waiting for his O-Levels results, Morrissey fulfilled a dream by visiting New York and New Jersey, where his aunts Patti and Mary on his mother’s side had relocated. Morrissey was infatuated now with Patti Smith, the former New Jersey factory worke
r turned downtown Manhattan poetess/music journalist/​actress/​shamanistic performer, whose debut album, Horses, had made the American top 40. After hearing it, he said, “I was never the same again.” The New York City punk scene, though not routinely called by that name, was not only far ahead of that which was just gathering steam in Britain, but that much more diverse, and Morrissey already knew more about it than most British teenagers. He did his best to educate himself further while on the East Coast, venturing to CBGB on the Bowery, where he had his picture taken outside the club with one of his childhood heroes, Russell Mael of Sparks.3 But if he was hoping to find a city infatuated with the New York Dolls, he was disappointed: the conversation that summer was all about the Ramones, with whom he was not greatly impressed.

  Morrissey came back to England to find that he had passed three of his four O-Levels, just enough for acceptance into an entry-level job with the Civil Service. He quit after two weeks, horrified by its mundane nature (though he would soon return to government bureaucracy for a yearlong stint at the local Inland Revenue office), and resumed his preferred, albeit unpaid occupation: firing off missives to the music press. Before the year was out, he scored the rare feat of having two letters published in the same issue of the same music paper—twice. The theme was relentlessly, almost depressingly familiar: praise for the New York Dolls and Patti Smith (whom he traveled to Birmingham to see in concert that October), and damnation of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols for, at least in the case of the Pistols, their “infantile approach and nondescript music.” He made this latter observation in response to writer Jonh Ingham, who had dared criticize the Dolls in Sounds; it became something of a career habit to aggressively assail people by mail if their opinions did not jell with his own, and many a friendship was to be ended via the letter box. All the same, he was at the Electric Circus in early December when the Sex Pistols returned to Manchester on their Anarchy in the UK tour, primarily because the now-defunct Dolls’ spin-off band the Heartbreakers (not to be confused with Tom Petty’s band of the same name) were on the bill too, and he was not about to turn down the chance to finally see Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan in the flesh. Yet when he showed up at the soundcheck, they rebuffed him. Later, he tried to downplay the cold shoulder: “They weren’t friendly and why should they be? Who was I, anyway?” Who was he? Only their former band’s UK fan club head, and more so, the biggest, most relentlessly persistent, and hopelessly single-minded fan they had ever had in the country. His encounter sounds suspiciously like the one that was recounted years later in the Smiths song “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” in which a fan shows up at the soundcheck and is rejected: “To you I was faceless, I was fawning, I was boring.”

  He fared better with a member of another support band that night, Mick Jones of the Clash, whom he had spoken to on the phone earlier in the year in response to a “singer wanted” classified ad in the music papers, a position that had gone, instead, to Joe Strummer. And he struck up the courage to talk, however briefly, to Howard Devoto’s girlfriend, Linder, the Manchester punk movement’s most visible female intellectual and artist, and in the process begin perhaps his most lasting and mutually admiring cultural and personal friendship. Raised on the council estates of Wigan and Liverpool before attending Manchester Polytechnic to study art, Linda Sterling had met the Buzzcocks the night they opened for the Sex Pistols in July, an event that inspired her to complete personal transformation: “Punk allowed you to rechristen yourself and be reborn,” she said of her subsequent decision to do away with her last name. “Proclaiming Linderland then gave me a psychic territory, a home and a landscape.” The Sex Pistols must have done something right in Morrissey’s eyes too at the Electric Circus, because his public criticism of the band ceased immediately. Still, when he placed an ad in Sounds for interest in forming a “Manchester-based punk band,” he stressed that he was looking for “Dolls/Patti fans,” with no mention of British influences. Nothing came of it.

