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

by Tony Fletcher

  There can be little doubt, given its subsequent longevity, that “Love Will Tear Us Apart” would have been some sort of a hit regardless, but in the wake of Curtis’s suicide, with media attention and radio airplay inspiring mass consumer sympathy, it became that much more of a hit, rising high into the British top 20 in July, matched then by the instant top 10 success of Closer. The record sales and chart positions provided bittersweet success for Factory and its main distributor, Rough Trade, satisfaction about market penetration dampened at record company meetings by the knowledge that they had on their hands a dead star. The surviving members of Joy Division decided to keep going under a different name, eventually recruiting drummer Stephen Morris’s girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on keyboards, and with Bernard Sumner taking lead vocals, returning as New Order. They had known, amongst themselves, that Curtis suffered from epilepsy and that he was on a heavy cocktail of prescription pills, some of which seemed to be messing with his moods, but as working-class lads brought up in a culture that encouraged the masking of personal health problems, and which generally ignored psychiatric issues entirely, they had lacked the tools to recognize, let alone deal with, Curtis’s suicidal tendency. The decision to continue as a band, they later admitted, was as much an act of anger as the change of name was one of professional courtesy.

  Curiously, the death of Ian Curtis appeared not to have any effect on the life of Steven Morrissey; neither the music nor the personalities of Joy Division seemed to touch him at all. This was odd, not only because the group was so highly regarded within Manchester and beyond, and not just because Morrissey moved in Factory’s circles but because Ian Curtis actually carried out Morrissey’s long-standing threat: he took his life somewhere that Morrissey, for all that he talked so relentlessly about suicide, could only contemplate from a distance.

  There was one regard in which Curtis’s suicide impressed very deeply on the future Morrissey, however: the association it created with Manchester as a city so miserable and depressing that a talented young singer and lyricist with a happening young band would sooner kill himself than embrace the possibility of becoming a pop star. That was Ian Curtis’s legacy; Morrissey was determined it should not be his own.

  The way Morrissey subsequently talked about them, his lost years were a permanent period of introspection, solitude, and soul-searching, marked by only the occasional glimmer of companionship or prospect of fulfillment. “It is difficult to describe how really insular I was,” he said in one of many references to this period. “Especially when I was twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three … I was entirely on my own. The very idea of me becoming what I have become was unthinkable. I found life unbearable at times.” Certainly, by the point at which Johnny Marr knocked on his door and “rescued” him, Morrissey had drifted sufficiently far from a continually moving Manchester music scene that he had been largely written off as part of even by those who genuinely liked him. Yet the sorry picture that he has painted of himself is at stark odds with the character who formed positive, active relationships with men and women alike, who continued to attend gigs on a regular basis, and who promoted himself, almost relentlessly, as a writer of merit.

  The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive. The nature of many people who suffer from depression is that they can maintain what appears, on the surface, an active social life. In this regard, Morrissey’s behavior was near enough textbook. When his mood was positive, he came across to his friends, including his pen pals, as the witty, sociable, occasionally catty but ultimately rewarding companion they knew he could be. When life got him down, he retreated to his room on Kings Road, drew the curtains, likely sought prescriptions, and hid from the world at large.1

  The downside explained the limitations to the upside. Morrissey had long tried all the obvious steps to get a band going—placing ads in music papers, responding to ads in music papers, suggesting himself to people he met at gigs, attending auditions, and even standing onstage. But he did not have the kind of resilience to find, corral, and motivate the right band members for himself, to scare up equipment, secure a manager, book rehearsals, and find gigs. For the same reasons, he lacked the personality to manage a band (as his negative experience with A Certain Ratio revealed) or start a label, which required all the above plus a degree in bullshitting and putting up with other people’s foibles. An incessant writer, his inability to publish his proposed New York Dolls book-zine demonstrated why he never got around to the obvious project for someone of such firm opinions, starting a fully-fledged fanzine. Though he could write (very well), type, and even lay it all out, he wasn’t willing to part with the cash and endure the process of selling it into stores. He far preferred to find a paying patron for his literary talents.

