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

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A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths Page 19

by Tony Fletcher


  For a while it seemed possible that Marr’s journey would entail joining Johnson’s band, to be called The The. But “I was coming from a much more left-field area compared to where Johnny was at that point,” said Johnson, who had worked or performed live with such experimental and credible acts as This Heat, Wire, and Cabaret Voltaire. “It was quite a different place to where Johnny was musically at that point, which was more classic British and American pop songwriting.” The pair concluded that Marr “was the right person at the wrong time” and vowed to remain friends.

  Joe Moss had come of age during the 1960s glory days (and all-nighters) of the Twisted Wheel, Manchester’s immortal R&B club, where the resident DJ Roger Eagle had turned him on to soul music and he had witnessed several seminal live performances at the peak of the British blues revival. Two decades later and Roger Eagle had moved to Liverpool, where he had proven equally (if unexpectedly) influential on that city’s post-punk scene at the nightclub Eric’s. For his own part, Moss had become extraordinarily successful in the clothing business. He had been one of the instigators of Manchester’s pioneering store Eighth Day, launched in 1970 as a “craft exchange” under the notion that “on the seventh day God rested, on the eighth day He (She or It) created something better.”7 Noticing a gap in the market for fashionable but unavailable “loon pants,” Moss and a partner sewed a half-dozen pairs together, dropped them off at Eighth Day—and watched them sell in a single morning. Within a few months they were making several hundred pairs a week and had hired the staff and bought the equipment to do so. They named the business after a song by Moss’s musical idol Van Morrison: “Crazy Face.”

  Through the 1970s, Moss lived an enviably profitable existence outside of the rat race. On Friday evenings, he would load a week’s worth of newly manufactured clothing into his Citroen DS (the seats removed for extra cargo space), drive down to London, and deliver them to a prominent retail dealer at a house-cum-discotheque off Fulham Road. There his products would be immediately bundled into various black sacks for distribution to stores across the capital—with Moss paid in cash. By the dawn of the 1980s, he and his partner were renting several floors at 70 Portland Street in the heart of Manchester, where they employed as many as sixty people. They also owned two retail stores of their own. One was in Stockport; the other was on Chapel Walks, right next to X-Clothes.

  In 1982, X-Clothes was the hipper of these two retail outfits. But Crazy Face had the credibility, a result not only of longevity but its manufacturing capabilities. (Owning a factory meant they could have a new line of clothing on the racks a week after formulating the idea.) As a sign that it was beyond the constant turnover in youth fashions, the Crazy Face store played music by Moss’s preferred blues artists, and its walls were hung with high-quality photographs of rock, blues, and jazz legends that he had picked up on his travels. Marr was now listening to more of this music, thanks in part to Pete Hunt entrusting him with Discount Records’ entire stock when he packed up to travel around Europe. Marr’s attic room in Bowdon was suddenly stacked to the rafters with vinyl from across the ages, affording him almost infinite access to vintage rock ’n’ roll and ’60s pop, which in turn led him to forage through secondhand record stores, searching out old Motown singles in particular. As he spent more time at Crazy Face during his lunch hour, soaking up the older music and perusing the photographs, he took to asking who owned them, whether he could talk to that person about them.

  He eventually got the opportunity one such lunchtime when Moss came over to his satellite store. Introduced by the Crazy Face shop’s manager, Marr held out his hand to Moss—a mark of respect for his elder in a city not widely given to formality—and said, “My name is Johnny Marr, and I’m a frustrated musician.” Alerted by something in the teenager’s direct approach, Moss invited Marr to take the short stroll over to Portland Street someday, where he kept a guitar of his own. (Moss was taking lessons from a former member of the Mindbenders, though he had no pretentions as to his ability; he was happy just hammering out a blues riff on the lower strings.) Marr took him up on the offer, and in response to Moss’s request to be shown a Smokey Robinson riff, played “Tracks of My Tears”—chords, arrangement, and vocal melody included. It was the same self-taught orchestration technique he had perfected in his Wythenshawe bedroom with “All the Young Dudes.”

  Moss was no neophyte. In the front rows at the Twisted Wheel, he’d stood almost nose-to-nose with some of the greatest blues guys in the world—including John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson—and their many British imitators, such as Alexis Korner, Jack Bruce, Cyril Davis, and Eric Clapton. As with Matt Johnson, with whom Moss had little else in common, something in what he heard put Marr straight into a similar league: “This little kid, sat across the table from me, just blew me away completely,” he recalled.

