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

by Tony Fletcher

  By the early summer, the numbers in the van included Grant Cunliffe, better known by his professional last name of Showbiz. A former member of the experimental hippie group Here & Now, co-owner of a studio called Street Level and a cassette label called Fuck Off Records, Showbiz, by his own admission “a yappy, shouty, loudy kind of person” had also produced albums for the Fall and regularly worked as their sound engineer. He had been invited to the ULU show by Scott Piering with a view toward working with the Smiths in a similar capacity.

  “It was a very weird combination,” Showbiz recalled of his first impressions of the Smiths. “Mike was kicking seven shades of shit out of it—in a really nice way. And Andy was playing what appeared to be ‘another song’ that was a countermelody to what Johnny was doing. And Johnny … literally was playing the eighteen parts that were in his head. And Morrissey was whooping charmingly over the top of it all.” Then again, for someone of his pedigree, the weirdness was but part of the attraction. “Because I saw the Fall as pop music, the Smiths seemed to be … equally strange.” The difference, he concluded, was “that it was done from proficiency. Certainly Andy and Johnny were incredibly proficient on their instruments, very skilled. And Morrissey and Mike were much more the raw kind of life force.”

  When the Smiths returned to the capital a month later, at the Brixton Ace, Showbiz was there as sound engineer, which was (welcome) news to the band, who had not otherwise considered having their own man behind the mixing board. Only when introduced to the group did Showbiz discover that he had a fan among them. Andy Rourke, during his mid-teens space-rock stage, had been to see Here & Now in Manchester and raved at school the next day to Johnny Marr about “this really cool guy, going ’round passing the bucket after the gig.” When Here & Now then split an album with punks-turned-hippies Alternative TV, the back cover showed the entourage of long-haired, bedraggled musicians and fellow travelers posing in front of their bus. Rourke had bought that album and pointed out Showbiz to Marr. As an oddball outsider hero, Showbiz was accordingly allowed inside the Smiths’ inner circle—the first from outside Manchester to be afforded such status.

  “They were incredibly welcoming,” said Showbiz, for whom the Smiths’ sense of identity represented an almost complete reversal of his former hippie outfits. “They were a total group. They all had the clothes, they all had the hair, they all had the jewelry, and then they all had the verbiage—a kind of slang that I couldn’t really follow.”

  “When Grant came along and couldn’t understand us for a few weeks, it wasn’t because of our accents, it was because of the language we used,” said Johnny Marr. “This truncated conversation that came from sitting around watching the same films all day long. It was constantly quoting movies to make a point.” The group had latched on to phrases such as “Them was rotten days” from the movie Hobson’s Choice, and would similarly adopt lines from A Taste of Honey and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which had become permanent viewing fixtures. The inside banter, in which Morrissey was every bit as much a participant as anyone else in the van, may have provided a challenge to a newcomer like Showbiz, but it also indicated the depth of the Smiths’ solidarity.

  “It was a band,” confirmed Showbiz. “No one was sending the bass player out to get fags. There wasn’t any of that. And there was no disagreement within the band. It was like those legendary bands, like when you see those Beatles press conferences, where they’re backing each other up and someone says something funny and someone spins off it.… Everyone was into it. Everyone was laughing at the same jokes. And very quickly, I got my hair cut [by Andrew Berry] and started wearing the same clothes they were wearing.” To some, he became the fifth Smith.

  In being hired, Showbiz was given one simple directive by Joe Moss: make Morrissey as loud as the rest of the band. And he was happy to act on it. “It’s a simple thing,” he explained. “Let’s hear what the singer is singing. There are these great singers that you’ve been told are great singers and you go to the gig and you can’t hear what they’re singing.” But it was more than just that. “What was very clear [with the Smiths] is that everything they were doing on every level was interesting, so you had to make everything audible. At the same time, if there were moments of hugeness, it didn’t matter if you couldn’t hear it all, it could just blend in. I believe in something called ‘psychoacoustics’—that you don’t notice it’s happening but it has some effect on you.” Showbiz’s own effect on the Smiths’ live presentation proved immediate, and he would maintain his presence behind the board for almost every single Smiths concert from June 1983 onward.

