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

by Tony Fletcher

  Marr backed Moss on this one. “As is nearly always the case with young street rock bands, a producer and/or a record company will start saying, ‘The drummer isn’t very good,’ and it’s probably because … you can hide mistakes easier on the other instruments. And if the drummer isn’t absolutely rock solid, then it can be criticized. The label can be straight onto it.” As far as he was concerned, “Mike had to adapt his style somewhat. Before he played with us he was all-out bombast. There was discussion over the first eighteen months that he was maybe not as on it as me and Andy, but he shook that off. And it kind of fell on deaf ears, to be honest.”

  With the band attracting a rapidly growing following, and with Joyce acquiring a strong reputation as a friendly face in the group, Porter had taken the right approach: find ways to improve the musicians’ confidence and skills in tandem with each other, and then allow them to march onward together. This was crucial, because one of the things that the Smiths had going for them was the public’s perception of them as a proper group. And so, even as they excluded the drummer and bass player from the process, Morrissey and Marr consistently talked them up in interviews. On Radio 1 in July, Morrissey had said, “They are just the most capable musicians I ever came across in Manchester and it’s a perfect little family.” And in a press interview conducted shortly before the Troy Tate album was abandoned, and leaving himself out of the equation only because he was assessing the group from the perspective of its leader, Johnny Marr said, with a little more clarity on how things would truly play out: “There’s Morrissey, the emotional vocalist and Andy the diligent, concentrating bass player who never misses a beat and the same with Mike. To me that’s the way a band should be—the songwriters and the rhythm section.”

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  I’m not a session player. I’m the drummer in the Smiths.

  —Mike Joyce, 1999

  When it became known that the money was going to be split that way, there was a very emotional meeting about it and then everybody just rolled with it for five years.

  —Johnny Marr, March 2011

  As part of his shifting attitude toward commercial success, Geoff Travis was increasingly taking appointments and forming liaisons with the major music business powers, especially those connected to Warner Bros. This would soon lead to his own partnership with another independent label’s A&R man, Mike Alway of Cherry Red, in a Warner “boutique” label called Blanco y Negro, from which Travis would draw a hefty salary—a sore point with the poorly paid staffers at Rough Trade even though Travis claimed to have funneled much of it back into his independent acts. With regard to the Smiths, these connections also led to him hinting at a likely licensing deal with Sire, the Warner-distributed American label, which offered the prospect not just of credibility and commercial opportunity but of additional funding for recordings and videos; and of a major publishing deal, which would help give the songwriters, and perhaps the band in the process, some immediate cash flow to compensate for Rough Trade’s paltry advance.

  Seymour Stein, Sire’s founder, had come of age in the 1960s, working for Leiber and Stoller’s label, Red Bird, in the Brill Building, where the Shangri-Las and a veritable treasure trove of other mid-’60s girl groups resided, powered by the husband-and-wife songwriting team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich; such pedigree alone made him perfect for Morrissey and Marr. Stein and songwriter-producer Richard Gottehrer had then launched Sire at the end of the decade, trawling the European markets for major-label acts that had not been picked up by their American counterparts. They found both the Dutch group Focus and the British band Fleetwood Mac in this manner, giving the company the basis on which, as an established independent, it was able to sign the cream of New York’s punk talent—the Ramones, Talking Heads, Richard Hell and the Voidoids—while the major labels prevaricated. When the punk boom in Britain then manifested itself in myriad independent releases, Stein resumed his transatlantic shopping trips. As early as 1978, Sire had signed the Normal, the Undertones, and the Rezillos, all of which had been initially distributed by Rough Trade; by 1983 he had added other Rough Trade–distributed acts Depeche Mode, Yaz(oo), the Assembly, and the label’s own signings Aztec Camera and Troy Tate. He had, in addition, taken on Echo & the Bunnymen and the Pretenders from the UK arm of Warner Bros.; stolen Soft Cell from underneath Polygram’s American nose and taken them into the top 10; and was busy making hit singles out of marginal British acts like Tin Tin and Modern English. He had also just signed a New York–based female singer and dancer who was part of the city’s thriving electro/hip-hop club scene. She went by a single name, Madonna.

