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

by Tony Fletcher

  There remained definite similarities to be drawn between Echo & the Bunnymen and the Smiths: the singers, for sure, with their long overcoats and their huge egos stroked through copious music press interviews, where incredulous boasts of self-worth were seemingly justified by savagely witty put-downs of the competition. Of the two, Ian McCulloch was by far the better vocalist, but his lyrics were oblique, poetic, contentedly clouded in metaphor. He was not interested in addressing teenage angst, let alone politics of either the personal or electoral kind. He was not looking for that kind of reputation—or responsibility. Steven Morrissey, on the other hand, most certainly was—and the evidence was apparent on the back cover sleeve of “Hand in Glove,” which confirmed, after weeks of telling friends and band members to address him accordingly, that the singer had chosen to do away with his Christian name. From here on, he would be forever known simply as Morrissey.

  This was seen by those around him as a markedly deliberate reinvention. “There’s a pre-Smiths Steven and a post-Smiths Steven,” noted Liz Naylor, who, with Cath Carroll, continued the four-way friendship with Linder and Morrissey throughout 1983. “Something happened. He constructs himself from the Smiths onwards.”

  Carroll was now freelancing for NME (Naylor doing likewise for Melody Maker) and with that paper having already run a positive live review, she found it easy enough to sell her enthusiasm for “Hand in Glove” in a short feature on the Smiths upon the single’s release. (“It was like it fell out of the record speakers,” she recalled. “That was the point where it seemed obvious that he knew what he was doing all along.”) She found it harder to conduct and write it: “It was difficult knowing Morrissey as much as I did, or liking him as much as I did, to write about his band without being sycophantic.” She compensated by keeping it to the Q&A format and including ample quotes from Johnny Marr, and one from Mike Joyce. Her editor sent her a note upon receipt, saying, “This is a very grey article about four very grey boys.” It was an inauspicious debut to the world of the music weeklies, and one that Morrissey quickly learned from; Joyce, for his part, would rarely be offered the opportunity to speak again.

  Perhaps Carroll should have focused more on the imagery surrounding the group and the lyrics to “Handsome Devil” (which was inadvertently listed as the A-side in that introductory NME feature). After all, the front cover of “Hand in Glove” portrayed the backside of a nude man, his close-cropped head facing a wall, his right hand reaching behind his back to cover—though definitely not obscure—his naked buttocks. Morrissey had found the image in Margaret Walters’s book entitled The Nude Male, and his insistence that it form the group’s initial visual image served as a clear statement of social intent as well as confirmation of his role as the group’s artistic director. “It blends with the record and it evokes both sorrow and passion,” he said of the photograph. “It could be taken as a blunt, underhand statement against sexism, yet in using that picture I am being sexist. It’s time the male body was exploited. Men need a better sense of their own bodies. Naked men should be splashed around the Co-Op, you know.”

  This latter comment was again offered in an interview to Cath Carroll, but not in NME; it was proffered instead in a separate profile on Morrissey published in Him (aka Gay Reporter) magazine’s August issue. The full-page story presented Morrissey as the “Arthur Marshall of the new wave.” Marshall was a veteran writer known to the Smiths’ generation as a genial old captain on the TV show Call My Bluff. Significantly, perhaps as a result of living through so many years of gay repression, Marshall never signed on to gay liberation. Neither would Morrissey. “He was keen on using every possible mouthpiece to get the word out,” said Carroll of her friend’s agreement to conduct the Him interview (at the editor’s request, notably). “But he never wanted to represent himself as a gay band or a gay man or even as a bisexual man or whatever he might have been.… There was just something about him that whatever it was someone wanted to say about him, he would say, ‘Well no, it’s not that.’ ”

  “I detest sexual segregation,” Morrissey duly confirmed (a comment he would repeat at every interview whenever the subject of gender or preference came up), and even launched into an attack on the contemporary gay scene for being “so full of hate in all directions,” accusing the “heterosexist behavior of some gay men” as rendering them “indistinguishable from Tetley Bittermen,” a term of the times for macho beer drinkers.