  The leading music papers did not welcome his appeals for employment. There was a separation of church and state between those who dictated what was hip and those who harangued the editorial pages to disagree, and Steven Morrissey had made enough of a nuisance of himself over the years for free that they were not predisposed to let him do so for money. Besides, the three major weeklies had all hired Manchester correspondents once it became apparent that it might be the second city of (post-)punk, back when Steve Morrissey still imagined himself as a singer. At one point, a staffer at NME even put the phone down on him mid-pitch.

  He was left with Record Mirror, the smallest of the four weeklies in both circulation and credibility; in 1976, in a letter to the paper promoting his usual American idols, Morrissey had criticized its “housewife image.” But in early 1980, with no other offers on the table, he accepted a humble role as its Manchester concert reviewer, the traditional point of entry into music journalism. Like any writer dealing with the realities of a paying gig for the first time, Morrissey fumed at his editors. “They chop and change all my reviews, making me look trite and basic,” he complained. But the imposition of a deadline, a specific word count, and whatever editing took place in fact proved invigorating. Over eighteen months of sporadic concert reviews, his writing grew ever sharper and wittier. Of Wasted Youth, a London glam rock band with overly obvious influences, he wrote, with Wildean precision: “The bassist appears from underneath what appears to be an abandoned ostrich’s nest.… The fab guitarist offers furtive sneers, and so would you if you had to apply your foundation with a shovel.…” And of his former idol Iggy Pop, he wrote that he “looks as fearsome as a well-laundered Klondike Annie.… One would imagine that the next step for him would be the Golden Garter or, better still, retirement.”

  The British music press has always been famously incestuous—as if, this being rock ’n’ roll, the usual rules regarding professional conflicts and personal objectivity don’t apply.2 And so, as he had with his writings for various fanzines, Morrissey did not think twice about championing the bands he was already a fan or a friend of. He gave Billy Duffy’s Lonesome No More an almost hysterically glowing appraisal as opening act for Wasted Youth. He referred to the Cramps as “the most important American export since the New York Dolls,” neglecting to mention that he was in the midst of setting up their British fan club, Legion of the Cramped, with The Next Big Thing editor Lindsay Hutton, who had turned him onto the band in the first place. (He was so excited about it that he placed ads in Sounds before the club was properly organized, which resulted in letters complaining about a certain Steven Morrissey of Kings Road running off with the fans’ money.) And he was positively relentless in trying to promote his best female friend.

  Following her historic Orgasm Addict design, Linder had gone on to publish a provocative fanzine full of equally controversial (and in the eyes of those who did not understand art, equally pornographic) photocollages, The Secret Public, alongside writer Jon Savage; she had designed the album cover for Magazine’s debut, Real Life; and she had formed the band Ludus, which she fronted as its only female member, taking to the Manchester live scene (and beyond) with a vengeance. If not quite famous, per se, Linder was certainly “a name.” Morrissey, by compar
ison, having played just the one or two gigs with the Nosebleeds, was otherwise anonymous.3 And yet the pair had nonetheless found themselves mutually compatible. “Linder seemed to know something that I knew,” Morrissey wrote of their budding friendship in Manchester’s post-punk years. “We both spoke in cinematic language, and we both somehow knew that our own presence on earth was trouble enough for those around us.” Linder, who shared Morrissey’s dry humor, has noted that what they most had in common was that each was “totally unemployable.” (Linder insisted on living by her art. Morrissey continued to take short-term jobs, including, in 1980, a stint as a porter at the hospital where his father now worked—and this despite their apparent estrangement.)