  In short, a British act would need to have either a vastly better option on the table or be signed to a watertight worldwide deal with a non-Warner label to consider turning down Stein’s approaches. The Smiths had neither, and fairly jumped when Stein indicated his enthusiasm. Although the Sire boss did not see the Smiths perform until he flew over for the show at London’s ICA on the Mall in October 1983—where, said Moss, “he just flipped”—Morrissey had actually announced the deal already, in an interview conducted at least a month earlier.1 When they did finally meet then, Stein, as was his fashion, regaled the duo with his celebrity stories. “He told me that when Brian Jones first came to New York, he took him to get a guitar,” recalled Marr. “I wasn’t going to let that opportunity slip. So I said, ‘If we sign to you are you gonna get me a guitar?’ ” Stein said he would.

  By this point in time, Sire was independent in name only. “Seymour would sign bands and rely on a network of people within the company to help take care of the bands,” said Steven Baker of Warner Bros., who in 1983 was transitioning from an A&R position with the label in New York, where he had developed a close relationship with Stein, to working as right-hand man for label president Lenny Waronker in Burbank, California—an ideal position from which to champion Sire acts. Aware that Stein had just secured the Smiths for Sire, Baker went to see the group at one of their London college shows at the end of October. He was instantly impressed (both by the fact that “Morrissey was an amazing front man” but also, from a vital American perspective, that “the band was a good rock band”) and joined Geoff Travis for a business lunch with the band a couple of days later—at a vegetarian café in Notting Hill, this being Rough Trade. From there, he quickly assumed the role of “point person” for the group in the States.

  Sire’s arrival on the scene added to the pressure on the debut LP, and the decision to scrap the initial Troy Tate recordings. Equally, it was the injection of the label’s capital that helped ensure the rerecording; John Porter noted that once the money arrived from America, it was instantly converted into studio time—at Pluto in Manchester.

  While enticing Sire into the fold, Travis simultaneously talked up the Smiths to Peter Reichert, the newly promoted Managing Director of Warner Bros. Music in the UK, as the group’s possible song publisher. Songwriting was the lucrative side of the music business, that which, away from the glamour of the stage and the studio, offered guaranteed income from record sales, performances, and airplay. A good publisher—and Warner Bros. was among the very best in the UK—would ensure that every penny of royalties was claimed and duly distributed to the composers. While some music publishers chased after unsigned acts with the promise of helping secure them a record deal, Reichert, as a major player, tended to work the other way, enticing acts with generous publishing deals at the point when they cemented their record contracts. Publishing was, after all, essentially, a numbers game: without the risk of the recording and promotional budgets that record companies indebted, an advance could be calculated directly against the mechanical royalties from album sales.2

  Reichert was already in the process of signing Travis’s other major act of the moment, Aztec Camera. He took one look at Morrissey onstage, concluded, “This guy’s a total star,” and offered to sign the Smiths as well. As much as the singer attracted him, however—“You couldn’t take your eye
s off him”—he loved that the band offered him some sort of alternative to most of the deals he was striking at the time. “They were really against the grain. It was all Duran Duran and that polished ’80s music, which I never liked. When I first saw the Smiths I felt ‘This is so real to me.’ ”

  When it came to offering Morrissey and Marr, as the sole songwriters, an advance, “eighty thousand pounds sticks in my mind,” said Reichert—a figure he considered “about normal for a hot band.” That translated, by his calculations, to a break-even of between 150,000–200,000 albums sold: double gold in the UK, but a relatively paltry amount for a global release. Additional mechanicals from single sales, and the performing-rights royalties that came from radio and TV airplay—that is, from hit records—would be considered “icing on the cake.”

