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

by Tony Fletcher

  So while the Sex Pistols bounced around major labels, and the likes of the Clash, the Jam, and ultimately the Buzzcocks, too, signed on the old-fashioned corporate dotted line, a second generation decided to do it themselves. Most of the acts were lumped together as part of the “New Wave,” but it was evident that something more profound was being created in this world free of major-label manipulation—something that didn’t subscribe to formulas of instrumentation, song structure, or production values; something that often reflected, additionally, the artist’s geographic surroundings. Retroactively, it would come to be known as post-punk.

  In Liverpool, where there was a thriving scene based around the club Eric’s, Bill Drummond launched Zoo Records to promote his band, Big in Japan; he would soon put out the debut records by A Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen. Bob Last started Fast Product, introducing the sharp guitars and equally pointed politics of Leeds bands the Mekons and the Gang of Four, but also the simple synthesizer rhythms and oddball lyrics of Sheffield’s the Human League. In London, a shy, twentysomething film editor by the name of Daniel Miller made a 45 noir, also on synthesizers, under the nom de plume the Normal; set up his own label, Mute Records; and, thanks to the Rough Trade staff’s instinctive ear and eager sales push, saw “TVOD”/“Warm Leatherette” become hugely successful on the independent circuit and massively influential on other bedroom musicians. Belfast’s Terri Hooley launched a label named for his record store, Good Vibrations, to showcase local punk bands. He started with Rudi, as led by Morrissey’s New York Dolls pen pal Brian Young, and came to prominence with a powerfully pop-oriented group from Derry, the Undertones, whose single “Teenage Kicks” was championed with religious fervor by BBC’s Radio 1 late-night DJ John Peel. Eventually Rough Trade itself got in on the act, though at first Travis seemed to have no more of a clear vision for the label than he’d had for his shop, given that initial releases featured both a French and an Irish punk band, a Jamaican reggae act, a Yorkshire electronic outfit, and a maverick London pop group, hugely influential on both Morrissey and Marr, called the Monochrome Set.

  For all this explosion in creativity, the accepted wisdom remained that if a major label came sniffing, the independent would cut the band free or, better yet, license the group to profit from future sales. This was the process by which Manchester’s Rabid Records became temporarily successful, selling off local punk poet John Cooper Clarke to CBS and licensing the highly entertaining eponymous punk single by Jilted John to EMI, who took it into the top 10. Fast let the Gang of Four go to EMI as well; Zoo sold off the Bunnymen and A Teardrop Explodes while staying involved in the management; Good Vibrations sold the Undertones to the American label Sire, whose founder, Seymour Stein, lionized in the UK for signing the Ramones and the Talking Heads, was now making frequent shopping trips to the British Isles; and Rough Trade, despite proving the power of its distribution abilities by taking its first LP, by Stiff Little Fingers, into the top 20, let the Belfast band sign to Chrysalis rather than be seen as holding them back on the more elusive hit single.

  The same philosophy was initially applied by Factory Records, launched in late 1978 by Granada TV’s Tony Wilson with Alan Erasmus, a Wythenshawe fly-by-nighter, and Peter Saville, a talented designer who had been turned on to punk at Manchester Polytechnic by fellow student Linder. Factory’s formation followed several months’ success with a club night of the same name at the Russel Club on Royce Road, in what the posters proclaimed was Moss Side though the location was within pissing distance of the notorious Hulme Crescents. From the beginning, Factory (its name a reference to Manchester’s industrial history rather than that of New York’s Andy Warhol) cultivated an artfully sophisticated and genially pretentious image, awarding catalog numbers to posters, notepaper, movies, and even a menstrual egg-timer designed by Linder. Their first vinyl artifact, A Factory Sample, came wrapped in a Saville-designed, heat-sealed polyethylene sleeve, and featured four acts, the first and foremost of which was Joy Division, whose music had been stripped down in the studio by Martin Hannett to its bare, stark minimum before being built back up around Ian Curtis’s oblique lyrics and urgent delivery. Joy Division wore old-men’s clothes, sported crude haircuts courtesy of an ancient local barber, and were depicted by local lad Kevin Cummins in famous grainy black-and-white NME photographs against a snow-strewn Princess Highway or a dimly lit rehearsal studio. The musical and visual combination made Joy Division the poster children for Manchester’s postindustrial collapse—and not just with those outside the city looking in. “Joy Division were definitive Manchester,” said Johnny Marr. “They sounded like what it was like living up here.”

  Factory soon followed up with a single by another local group, A Certain Ratio, which sounded nothing like its title, “All Night Party,” and one by a Liverpool synthesizer duo, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD for short), which sounded everything likes its title, “Electricity,” and inspired Virgin Records to come knocking in pursuit of a possible hit act. Wilson and partners happily sold OMD to the major label and used the proceeds to set up office on Palatine Road in South Manchester’s bohemian quarter of Didsbury. But when it came to Joy Division, the band’s manager, Rob Gretton, yet another product of the Wythenshawe council estates, suggested that they hold on to the act for themselves. And when the Hannett-produced LP Unknown Pleasures was released in the summer of 1979, both the music, which was as euphorically cathartic as it was (accused of being) dark and depressing, and artwork (an abstract silver astronomic image set small in the middle of black-grained paper) were rightly hailed as art. Best yet, this art found its way to the public: Rough Trade was now acting not only as a major retailer of the new independent music but as a wholesaler, supplying other, similarly-minded record stores. A new independent distribution network was growing by the day.