  Determined to grab the new decade by the horns, in early 1980 Morrissey moved into Linder’s house at 35 Mayfield Road, adding to the eventual rumor that they were a couple. In fact, Morrissey’s “rented room in Whalley Range,” as he was to immortally describe it, was in Magazine guitarist Barry Adamson’s former flat; Linder—indeed, pretty much everyone in Ludus—lived above him. All the same, the house had the bohemian air of a salon: “It’s a oasis of culture and free expression (in other words it’s a dump but the rent is low),” he wrote a friend. Morrissey was evidently infatuated with Linder as the complete package of brains and beauty—“I did not know or hear anyone at all across human civilization who was like Linder,” he later admitted—and in an interview conducted by Morrissey himself for Interview magazine in 2010, Linder waxed equally lyrical about their early friendship: “The currency of ideas in the houses I shared—as you well know, given you were there—was, in retrospect, the most memorable education in intellectual imagination. Not that anyone would use those terms, but you and Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley and others were so very, very smart. All finding different ways of saying, ‘Yes, but.…’ It had less to do with talent than with genius—musicians and singers, but with the minds and eyes of novelists. Nowadays, boys with enormous … record collections describe me as the ‘muse’ to this circle in Manchester. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.… But you were my muses too.”

  Away from the other central figures on this scene, Linder and Morrissey developed their devotion on long walks, Morrissey’s preferred way to see the sights while simultaneously escaping from the world. Their visits to Southern Cemetery in Chorlton have become particularly legendary due to the song “Cemetry Gates,” but the graveyards were far from their only destinations and distractions. “We’d go wandering in Moss Side,” recalled Linder. “Hours and days wandering, just the two of us together, but very alone at the same time, extremely intimate but very separate.”

  Other than walking and talking, said Linder, “we used to read obsessively, devouring book after book after book. It was a very essential ingredient in our lives.” Specifically, “most of the books we read were by women, or about women.” This continual process of reading and talking (and walking) with such a strong feminist figure led Morrissey toward the concept of a “fourth sex” that he would promote, once the Smiths got going, as part explanation for his proffered celibacy. In the meantime, however, Linder had her band, Ludus, and by 1980 they had started releasing records—on New Hormones, the label formerly associated with the Buzzcocks and now being run out of an office just off Manchester’s Piccadilly by Richard Boon alongside band manager Peter Wright.

  Ludus were not exactly commercial: Linder’s lyrics took poetic license with traditional rhythmic formula, and the band’s music was largely asymmetrical in response. When the two threads threatened to go off in entirely separate directions, she might scream or offer something very close to a yodel to mask the rip in the musical fabric. Songs were uneven in length, and titles like “Anatomy Is Not Destiny” were clearly not designed for the daytime airwaves. (And yes, in all these regards, Linder’s Ludus served as a blueprint for Morrissey’s Smiths.) But in an era of thriving post-punk experimentation, Ludus fitted in perfectly alongside the like minds of London’s Slits and Raincoats, Leeds’ Delta 5, and Birmingham’s Au Pairs—all of them female-fronted/dominated groups releasing sexually political records on independent left-leaning labels. (Morrissey, not surprisingly, was a fan of Au Pairs, and DJ’d a gig for Delta 5, bringing along his Sandie Shaw records alongside those of Ludus.) But whether it was the good-natured disorganization of New Hormones or, as Boon claimed, Linder’s conscious resistance to popularity, her band never quite took off. Morrissey did his best to rectify this, reviewing them in Record Mirror not once, but twice.

  The second of those occasions, a gig at which Ludus opened for Depeche Mode, turned out to be his final paid review. Neglecting to mention that he had lived with Ludus, written their most recent press release, asked New Hormones to send him to New York with the group, and, in fact, operated the lights for them at this particular show, he wrote instead how “their music offers everything to everyone.” (Admittedly, he also noted that “Ludus like to wallow in other people’s depravity.”) Of course, as a pop magazine, Record Mirror was none so interested in Ludus as Depeche Mode. And Morrissey, not yet knowing that in a little over a year he would be leading a musical charge against the headlining band’s form of synth-pop (and that a couple of years after that, they would share thousands of the same fans in America), manned the barricades for the time being from the critics’ perspective. “They resurrect every murderously monotonous cliché ever known to man,” he wrote, assailing their top 20 hit single “New Life” as “nothing more than a bland jelly-baby.”

