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

by Tony Fletcher

  Morrissey felt much the same way. “It was as if these four people had to play that song,” he said. “Those words had to be sung.”

  Most groups in the Smiths’ situation would, at this point, have considered other hometown gigs—a headliner, perhaps, at a respectable local club—to further tune and hone their set. They would have considered taking their most recent demo tape—in this case, generously financed by EMI—to various record companies. Had they been rejected, then down the line they might have considered a third recording session, taking what they had learned from the previous ones, hoping that this time they would get it right. And had all that failed, they might have considered releasing their own record—assuming that dejection had not yet set in.

  But the Smiths, to paraphrase “Hand in Glove,” were not like any other group. (This one’s different!) As far as the individual members were concerned, they had already paid their dues over multiple years in various gigging bands, rehearsal bands, half-considered bands, and barely imagined bands. They’d sat in their various bedrooms and rehearsal studios and practiced their craft, be it guitar or drums or lyric writing, to the point where they had built up an entire catalog of ideas and an inherent expertise on how to articulate them in a group format. They’d now come together as the Smiths and, by further developing that craft (both the songwriting and performing aspects) over several more workdays per week, were collectively convinced that they had something. Something very special. So, as much as it could be perceived as impatience, it was more a desire for perpetual forward motion that found the Smiths booking Strawberry Studios in Stockport on the last Sunday of February 1983, to record “Hand in Glove” for the A-side of a single, barely a month after the song had been written and first performed.1

  That this was the right course of events was proven by the master tape they emerged with at the end of that day, as recorded by Strawberry’s resident engineer (and Martin Hannett’s favored right-hand man), Chris Nagle. Throughout the three-minute performance, the band played with a cohesion that made it sound like they’d been together for years, and though Morrissey was still not anybody’s idea of a natural singer, and his vocals buried relatively deep behind Marr’s multiple Gretsch guitar tracks, Joyce’s cascading cymbals, and Rourke’s punchy melodies, there was considerably more range and resonance to his voice than there had been up until that point (either onstage or in the studio), and greater character as well. As such, his attempts at the occasional tremolo and his ascension into a higher octave toward the end sounded less like the work of a freak than that of a genuine new voice.

  Nagle, who hadn’t heard of the group before, recalled that the Smiths were “basically very keen, very energetic” and that the session went “swimmingly well,” with Marr doing the talking for just about the whole band. “Everyone was looking at the clock all the time. Can we do this? Have we got time? Can we do an overdub? Rush, rush, rush. It was a proper old-school recording.” At the end of the ten-hour session, the group then handed Nagle a cassette tape of “Handsome Devil” as recorded live at the Haçienda. “It gave me a real thrill that a band could be so keen to just say, ‘This is a B-side, this is what we sound like, let’s just get it out,’ ” said Nagle, who spent a couple of additional, unpaid hours “tarting it up” for potential release. “It was lovely,” he said of the experience, “and I was happy to do that.” (He was less happy to find, when the single was eventually released, that he was not mentioned, credit for production going to the Smiths instead.)

  Two simple acts of brilliance that day at Strawberry took “Hand in Glove” beyond the realm of the traditional introductory single. Just before the vocals came in for the first time, and immediately after they concluded for good, Johnny Marr added a simple harmonica line—which in addition to providing some instrumental warmth to the otherwise abrasive mix, resonated immediately as a reference and homage to the Beatles’ debut single “Love Me Do.” And though the choice to fade out on the “Iggy” guitar riff was not unusual, the decision to fade in on it most certainly was. This was a bold statement of confidence, one that was rarely used in popular music because it distracted a disc jockey from his or her ability to talk over it. Few artists (other than the Beatles again, with “Eight Days a Week”) had ever used the fade-in and still garnered airplay. Fewer still had dared use it for their debut.