  It was several months of further traveling in that “upward direction”—opening for Howard Devoto and the Gang of Four on separate occasions at the London Lyceum, sharing the bill with Aztec Camera at Warwick University, topping a Rough Trade night over the Go-Betweens at London’s the Venue, headlining Dingwalls in London (twice) and packing the place, sharing the bill with other Manchester bands at the ICA Rock Week in October—before they brought their next mainstay on board.3 “This Charming Man” had just been released and the group was on a patchwork tour of colleges and polytechnic venues, shows that were either turning into memorable madhouses or being rapidly rescheduled into larger rooms to meet the increasing demand. (The “patchwork” aspect was due to the fact that the group was otherwise in the studio rerecording, overdubbing, and mixing its first album with John Porter.)

  On November 16, a week before the Top of the Pops performance, that tour rolled into Leicester Polytechnic, where the lighting was handled by an affable and intelligent nineteen-year-old named John Featherstone, who struck up a conversation with Marr at the soundcheck. He suggested to the guitarist that he light the stage without the usual dramatic effects and constant color changes beloved by most bands on the throes of success—that he use “just blues and greens”—and Marr agreed. That night, said Featherstone, “it was immediately apparent just in the way they took the stage that there was something very different going on here.” As far as Featherstone saw it, “So many of the bands that came through seemed like they were trying really hard to do the same thing that other bands were doing—and it seemed like the Smiths were trying to do something that no other bands were doing at the time. Obviously they were still very young and it was very rough around the ages. But [by the] second song I remember thinking, ‘This is something really quite remarkable.’ ”

  As much as he was impressed by what he saw onstage, though, Featherstone was, like Showbiz before him, taken by the personalities he encountered off of it. Things were clearly happening for the band—they were in the charts already—but “they were trying very hard not to be rock stars. These were just four guys who … were still at that endearing stage where the band is delighted that people showed up and paid attention.”

  Featherstone hit it off with Marr that night: it was like “meeting a member of your lost tribe,” he recalled. The feeling must have been mutual, for a few days later, Joe Moss called to invite him to work a major show coming up at the beginning of December in Derby, where they were to be filmed in concert for a Whistle Test “On the Road” special devoted entirely to the Smiths. (The show had dropped the “Old Grey” prefix and hired new presenters, largely in response to the success of The Tube.) And so, at the age of nineteen, he stepped into the role of the Smiths’ lighting designer; he would work alongside Showbiz as a fully fledged member of the inner circle until the bitter end.

  Ironically, the Derby show was one of only two (and the other was also for TV) where Featherstone allowed himself to be talked into tracking Morrissey with a spotlight for the cameras’ sake. Otherwise, it became a sacred point for the Smiths that they were not to be lit from the front. “Most bands can’t see for the lights in their eyes,” said Featherstone. “They’re oblivious to the audience. One of the reasons the Smiths responded to the audience the way they did was that Morrissey really could see the audience. When he looked out, he could see people and look in the
ir eye and connect with them. And the band always had a really good sense of the tone of their audience.”

