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

by Tony Fletcher

  It was no coincidence that Morrissey’s own immersion into feminism coincided with his growing friendship with Linder. “She led me by the lapel,” he wrote in an essay accompanying a Linder career retrospective in 2006, citing the artist’s influence as the direct reason, for example, that he acquired Sex and Racism. Linder, whose charismatic personality and forceful intellect were topped off with a fierce beauty, was hardly lacking for male attention; Pete Shelley reputedly wrote Buzzcocks’ classic single “What Do I Get?” about his unrequited love for her. (Shelley, who later came out as bisexual, was always careful never to specify gender in his love songs.) In spite of the fact there would be subsequent rumors about the extent of her physical contact with Morrissey, in 1977 the future Smiths singer was coming to terms, instead, with the fact that he wasn’t desperately interested in the subject.

  Asked bluntly about the loss of his virginity in an interview in 1987, Morrissey answered: “It was in my early teens, twelve or thirteen,” spectacularly early even by 1970s inner-city standards. “But it was an isolated incident, an accident. After that it was downhill. I’ve got no pleasant memories from it whatsoever.” At the age of sixteen, he had confided in writing that “I don’t have sex much, in fact I can count the number of times,” which suggested that, unlike many boys his age, at least he still had it. But two years later, at the height of his punk gig-going, just as his friendship with Linder solidified, he seemed to have reached an epiphany of sorts over the subsequent drought. “I always thought that I was asexual, because I’m not really stimulated by either male or female. There was a period when I thought I could be gay, but then it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t like boys either.” His conclusion: “I’m just not turned on by naked bodies.” These confessions may not have been intended for public consumption, but that only lent additional credence to the quotes Morrissey made at the start of the Smiths’ career about his celibacy, such as in March 1984, that it was “a series of very blunt and thankfully brief and horrendous experiences that made me decide upon abstaining, and it seemed quite an easy and natural decision.”

  In the absence of conventional teenage dating, he continued to use the music papers as his personal pen-pal site. It wasn’t so much that the British punk rock explosion energized him in any way; it was more that the rest of the country had caught up with his own tastes and so, as Xeroxed fanzines started to emerge by the plastic bag–load as an alternative to the weekly music papers, Morrissey contacted any and all that showed an interest or an understanding in the New York scene, offering to write articles about his favorite subjects. Both Kids Stuff in Surrey and The Next Big Thing in Scotland said yes to Dolls-related features, inspiring Morrissey to consider his own magazine-length fanzine on the band. Further letters to the weekly music papers on the same subject saw him gradually widen his network of pen pals: Brian Young in Belfast, a Thunders fanatic who played guitar in that city’s leading punk band, Rudi, and who hooked Morrissey up with a local fanzine, Alternative Ulster; Tom Crossley, another budding guitarist, in London; and also in London, a sixteen-year-old by the name of James Maker, who followed up the publication of Morrissey’s full address in a letter in the summer of 1977 by calling up Directory Enquiries for his phone number and introducing himself.

  Thrilled to encounter what he took to be a kindred spirit, Morrissey invited Maker to come up and stay for the weekend. Maker, who despite his youth had long come to terms with his own homosexuality, dressed for the occasion in a bowler hat and cork-heeled boots, which he considered relatively subtle accessories. Though a product of South London’s tough docklands, around Bermondsey, and familiar with the parade of London punks on the Kings Road in Chelsea (not easily confused with Kings Road in Stretford) that occasionally ended in violent confrontations with reactionary teddy boys, Maker had not figured on the latent aggression and blatant homophobia of the northern cities. Having barely had time to make Morrissey’s acquaintance in the flesh, Maker received a public beating in the middle of Piccadilly Gardens, and after being rescued (somewhat embarrassingly) by an elderly couple, he and Morrissey ran (according to Maker, Morrissey sprinted, his athletic prowess still quite evident) to board any bus that could outpace their attackers. When the driver insisted, with an undue lack of concern for their health, that the pair instead disembark, they took a look at the “seven pairs of tattooed fists” banging against the window, and refused. Maker was impressed by Morrissey’s calm obstinacy—“Arms folded, unbudgeable”—correctly analyzing the behavior that day as another career-forming habit. “Some people advance by fighting and struggling and pushing and scratching; others advance by simply not moving at all,” he noted in his memoir, Autofellatio. (Morrissey won that battle; the bus left with him and Maker on board.)