  The pair took to meeting most lunchtimes. Soon enough, Moss invited Johnny and Angie to dinner at his house in Heaton Chapel, where he lived with his second wife, Janet, and their baby son. Over the course of that evening, Moss found that “my thoughts about this guy were pretty spot-on. He seemed quite well sorted for someone who obviously wasn’t a wealthy lad, who didn’t have any spare money at all.” In addition, it was apparent “from the word go [that] Angie was a great, intelligent woman, a real source of strength to him.”

  Moss had an extensive record collection of his own, and could help steep Marr in the history of music, but he couldn’t teach the teenager anything about musicianship itself. Likewise, Moss had a long-standing interest in “the mechanics” of the music business from reading the music papers for twenty years, and was a highly successful entrepreneur, but he had never managed a band. For the time being, he took on what was, in the wake of Marr’s exit from his family nest, an even more important role: that of the surrogate father—a supporting, nurturing, and calming figure in the life of an eager if impatient young prodigy. Over the countless hours they spent together, at Chapel Walks, Portland Street, or Halesden Road in Heaton Chapel, they learned to trust each other, implicitly.

  Minus a band, Marr’s musical compositions changed dramatically during this period. As he described it, “Because I was writing songs on my own, they became less riff-based, and much more about chords.” It was a crucial difference. As he began working up some of the progressions that would soon make their way into Smiths songs, and as he talked musical history with Moss, he became ever more interested in the 1950s and 1960s hit factories. Marr soon grasped that he had been going about the band process backward. He needed to first find himself a proper lyricist as a partner—hopefully someone who was a viable vocalist as well—and then worry about a rhythm section. The problem, as he already knew all too well, was that the field of prospective candidates was limited; Marr was so far ahead of the game that most people his age were simply not up to the task. That was one of the reasons that he came around to the idea of approaching the twenty-two-year-old Steven Morrissey. Back when Billy Duffy had been with the Nosebleeds, he had shown Marr some of Morrissey’s lyrics, and Marr had been mildly impressed. That they had met—ever so briefly—at a Patti Smith show suggested an important shared reference point. (Marr went so far as to say of the Smith connection that it was “one of the things that gave me the balls to go and knock on Morrissey’s door.”) But all he really knew that Morrissey had achieved in the years since was this locally distributed book on the New York Dolls, and although that meant that they shared another piece of common musical ground, it still wasn’t an awful lot to go on. And yet something about Morrissey’s reputed enigma, his supposed eccentricity, and his apparent literary talents, kept bringing the guitarist back to the same question: Might this be his man? He was either clutching at straws—or grasping for greatness. And he wouldn’t know which until he tried it.

  It was a fear he confided to Joe Moss, over a number of weeks, a matter that finally came to a head when they sat down in Heaton Chapel one night to watch a recent South Bank Show profile on Leiber and Sto
ller. Moss, who owned a coveted new VHS machine, had already seen it. So he knew to bring Marr’s attention to the moment when the legends talked about how they met: the gregarious lyricist, Leiber, simply knocking on the door of the more taciturn musician, Stoller.8

  Like Jerry Leiber before him, Johnny Marr was the walking antithesis of shyness. He had no qualms about knocking on anybody’s door. (One of the better anecdotes of the period has the teenage Marr touting himself to Pete Shelley of the freshly disbanded Buzzcocks as a viable new guitar partner.) But something about Morrissey’s reputation told him that in this particular case, the full-frontal assault would probably backfire. He approached Phil Fletcher for suggestions, as well as for confirmation that he wasn’t heading up a dead end. Fletcher couldn’t help him on the latter question—he hadn’t spoken to Morrissey since they fell out over a Patti Smith concert review—and recommended Steve Pomfret as the best mutual contact. Marr duly pursued it all the way to Morrissey’s door.9