  At the Derby Assembly Rooms concert, which was broadcast on the BBC just two nights later (while the Smiths were onstage at their first ever concert in Ireland, an important “homecoming” of an entirely different kind), that connection with the audience was already apparent. The front rows all carried bouquets of flowers, which they threw at Morrissey during “This Charming Man,” and even if that was preplanned, the depth of something more than the usual audience adulation for a new chart band was evident throughout—especially when a teenage boy jumped onstage during “Hand in Glove” and didn’t just hug Morrissey but held on to him as if his life depended on it. Compared to the band that had played to a few dozen people at the Haçienda at the start of the year, the most notable difference was not necessarily the professionalism—that had been remarkable all along—but the level of confidence. Johnny Marr no longer felt the need to run around and goon with the crowd; he was the epitome of calm control, hunched over his black Rickenbacker throughout, clearly concentrating on the job at hand. Morrissey, his quiff reaching almost as high as Johnny Marr’s bowl cut hung low, had adopted the full idol persona, accentuating every one of his personal traits: the one-legged pirouette, the bouquet-as-weapon, and the shirt unbuttoned to the waist, revealing a torso and abdomen remarkable only for its everyday Anglo-Irish scrawniness. The concert culminated with a full-scale stage invasion, by boys and girls alike, during an encore of “You’ve Got Everything Now” that forced Morrissey to the floor and an early fade-out by the BBC. The stage invasion itself was nothing new on the live scene—it had been a mainstay for the Jam and the Specials, equally energetic British live bands of recent years—but this audience seemed so uniformly (or uniquely) nonthreatening that there was something incredibly heartwarming about their presence onstage. It would be too much to suggest that they were all mini-Morrisseys, but they had seen a reflection of themselves in the Smiths’ singer, even if it was just the recognition of their teenage angst masquerading as inadequacy, and they wanted to share in it. By jumping onstage, they were showing off, perhaps, claiming their little piece of the spotlight for sure, but as much as anything, they were claiming the Smiths as their own.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  At the moment, it feels completely perfect. I feel that if the Smiths were accepted by the entire universe tomorrow, it wouldn’t surprise me.

  —Morrissey, Jamming!, January 1984

  As “This Charming Man” peaked in the British charts at number 25, Rough Trade released an additional 12″ of “New York” mixes: an extended vocal rendition on one side, an instrumental on the other. Though intended in part as an(other) incentive to maintain the single’s chart run, the 12″ was also designed to make an impact on American dance floors. In the States, new British bands such as the Smiths, despite being viewed as “alternative”—in fact, in large part because they were viewed as alternative—had a distinct appeal in nightclubs, especially in the major music capitals like New York, that were actively mixing up hip-hop, electro, funk, and New Wave. To this end, club remixes were an avenue by which several Sire artists—from Talking Heads to Madonna, Yaz(oo) to Tin Tin—had been staking out their claim to multidenominational appeal, and given that the likes of Echo & the Bunnymen and Elvis Costello had similarly surrendered to the 12″ extended mix in 1983, it seemed almost inevitable that the Smiths follow suit. New York DJ Francois Kevorkian’s remix of the Strawberry Studios multitracks (for which John Porter’s use of LinnDrums to ensure a precise rhythm must have been greatly appreciated) duly followed the formula for the period, allowing the song a straightforward run-through before accentuating various rhythmic elements as part of what could, at a stretch, be considered a “dub” addendum. (By comparison, the instrumental version overly focused on these rhythmic elements to the detriment of the song’s original melody.) These New York mixes were released by Rough Trade in multiple European and Antipodean territories and promptly imported into the States by Sire, to be provided to the growing number of “alternative” DJs, via insider subscriber services like Rockpool, as an exclusive enticement to play their label’s latest British signings. It was hardly coincidental that just as these mixes hit the turntables, it was announced that the Smiths would be playing Danceteria, New York’s hottest cross-cultural club, on New Year’s Eve 1984.

  Unfortunately for Geoff Travis, no sooner were the mixes released than Smiths fans—the sort who had already laid claim to their band as guitar purists—reacted negatively, at which Morrissey publicly denounced the mixes as having been commissioned without the band’s knowledge and as “entirely against our principles.” (Travis was unlikely to have gone ahead with anything so potentially problematic without prior approval, though he allowed that when he sent them to the band upon completion, he might have taken silence to signify consent.) The issue of “principles” was an important one: it signified that Morrissey saw the Smiths as distinguishable from their peers by their steadfast refusal to engage in the modern marketing methods of the era—which included not only the customary dance remix but, as Morrissey was busy telling the world by this point, the promotional video, too. The former stand made absolute sense to someone who had been raised on the pop music of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, where the original version was the definitive version, and where a 7″ single stood as a work of art, a souvenir of its time. The latter was a particularly brave position to take, and for the time being it won him many fans’ further loyalty, especially among those who were rightly disgusted by the lavish budgets—frequently exceeding those of the recording studio—afforded the most insipid of pop acts in the pursuit of something called MTV. By what may not have been coincidence, the refusal to participate in either such endeavor also saved a considerable amount of marketing money that would otherwise be considered an “expense” to be covered before profit-sharing.