  Yet as the Smiths’ reputation spread over the second half of the year, Morrissey made a conscious decision to withdraw from the front lines of sexual identity. “The gay connotation could well be harmful when it comes down to dealing with the press,” he told Record Mirror in November when asked about his presence in the gay media. “I wouldn’t like to be thought of as a gay spokesman … because it just isn’t true.” The Him interview was quickly removed from the growing file of press cuttings.

  The Smiths returned to the capital on May 6 to play the University of London Union, opening for the Sisters of Mercy. The ULU gig, booked by Mike Hinc at All Trade, as would be every Smiths concert in Europe from here on in, served as the launch for “Hand in Glove,” and word was put out throughout the label to invite anyone and everyone.

  Key among those to do so was Scott Piering. A central part of the Rough Trade setup (one hesitates to call it an establishment) for four years already, Piering hailed from San Francisco, where he had made his name as an independent concert promoter in a city “owned” by Bill Graham; famously, he had picked up and booked Bob Marley and the Wailers after they were thrown off a Sly Stone tour, earning Island Records boss Chris Blackwell’s eternal gratitude. That led him to promote an entire tour by reggae band Third World when Richard Scott was managing that band, which eventually saw him invited to join Rough Trade by Scott, though not before he took a detour to New York to manage the Cramps. Piering enjoyed nothing more than to talk about music, which made him a born publicist, and in establishing that role for himself at Rough Trade, he helped take it out of its self-imposed ghetto (the label formerly insisted that journalists buy their own review copies of records) and into a more visible role at the vanguard of the post-punk maelstrom. If Piering didn’t like a record, he freely admitted as much, which was not the way publicists traditionally operated, but when he did love something, he went above and beyond the call of duty to let the world know about it. Piering’s passion for the music on and around Rough Trade had him visiting the music papers to hang out all afternoon and play new records, and then taking up a similar role at Radio 1—at least within the offices that would admit him, essentially those of the evening and weekend shows.

  Piering, like Mike Hinc, had been among the perceived “victims” of Rough Trade’s near-bankruptcy, forced out of the company’s employ and told to set up on his own or vacate his office. He chose the former option, created the company Appearing PR—and very quickly emerged stronger as a result. Now he could not only charge Rough Trade a fee for his work even as he continued to operate out of their offices, he could charge other labels too. (Among them was Factory, whose “Blue Monday” was gaining daytime airplay at the moment the Smiths signed to Rough Trade.) For all his eccentricities (long conversations on multiple phones intimated a glacial sense of progress, though the job always seemed to get done, usually at the expense of sleep), he was as beloved by record labels, editors, journalists, radio DJs, and producers as he genuinely loved the music he promoted to them.

  Impressed by the band’s single and trusting the word of Travis and Hinc, Piering opened up his phonebook for the ULU gig. He scored two direct results: John Walters, the producer for John Peel’s show and a respected music personality in his own right, attended, loved what he saw, and awarded the Smiths a much-coveted Peel session. It was recorded twelve days later and aired two weeks after that. And Dave McCulloch, a high-profile journalist at Sounds, reviewed the gig for the next week’s paper and followed up with a major interview.

  McCulloch’s live review was enthusia
stic in the extreme. Alongside the most evocative picture seen of Morrissey so far—leaning forward, eyes closed, love beads dangling, microphone in one hand, maracas in the other hand, looking every bit the 1966 San Francisco psychedelic love child—he struck all the right referential chords: Magazine, the Fall, Costello, Nietzsche. (Music journalists loved referencing Nietzsche.) He even prophesied, correctly, that “one day Smiths could save [Rough Trade’s] financial skin: That’s how good they are.” But he also took what he could hear of Morrissey’s lyrics and concluded that “most are about child-molesting, and more mature sexual experimentation.” As for the use of the Al Jolson refrain “Climb upon my knee, Sonny Boy” at the end of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” he wrote, without any evidence, that “it was used as a child molesting come on to a seven year old in a park.” One might have expected McCulloch to present this interpretation as a problem, but no: “This kind of ultra-violent, ultra-funny grime is just what is needed to pull rock ’n’ roll out of its current sloth,” he wrote. As another hyperbolic review of what could have been just another unrealized next big thing (other than the NME feature, McCulloch’s was the only substantial piece of press that the Smiths received through the month of May), it seemed—at the time—like business as usual. And nobody—well, hardly anybody—paid the child-molesting reference much heed.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Q: What is it that you do?