  With it came a new, intentionally unrestrictive framework. Rough Trade kept its initial contracts to two paragraphs, Factory to two sentences; Mute did not even bother. At all three labels, royalties were eschewed in favor of a 50–50 profit split. With the acts effectively free agents, and the labels recognizing one another as comrades-in-arms, there was considerable overlap: Rough Trade and Factory both released records by Sheffield’s experimental electronic act Cabaret Voltaire, while Fast Products got an early look-in on Joy Division. Gradually, though, each of the independent labels created its own identity and accompanying philosophy. Rough Trade was the anything-goes, left-wing London collective. Mute became known as an electronic music label. As for Factory, it followed Unknown Pleasures with further local releases by the Distractions, Section 25, and former Nosebleeds guitarist Vini Reilly’s new band, Durutti Column, but the label’s genuine musical diversity was obfuscated by Saville’s sleeve designs, which shunned pictures of the acts themselves in the name of art. The Buzzcocks had employed a similar tactic on a series of five romantic 45s that became a national teenage soundtrack in 1978, eventually leading them into the top 30, but those sleeves, designed by Malcolm Garrett (also a product of Manchester Poly), were (pop) artfully simplistic, to match the punk-pop (art) of the music. Besides, the band compensated by featuring themselves prominently on the album sleeves. The music on Factory was none so radio friendly, the designs that much more obtuse, and the album artwork no more likely to feature band photos than the singles. As the label grew more visible, it became apparent that Factory was being perceived across the country as “representing” Manchester in a particularly stylized fashion—for better, in as much as it made the city a focal point, or, as Factory’s influence grew and threatened to overshadow anything else happening on the scene, for worse.

  Steve Morrissey was almost nineteen when he performed with the Nosebleeds, the same age as Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce would be once the Smiths started gigging at the end of 1982. To a large extent, Morrissey’s personality was formed already. Had he made it as a front man at that point in his life, it would not necessarily have been a surprise to those on the
scene, nor would it have been unduly premature. What was lacking, though, in terms of completing his package, was the subsequent four years of his life before he met Johnny Marr (again): four years of frustration and desperation that would further create the unique, singularly named Morrissey, the character who would prove so attractive (in so many ways) to myriad teenagers and young adults who were going through (or had occasionally emerged from) similarly disastrous periods of their lives. Without becoming a failure, in effect, Morrissey could never have become a success.

  From one perspective, it was indeed a disastrous period. As a prominent example, he followed his short-lived, positively reviewed engagement with the Nosebleeds with an even shorter liaison in a similarly disintegrating Slaughter & the Dogs, whose Wayne Barrett had left behind the drudgery of his Wythenshawe council estate upbringing for a Parisian wife. Billy Duffy recommended Morrissey for the vocalist role, and he passed an audition with the band—but not with the record company on a sojourn to London. When the group renamed themselves the Studio Sweethearts and moved south, Duffy went with them; Morrissey was left behind.1

  Increasingly desperate to find a way into the thriving Manchester music scene, and no longer certain that it would be as a singer, he started associating with A Certain Ratio, whose interest in 1970s German “kraut rock” and funk initially suggested that it would set them apart from other Manchester bands. Morrissey helped out in something of a managerial capacity, which at this early point consisted of little more than collecting their gig money (though as with Slaughter & the Dogs, he wrote about them quite generously in The Next Big Thing). But somewhere along the way, his relationship with the singer Simon Topping unraveled, over misinterpreted approaches, forcing Morrissey to write a nakedly—and painfully—honest letter, explaining that he was essentially nonsexual and that he chose his friends based on their personality alone. Though the sense of hurt was evident, so too was his capacity for humor, the acute balance between dark and light that would distinguish Morrissey as a lyricist, and he joked that he would be willing to discuss female anatomy with Topping in the hope of saving their friendship.

  The appeal did not work, and given the general lack of forward motion in Morrissey’s life, it may have seemed like time to leave Manchester behind entirely. Steven certainly thought so; in the summer of 1978, he wrote to tell a friend that in September he would be going to live in New York. His mother thought so too, and as preparation for what was touted as a brand-new start for the family in America, shepherded Steven and Jackie Morrissey off—not to New York but instead to Arvada, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, at the beginning of November, where they were to live with Betty’s sister Mary. Jackie quickly got herself a job there; Steve did not, complaining instead, in a letter back home, “It’s dead here. Everyone walks like John Wayne, so starch and masculinist. I wore a pink tie and everyone thought I was a transvestite.” Rather than taking comfort in American music, he was evidently homesick for the British New Wave, noting that the latest singles by the Jam, X-Ray Spex, and Public Image Ltd made his life worth living. It might not have been unrelated to his newly noted fondness for these London New Wave acts that he talked wistfully about moving to the British capital the following January. But when the New Year came around, he returned instead to the familiar, if cold, comforts of Kings Road, Stretford. Jackie stayed on in Colorado for the time being, but emigration for Steven was taken off the table.

