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

by Tony Fletcher

  “The vibe was, I am a guitar player and that is what I am going to do for the rest of my life, and she was like, ‘OK, whatever that takes, I will do that with you.’ ” This was not to suggest that Angie lacked for her own personality—her energy and tenacity would often prove crucial to the Smiths’ forward motion—as much as that she and Johnny could afford to share a similar goal because they shared similar music tastes. “From the minute she heard Raw Power, she knew what she liked. She loved David Johansen, Iggy Pop, Jimi Hendrix, and not much else. And the great Stones records. And so it stopped me fucking around too much, musically.”

  Perhaps most tellingly, Johnny and Angie were entirely, completely comfortable in each other’s company. “Those noises I was making on a guitar,” said Marr of the many evenings at home he played around with the shapes of chords both conventional and intuitive, honing his talent in the process, “it wasn’t some lonely kid sat in a bedroom on his own. I was sat there with a very beautiful fifteen-year-old girl, keeping quiet, flicking through magazines and looking at New York Dolls covers, sitting there two feet away listening to me doing it, her in her own world and me in mine.”

  Marr understood the introduction of Brown in his life as a continuum of the close connection he had already with his mother and sister. “My relationships with guys has always been very close but it’s always been about work, and my relationships with women have always been about psychology,” he acknowledged years later. Perhaps because he and Rourke were already set on their musical path, they managed to avoid the usual consequence of a first serious teenage romance—the sacrifice of the best friend. “It was the three of us,” said Marr. “All the time. We were all into the same clothes. The same music.” Rourke concurred: “We were all just really good friends. Every waking hour we’d spend together, the three of us.” Rourke would frequently host the couple over at his family house on Hawthorn Lane, and even lend them his father’s bedroom when needed—an invitation that led to great embarrassment the time Michael Rourke came back early from a business trip and caught Marr running down the stairs wearing his dressing gown.

  Around the middle of ’79, Marr was asked to join the local band Sister Ray. Positioned musically on the fringes between Hawkwind and the Damned, they were, said Marr, “much older, really hardcore guys, just speed freaks,” whose singer, Clive Robertson, had helped garner them a local reputation for the simple fact that he “was crazy.”2 Marr rehearsed with Sister Ray for a couple of weeks in a basement in Whalley Range before taking to the stage with them for his first-ever gig, a relatively prestigious slot opening for the Freshies at the Wythenshawe Forum, which subsequently saw him written up in the local paper. Because of musical, age, and habit differences, he and the band were not meant to be, but Marr was grateful to bank the experience—and an ongoing friendship with the dreadlocked drummer, Bill Anstee.

  The brief dalliance was effectively just a sabbatical from what looked like a more conventional progression into professional music. When the older Wythenshawe guitarists hit the age of eighteen, they largely went their separate ways, some giving up music for regular jobs, others—like Billy Duffy—setting off for London for the big-time. Robin Allman stuck at it on home turf, and Marr and Rourke found themselves sitting in with him and classically trained keyboard player Paul Whittall, practicing multiple-part vocal harmonies and similarly complex picking guitars in the style of Pentangle. The next they knew, they had recruited Bobby Durkin and formed a new band, White Dice.

  Allman’s reputation was without compare in Wythenshawe. Marr called him “about as talented as anyone I ever met.” Whittall said that Allman was “a legend in South Manchester circles” and “widely acknowledged as being a brilliant songwriter.” Rourke, whose home became the practice space, admitted, “We used to look up to Rob,” that he was “more knowledgeable about his music” and “a very talented guy.” Allman’s musical tastes, however, were almost painfully orthodox, and he set White Dice out on a path influenced not only by the familiar figures of Tom Petty, Rory Gallagher, and Neil Young but by English folk group Fairport Convention and their approximate Irish equivalent, the Bothy Band. For Marr and, especially, Rourke, this was not of itself a great problem. They had grown up on many of these acts and were not ready to discard them for the sake of fashion; indeed, Marr was photographed in White Dice imitating Bruce Springsteen on the cover of Born to Run, while wearing a Tom Petty T-shirt. (Allman served as his Clarence Clemons.)