  A: I’m not bad with words.

  —Morrissey to Paul Morley, Blitz, 1988

  The Smiths’ public onslaught began with the John Peel session, broadcast on May 31, 1983. As expertly recorded by BBC engineer Roger Pusey, the Smiths delivered four songs that revealed levels of texture and depth, clarity and contrast, that had not been evident in the claustrophobic mix of “Hand in Glove.” The session ranged musically from the passive-aggressive (“Miserable Lie”) to the relatively rockist (“What Difference Does It Make?”), to the pseudorockabilly (“Handsome Devil”), and the powerfully evocative (“Reel Around the Fountain,” recently introduced into the live set). And yet, despite the fact that Johnny Marr’s evident talents as a composer and musician shone brightly through all of this, it was Morrissey who truly stole the show. With every visit to the studio, he was improving. He no longer sounded strained or muffled; in fact, his voice now carried a resonance and warmth that afforded him the confidence to engage in the vocal tricks that would become his trademark: the falsetto, the yelp, the yodel.

  On “Handsome Devil,” he petitioned, “I’d like to help you get through your exams,” and for those Peel listeners busy studying for them while tuned into the radio between ten p.m. and midnight there at the end of the British school year, that was temptation enough to put aside the homework and hear what else Morrissey had to offer. It turned out to be an endless series of majestic one-liners about love and romance that covered every base (instinct): “I look at yours, you laugh at mine” (from “Miserable Lie”); “I’d leap in front of a flying bullet for you” (“What Difference Does It Make?”); “You can pin and mount me like a butterfly” (“Reel Around the Fountain”). Fifteen minutes with the Smiths? Who would say no?

  Picking up the music papers the next day, that same Peel listener, intrigued by the Smiths for sure, perhaps even converted already, might have gravitated to Dave McCulloch’s interview in Sounds under the (predictable) headline HANDSOME DEVILS. It was only a page, and Johnny Marr shared the spotlight, but it was Morrissey’s words that shone. Some of what he said was mere ego, the kind that would become a future trademark of so many Manchester bands: “I tremble at the power we have, that’s how I feel about the Smiths.” But most of it revealed a level of freethinking to back up the snatched couplets of the Peel session’s lyrics: “I feel I’m a kind of prophet for the fourth sex.… It sounds trite in print but it’s something close to men’s liberation that I desire.… I’m bored with men and I’m bored with women.… I don’t want to GO ON about feminism but it is an ideal state.… This is a society that only likes women who faint and fawn and want to get married.…”

  Perhaps most profoundly, Morrissey also announced to McCulloch, “I want a new movement of celibacy. I want people to abstain.” Celibacy? Abstention? Culture Club’s Boy George had quipped about how he’d “rather have a cup of tea” than sex, but nobody in the music world had ever come out and called for a celibate movement. It didn’t exactly start a revolution, but for that teenage Peel fan, that teenage Sounds reader (the demographics of both leaning strongly toward the male) struggling to find and hold on to a lover or partner, the very hint from Morrissey that it might not be worth the effort—that love was just a miserable lie—was indeed a moment of (men’s) liberation.

