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

by Tony Fletcher

  Both Morrissey and Marr have suggested that it was this second meeting that properly launched their relationship. And each has recalled that they laid out not so much a wish list that day as a game plan. They talked about the band they would form and how they would dress alike and stand close to each other in photographs, draped over each other if need be, like the New York Dolls. They decided that their first single would have a blue label, that it would be laid out like one of the 1960s hit-factory releases rather than in any of the styles of the present day. They decided, too, that they would like to be on Rough Trade—an understandable quest, especially given that the London label had recently added the Fall, the Monochrome Set, and Aztec Camera to its roster, but a distant one, given that Morrissey and Marr didn’t have a single contact at the company. And in confirming that they would write for other artists as well, per Leiber and Stoller and the ’60s hit factories in general, they agreed immediately that Sandie Shaw would be their first choice. Years later, long after the split, long after the court case, and in an attempt to find some common ground and happy memories, Marr and Morrissey would meet up once more and remind each other that everything they laid out that evening they achieved.

  Over those years, Morrissey and Marr would frequently try and define the chemistry that lay at the heart of their partnership while simultaneously acknowledging that it was ultimately intangible. (Or, as the Buzzcocks put it in one of their finest recordings, presumably discussing love, “Why Can’t I Touch It?”) Morrissey tended to the more matter-of-fact approach. “We moved very very quickly,” he once recounted, acknowledging that while “I thought of the name the Smiths … it was Johnny’s venture. We both had an astonishingly solid sense of direction, and we very rarely disagreed which was unusual because we were opposites—he was full of excitement for everything and I was … not.”

  Too much would be made over time of the pair as opposites—in geniality, exuberance, hedonism, sexuality; in hours kept, clothes worn, and books read. In fact, as already noted, they had a phenomenal amount in common: Irish immigrant parents, working class roots, a single female sibling (within close age range), a strong relationship with mother and a distant one with father, the violent drudgery of the Manchester Catholic schools system, and forced slum clearance from the inner city. Their musical tastes, too, while often defined by where they diverged—Morrissey’s love for the Cilla Black of 1968 versus Marr’s passion for the Rolling Stones of that year—were for the most part in stark alignment. Each was as fanatical about the New York Dolls and Patti Smith as they were turned on by T. Rex and Sparks. Each was devoted to the glamorous girl groups and solo female singers of the 1960s and to the methodical workaday approach of the Brill era songwriters. And each came to the other at a time when the rockabilly revival was in full swing and each a part of it according to his specific style. “Johnny had his more modern approach, which was all the Hard Times/ripped jeans/La Rocka thing,” noted Andrew Berry. “And Morrissey had that whole English thing after rock ’n’ roll hit but before the Beatles.” The distance between Morrissey’s fascination with the saga of Billy Fury and Marr’s obsession with the look of Stu Sutcliffe was therefore no real distance at all—or, as Berry put it, “Johnny’s and Morrissey’s styles merged.… (They) influenced each other so two ideas came into one.”

  Morrissey, for sure, was the more literate of the pair, and Marr clearly the more musical, but, of course, that was merely the difference in their parts that added up to the sum of the Smiths; and the fact that both instantly recognized the abilities of the other was surpassed only by the fact that they tended not to interfere with or second-guess each other’s contributions when writing and recording music together. Rather, they set to work on making the partnership visible. Or, as Marr told Sounds at the end of 1983, “The whole idea of two people getting together with lots of common ground but with separate influences to bring out something we believe to be the best we’ve ever heard is something we feel has been missing since the Sixties. It’s joyous the way we work together and if that’s reminiscent of the Sixties that’s fine.”

  Almost thirty years later, Marr was able to elaborate upon the “joyous” nature of that collaboration. “One thing that was never in doubt was my time and my dedication and the songs. But I met someone who was equally dedicated.” In the early days, Morrissey appeared no less driven to succeed than Marr; it was only after success hit in such a big way that the singer would develop a reputation for cancellations and disappearances. And so, said Marr, “It was a fantastic thing to happen. If it was possible for me to be an even happier guy, it happened. Because I’ve got the most perfect relationship with the girl of my dreams. And then I met this guy I admire. And I’m able to share a side of me that he innately understands. Which is separate to ‘let’s form a group.’ There’s a thing inside him of what you can be. Without trying to sound too esoteric, it takes up half of your being. This desire to fulfill this … knowing about yourself as an artist. There’s an unusual aspect to both our personalities that we both understand. It’s about having a knowing of this vision of something that you can do and something that you can be, which is really a big part of you. I’m not just talking about success: it’s about being Johnny Marr, or being Morrissey.”