  They were dark days all around. A week before this letter, the political pendulum in Britain had swung once more to the right. Following what was termed the “winter of discontent”—crippling strikes in both the public and private sectors as the Trade Unions sought and won pay increases far beyond a government-imposed 5 percent limitation, all while Britain endured its worst weather in sixteen years—Margaret Thatcher swept into Downing Street as the new Conservative (and Britain’s first female) prime minister. She did so largely due to public frustration at Labour’s inability to control the unions, but also on the back of a brilliantly simple campaign image: that of an unemployment line stretching off into the distance under the slogan “Labour Isn’t Working.” It was true that unemployment had reached 1,500,000 (out of a 50,000,000 population) by the time of her election. But it was equally true that this figure would double during her first period in office, to levels not seen since the Great Depression, as her unapologetically hardline program of closing down loss-making factories and shipyards, privatizing other state-owned industries, lowering taxes on the rich, and enacting laws to curb union powers, saw Britain enter a deep recession in which millions lost their jobs, with replacement work of any lasting value almost impossible to find. To those who came from a working Labour background—which included most residents of the industrial northern cities like Manchester—Thatcher’s policies looked suspiciously like class war.

  The same month Thatcher was elected, Morrissey endured an especially unhappy birthday. Understandably, he had “found the prospect of turning twenty alarming … I hadn’t a clue what was going to happen.” He tried to stave off the pending crisis with a two-week spate of movies on television, but it didn’t help. “When I’d go to bed at night I’d have terrible palpitations because I was so worried. I’d wake up at three o’clock and begin to pace the bedroom.” Other than his enthusiastic embrace of American psychobillies the Cramps, the rest of the year fairly passed him by. Around him, and despite—or quite arguably because of—Manchester’s economy ruination, Factory Records was booming, Joy Division and the Fall were on the John Peel show almost every night, Tony Wilson was managing A Certain Ratio, Paul Morley was a permanent fixture at NME, and the Buzzcocks had released their third album in eighteen months. Steven Morrissey, meanwhile, had yet to get started. He rang in the 1980s at home, curled up with a copy of Pride and Prejudice.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Back then you couldn’t go to university to do media studies or learn how to be in a band, like you can now, you had to just go and do it.

  —Johnny Marr, 2011

  On a Friday afternoon in early 1979, in the midst of the “Winter of Discontent,” with the mercury stuck at freezing, the snow deeper on the ground than it had been in sixteen years and the bus drivers on strike, Johnny Marr set off on foot to the part-time job he had landed for himself stacking shelves at a local Co-operative supermarket, deep in the heart of Wythenshawe. When he got there, he was informed that he was being sacked, “for being lazy and cocky and distracted” as he presumed after the event. This was bad enough, but the Co-operative workers had a ceremony for employees who were fired: “At the end of that shift you had to go out the loading bay and you were greeted by all the adults with an endless supply of complimentary eggs. Literally. Pallets and pallets. And you’re stuck like a trapped animal in the loading bay. And all the adults who think ‘This lad’s had it coming’ start pelting you.”

  Within minutes, Marr had been turned into “a human omelet.” As he set off on the long walk back through Wythenshawe, he realized he couldn’t possibly make it the whole way home, let alone explain himself when he got in; he stopped off at a Brookway friend’s house instead. That friend, Danny Patton, told Johnny about a house party that was taking place that same evening, that there would be “a load of beautiful girls going.” Marr took a shower, borrowed a shirt and a jacket off Patton (“luckily, he had good dress sense”) and accompanied his friend to the party. As soon as he walked in, a certain girl caught his eye. Her name was Angela Brown, a third-year pupil at Brookway who had been born, by coincidence, precisely one year to the day after Johnny. She was petite, like him, with brown eyes and a lively smile, and as far as Johnny was concerned, “from the first minute I saw her I wanted to be with her all my life.”

  He got his wish. “She made me chase her around for six weeks while everybody observed it, which was her prerogative—quite rightly. And I completely complied. We started dating and I never let her out of my sight.” The Browns were more middle-class than the Mahers, which c
aused some initial problems with her protective brothers, and she was a vegetarian, which appeared alien to the Maher household. But under Johnny’s influence, her dress sense quickly gave way to classic-rock chic, the pair of them developing a mutual fondness for the eyeliner beloved by ’60s mods and modettes—and 1970s Keith Richards. Before long, they were seen—inseparably—as a pair.1

  Marr was never in any doubt as to his good fortune: “Her joints would knock you sideways like nothing else and in some people’s eyes, that’s why they had plenty of time for me, because I was with such an amazing person.” But that was only one reason to be grateful. As he and Angie settled into a permanent relationship, Johnny realized that “the thing that takes up a lot of teenage boys’ time—i.e., their hormones and trying to get a partner—was taken care of for me.” Having barely broken his stride in acquiring the love of his life, he could resume his musical ambitions—and without distractions, because Angie supported him every step of the way.