  Other events took precedence. Just two days before Christmas 1976, Peter Morrissey left his family, moving in with his sister Patricia. Family relations on Kings Road had become increasingly strained; the son claimed to have gone six months earlier that year without speaking to the father, who was hard put to explain the gap that had grown between them. “I’ve never done anything against Steven,” said the man who was near enough idolized by his son’s friends for his George Best–like looks and agreeable personality. “I’ve never even raised my voice to him.… Something happened to Steven and I can’t explain it.” The son never set out to try. “I was completely raised by my mother’s family,” he stated firmly in 1999. “My personal history is the Dwyer family, not actually the Morrissey family.” This would of course highlight the irony that while his mother duly reverted to her maiden name following her husband’s departure, Steve Morrissey would end up dropping his Christian name to use solely his father’s family name from which he claimed to be so disconnected.

  In more positive future recollections, Morrissey would attempt to play down his parents’ eventual breakup after so many years of underlying unhappiness, recognizing that in the big picture, it was neither the worst nor the most unique thing to happen to a teenager (although it was certainly less common among Catholic families). But the end result was nonetheless the same: he grew even closer to his mother, who would dutifully support him over the next several years of chronic underemployment and occasional depression, when many another parent of either sex would have kicked their grown son out of the house in a last-ditch attempt to make a man of him. In the biography Saint Morrissey, Mark Simpson suggests of Betty’s indulgence that, having “resigned herself to the failure of her marriage long before she and Peter finally divorced … she turned her spurned affections towards someone she could be more sure of, someone who needed them so much that he would never reject them.” It’s a valid theory, especially given that the bond grew only stronger over subsequent years, with Morrissey buying a house for the pair of them once he acquired some wealth, and Betty duly casting a long and, for those on the opposite end, frustrating shadow as a quasi-managerial figure in her son’s professional life. Regardless, it’s not as if Morrissey ever shied away from acknowledging the particular closeness of their attachment, often joking about it at both his and her expense in interviews, and admitting to it in song: in “The Queen Is Dead,” as a prominent example, he notes that “when you’re tied to your mother’s apron, no one talks about castration.”

  Indeed, in the wake of his father’s departure, Steven Morrissey immersed himself in the politics of feminism—specifically acquiring such books as The Facts of Rape, The Female Eunuch, Sex and Racism, Women and Madness, and, interestingly, given his home setup, a book written by a prominent psychologist intended to help mothers communicate better with their children. None of this made for idle reading, even for a teenager already well versed in Oscar Wilde: the premise behind Susan Brownmiller’s uncomfortable study Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, for example, held that the male of the species had historically, categorically, and with deliberate prejudice, subjugated the female of the species as chattel, her virginity and motherhood to be bought and sold according to prevailing local customs. Despite the fact that “women’s suffrage” had gained its British foothold in nineteenth-century Manchester (yet again, the northern capital had been at the epicenter of political progression), the concept of actual “Women’s Liberation” was still relatively new in the mid-1970s, and the arguments presented by the feminist philosophers were not easily or readily accepted in the working-class, manual-labor households of the urban north.

  If Morrissey’s feminist leanings put him at odds with wider society, they fitted in well with punk, a culture that initially embraced a challenge to gender stereotypes. In America it did so via icons like Patti Smith (who dressed in a purposefully masculine manner on the cover of Horses), the transvestite Wayne County (who eventually became the transsexual Jayne County), and the flamboyant dress sense and ent
husiastic camping of the New York Dolls; in the UK, it did so with the provocative poses of Jordan, Siouxsie Sioux, and Soo Catwoman, who struck fear in the heart of an establishment that had no idea how to react to such strong, beautiful women in control of their own sexuality. (This was most evident in the case of TV presenter Bill Grundy, whose drunken lechery in front of the Sex Pistols’ female friends led to the band swearing live on camera and subsequently being banned from most venues on their Anarchy tour. Manchester, to its credit, was one of the few cities whose council did not seek to cancel the concert; in fact, the Anarchy package returned to the Electric Circus ten days after its initial show to fill up one of the sixteen canceled concert dates, marking the fourth time the Sex Pistols played in Manchester within six months.) In Manchester, the influence of the London female punks was evident in local characters Joan and Denise, frequently photographed by Kevin Cummins; true feminist principles were most visible in the artwork of Linder, whose cover design for Buzzcocks’ first major-label single in late 1977, Orgasm Addict, a photo-collage that replaced a naked woman’s head with a clothing iron and her nipples with perfect teeth and lips, remains a classic of the format, the statement, and the era.4