  United by this experience, their acquaintanceship now blossomed into a beautiful friendship. On trips to London, Morrissey would visit Maker; on one occasion the pair were insistent that they saw flying saucers “hover low and slow over Bermondsey,” only about three hundred feet in front of them, and they reported the sighting to the UFO Society. (“At one point I stood on the balcony and stared directly into one hovering ship, and it STOPPED in mid-air above me,” Morrissey wrote to his friend Lindsay Hutton. “Without a doubt, it was watching me!”) On another occasion, they had their mutual friend Tom Crossley over and “drank ourselves silly and sang Dolls songs (very badly) till the oily hours.” Maker would, despite his initial experience, continue to visit Manchester, even living there for a while himself in 1980; and the first time the Smiths ever stepped onto a stage, Maker stepped onto it with them.

  In early 1977 Slaughter & the Dogs released a single, “Cranked Up Really High,” produced by Martin Hannett, on a local Manchester label set up especially for them, Rabid, only weeks after the Buzzcocks released an EP, Spiral Scratch, also produced by Hannett, on a label they and Richard Boon set up especially for themselves, New Hormones. The titles of the songs on that EP, like “Breakdown” and “Boredom,” initially appeared to be imitating the Sex Pistols’ seemingly nihilistic screed, but they emitted a highly visceral art-rock appeal that immediately distinguished them among Manchester punk bands; as Morrissey astutely noted, they were “the only ones who possibly sat down beforehand and worked out what they intended to do.” In accordance with the values of these new times, Howard Devoto left the band the week the EP came out.

  To the extent that any local record shop sold all the available punk records, from both near and far, and encouraged customers to pin up cards and fliers to find band mates and promote gigs, it was the Virgin Records store on Lever Street. Saturdays in particular, the place became a busy gathering ground. It was there that Phil Fletcher came across Morrissey again and decided this time to introduce himself. (He recalled that Morrissey was wearing a Dolls T-shirt while perusing the New York Dolls section of the store.) Finding him perfectly pleasant to talk with, Fletcher invited Steve Morrissey to join the Wythenshawe crowd at a gig that week at the Electric Circus.

  There were certainly enough shows to choose from. During that summer of 1977, the part-time hard-rock club, way out in Collyhurst, played host to the Clash, the Slits, Wayne County, the Ramones, the Talking Heads, the Buzzcocks, the Jam, Penetration, and the debut gig by the Manchester band Warsaw, later to become Joy Division. Despite recalling pronounced antagonism from the council-estate kids across the road, whom he described as “white working-class mutants of the most deranged cross-eyed variety,” Morrissey attended most of these shows as he did gigs at the Oaks Hotel in Chorlton, Rafters on Oxford Street, and the Squat at the university.5 And he was occasionally seen at the Ranch on Dale Street—a dimly lit, stageless, openly gay basement bar underneath Foo Foo’s Palace that had been popular with the Bowie/Roxy kids in the mid-’70s and which was therefore an obvious venue for the occasional local punk gig.

  As he became a permanent fixture on the scene, and perhaps even despite himself, Morrissey grew tight with the Wythenshawe crowd. “He was quite gentle;
very, very knowledgeable about music,” observed Fletcher. “And because he was a New York Dolls fan, which we didn’t think anyone else in the world was, he was accepted by us.” Morrissey had been close with the hard case Mike Foley back at school, but this new relationship was different: it offered him a chance to mingle with a whole gang of straight, masculine people off the council estates, Billy Duffy among them—people who chased women and rival football fans, people with whom he shared an interest in music but still struggled to form proper friendships. “I don’t think he was the most social animal at that age,” said Fletcher. “He was quite a troubled young lad. Whereas we weren’t.”

  All the same, he saw in this new gang a potential for advancement, and promoted himself as a potential singer. He was invited to “practice” with Duffy and Steve Pomfret at Pomfret’s Wythenshawe home. He additionally answered a “musicians wanted” ad in NME placed by a local sixteen-year-old girl, Quibilah Montsho. And he had the courage to bring them all together in the hope of stirring up something that might have been unique. It didn’t happen, and the friendship with Montsho ended when she wrote and told him she was gay (which would have taken considerable courage in the UK at the time, additionally so given that she was “colored,” which already marked her as a minority), and he responded, in what she described as a “patronizing and sarcastic” manner, by complaining that she hadn’t shown interest in his sexuality.