  But as the 1970s came to a close, Marr and Rourke were increasingly taken by the music emerging out of the New Wave, especially given that the concept of musicianship—albeit of a less self-indulgent kind than in the pre-punk era—had returned. Rourke, now using a fretless bass that Marr had picked up “on the cheap,” was naturally intrigued and subsequently influenced by the bass playing of Mick Karn in the group Japan, whose concert at the Manchester Apollo around that time he cited as “one of the most amazing shows ever.” Rourke and Marr went to see the Cure together, twice, and Marr became a fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees, and even more so of the Only Ones, whom he followed religiously. This combination of the incredibly traditional and the highly experimental was, as Rourke admitted, “schizophrenic,” but it was partly because “we didn’t want to follow trends.” Still, in White Dice, they were expected to keep their more modern interests at bay and follow the older bandleader. The result, said Rourke, was a “very American soft rock.”

  It was a perennially popular sound, as demonstrated by the fact that the biggest hit to come out of Manchester in 1979 was not by the Buzzcocks or Joy Division but “Every Day Hurts” by the painfully mainstream group Sad Café. White Dice not only had the same kind of name, they used much the same instrumentation and arrangements. So when, in early 1980, they entered a demo contest hosted by F-Beat Records (started after Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and label chief Jake Riviera peeled away from Stiff Records), for which they crowded around a cassette machine to record a single song complete with four-part harmony, it was perhaps not surprising that Riviera was sufficiently intrigued as to invite them to London to record at Lowe’s home studio. White Dice did their utmost to prepare properly for the opportunity, rehearsing several more songs, for which Marr—despite his general disinterest in a lead vocal role—nonetheless insisted on a coauthorship credit with Allman for his contributions on guitar and arranging.

  The trip to the capital, in April 1980, had its high points. Marr was invited to use Elvis Costello’s Rickenbacker on the session; they all saw Nick Lowe’s wife (and Johnny Cash’s daughter) Carlene Carter in her negligee; they stayed in a hotel; and they reunited with Billy Duffy, who was living what looked like the rock-guitarist dream in a band called Lonesome No More. Six songs were recorded, and although their influences were overly betrayed by a cover of Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” one of the self-composed numbers aroused significant interest from the engineer to focus on it above the others. Still, the demo was ultimately rejected, in a brief phone call to Allman from Riviera. “We didn’t have that spark or edge,” admitted Rourke. “Something was missing.”

  It needn’t have been the end of White Dice—and in the short term, it was not. With the group essentially camped out in the Hawthorn Lane house, Chris Rourke took on a role as publicist, garnering local press and the prospect of gigs. But White Dice’s progress was further constricted both by Rob Allman’s fear of playing live and his tendency to mask that fear with alcohol. Since they were kids, Allman and Duffy had been into Special Brew, a particularly potent canned lager much favored by street tramps and cost-conscious teenage drinkers. Duffy, though, could hold his drink; Allman could not. Two cans, said Whittall, and Allman “was unrecognizable. He was one of those people who shouldn’t probably have gone down that road.”

  This made it all the more frustrating that when White Dice finally played a gig, at the Squat off Oxford Road a full year after forming, Allman got so drunk he could barely stand onstage. White Dice called it a day shortly afterwa
rd, in January 1981. That same month, Allman and Chris Rourke, perhaps predictably, had a fight, and Allman moved out.

  Given Allman’s high regard in Wythenshawe, the fact that he subsequently allowed the success of those around him to become a measure of his own sense of failure was upsetting to his friends. “It was really hard for him, being top dog with all those people, Billy Duffy included,” observed Whittall, who continued playing with Allman for many years to come. “In the South Manchester hierarchy, he was number one, and for Johnny to go ahead and beat him to it was a massive comedown.”

  “It was an unfulfilled life that killed him,” said Marr of Allman, who died in 1993 of a brain hemorrhage. (Marr, Duffy, Whittall, and Pomfret were among the many former Wythenshawe musicians to attend his funeral.) “He was a very clever middle-class kid, with a very, very loving and nurturing family, which, in a way, played a part in his psychology. Me and Billy, we just had to get out and do stuff. But Rob was almost too comfortable to make it, and he wasn’t tough enough. He didn’t have the ‘I will sleep on a couch’ mentality. You need a sense of desperation to put up with a lot of stuff. You do need a certain kind of dissatisfaction.”