  And there was still more. “Jobs reduce people to absolute stupidity, they forget to think about themselves. There’s something so positive about unemployment. You won’t get trapped into materialism, you won’t buy things you don’t really want.” Admittedly, this was coming from someone still living at home at the age of twenty-four, not from someone (like Marr alongside him) more or less kicked out of the house at the age of seventeen who worked in clothes stores to spend money on fashion. A similar observation could (and would) be made of Morrissey’s calls for celibacy in a band whose other three members all had steady girlfriends. But that was both the point and not the point. The other three could represent the vast percentage of the “normal” population if they wanted to. Morrissey was speaking to the others: the freaks, the loners, the depressives; the unemployable, the unlovable, and, as Morrissey put it in his last letter to Robert Mackie, the unacceptable. And he was so enjoying the opportunity to do this in print—finally, as a featured artist and not a signature on a letters page or a byline in a live review—that he allowed himself to state, accurately if fawningly, that “the British music press is an art form.”

  McCulloch played devil’s advocate to that one and threw out the name of Garry Bushell, a fellow Sounds writer whose passion for working-class authenticity had led him to invent, champion, and defend the Oi! movement of punk-skinhead bands, many of whom harbored far-right and racist beliefs. Morrissey replied, quick as a flash, “There is always an exception to a rule, Dave,” and the conversation immediately returned to the word “handsome” and Morrissey’s assurance about his fans that “in six months’ time they’ll be bringing flowers to our gigs.”

  It would happen that much sooner. The Smiths had been booked back into the BBC for another session, this time for David “Kid” Jensen, whose show went out directly before Peel’s. As befitted the earlier time slot, Jensen’s show was less eclectic, had a wider audience, and featured interviews and the occasional guest DJ. The few new bands that were granted one of the limited session slots were usually further rewarded with a phone interview from the Canadian-born DJ on the night of its broadcast, to introduce themselves on-air. The Smiths, however, had created such a buzz already that Morrissey was invited down to London to be interviewed live in the studio.

  And so, on July 4, Jensen’s birthday, Morrissey pontificated at large from Broadcasting House to the rock-loving, radio-listening nation. (The nation? Yes. Other than sporadic late night shows on what passed for commercial local radio, there was no other place on the radio to hear rock music in Britain at the time; Radio 1 owned the medium.) He did so with the same casual self-confidence as had been evident in the Sounds interview: “We planned a strategy and everything has worked and here we are,” he announced nonchalantly of the Smiths’ rapid rise, as if it were preordained. “We just followed nature and there you have it.” But he also ensured some self-deprecation as a balance: his life, he said, “has been quite tragic, hence most of the words seem to be quite tragic and sorrowful.” Offering some background to “You’ve Got Everything Now,” he admitted, “I sound such a mess,” but still went on to claim a modicum of revenge on his former St. Mary’s pupils: “When I left school, it seemed like all these oafish clods from school were making tremendous progress and had wonde
rfully large cars and lots of money. And I seemed to be constantly waiting for a bus that never came. And it seemed as though I had the brains, I didn’t have anything else.”

  But now he did, which made it all the more beautiful that the refrain—“What a terrible mess I’ve made of my life”—should resonate through the airwaves and into any number of bedrooms, where listeners might well have experienced instant relief to hear that someone else, a singer in a pop band, no less, should have felt that way while confessing in the same song that he had no interest in rectifying that mess by taking up something as mundane as a job. Such pride in willful unemployment sat perfectly alongside the reference in “These Things Take Time” to “the alcoholic afternoons where we sat in your room,” a line that caught the attention even of the former Buzzcocks guitarist Steve Diggle, who recalled himself sitting out society in early punk days by claiming quiet hours in the pub for philosophical, alcohol-fueled debate.

  The interview with Morrissey concluded with news that the group had been recording an album with Troy Tate—a former member of A Teardrop Explodes who had recently released a solo single of his own on Rough Trade. “It’s been quite a magical communion,” Morrissey assured listeners, promising that the album would be out “within about six weeks,” suggesting, in reality, a September release. Jensen’s producer immediately booked the band back in for another session that could air around that date. In the meantime, the Smiths followed up this high-profile broadcast with their first show in Manchester since February—at the Haçienda again, on July 6. And this time, as headliners.