  Morrissey himself would frequently elaborate upon this sense of higher calling even as he avoided his partner’s more spiritual observations. “Though I always wanted to sing and I always wanted to make records, it was never really for the reasons that I felt most people did those kind of things,” he explained to MTV on the eve of playing the Royal Albert Hall, less than three years after he and Marr first met. “I had no aspiration for stardom for the sake of stardom, for the sake of glamour, for the sake of money and elaborate clothing or lifestyle. It was never that. It was always for reasons that were much more serious—but not so serious I felt they were ungraspable for an audience.”

  As such, both were adamant that they were driven by something much deeper than “a relationship of convenience,” as Marr described the occasionally perceived notion that theirs was but merely a professional alliance. “You can’t need each other that intensely every day, on some convenient arrangement—it will not work. You can not need each other like that. And provide for each other. And be there for each other, if it’s just about ‘here’s a tune, here’s some words.’ I’m not like that. I don’t care about career enough to do that. I really don’t.”

  The fact was that the pair did need each other—and on a very deep, emotional level. There developed, undoubtedly, something much more than a friendship, but rather love between them such as can often be found on the battlefield, occasionally on the sporting field, and which, when evident in a rock group, too, inevitably fuels the flames of something erotic. Both Morrissey and Marr would occasionally invite such speculation, inadvertently or otherwise. “I was so utterly impressed and infatuated,” said the singer of their initial encounter very shortly after the partnership dissolved, using a highly charged word, “that even if he couldn’t play it wouldn’t have mattered because the seeds had been sown and from those seeds anything could sprout. He appeared at a time when I was deeper than the depths … he provided me with this massive energy boost. I could feel Johnny’s energy just seething inside me.”

  “From when we first met, we loved with each other,” said Johnny Marr. “We didn’t fall in love with each other, because we respected that we both enjoyed having our own space and our own lives and we knew that was important. There was a very strong bond all the way through until the last couple of weeks of the band. And it was very very important. But we didn’t fall in love with each other.”

  “There was a love and it was mutual and equal,” confirmed Morrissey, “but it wasn’t physical or sexual.” From the singer’s perspective, it would have been foolish to even dream of it being otherwise. The day that he went over to write songs with Marr for the first time, he was introduced to Angie Brown, who ferried him to the Altrincham train station in her
VW Beetle. It was not a deliberate test of the prospective singer, not even a warning, but a mere confirmation of fact: “You didn’t get Johnny without Angie,” as Marr put it. Fortunately, Morrissey and Brown instantly warmed to each other, becoming close friends themselves, creating one of the many personality dynamics that would prove integral to the Smiths’ ability to succeed as much—and to survive as long—as they did. So while it was true that Morrissey and Marr would spend considerable time traveling together and talking together, it was likely that Brown would be in the driver’s seat much of the time—and that Morrissey would often be the only other passenger.

  Besides, for all of Morrissey’s reputation as a loner, we already know that he was far from the suicidal figure he liked to paint himself as at the point that Marr arrived in his life. “I think he was developing his own aesthetic,” said Marr of Morrissey up until that moment. “And there’s a lot to be said for cocooning oneself and doing research to make yourself who you want to be, intellectually and existentially.” Ultimately, “I just went along with his explanation of it, really: just sitting in his room. And I never saw any evidence that he was crushed by that activity.”

  In fact, given Morrissey’s intellect and his wit—in short, his way with words—Marr was not surprised to find that his new writing partner kept select but quality company. “I didn’t see him as someone who had zero friends,” said Marr, “and the friends I met of his at that time,” citing James Maker, Richard Boon, and Linder, “I really liked, and I got along with. I had a tremendous amount of respect for all these people. His friends were cool. He never introduced me to anyone I didn’t like.”

  In turn, Marr took to introducing Morrissey to his own friends. Andrew Berry observed, as did so many at this point, before Morrissey truly found his voice (in the Smiths) that “he was really quiet and private, especially when you were in the same room with him.” But Berry nonetheless sought to become Morrissey’s friend “because if Johnny says he’s cool then he obviously is.” And in this, Berry and his friends quickly grasped the great reality of the partnership: “Johnny was very protective over him.”

  “It’s something I’ll never regret, that relationship,” said Marr, “because one day you get old—and hopefully very old—and you say, ‘Wow, I didn’t see that relationship coming.’ Because it brought out something in me that maybe I didn’t know I had, which was a very kind of protective aspect. I just thought I was looking for a guy who was going to be a great lead singer.”

  On Friday, May 21, 1982, toward the end of the same month, if not even the very same week, that Johnny Marr and Morrissey met for the first time, the Haçienda nightclub opened its doors on Whitworth Street in Manchester, the billing shared by ESG, the thrillingly contemporary all-girl New York electro/hip-hop trio, and Bernard Manning, the aging, overweight, famously sexist, and decidedly unfashionable Manchester comedian. The club, also known early on by its catalog number, FAC 51, was evidently trying at once to be both hip and ironic, and it would bounce uncertainly between these cultural extremes for several years to come. It did not help matters that Ben Kelly’s industrial design turned out to be way ahead of its time, and that the acoustics bounced painfully about the vast club whenever it was less than half-full—which was most of the time—or that the city only granted the liquor license on condition of it being a members-only club. (Fortunately, members’ guests were allowed entry too, or else the club would never have survived.)