  Four days before the Strawberry session, the Smiths played their fourth gig, opening for Richard Hell, the original New York punk: it was his visual look, all torn T-shirts and spiky hair, from his time in the bands Television and the Voidoids, that Malcolm McLaren stole for the Sex Pistols; his song “The Blank Generation” that had been heralded as the CBGB scene’s first true anthem. For Morrissey especially, being such a devoted student of that scene, it must have seemed like a big deal. But Hell’s time had long come and gone, and if the gig at Rafters on Oxford Street was noticeable for anything in the long term, it was the presence in the audience of the band James.

  By any standards James were an odd bunch: their singer, Tim Booth, was a frustrated former private-school boy who had come to Manchester to study drama and found himself, like so many others at the time, caught up instead in the music of the Fall and Joy Division. Living, surrounded by abject poverty and violence, in the Hulme Crescents, as did many band members on the Manchester scene, Booth befriended two feared members of Manchester City’s terrace crew at a student disco. (While the Smiths would later title an album for the prison Strangeways, original members of the band James actually served time there.) This pair had a purposefully untutored band going and invited Booth in as a lyricist, dancer, and eventual front man. One of the founding pair, James Glennie, alongside Booth and their romantic partners, then took up meditation and vegetarianism as alternatives to the usual pressure valves for inner-city living, and by the time they came to see the Smiths perform, had cemented a semi-permanent lineup under their new moniker—that of Glennie’s first name. This similarity between the Smiths and James was pure coincidence in as much as they didn’t know each other, but signified a mutual determination to counter the considerable pretensiousness on both the independent and national music scene. Of the two groups, James had the greater pedigree; they played the Haçienda for the first time in November and again in January, at the Friday-night local band showcase, two weeks before the Smiths. There they had handed Mike Pickering and Rob Gretton a demo tape including the songs “Hymn from a Village” and “Stutter.” Both the Factory men were instantly excited by what they heard, and when Tony Wilson watched the footage of James at the Haçienda (filmed from stage right as per the Smiths at their show), Booth stalking that stage like a boyish and bearish Mark E. Smith, and the band members trembling at their instruments as if possessed by the Birthday Party, he too was convinced. After opening for New Order in March, James signed to Factory.

  Yet Tim Booth recalled being bowled over by the Smiths at Rafters, by “how big they looked onstage. The charisma. Morrissey and Marr I remember quite visually. Musically, I think we were quite a bit threatened, because it … it was like, ‘Oh shit, here’s another band doing this thing.’ Although it seemed very different to us. We were so much wackier and weirder and so much more fucked-up in our music. Whereas the Smiths were, if not the finished article, definitely ready to go. We needed years to forge our way, learn our instruments, learn our trade. But they were ready.”

  There was never going to be room for both James and the Smiths on Factory; it was quite enough for one new guitar band to come to the label with a sense of unease about Wilson and co.’s perceived elitism, and a demand for creative control that masqueraded, in James’s case, as mischief when they became the first Factory band to refuse a Peter Saville–sanctioned sleeve, turning in a felt-tip drawing instead. Morrissey might well have desired the Smiths to be that band. But even had James not been on the scene, had Pickering and Wilson been quicker to react to what they saw at their first two Smiths shows, and had Gretton been not so (understandably) dismissive of t
he first Smiths tape, Johnny Marr was never going to let it happen.

  Marr had nothing against Factory. He was, as we know, a regular at the Haçienda, friendly to various degrees of intensity with key figures Andrew Berry, Mike Pickering, and Tony Wilson, and his musical tastes aligned with those of New Order, whose affinity for contemporary American dance music was about to manifest itself globally via “Blue Monday,” which would become the biggest selling 12″ single of all time. Marr simply understood that the Smiths were capable of being bigger than Factory was willing to contemplate and encourage; that they didn’t want to be so closely associated with Manchester as were other Factory acts; that, like James, they wanted to distinguish themselves from all the bands that had a Saville-sanctioned sleeve design. He knew, too, that Factory worked at its own pace, and it was not much faster than the major labels. (James would not release a single until November.) And he knew, musically, that it would never be a comfortable fit, that Factory would only constrain a band like the Smiths, who were interested in 7″ pop singles at a point when Factory was moving increasingly, even exclusively, toward the extended mix on the 12″ format.

