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

by Tony Fletcher

  In the meantime, he and Angie took a Saturday job at Aladdin’s Cave in the infamous Arndale Center (the largest indoor shopping center in Europe, and arguably the ugliest as well; no surprise that it was designed by the same architects as Hulme Crescents). What started out as “a dodgy Goth shop”—a reference to the music and fashion movement that had its roots in post-punk Yorkshire—mutated into something more London-centric as the young couple began taking journeys down to Johnson’s, the trend-setting rock ’n’ roll store on London’s Kings Road—where, not coincidentally, Billy Duffy was now working behind the counter. Under its own name Johnson’s was the modernist store of choice for the likes of the Jam and the Pretenders; a second label, the more retro La Rocka, was worn by the Stray Cats, Iggy Pop, and financially flush followers of a booming rockabilly revival. (This was, after all, the peak period of British youth style, with more fashion movements and revivals competing for teenage savings than probably at any point in history.) Johnny and Angie were careful, however, not to become the distinctive store’s fashion victims; “on the train on the way up” to Manchester, stressed Marr, the look “got translated” into something more regional and personal.

  Angie went on to work as receptionist and hair model at the salon Vidal Sassoon in the city center (a poster of her was soon hanging in the store window), and Marr “got poached” by the store Stolen from Ivor, where he joined his schoolmate, the Bowie/Roxy fanatic Phil Powell. Stolen from Ivor had enjoyed an impeccable reputation in the ’70s for outfitting football fans in their Oxford bags and star jumpers, as preferred by a prepubescent Johnny Marr. But football fashions were moving on again, with the Liverpool “soul boys” and Manchester “Perry Boys” set to inspire a nationwide “casuals” movement that placed high value on high-street fashion. Stolen from Ivor could not compete with the likes of Top Man; the owner took to sending Johnny and Angie to London instead, providing them with a blank check to buy clothes he told them he would resell. Lloyd Johnson took a liking to what he called the “two little lovebirds,” and began gifting them their outfits—something not even most of his rock-star customers could expect. Once it became apparent that Stolen from Ivor “started to copy” Johnson’s fashions, according to Marr, he and Brown kept the free clothes for themselves and used the owner’s checkbook to buy “crap.” And when Marr heard that a more reputable chain of street clothing from Yorkshire, X-Clothes, was opening up a Manchester store on Chapel Walks, he went for an interview and talked himself into a job.

  As with the other staff, he was hired more for his own sense of style than any ability to fold clothes. The employee sent over from the store’s Sheffield headquarters, for example, brought with him a Yorkshire Goth’s interest in Clock DVA, Fad Gadget, and the Banshees, while the local assistant manager was into more esoteric indie music like the Fall and Australia’s Birthday Party. They were all listening to the sounds coming out of Liverpool, where Echo & the Bunnymen in particular were proving that a northern rock band could develop a nationwide cult following centered on psychedelic guitar music and a charismatic lead singer. Then there was the new label from Edinburgh, Postcard, whose marquee acts Orange Juice, Josef K, and Aztec Camera suggested that pop, if approached with sufficient élan, need not be a swear word. The Americans, meanwhile, continued to prove that they did dirty rock ’n’ roll—from the Cramps to the Gun Club—better than anyone. It was, in short, a fascinating and fertile period for music, regardless of the gradual domination of the charts by synth-pop acts.

  The band that Marr and Andy Rourke set about forming, however, now that White Dice had bit the dust, ignored most of these influences and aimed instead straight for the dance floor. In such a transformation they were hardly alone. Of the punk heavyweights, the Clash had gone off in a dozen different directions of groove on London Calling and Sandinista!, while the Jam were doing their level best to follow suit, and Johnny Rotten’s post–Sex Pistols band, Public Image Ltd, had similarly immersed itself in the rhythms of the dance floor with “Death Disco” and the album Metal Box. The migration was apparent too, across the Factory stable, with New Order, A Certain Ratio, and Blackpool’s Section 25 all placing increasing faith in programmed rhythms and 12″ mixes. And it was reflected in the (newly established) independent charts, where probably the biggest record of 1981 was “Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag,” a wild, James Brown–influenced 12″ instrumental by a band called Pigbag that had splintered off from the once-uncompromising Pop Group.1