  In both cases, Johnny Marr stood by his partner. Even though, as a fan of the New York dance scene, he was flattered to have been remixed by Kevorkian, he was also aware that Smiths fans were perceiving Morrissey’s fastidiousness as a positive. The belated complaints came in time to ensure that the New York mixes did not flood British record stores, but late enough that they established the group on the “alternative” American dance floor all the same. In the meantime, the Smiths prepared to take New York in person.

  Joe Moss accompanied the Smiths’ entourage to the airport. He did not get on the plane. It turned out that he had already witnessed his last show as manager, a headliner at the Electric Ballroom in London shortly before Christmas that was almost as oversubscribed as the Haçienda. From there, he had gone back to Manchester, to his wife, Janet, and his newly born baby daughter. “I got home for Christmas after spending most of the last six months away,” he said. “And I saw this little girl.… I saw her and I just realized I wasn’t going anywhere again.”

  The fact that Moss’s first attempt at a family had ended badly made it imperative that he treat his new one with all due care and devotion, and he decided that spending time on it took priority over spending time with the family that was the Smiths. The decision was not made lightly; he had “a real traumatic period” over it, he insisted. Neither was it impetuous. Moss had always seen himself as a mentor first, a manager second. He also believed that the fun part of managing a band was the early days: putting the team together, engaging the creative forces, and striking the initial deals. (And he had loved every moment of it; “It was such a bloody joyous trip,” he said of his time with the band.) The nuts and bolts of subsequent recording and touring schedules didn’t particularly excite him in the same way. That, at least, pursuant to the personal reasons, was part of his external justification for resigning.

  Internally, it appeared that he could not put aside the notion that Morrissey saw him as Marr’s man, as evidenced by the singer’s defection to Geoff Travis over the four members’ financial arrangements.
It was a point of interminable frustration, given that “I put more time into Morrissey and into what I considered protecting Morrissey and looking after Morrissey’s interests than I did into Johnny, just because that was the way the job fell. I wasn’t there as Johnny’s mate, I was doing the job.”

  “He understood both of them really well,” said Grant Showbiz, who had spent the last five months at every show with Moss and the band. “And he, in a very effective way, had Morrissey’s best interests at heart. He wanted the best for Morrissey and he knew how to get it and he went about getting it in a very intelligent way.” Unfortunately, said Showbiz, “I don’t know if Morrissey understood that.”

  Moss had told Marr that he wouldn’t be in it for the long haul, but Marr essentially ignored the warning, believing that as long as the band continued to move forward inexorably, Moss would never be crazy enough to jump ship. He was wrong. Shortly after the Electric Ballroom show, after returning to his family in Manchester, Moss had a conversation with Marr in his car. Moss had always insisted of his eventual departure that “I wasn’t going to go until they’d ‘made it,’ I wouldn’t leave him in the lurch,” and he had reason to believe that he had lived up to his promise. The Smiths were in the top 30 with only their second single, all over the radio, the TV, and the music papers (on the cover of Sounds and Melody Maker in consecutive weeks in November), selling out increasingly large venues, unanimously viewed as the most exciting and important new band of 1983. Moss had set them up with a rehearsal space, a PA, a van, even their clothes. He had financed their original recordings. He had structured the deals with Rough Trade, Warner Bros. Music, Sire Records, and All Trade Booking. He had overseen the hiring of Grant Showbiz and John Featherstone. He had helped put together a damned good team. What he had not been able to do, and it was to prove costly in all senses, was to leave the Smiths in the hands of an equally capable manager or get the group’s internal finances down on paper. But had he stayed around to complete these goals, they might well have remained perpetually at arm’s length; worse, given Morrissey’s behavior thus far, he may have found himself being fired. It is probably for these unstated, hypothetical explanations that Marr was later able to surmise that “Maybe [Joe] saw something ’round the corner that I didn’t see,” but at the time, when Moss told Marr he would not be coming to New York, the guitarist didn’t believe him. In fact, for many years, he blocked out even the memory of the conversation. “I didn’t know that he really wasn’t going to come on the American visit with us.”