  Joe Moss had set up a nominal publishing company (Glad Hips Music) for the debut pressing of the Rough Trade single, knowing well enough the horror stories of acts from the ’50s and ’60s who had signed away their songs—and effectively, their incomes. But by the 1980s, the business had changed considerably: there was more to lose by trying to collect the royalties oneself than by assigning the songs to a reputable publisher. And the deals had grown more generous: Morrissey and Marr were assured the reversion of their rights after ten years and would have been guaranteed at least 75 percent of income, said Reichert. Plus, the advance payments were not inconsiderable to Morrissey and Marr. Even when split between the two of them, over the course of a year, and allowing for potential management commissions, it was a significant “salary” for a pair of young men who had only previously worked in clothes and record shops, entry-level bureaucratic office jobs, and as hospital porters, if at all. A deal was duly struck.

  When it came to signing, however, “Geoff wasn’t allowed to be there,” said Reichert. “I think Morrissey particularly was a bit paranoid about the mighty Geoff Travis having too many influences over his career.” As Reichert recollected matters, Morrissey and Marr put aside the idea of continuing with Glad Hips or setting up a limited company to collect and distribute their income (there were tax incentives to support such a move, and an abundance of paperwork to counter it), and signed directly, as individuals. Reichert had made routine approaches about the rhythm section: “I always liked to sign all members of the band just in case. It was very much pointed out, ‘They’ll never write.’ I can remember saying, ‘Well, I would like to sign them anyway.’ ” The response? “ ‘No, they’ll never write.’ ”

  There was never any expectation that Rourke and Joyce would share in the songwriting credits. Marr had knocked on Morrissey’s door with a definite view toward writing songs together, and the pair had completed several future Smiths classics before Joyce, and then Rourke, came on board. Even as the group slipped into a steady pattern of rehearsing, recording, and playing live together, the songwriting process was always considered a private one between the lyricist and the musician, and most songs were composed in isolation from the rhythm section. Morrissey and Marr saw themselves in the grand tradition of Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, even Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. They were the band’s acknowledged songwriters, and its leaders, and they expected not just the credit for it but the money, too.

  There were, however, many groups who took a different approach, preferring to share the songwriting royalties on the understanding that everyone was in it together, and that each individual contributed in his own way to the band’s overall success. This was the attitude of Britain’s most highly visible, consistently successful post-punk groups: U2, Echo & the Bunnymen, and New Order. It was also the approach taken by the American group with whom the Smiths had most in common: R.E.M., who likewise had a magnetic front man of indiscernible lyrics and inscrutable personality, a Rickenbacker-playing guitarist with encyclopedic musical knowledge, and a rhythm section entirely devoid of pretentions. R.E.M.’s debut album, Murmur, had proven a considerable success in 1983 in an American marketplace that was not just inherently conservative, but to the extent that it entertained what it still called “New Wave,” focused relentlessly on the “British Invasion” of synth-pop and post-punk groups to the exclusion of its homegrown talent. It would prove eminently frustrating to R.E.M., who had been together since 1980, that when they embarked on their first visit to the UK right around the release date of “This Charming Man,” they found themselves hailed not so much for their individuality but for their similarities to British newcomers the Smiths.

  When it came to their business setup, R.E.M. had decided on full equality. “The songwriting money we share isn’t necessarily for writing the songs,” Peter Buck, who would come to form a solid friendship with Johnny Marr, later explained. “It’s for sleeping on the floor for ten years while we toured, it’s for the eight hours of rehearsal we used to do when we were making forty dollars a month.”

  The problem with the Smiths—because this would become a problem—was that they had not been through a similar period of collective struggle. Morrissey and Marr had met, identified their potential as a songwriting partnership, worked to put together a group around those songs and their personas, and that group had taken off, all in less than a year. Given the speed of this process, there was no incentive to share the publishing—and neither was their complete and total ownership of the songs ever challenged by the rhythm section.3

  But the same thinking was then applied to the lone signatures on the record deal. As Joe Moss later tried to justify the process, “It couldn’t be any other way, really. Two people were doing what Johnny and Morrissey were doing. For Mike and Andy to be able to have power of veto, to be able to say no to things, that’s inconceivable. It’s not their vision; they’re part of Johnny and Morrissey’s vision.”