  Johnny Marr had a specific image at the time. It had a lot to do with Johnson’s, and it was becoming increasingly influenced by the successful London punk-rock band Theatre of Hate, who were big on stylized quiffs and sleeveless jackets. (That Billy Duffy had just joined this group was beyond coincidence. From the Nosebleeds to Slaughter, Johnson’s to Theatre of Hate, Duffy seemed to be living out the younger guitarist’s fantasies; Marr even traded in his Les Paul for a Gretsch as favored by Duffy in Theatre of Hate.) But the real inspiration was Stu Sutcliffe, the Beatles’ original bass player, the one who looked so cool in leathers and shades and personalized haircut in his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr’s photographs, the one who stayed on in Hamburg to live with her and enroll in art school, the one who died of a brain hemorrhage before the Beatles made it. Stu Sutcliffe embodied a forgotten year in that musical period—1961, when in theory, rock ’n’ roll had died and pap ruled the pop charts. For those who truly knew what they were talking about, however—among them Joe Moss and now Johnny Marr—it was an era of new beginnings: not just the Beatles, but Tamla Motown, Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, the girl groups, the Brill Building, Leiber and Stoller, the British blues explosion, the subsequent beat boom, the British Invasion, and so on.

  Knowing the importance of first impressions, Marr dressed in his finest to approach Morrissey. “Wild One” biker boots. Vintage Levi’s jeans “rolled up exactly the right height.” A Johnson’s sleeveless jacket and Johnson’s shirt. A “proper old American flying men’s cap.” And, crucially, a “tinted quiff” courtesy of hairdresser friend Andrew Berry.

  Marr and Pomfret boarded a number 263 bus. It was lunchtime, and the sun was out, a rare treat in Manchester. It was May 1982. And when Steven Morrissey (eventually) descended the stairs, wearing his regulation cardigan and sporting a retro quiff of his own, he and Marr saw in each other, immediately, that their dreams just might be about to come true.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  It was an event I’d always looked forward to and unconsciously been waiting for since my childhood. Time was passing—I was 22—and Johnny was much younger, but it seemed that I’d hung around for a very long time waiting for this magical mystical event, which definitely occurred.

  —Morrissey, Melody Maker, September 1987

  I think I thought he was waiting for the world to come to him. And it kind of did!

  —Johnny Marr, March 2011

  The meeting at 384 Kings Road that May afternoon would turn out, as we know now, to be one of the great initial encounters of modern music. To quite some degree, both Morrissey and Marr recognized as much immediately, as evidenced by the extent to which Steve Pomfret’s presence in the room was barely even acknowledged. Morrissey would prove more than capable of his familiar flippancy when it came to describing the occasion—“I was just there, dying, and he rescued me,” he announced in an interview barely a year later, the fruits of the partnership apparent by the fact that he was appearing live on Radio 1 at the time—but generally speaking he sought to fully acknowledge the majesty, and indeed, the mystery, behind their seemingly unlikely attraction and how quickly it manifested into a collaboration of exceptional creativity and loyalty.

  “I had no doubt that Johnny was the moment,” Morrissey explained to author-musician John Robb long after the event, “and I was grateful that nothing had ever happened for me earlier on.” Certainly, Marr’s carefully cultivated style that day had served its purpose in making a positive first impression. “He looked a bit rockabilly, a bit wired and very witty, but also hard and indifferent. It was the exact opposite of the few rehearsals I’d had with Billy (Duffy) because with Johnny it was instantly right and we were instantly ready.”

  This represented a crucial understanding on Morrissey’s part. If he had developed a reputation for underachievement on the musical front, it was because past experience had taught him not to get in too deep with the wrong partners. His gut instinct that day on Kings Road—that Marr was perfect for him in a way that Marr’s neighbor and mentor Duffy was not—had him promise to call Marr within twenty-four hours. Being overly familiar with “people who said they were going to do things and never did,” Marr could not be entirely sure that the call would come. But as it turned out, Morrissey’s primary gripe with prospective partners was much the same as Marr’s: “So many people seem to enjoy talking about things and so few people seem to enjoy doing them,” as Morrissey put it upon release of the debut Smiths LP. (“And that’s really been the history of the group, that we’ve got on with things,” he elaborated.) These mutual frustrations turned out to be one of many shared strengths, and when Morrissey duly made the call to X-Clothes the following day, both of them knew that the partnership was on.