  History has suggested that the Smiths grew and operated in opposition to this perceived Haçienda aesthetic, that their performances at the club in 1983 represented an invasion of common sense and good taste, of a return to good-old uplifting guitar music in the midst of a Factory scene that had disappeared up its own sense of self-importance. “The whole Haçienda thing,” Morrissey would reflect in the middle of that year, before even the second of their three shows at the club, and already using the past tense, “seemed terribly antiseptic.”

  The reality was that both Morrissey and Marr spent considerable time at the Haçienda when it opened. Indeed, it’s of interest to the story of the Smiths’ own aesthetic that through the early part of the group’s development, both before and after the lineup was cemented, the two founding partners continued down their individual paths, accentuating in the process the marked differences between the two characters even as their friendship blossomed.

  For his part, Johnny Marr remained firmly immersed in style culture; when Andrew Berry and John Kennedy organized a bus trip to the gay London nightclub Heaven (to see Animal Nightlife), in July 1982, he went along for the ride. And when Berry and Kennedy moved on to open a weekend night called Berlin, in a King Street basement club, Marr could be found there as well. So could Rob Gretton and Mike Pickering; despite the fact that the Haçienda was already booking the best of touring bands, it was struggling to pull people in for its dance nights, perhaps because the kind of kids they were looking for were over at Berlin instead. Berry was invited in for a meeting at the Haçienda and offered a role as a DJ. He agreed—on condition he could use the club as a hair salon during the day. He was duly given the use of a dressing room, and his new salon, Swing, assigned the catalog number FAC 98, was soon cutting hair for New Order as well as Morrissey and Marr and every visiting band that took advantage of the Haçienda’s unlikely fashion opportunity. With Berry ensconced in the club six days and several nights a week, Marr, as his best friend, became an additional part of the Haçienda’s inner circle, and though he never made a habit of spinning records there, he was frequently to be found hanging in the booth. In fact, when The Face commissioned a report on the Haçienda’s progress at the end of 1982, amid the references to its “bleak” landscape and half-filled dance floor was a quote from “flat-top Johnny Marr” defending the Saturday night music policy: “I schlepp to funk.”1

  Contrary to his own subsequent dismissal of the place, Steven Morrissey could also be found hanging regularly at the Haçienda during its early days. That’s where Cath Carroll and Liz Naylor first came across him, wearing his customary heavy overcoat on a typically quiet Saturday night shortly after the club opened; they had gotten into a conversation with Linder there, and “Steven came with Linder,” said Naylor. “He was Linder’s shadow.”

  Carroll and Naylor were classic feminist children of punk, their desperately stifled teenage lives in the Manchester suburbs having been completely redirected at inner-city gigs by the Fall, and by moving into a council flat and surviving, as Carroll put it, “single mothers who were drug addicts, and feral teenagers who would chase us.” With the support of Tony Wilson and others, they had gotten involved with the prominent local zine City Fun. They had also gotten involved with each other for a while, and their tendency to dress up in capes or anything else that caught their fancy (“It was so liberating just to be able to take off your polyester blouse and put on whatever you wanted to wear and go to a gig,” said Carroll) gained them almost as much notoriety on the scene as their band, Glass Animals. But by 1982, they were known (as the Crones, though good-naturedly so) for other reasons: in an act of willful Stalinism against City Fun’s “hippie, dope-smoking” editors, according to Naylor, they had “hijacked the magazine on the way to the printers.” Their intent as City Fun’s new bosses was, said Carroll, to be “irreverent” and “oppositional.” “We were just basically incredibly annoying. And people were amazingly indulgent.” No one proved more so than Richard Boon, who provided them with space at the New Hormones office on Newton Street. In accepting it, they had come into occasional contact with Linder, an obvious feminist icon, but were too intimidated by her reputation to converse with her: “She was always in that fashionable atmosphere you don’t ever think you’re going to penetrate,” said Carroll. This made it all the more surprising when Boon said that Linder wanted them to manage Ludus; only after they accepted did they realize that “as a daring lesbian duo,” in Naylor’s words, they were being “appointed managers as an art project.”

 
Following their introduction to Morrissey at the Haçienda, a four-way friendship quickly developed, an extension of the one that already existed between the two pairs of close friends. Typically, the relationship was conducted in person, by mail, and on foot. “Everyone walked around Manchester at the time,” said Naylor. “You were poor, you had to. Also, we didn’t have a phone. Steven would write us letters. He would write letters, like, ‘We will meet at the gates of the cemetery,’ and that would be a jolly day out.”