  As teenagers fresh out of school, with a wage packet in their pockets, Marr and Brown, often with Rourke in tow, were frequently to be found in 1981 dancing the night away at Legends disco in the town center. They were soon joined by their new drummer, “Funky” Si Wolstencroft. He and Rourke had met at a pub in Sale; invited back to Wolstencroft’s house after closing time with the familiar explanation that the host’s parents were out of town, Rourke had been followed by several dozen “party-crashers” who trashed the place.2 The bass player stuck around to help clean up in the morning, and a friendship was formed. He and Wolstencroft bonded musically, too, over their enthusiasm for a thriving British jazz-funk scene that included the acts Light of the World and Central Line but was most specifically focused on the band Level 42, whose front man, Mark King, played bass at considerable speed (and height). Catering to a section of the working class often disparaged as the “Ford Cortina crowd,” Level 42 managed to divide the British public in the early 1980s almost as much as the Smiths would just a couple of years later. Johnny Marr, certainly, was not part of that band’s demographic, but the guitarist’s own devotion to the dance floor saw him readily embrace the new rhythm section’s love of slap bass, syncopated rhythms, and pervasive hi-hat.

  Freak Party, as the trio called themselves, secured a rehearsal space at Decibelle Studios, a former cotton mill on Jersey Street, in the heart of Industrial-era Ancoats, where they auditioned on an ongoing basis for a singer.3 Yet the longer they played without one, the more complete—and complex—became their sound, and therefore the harder for a would-be vocalist to pitch himself over it. (It can’t have helped that they frequently set Public Image Ltd’s “Flowers of Romance” as an audition track.) Undeterred, at the end of 1981, and unbeknownst to the studio’s owner, Marr recruited Decibelle’s resident engineer, Dale Hibbert, to record two instrumentals live to tape.4

  Wolstencroft believed that Freak Party was aspiring toward the music of ABC. (A former lo-fi electronic act from Sheffield now fronted by Stockport’s own Martin Fry, ABC’s flaunting of gold lamé suits, along with their übercommercial producer, Trevor Horn, made them arguably the archetype of what was fast becoming the new decade’s commercial shift from post-punk monochrome to preprogrammed color.) The reality was less polished: one of the demo tracks had Marr providing a slashing rhythmic guitar not unlike that of the Gang of Four; the other sounded like the Jam covering Pigbag.5 Throughout, Rourke and Wolstencroft held down the sophisticated rhythms with impeccable precision; that the overall sound was representative of what was then a prevailing Manchester mind-set can be demonstrated by the fact that Tony Wilson himself showed up at X-Clothes one day and invited Marr to join Section 25, whose guitarist had left suddenly due to fear of flying, jeopardizing their European tour with New Order in the process. Section 25 encapsulated Marr’s varied tastes in modern music as well as any northern act, but they were based in Blackpool, fifty miles away, and Marr was determined to no longer play second fiddle (or hired guitarist) in any one else’s band.

  Indeed, Wolstencroft noted how, throughout this period, and regardless of their shared love of dance music, “Johnny was total guitar mad, always had a guitar, always looked cool, always dressed like a rock star, talked, acted like one.” Through his clothing-store earnings, and his connections in town—he was bringing his friends’ business to one of the leading instrument stores—he had even acquired a secondhand Gibson Les Paul, the guitar of choice for Johnny Thunders, among others. He was at Decibelle one evening, rehe
arsing with Freak Party, playing that Les Paul through his equally beloved Fender Twin Reverb amp, when the door was kicked down and four policemen rushed in; they identified Marr, threw him against a wall, handcuffed him, and arrested him. It was perhaps indicative of his personality during this period that he could claim, “I didn’t know what for at the time; it could have been anything.”

  It turned out to be for something very serious. Marr’s reputation as someone who knew everyone had seen him pestered by a Saturday workmate to find a “fence” who would buy some art—sketches that had been stolen from their display at a local restaurant. They just happened to be by L. S. Lowry, Manchester and Salford’s most renowned artist. If Marr’s instinct had been to not get involved (especially because his landlady happened to be Lowry’s biographer), his personality as a compulsive Mr. Fix-It found him eventually suggesting to the thief an introductory visit to his local pot dealer. Though Marr stressed that he wanted no further part of any transaction, including profits, he had consciously interjected himself into a criminal enterprise—and it had now caught up with him.