  He had a point in that Depeche Mode’s early music revealed an old-fashioned pop sensibility wrapped in the sort of synthesizer bubblegum that veterans like Morrissey had grown out of around the time of Chicory Tip. But he also missed the point. For although Depeche Mode were poster boys for a new “futurist” movement of synthesizer-favoring club-goers, they were also the inevitable result of the past three years of post-punk freedom, the love child of a musical orgy between (Rough Trade/​Factory/​Mute/​Fast Products darlings) Cabaret Voltaire, the Human League, OMD, and the Normal. A self-functioning young group, much the same age as Morrissey and, like him, former Bowie and Roxy kids, they exhibited a do-it-yourself attitude; had a genuinely talented songwriter in Vince Clarke; and had been picked up by a proper independent label, Mute Records. And when, just a month after Morrissey’s scathing but ultimately irrelevant review, they hit the top 10 with “Just Can’t Get Enough,” it marked a further triumph for that label and its distributors, Rough Trade. As a revamped Human League, now signed to Virgin, swept the nation that Christmas with the omnipresent “Don’t You Want Me,” and in a year that saw other independent label discoveries OMD and Soft Cell also scale the high peaks of the charts, the success of Depeche Mode—who remained loyal to Miller and Mute despite the allure of multimillion-pound advances—proved, without doubt, that the independent network could rival that of the major labels, and on a minuscule budget. The fact that it proved as much with a group who made guitars and drums look positively arcane seemed, at the time, just part of the apparent flow of history.

  In October 1980, word emerged from Palatine Road that Factory was considering a publishing imprint, which made sense, given that Tony Wilson had studied literature at Cambridge and was vocal about his desire to maintain Factory as something other than a mere record label. In the end, nothing came of the idea, but Morrissey took up the rumor as an invitation to greatness. Before the announcement about Factory Books even hit the music papers, he was telling friends that they were publishing a play of his. Whatever assurances he might have been given by Tony Wilson to that effect turned out to be empty promises. After another lengthy sojourn to the States—Christmas 1980 in Colorado, and several weeks of the New Year on the East Coast in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York, where he fell in love this time with the vast secondhand bookstores and the fact that they were open on Sunday, something that was, quite literally, sacrilegious at the time in Britain—he returned home eager to know the play’s presumed good fortune. A letter to Wilson i
n March brought no response; in April, he wrote again, in what was now becoming his familiar, slightly spidery noncursive handwriting: “I feel it my juristic duty to remind you of my little play. Is it still to be printed?”

  The lack of response should have convinced Morrissey that it was not, but he found he could not let the matter lie. In fact, what he perceived as Wilson’s cold shoulder (which, as Morrissey would find out soon enough in the Smiths, was more the result of being overwhelmed by success) provoked him, two months later, to the typewriter for a more officious letter, “concerning that little bit of hearth-fire hokum, my play. I wish you’d let me know what you’re doing with it. But you won’t.” Undeterred by this, and that Wilson had not returned the script either, he embarked on a separate plea on behalf of his friends in Ludus; the fact that they were already signed to New Hormones and that Wilson was not likely to steal a band off his friend Richard Boon, appeared not to have occurred to him. He then followed with a further idea, suggesting that he viewed Tony Wilson’s Factory as duty-bound to emulate the multimedia world of Andy Warhol’s 1960s New York–based Factory: Wilson, he said, should find a theater, create actors, and perform Morrissey’s admittedly plotless plays. Though he was well-mannered and typically funny in his writing, Morrissey concluded with what could easily be construed as a challenge or provocation, using a line he would later work into his lyrics, that “I will write to you weekly until you either decide to speak to me, or spit right in my eye.” It appeared to be his last correspondence on the issue.