  Which is not to suggest that he and Morrissey had no interest in being on a Manchester label. Richard Boon recalled the pair bringing him the prospective single with a view to releasing it on New Hormones, which surely would have been an ideal home for Morrissey. They were unaware, however, that the label was about to close up shop—with Boon, not that he knew it yet, set to move to London and work at Rough Trade as production manager. “They played it to me in my failing office and it was brilliant,” he recalled, “but I couldn’t help them. Because I just knew, hearing it, they really had it, whatever ‘it’ is. It was substantial, it was fantastic, it had legs. But legs I couldn’t walk with.”

  Marr had another Manchester indie up his sleeve, and he was perfectly excited by the prospect: a “Portland Street” imprint complete with a picture of Moss’s premises at number 70 on its label, a Brill Building of their own. It would require manufacturing and promotion, but Joe Moss was an expert at the former and there were few better at the latter, at least in Manchester, than Marr himself. But before putting that plan into action, they needed to follow up on a London independent label that took priority: Rough Trade. In early March, shortly after recording “Hand in Glove,” and with the live version of “Handsome Devil” appended to it on cassette, Marr and Andy Rourke—curiously, not Morrissey—took a train to London to present themselves in good, old-fashioned, Brill Building manner: by knocking on the door and asking to play their songs to the man in charge.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  I was obsessed with fame, and I couldn’t see anyone in the past in film or music who resembled me. So when I started to make records, I thought, well, rather than adopt the usual poses I should just be as natural as I possibly could, which of course wasn’t very natural at all. For me to be making records at all was entirely unnatural, so really that was the only way I could be. Unnatural.

  —Morrissey, Blitz, April 1988

  Back in 1981, Rough Trade had compiled a cassette tape for free distribution through NME. C81 reflected the independent music scene as it stood at the dawn of the new decade, one of incredible vitality and variety. The track that got most people talking, though, was the one placed, strategically, at the beginning: “The ‘Sweetest Girl’ ” by Rough Trade’s own signing, Scritti Politti. Incredulously, the former communist squatters and scratchy reggae-rockers, infamous for listing the (cheap) production costs of their records on their (broadsheet-style) single sleeves, had turned in a svelte, luscious, romantic piece of lovers rock set to sweetly programmed drums and keyboards. It was the kind of dramatic shift that not only turned heads but provoked arguments: was it the greatest pop song of all time or a complete sell-out?

  Geoff Travis leaned toward the former. For the thirty-year-old, after several years on the front line of all things confrontational, “The ‘Sweetest Girl’ ” represented a return to the soothing qualities of a divinely produced pop song. And for a moment—during which a number of independent scene–watchers took a deep breath and agreed that the new-look Scritti Politti (for there was an image change as drastic as the aural one) was better than the old one—he had the staff on board with him. It seemed “The ‘Sweetest Girl’ ” was set to be Rough Trade’s first hit single.

  But then Travis second-guessed himself. Rather than release “The ‘Sweetest Girl’ ” as it was, he encouraged the group (a group that was quickly being whittled down to just singer-songwriter Green Gartside) to tinker endlessly in the search for the perfect mix. By the time it was released as a single, at the end of 1981, it had cost the label a small fortune, and a song that had helped shape that year’s pop music landscape on cassette now appeared to be chasing after it on vinyl. “The ‘Sweetest Girl’ ” barely grazed the charts. Travis nonetheless persisted with Gartside through the expensive—and drawn-out—process of completing an album of similarly lavish new soul. Finally released late in 1982, Songs to Remember (such statements of grandeur were very much en vogue thanks to the peacock-strutting New Romantics) became Rough Trade’s first top 20 album since Stiff Little Fingers, but it still failed to produce a proper hit. Unable to continue financing Gartside’s musical ambitions, Travis set him free to sign with Virgin.