  A few days later, Morrissey came over to Bowdon to work on songs. Stepping into Marr’s abode, he could not have been anything but impressed. Morrissey, after all, had long dreamed of writing for Coronation Street, of finding some way into the entertainment world of Granada TV, and yet the teenage Marr was living inside that dream; his landlady was the great Shelley Rohde, and her living room walls were decorated with vast framed pictures of the Corrie stars. Upstairs, Marr’s attic room offered, at least, a similar sense of obsession to that of Morrissey’s bedroom back in Stretford: walls (and floors) of vinyl to match Morrissey’s collection of books, guitars (and accompanying recording paraphernalia) for his typewriter and pens. But the pair had not met this second time to spin each other’s 45s as much as to write them, to get to work and see if the initial spark of a few days earlier could light a fire.

  The prospective lyricist and singer had already supplied the composer and guitarist with a cassette of himself singing a song entitled “Don’t Blow Your Own Horn,” but despite having a few days to live with it, Marr had not been able to come up with a viable chord sequence, as evidenced by Morrissey’s disappointed reaction. The musical partnership only took off when they moved on to work from a metaphorical blank sheet of paper: two sets of Morrissey’s words unconstrained by an existing melody. One of them was “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” and Marr saw something in its phrasing that reminded him of Patti Smith’s “Kimberly.” (Given Patti Smith’s iconic influence on both Morrissey and Marr, and the fact that they had met so briefly at one of her concerts four years earlier, the use of the “Kimberly” riff was as much an act of homage and tribute as theft. The similarities in the finished songs are minuscule.) The other was “Suffer Little Children” and, in this case, not seeing a reference point from which he could similarly crib a riff, Marr came up with an arpeggio chord sequence on the spot. Morrissey expressed his enthusiasm in both cases, and the pair set about completing the songs there and then. Within a couple of hours, working in the same manner as the great 1960s songwriting partnerships that they so admired and to which they both aspired, the pair came up with the songs that would close out the two sides of their debut album. As auspicious starts go, this was one for the record books.

  While much can and has been made of th
e music Marr composed that day, what was truly astonishing was that Morrissey turned up in Bowdon carrying a pair of poems of such emotional and literary depth. In comparison to his cut-and-paste biographies for Babylon, his hack gig reviews for Record Mirror … well there simply was no comparison. Neither “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” nor “Suffer Little Children” had any obvious reference points in the popular culture of the time, not even on the post-punk independent scene where, for the last three or four years, anything had been possible—including the recitation of poetry to whatever meter (or lack thereof) took the author’s fancy. Morrissey, to his credit, knew as much. “I was a bookworm,” he admitted readily in 1985. “I was also an avid record collector and the two of them didn’t seem to go together. But I always felt that they could, because the way I wrote, when I wrote words, it wasn’t the traditional pop nonsense. It was quite literary.”

  Indeed. “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” was anything but traditional pop nonsense. It appeared, on the surface of its title, to express the love of a parent for his or her infant child—an uncommon enough subject for a young working-class lyricist, but one that turned out to be merely the bait before the switch. Reference to “blood on the cleaver tonight” intimated something much more sinister, leading toward a gradual elaboration in the later verses: a veiled admittance by what was now clearly a male protagonist, of some form of unstated abuse on a male child, a child that may not even have been his own. And yet, as taboo subject matter goes, it was instantly outdone by “Suffer Little Children,” which dared detail that which was not discussable in Manchester: the Moors Murders. “Fresh lilaced moorland fields cannot hide the stolid stench of death,” Morrissey stated of the crimes and, in accordance with this couplet, he made no attempt to sugar coat his own lyrics. References were made to victims Lesley Ann [Downey], John [Kilbride], and Edward [Evans] by name; and Morrissey quoted Myra Hindley directly, and thereby Ian Brady by association, as saying “Whatever he has done, I have done,” and used poetic license elsewhere to lightly alter Hindley’s phrase. The fact that both the song title “Suffer Little Children” and the lyrical couplet “Hindley wakes” were chapter titles from Beyond Belief, Emlyn Williams’s dramatically enhanced account of the Moors Murders (Marr recalled seeing a poster for the book on Morrissey’s wall the day that they met) or that individual lines had similarities to specific expressions elsewhere in the book really mattered very little. If only for having the courage to write the line “Oh Manchester, so much to answer for,” a refrain that would inspire greater soul-searching among Mancunians than any number of essays or editorials on the Moors Murders, Morrissey had already proven himself a poet beyond contemporary—or at least conventional—compare.

 

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