  His musical persistence finally paid off, however, at the end of 1977, when both the singer Ed Garrity, and guitarist, Vini Reilly, quit Wythenshawe’s second most notorious punk group, Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds, leaving a rhythm section and a well-known local band name for the taking. That Billy Duffy seized one of the vacant spots was hardly surprising—he was a Wythenshawe punk guitarist, after all—but it was a shock to all when Steve Morrissey stepped up to replace Garrity, who tended to pogo relentlessly around the stage, and whose debut single, “Ain’t Bin to No Music School,” laid out a cartoon punk manifesto at total odds with Morrissey’s endless screeds to the music papers about British punk’s frustrating lack of musicianship.6 The process of auditioning for the role, being appointed to it, and then gradually writing some songs alongside Duffy was a slow one, but on May 8, 1978, Morrissey’s dream of fronting a band took flight when the new Nosebleeds opened up for Howard Devoto’s new group, Magazine, and John Cooper Clarke at the Ritz.7

  The show went unrecorded, sadly. The Nosebleeds reportedly covered the Shangri-Las’ “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” in homage to the New York Dolls, plus a song by a Dolls spin-off project, and included Morrissey’s first publicly performed lyrics, among them such unlikely Smiths candidates as “(I Think) I’m Ready for the Electric Chair” and “Toytown Massacre.” Although it would not seem in retrospect like a particular portent of greatness, music journalist Paul Morley, another local whose life had been changed at the Sex Pistols shows, was enthusiastic in the extreme in a concert-review roundup of four Manchester bands in NME. After cautiously citing Joy Division for their “ambiguous appeal,” he put his stock instead in the Nosebleeds, giving them final billing. He referred to Steve Morrison [sic] as “A Front Man With Charisma” and a “minor local legend,” who “is at least aware that rock ’n’ roll is about magic, and inspiration,” before concluding, with the kind of hyperbole by which music journalists secure their reputations: “Only their name can prevent them being this year’s surprise.”8

  That … and the fact that they broke up the following month. It would be more than four years before Morrissey would appear onstage again fronting a band. Ironically, it would be at the same venue, the Ritz. That band, of course, would be the Smiths.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  I was suicidal for years and years. It’s really embarrassing to say that, but it’s the truth. It really got to the point where I was so angry and yet I was really very ambitious and I was prepared to kick very, very hard.

  —Morrissey, City Life, Spring 1984

  This gang of guitar players entered my life, and then I started to feel much more at ease, and those guys gave me a lot of confidence, because it was about whether you could play the guitar, and I had this natural ability that I didn’t realize until then.

  —Johnny Marr, March 2011

  In the wake of the Paris Valentinos, word of Johnny Marr’s improved abilities spread among the Wythenshawe guitarists. He was invited to jam with David Clough one day, and “it was significant,” he recalled. And Robin Allman brought him to see the Freshies front man, Chris Sievey, figuring that Marr was good enough to become the band’s new guitarist, even at the age of fourteen. Sievey didn’t disagree but, wary of the novelty factor, gave the job to another Wythenshawe local, Barry Spencer. Marr had once stood outside that lad’s window, listening to Spencer play Thin Lizzy songs from his bedroom. That he was even moving in such circles was a sign of success.

  “Johnny had something where he was accepted by the older guys because he knew his music,” said Phil Fletcher. “I remember him coming up to me and saying, ‘Can I borrow four or five Rolling Stones albums off you?’ and if any other fourteen-year-old had asked me that I’d probably have hit him. But I said no problem, lent him the albums, and he gave me them back a week later. He was a very engaging lad.”

  Marr continued to crash concerts with these older friends, as in March 1977 at the Free Trade Hall for a Uriah Heep show where both the headliners and support act featured former members of the Spiders from Mars. Also along for the ride that night was Andrew Berry, who attended another Catholic grammar school, St. Gregory’s, and who recognized Marr from preteen evenings at the West Wythy youth club. The pair met again at the Ian Hunter show at the Free Trade Hall in June, when they both showed up at soundcheck hoping to meet Hunter and Bowie guitarist Earl Slick, and this time they truly bonded. At the time, recalled Marr, Berry sported “red Bowie hair, a side parting with a flick, with a cap-sleeve Roxy T-shirt, with pegs,” which made him the very picture of the fashionable soul boy, or what in the 1960s mod culture would have been considered a “face.” As important, said Marr, Berry was “a notorious character and always very likeable.” The friendship the pair formed, like the ones Marr already had going with Rourke and Powell, was set to prove pivotal to the Smiths.