  For Travis, the lack of a hit was becoming a proper thorn in his side. Rough Trade Distribution was now a powerhouse, and as part owner of the company, Travis could take pride and profit in its success. But that distribution side was effectively run by his partner, Richard Scott, for whom “the process” was the all-important driving force. “We were trying to set up an access structure for small labels and for people to have their fifteen minutes of fun—rather than fame,” said Scott, though in the case of a “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag,” or, as he was about to discover, a “Blue Monday,” those fifteen minutes could go on for years.

  Travis had gravitated toward precisely the opposite point of view: “The music is ultimately the most important thing. The system is not more important than the content.” Scott’s negative opinions about the nakedly commercial ambitions (and cost) of Songs to Remember had created a tense division between the partners, essentially opening up an ideological chasm at the very heart of the independent music scene. To make matters worse, in late 1982 it was revealed that Rough Trade had been ordering too much stock, diversifying into too many areas, signing too many artists, and spending too much money on them in the studio. In other words, it was insolvent. Only the forbearance of Daniel Miller, whose Mute Records was owed close to a million pounds, prevented Rough Trade from being declared bankrupt. The financial revelation had resulted in a night of the long knives, as it were: the record shop that started it all, as well as the booking agency and the publicity firm that emerged out of the growing enterprise, were restructured as standalone, employee-owned entities. The ongoing importance of Daniel Miller (and his hit act Depeche Mode) to Rough Trade’s bottom line only served to spotlight Travis’s primary problem: “We were pioneers in setting up the distribution that enabled that system,” confessed Travis, “but we weren’t leading the way in commerciality.”

  To rectify this, Travis replaced Scritti Politti at the label with Aztec Camera, whose records Rough Trade had previously distributed as part of the now floundering Postcard label. Like Scritti, Aztec Camera was a group based around one man, the teenage prodigy Roddy Frame, only seventeen when he had released his first single, and whose pop sensibilities were now indulged at Rough Trade much as Gartside’s had been. The end product was the album High Land, Hard Rain, set for release in April 1983, and preceded by a gorgeously cerebral single dominated by ringing acoustic guitars, “Oblivious.” Travis’s problem with Aztec Camera was clearly not the ability to make great music on a Rough Trade budget, but that Roddy Frame was just too young, too talented, and too handsome: the Warner Bros. empire was dangling six-figure deals in front of the tee
nager and there was nothing that Travis could do about it—especially as his contract with Frame consisted of only a handwritten note of temporary acquiescence from the artist.

  And so, that spring of 1983, even as “Oblivious” hovered outside the top 40 and allowing that the label was enjoying ongoing kudos for typically diverse recent albums by Weekend, the Go-Betweens, and Robert Wyatt, Travis knew that for Rough Trade’s long-term success—and his vindication as a music man—he needed to find his own Joy Division or Depeche Mode. He needed an act at the start of its career, without previous baggage, an act that would come with credibility but was also interested in commercial success, one that was willing to work hard and play live without costing a fortune in the studio, one with whom he could form a nurturing relationship as some kind of executive producer—and one that would agree to a long-term contract.

  Enter the Smiths.

  The story has become as much a part of rock ’n’ roll lore as Jerry Leiber showing up on Mike Stoller’s doorstep—or Johnny Marr on Steven Morrissey’s. It is, in fact, told in a very similar fashion. Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke took a train down to London on a Friday afternoon in March, and when they arrived at Rough Trade’s West London offices late in the day, brandishing their cassette, they were introduced to Simon Edwards. Though he officially went without a job title, like everyone else at Rough Trade, where equal salaries were also the rule, Edwards was essentially the head of sales, and a vital liaison between Records and Distribution (in other words, the feuding partners Travis and Scott). He was a key figure in setting up the ironically named Cartel, the new national distribution network that fed records through six regional independent wholesalers, with Rough Trade in London as the largest and most influential. In a Blenheim Crescent building that often resembled a cross between a socialist republic and an insane asylum, he was also one of the few permanently composed individuals.