  Early on in their friendship, Marr and Rourke had become particularly dissatisfied with St. Augustine’s. The pair frequently ran afoul of the school’s variation on the St. Mary’s strap—in this case a three-pronged leather whip—though one of them more than the other. By the time he was thirteen, Rourke was receiving it almost on a daily basis—“just because I couldn’t hold my tongue.” (Unlike at St. Mary’s, where the number of whips was noted on a student’s conduct card, a St. Augustine’s pupil sent to the headmaster’s office often negotiated his own punishment.) Their interest in schooling had hardly been helped when the then-Labour government finally got its way in abolishing free grammar schools; in 1977 as Marr and Rourke went into their third year, St. Augustine’s was turned into a public high school and renamed St. John Plessington, opening up its doors to what Rourke called “renegades from Wythenshawe and Chorlton.” (Not, of course, that Rourke or Marr were angels.) This in turn led to a massive turnover in teachers. Monsignor McGuiness, who had become “such a drunk,” said Rourke, that “he used to wander around the corridors, banging off the walls,” was let go. But because he was living in a bungalow on the school property, he still made his presence felt—if only by leaning up against the school windows, crying, as Rourke recalled. (McGuiness died in early 1980, shortly before Marr and Rourke left school.)

  As the pair’s musical abilities increased in tandem with their ambitions, and given the regular beatings, the prospect of attending school at all became increasingly unattractive. Rourke’s view was, “Why do I need Latin or geography when I want to be a musician?” For Marr, the people he looked up to and hung out with were already out of school, spending their days working on their musicianship, making contacts and promoting themselves in town; he wanted to do likewise. By their final year, as White Dice looked like it might become a serious proposition, Marr and Rourke were barely going to class at all. Instead, they would meet at the bus stop opposite Marr’s house (two bus journeys in for Rourke already), wait for the Mahers to go to work, then return to Churchstoke Walk and work on their music. Marr had signed up to take music O-Level, but any initial enthusiasm disappeared once he became aware that it was largely about studying theory—which was math, and he hated math. Besides, the music teacher, Adrian Jessett, had served as his and Rourke’s homeroom teacher earlier in their school days, and Marr had come to perceive him as a bully, in which he was not alone; another St. Augustine’s old boy called Jessett “a sadistic opportunist.” Jessett went on to found the acclaimed Manchester Boys Choir but was eventually disgraced after pleading guilty to repeated sexual assault on an underage male chorister. (Pupils from St. Augustine’s had their own memories of being sexually abused by other teachers while at the school.) Teachers aside, Marr was wary of knowing too much about how to make music properly: “I wanted to be someone who learned from playing off records.”

  Steven Morrissey had entered St. Mary’s in 1970; Marr and Rourke officially left St. Augustine’s in 1980. (Mike Joyce attended St. Gregory’s, the same Roman Catholic grammar school as Andrew Berry, from 1974–79.) To the extent, then, that the Smiths represented any British generation, it would be that of the 1970s secondary-school child; religious indoctrination and physical beatings aside, their experiences were akin to those of grammar schools, secondary moderns, and comprehensives in other major cities through the 1970s. Like so many of their age group, they felt betrayed by this system; Morrissey fairly enough called his an “education in reverse.” The sadism and the bullying and the general lack of personal compassion and progressive education had been bad enough, but it was made worse by the knowledge that the economy around them was failing, that the local industry was collapsing, and that the careers that they were once being trained for—the “jobs for life” that previous generations had come to expect—didn’t exist anymore. When Morrissey left school in 1975, inflation was at an astonishing 27 percent, and unemployment at a million. When Marr and Rourke left in 1980, inflation was back down to 10 percent but unemployment was at almost two million and still climbing. Did it make any less sense for them to blindly pursue their interest in music?