  A week after the Uriah Heep show, the Wythenshawe crowd went to see an increasingly unfashionable T. Rex at the Manchester Apollo, on Ardwick Green, Marr’s old stomping ground. The former cinema had only just started putting itself up as a concert venue, and was to prove so successful in its ambitions that it would soon replace the Free Trade Hall as the major Manchester stop on the tour circuit. Marr considered this ruinous, not only because “the Free Trade Hall was just better,” but because “the Apollo was much more difficult to sneak into.” Teenage loyalties can turn into lifelong grudges, and accordingly, the Smiths never played the Apollo; they did, however, twice play the Free Trade Hall.

  As punk took hold across Manchester, Marr expressed interest in the new British bands (especially local heroes the Buzzcocks), but much like Morrissey, indeed much like Manchester in general, it could be argued, he was always more motivated by music from America. The older Wythenshawe crew turned him on to the New York Dolls, belatedly enough that he could only express his enthusiasm for guitarist Johnny Thunders through Thunders’s new act, the Heartbreakers. (Unlike Morrissey, Marr had long been a fan of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, too, and he hitchhiked to Knebworth in June ’78, where Petty performed in the middle of a typically bizarre festival bill, headlined by Genesis, but which also featured Ohio New Wave futurists Devo.) Billy Duffy, whom Marr considered his “closest ally” and “role model” at the time, additionally tutored him in Iggy Pop and the Stooges, specifically the album Raw Power, and Stooges guitarist James Williamson became yet another major influence. (“Me and my mates were obsessed with the Dolls and Iggy and everything New York circa 1974,” recalled Duffy, who said of himself and Marr that “all we really wanted to be was rock stars really;
it’s the old dream.”) And he was awestruck by Patti Smith. “I was one of those rare people who loved Radio Ethiopia,” Marr said of her generally derided second album. As a result, he put aside his dislike of the Apollo and joined Duffy and Slaughter bassist Howard Bates when Smith came to town in August 1978.

  He subsequently described it as a “life-changing” concert, despite the choice of venue. “It was almost like the stage was a window to another world, a world of real modern rock ’n’ roll, and these people were living it. It was like watching a play. Like ‘I need to be in there; that’s where I belong.’ ” The show should have been additionally notable for marking the first occasion he met his future musical partner—except that nothing came of it. Marr knew of Steve Morrissey as the Dolls and Patti Smith fanatic who had dared to briefly front the Nosebleeds, and perhaps imagined a character of Ed Garrity’s persuasive nature. But when Billy Duffy made the introductions, Marr was disappointed. There was “utter non-interest, disinterest, on Morrissey’s part,” he recalled. And as for his own first impressions, there was merely “a reserved curiosity … because he didn’t look exactly as I’d pictured him.”

  Unintentionally, the Buzzcocks having only pressed up the EP as a souvenir to hand out at gigs, Spiral Scratch started a revolution. Independent labels had always been a part of the British music industry, but with their familiar presence came an assumption, as proven by London pub/punk-rock upstarts Stiff, that they needed financing, a distribution contract, an office, and a staff with some kind of music business experience. New Hormones—which was nothing more than Richard Boon at the end of a phone—disproved this notion entirely. By the time he and the band ceased pressing Spiral Scratch, it had sold 16,000 copies.

  A significant number of these were handled by the London record store Rough Trade, which had been opened on a Ladbroke Grove side street in 1976 by Geoff Travis, a Cambridge University graduate and, more important, an obsessive music fan of no fixed genre. Stocking punk from America, reggae from Jamaica, and Xeroxed fanzines from all across the UK, and encouraging both in-store browsing and politicking, Rough Trade quickly became the London one-stop for underground music fans, with a healthy mail-order business on the side. As the success of Spiral Scratch convinced any number of musicians, producers, hustlers, fellow record-store proprietors, or merely long-standing music fans of reasonable reputation that it was possible to record, press, design, and sell a record without the permission, let alone the patronage, of the mainstream music business, Rough Trade was increasingly looked upon as a, if not the, major source of sales.