  The much-ballyhooed absence of Rourke’s and Joyce’s signature on the Rough Trade contract was a red herring of sorts. After all, there was nothing stopping Morrissey and Marr from signing the Rough Trade deal as the Smiths, thereby signifying their ownership of the name and effectively denying the rhythm section “the power of veto” while still splitting recording proceeds evenly with Rourke and Joyce. (Similar deals are struck all the time in the music business.) This would have left the lion’s share of income—the publishing—in their hands as songwriters, and presumably everybody would have been happy. But it didn’t happen that way. With the record and publishing deals now signed, yet with Rourke’s and Joyce’s name absent from each, the rhythm section understandably sought to clarify their share of income; Morrissey, Marr, and Moss likewise thought it likewise prudent to establish an agreement. But when the conversation eventually took place, it was under less than ideal circumstances. The group was in the midst of rerecording its album at Pluto Studios in Manchester, in mid-October 1983, when a meeting was abruptly called. Either just before or after that announcement, Morrissey left the recording session, ostensibly to get food—and didn’t come back.

  “Before he moved on with the band he wanted to have it firmly established as to what each person was going to be earning out of it,” said Joe Moss in a BBC documentary, The Rise and Fall of the Smiths, in 2001. “And as far as he was concerned, that was Johnny’s job to do that with Mike and Andy. Johnny had brought them in. Morrissey doesn’t want to be having to go doing that.”

  “We didn’t know where he was, couldn’t find him,” said Johnny Marr of his partner on that same BBC documentary. “And then later on that evening we got a phone call from Geoff Travis … saying, ‘He’s in Rough Trade and he’s not coming back until you sort out the business.’ ” (Both John Porter and Geoff Travis recalled Morrissey leaving a recording session and taking a train to London to discuss business with Travis.) It fell to Moss and Marr to explain the proposed, and decidedly uneven, split of record royalties: 40 percent for the bandleaders, 10 percent each for the rhythm section.

  To the BBC, Mike Joyce recalled the conversation as follows: “Johnny Marr came in and said … ‘Morrissey wants me and him to get a higher percentage�
�or more money.’ And … um, Johnny said, ‘If you don’t accept it, I’m going to leave the band.’ ”

  “All me and Mike were trying to do was stop Johnny leaving the band,” said Rourke on that documentary, presumably in defense of their apparent acquiescence. “Which I hope he in hindsight realizes was a good thing.” Another way of looking at it might well have been that both Joyce, whose drumming had been found wanting, and Rourke, whose drug habit was similarly troubling to those who knew about it, felt that their own positions in the group were precarious, that they were not in a position of strength (or knowledge) to argue the case that particular night. It didn’t help that they were among the Smiths’ biggest fans. “It was stuff me and Johnny had dreamed about since kids, being in the recording studio,” said Rourke, who admitted to “becoming obsessed” with listening to the latest Smiths recordings. “And then we’re in there almost every day. Living the dream and loving it.” The bassist had likened his previous job at the lumberyard to “being on the chain gang. It was nasty work. It was manual labor.” Upon recently leaving that job, he’d told his boss (“[who] hated me anyway”), “You’ll see me on Top of the Pops in one year.” This was the kind of brash comment made by countless kids with dreams of making it as pop stars, but the nineteen-year-old could just about sense it coming true. He had no intentions of throwing that possibility away and returning to a life of drudgery.

  So the rhythm section kept quiet. Rourke subsequently insisted that even though a conversation certainly took place at Pluto, “nothing was ever worked out,” and Joyce ultimately went to court based on the same (mis)understanding: “We didn’t come to an agreement that we were going to get twenty-five percent. There was no agreement that we were going to get less.”