  The case came before magistrates’ court, and the prognosis was not positive. On the eve of his appearance, he recalled, “I said good-bye to Angie and good-bye to Andy. And I had people telling me that they knew people who would keep an eye out for me [in prison]. I was told that I wouldn’t be seeing my girlfriend or my guitar for six, eight months. It was terrifying.” In court, custodial sentences were handed down to everyone involved in the case except, said Marr, for himself. “The judge … just sentenced me to embarrassment and stupidity.” He was saved, as he understood it, because “I had done it without trying to make anything from it, I was just trying to get this guy off my back.” It was both a close escape and a valuable lesson; while Marr had relished his reputation as a lad about town, he had no interest in becoming the sort of “wide boy” whose petty crimes led to a lifetime of increasing jail sentences.

  Ironically, it was for another form of criminal behavior that Freak Party eventually disbanded. With the father rarely at home, the Rourke household on Hawthorn Lane had been steadily descending into an ever-deeper pit of narcotics, the drug abuse so brazen that users from the local fire station would stop by in their truck to pick up supplies, thinking nothing of the attention they might be bringing to the house. More important, though, the drugs themselves had changed. “We had gone from pot to smack,” admitted Andy Rourke, and “the guy who was the dealer was now a lodger in the house.” As the second youngest of the four children, Andy was powerless to stop the dealing. And he found himself equally unable to keep from dabbling in heroin. He mostly just smoked it, very rarely snorted it, and was sufficiently scared of needles as to make sure that he never injected it, but it was a part of his attraction to the dark side, to the notion of “scary,” to the thought that he wasn’t long for the world. In short, he liked it.

  Marr did not. “The scene at Andy’s started off being very much about teenagers with guitars, and then other people started to come around who didn’t have a musical bone in their body. The connection was drugs, and when it became nothing about music, then it was nothing about me.” Marr’s fondness for weed and his devotion to Keith Richards and Johnny Thunders, both of whom were closely associated with the allure of heroin (indeed, both of whom could be accused of glamorizing it), suggests a degree of hypocrisy. But it also indicates an understanding of different drugs and their varying degrees of dependency and addiction. In addition, Marr had an opinion on the social causes behind the sudden flood of cheap heroin: “It was a slow, insidious thing that was much less to do with rock-’n’-roll decadence than early ’80s Manchester. And a lot to do with Thatcherism.”

  Manchester’s particular decline was evidenced in the release of the 1981 census, which revealed that it was one of the top three cities for percentage of single-parent households. Only Liverpool had a lower rate of car ownership. Fully 50 percent of Manchester’s housing stock was owned and rented out by the council. And the number of unemployed males (one in five, a figure that rocketed to one in three in Marr and Rourke’s age group) was higher even than in the 1931 census, during the height of the Depression. Under the circumstances, it should have come as no surprise that uprisings occurred in Steven Morrissey’s former home area of Moss Side in the summer of 1981, although, like those in London’s Brixton and Liverpool’s Toxteth that preceded them, they were predominantly the result of West Indian immigrant youth fighting police oppression and were conveniently labeled as “race riots.”6 The white working class seemed less willing to revolt, and Marr thought he understood why. “If these kids are getting up in the morning and their main concern is nicking a hair dryer from Boots [drugstore] to get some heroin, it stops them from saying ‘Why have I got no job?’ and ‘Why have I got no education?’ I put that together. It was pretty sinister.”

  But it didn’t mean he was going to hang around heroin. The final straw occurred when Freak Party returned from a rehearsal, Johnny with Angie in tow as usual. Marr was staying at a (unnamed) friend’s house for a few days. “I went into the kitchen and one of my mates was shooting up another mate [neither of whom was Andy Rourke], and I did literally go get my bag, and I said to Angie, ‘We’re out of here, we’re not coming back, I’ll tell you why when we get on the train.’ ”

  He and Andy Rourke would not speak again for several months. In fact, it was not certain at the time that they ever would.