  In Marr’s case there had been an alternative. Throughout his early teens, despite the distractions of music, he had maintained his reputation on the football field. At school, he played for the first team. Locally he played for a Sunday team, Brooklands Athletic. Among those he trained with were future England international David Bardsley and Gary Blissett, later of the Wimbledon “Crazy Gang”; it was serious company. As befitted his eventual role in the Smiths and elsewhere, Marr’s skill was as a winger, setting up goals for someone else to score. This was the type of player every team was looking for—and a scout from Whitehill, a feeder team for Manchester City, became a regular touchline presence, followed by one representing Nottingham Forest. At this time Forest was the best club in Europe; under the leadership of the inimitable Brian Clough and his (then) loyal assistant Peter Taylor, they’d won the English League in 1978, and were set to win the European Cup in both ’79 and ’80. The scout came around to Churchstoke Walk after the Brooklands game, telling Johnny’s parents that the boy would be good for a year’s apprenticeship in Nottingham after he left school. But Marr wasn’t interested. His memory of that morning was that “I’d been out at a gig the night before with Andy and Angie, and I still had my eyeliner on. I just wanted to get the game over and done with, so me and Andy and Angie could go back to Andy’s and do what we always did, which was kick back and listen to some records.”

  The attitude appears cavalier but was in fact perfectly calculated. Marr knew how intensely he would have to work at football if he wanted to pursue it; he was perfectly aware that an equally low percentage of apprenticeship footballers made it to the big-time as did amateur musicians. He instinctively grasped that he could not possibly juggle two precarious (and contradictory) careers—and that if he moved away from Manchester right at the point that he was playing in bands with older, more respected musicians, he would be throwing away everything he had worked toward. The choice, for him, was therefore no choice at all. “It was a long, long way from making records,” he said. Besides, “I didn’t really like being around professional footballers.” They were “too macho.”

  In the spring of 1980, then, Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke walked away from St. Augustine’s with, like Morrissey before them, the barest of qualifications. Rourke, as punishment for his constant truancy, had not even been allowed to sit for his exams in the end: “They said ‘These cost the school money and you’re a waste of money.’ I used to go in for my dinner and then go out again.” Determined to get himself a bass amp, he went into manual work at Snap-on Tools, stuck it out for the six or seven months it took to acquire the equipment, and then quit.

  Like Morrissey, however, Marr felt compelled to go back to
school and finish the job. It annoyed him that he had failed his O-Levels in English and art, although not half as much as it frustrated his father, who had come to despair of his son making anything of his life. Ironically, John Maher had moved into promoting live music in his spare time, and had been trying to get his son interested in the process, but the difference between the adult’s country showbands and the teenager’s rock ’n’ roll was as distinct as that between football or music for a career. The younger Marr signed up to West Wythenshawe College of Further Education, in the same building where he had spent so much time at the youth club. He took a drama course, and to his surprise, thoroughly enjoyed it. He made friends with an eager student named Tony O’Connor, who had an interest of his own in the music business. And before he knew it, he was president of the student union. In addition, and just as important, Marr abandoned the local shelf-stocking jobs for those in city-center clothing stores. And in the process, he went from being a Wythenshawe lad to a Manchester townie.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  I am somewhat of a back-bedroom casualty. I spent a great deal of time sitting in the bedroom writing furiously and feeling that I was terribly important and feeling that everything I wrote would go down in the annals of history or whatever. And it’s proved to be quite true.

  —Morrissey, Oxford Road Show, March 1985

  On May 18, 1980, Ian Curtis, the singer for Joy Division, took his life, hanging himself at his house in Macclesfield, just outside Manchester, leaving behind a widowed wife, a fatherless baby daughter, and a distraught band and record company. The shockwaves did not cease there: Curtis’s conscious decision to kill himself, at the age of twenty-three, reverberated all the way through his (post-punk) generation and beyond. Joy Division were on the brink of major success at the time. They had just completed their second album, Closer, and had a new, eminently commercial single, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” scheduled for imminent release; indeed, the group was due to leave for an American tour the very day that Curtis took his life. On the face of it, Curtis had everything to live for.