  If the breakup of White Dice had served to push him out of the reactionary Wythenshawe rock scene and onto the dance floor, then the collapse of Freak Party propelled Johnny Marr further toward the heart of central Manchester’s modern action. He and Angie continued to go out dancing at night; it was a mark of their fashionable status that they were even allowed entry into gay clubs like Devilles. When, at a new weekly night called the Exit, Marr heard the familiar sound of “Let’s Start the Dance” by Hamilton Bohannon, it brought him back to the good old days of the West Wythy Youth Club, and he went off to find the DJ—who turned out to be none other than Andrew Berry, his former West Wythy pal. Berry had followed through on his ambition to become a hairdresser, but had additionally partnered up with flamboyant promoter friend John Kennedy, who had launched the Exit out of an existing nightclub in an attempt to emulate London’s futurist fashion culture of “Blitz Kids.” Though this scene had grown out of but a small group of Central London dandies, its influence would prove quite profound across the new decade. It had first come to the fore in the November 1980 issue of the new monthly magazine The Face, in which author Robert Elms—attempting unsuccessfully to peg it as the Cult with No Name—noted that the scene had already spread to Liverpool, Birmingham, even Southend. If there was no mention of Manchester, it was because that same issue of The Face carried a separate story, by future Smiths biographer Mick Middlehurst, on “Pip’s” Disco, where the Bowie and Roxy kids had danced their way through the punk explosion and were now enjoying a return to fashionable status thanks to the success of electronic pop by the Human League, Gary Numan, and the like. The Exit opened very much as an attempt to provide a home for the new, younger generation of Manchester Pip’s/Blitz Kids. Essentially, where Berry and Kennedy went, the colorful night people—as opposed to the dour, gray Factory Records raincoat crowd—followed. This made it ironic that Berry was to be found living on Palatine Road, just down the road from Factory Records, where his own abode was considered the nearest that Manchester had to a proper New York, Warhol-like Factory scene.

  Marr not only took to staying over on Palatine Road but to working alongside Berry (known by his middle name, Marc, at the time) in the Exit DJ booth. Berry was the more accomplished mixer, but he noticed that Marr looked after his records more carefully—and had that many more of them, including many of the disco and funk classics from the mid-’70s. Along with much of hip Manchester—white and black, straight and gay—they were both fascinated by the modern disco emerging from New York: labels like Ze and O, producers li
ke Lovebug Starski and J. Walter Negro, and genres like “electro” and “hip-hop,” which, they understood, were not mere novelties but style movements in their own right. This was the same sound and look that was proving highly influential on New Order, who were so impressed by the scene they had discovered upon playing New York that they had set about opening their own nightclub, the Haçienda, in conjunction with Factory, in a former boat showroom in central Manchester. The Haçienda’s artistic director, Mike Pickering, even stopped in at X-Clothes one day to show Marr the floor plans.

  Back in Altrincham, Marr had made friends with Pete Hunt, manager of the store Discount Records, who had encouraged the teenager to increase his musical knowledge even further via a growing (or renewed) love for 1960s girl pop, from Motown to the Shangri-Las, Sandie Shaw to Dusty Springfield. Hunt was an outgoing character in his own right and, following a social trip to London, invited Matt Johnson, who had just released the critically acclaimed album Burning Blue Soul on London’s new esoteric independent 4AD Records, up to Manchester, suspecting he and Marr would hit it off. Johnson, always eager to widen his worldview, took Hunt up on the offer, and when introduced to Marr at X-Clothes, was duly impressed by “how friendly, enthusiastic, and quick-witted he was”—and how closely Marr had been listening to Burning Blue Soul. That evening, Marr brought his guitar around to Hunt’s house, eager to learn some of the songs. Instead, “We opened some beers, snorted some lines of speed, picked up our guitars, and had a jam session,” recalled Johnson. “We swapped riffs, stories about records, guitars, equipment and much else.” Then they went out to Legends “to dance the night away.”

  As this friendship developed, the twenty-year-old Johnson was bowled over by the younger guitarist’s talents, noting that Marr “had a natural fluency that only comes with much practice and a love of the instrument,” and that “he was able to play lots of other people’s songs,” whereas Johnson could only play his own. “He had that young gun-slinger vibe about him and seemed to see himself as naturally next in line of the great English guitarists: [Jeff] Beck, [Jimmy] Page, [Keith] Richards. He struck me as very confident yet not arrogant, with a real hunger to learn but with a deep-down certainty of who he was, where he was going, and how he was going to get there.”