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

by Tony Fletcher

  “It wasn’t as stupid as it seems,” said Grant Showbiz of her approach. “Because she was the first to realize they were going to be massive. Other than Seymour Stein: maybe he just signed them because they were pretty young boys, I don’t know. But Ruth was absolutely right. On a serious note, she was asking, ‘Why the fuck are you staying in such shit fucking hotels? Why are you getting paid so little money? Why are you on this crappy record label? Why are you getting these tiny advances?’ And she was right on every single point.” All of which made her inherently unwelcome to those who were already invested in the band. “She was the enemy to Rough Trade from day one.”

  Showbiz, while admitting the diagnosis could apply to him, too, considered Polsky “a crazy party lady who you felt had something missing in her that was completed by the band experience,” a viewpoint confirmed by Amanda Malone, her assistant at Danceteria, who had just moved over to London herself upon Morrissey’s insistence that he was going to make her a star. “You think about club culture: how many of these people would you really call winners?” said Malone; Polsky “was a very spoiled, difficult person,” but on the other hand, “she was very good to all the bands she represented.” At times too good: Malone had seen Polsky make a move on someone in the Smiths entourage when they were in New York, and how it had upset Morrissey. “It meant that he couldn’t take her seriously as a businessperson.”

  Given Morrissey’s noted fear of confrontation, it was entirely possible that Polsky had suggested herself as the band’s manager—at the very least in America, where there was clearly great interest in the group—and that when Morrissey expressed cautious enthusiasm rather than a flat-out refusal, she promptly translated that into approval. All the same, said Malone, “he was livid” when she announced as much to the industry. “And the rest of them were even more livid.”

  “I loved Ruth,” said Johnny Marr. “But manager material she wasn’t.” Though Morrissey quickly confirmed to his partner that he had not appointed her, Polsky was used to getting her way and surely felt that, given the chance to prove herself via her forceful personality, she would soon win over the group. The Smiths would certainly not have been the first or last band to find a manager muscling in on their vacant (or even occupied) territory and declaring control by fiat. The Polsky problem, which did not go away immediately, was compounded by the fact that the band already had two Americans operating on their behalf: Scott Piering and his assistant, Martha DeFoe. At the start of 1984, when it was evident that Joe Moss had vacated the premises, Piering did not so much ask to manage the Smiths as he began taking care of their business as a matter of course.

  Eventually, Piering proposed that he be officially appointed—in large part, he insisted, to protect the Smiths. “I wasn’t sure whether I wanted the responsibility,” he told Johnny Rogan, “but it seemed a good way of ensuring that Ruth would not become manager.” Curiously, despite his loyalties to Rough Trade, Piering did not disagree with some of Polsky’s primary arguments. “Ruth made every effort to basically point out how shabbily they were handled—which was, more or less, true! That psychology would attract Morrissey. His mother was constantly telling him the same.” Piering likewise believed that Morrissey needed to be treated like a star, and while the rest of the group were relatively comfortable fending for themselves, he frequently insisted that the singer be supplied not just a taxi to a TV station, for example, but a chauffeur; not just with the items on the backstage rider but his own dressing room too. If this ran counter to Rough Trade’s long-standing socialist principles, and equally to those of the university social secretaries who still made up the majority of the first headlining tour’s promoters, so be it.

  From the perspective of Geoff Travis, or Mike Hinc, the fact that Piering was willing to take on the aggravation of being point person for the group was comforting; they knew him, after all, and as a comrade, if not always as a best friend. And from Morrissey and Marr’s perspective, having Scott Piering fight for their cause was much more preferable than opening up a potential Pandora’s box with Ruth Polsky. Piering may not have been as disciplined as a professional manager with the appropriate office staff and resources, but he was devoted, available, and trustworthy. Besides, he was working for Rough Trade; no contract need be typed up, no commission paid out.

  Or, as Johnny Marr put it in an interview that February, “Everybody we meet wants to be our manager! But we’re just organizing ourselves at the moment and not listening to anybody.”

  And so the tour rolled along, in its joyously chaotic manner. “We were really making it up as went along,” said John Featherstone. “ ‘We’re going on tour? How do we book a truck? How do we advance a show?’ I didn’t know that the band was supposed to have a manager. I hadn’t gotten comfortable enough with Joe being around to know that this was a path fraught with peril.” Featherstone’s subtle lighting, his refusal to dramatize the band, came in for considerable early criticism, not least from Grant Showbiz, who himself was under constant attack from tour manager Phil Cowie, in part for acting more like a member of the band than one of the crew. And there lay the core of the group’s intriguing dynamic. “Even though we did not always see eye to eye, Grant and me,” said Featherstone, “and there may have been a certain amount of insular fighting, we locked arms facing outwards as part of protecting the band whenever we were dealing with anyone outside of the organization.” Cowie was considered one of those “outsiders” and his days were quickly numbered. The PA crew, on the other hand, were very much viewed as insiders, and would work with the Smiths for years to come. “They knew what they were doing; they were people who genuinely were part of the band gang,” said Featherstone of monitor engineer Eddie Hallam and sound supervisors Diane Barton and Oz McCormick, whose company, OZ PA, also served New Order. “It had that sense of being with the best bunch of mates at school.”

  Central to the Smiths’ touring sensibility was the fact that whatever else was going on around them—and on that first major tour, without personal management, and at odds with their tour manager, there were constant battles with security and promoters, multiple late arrivals for soundcheck and showtimes, and no small amount of debilitating hangovers—“they checked their baggage at the stage door,” as Featherstone put it. “They loved playing live.”

  “The whole reason that I wanted to be a musician and be in a band was to go on tour and play onstage,” confirmed Andy Rourke. “And when we were onstage it was perfect. Amazing. Every gig was amazing. And everybody gave one hundred percent. One thousand percent, if that exists.” The constant stage invasions, the routine late-show dance of mutual appreciation between Morrissey and Marr, the general level of hysteria, the fans who had started hanging around at soundcheck and whom the playing members of the Smiths readily welcomed backstage, all confirmed as much.

  So did the peer approval that the group rapidly received from other artists. When The Smiths entered the national charts at number 2, held off the top spot only by the Thompson Twins, it simultaneously entered the “independent charts” at number 1, replacing the debut mini-LP by Billy Bragg. (The Smiths also held the numbers 1, 2, and 3 positions in the singles chart—a first for any artist since the chart had been established in 1980.) A former punk musician and soldier with a thick cockney accent, Bragg had recently returned to the music scene as a solo artist, mixing the personal and the political in a format that might have been considered the domain of the folk singer but for the fact that he was wielding an electric guitar with considerable force. Bragg had already demonstrated his own songwriting ability with the opening track from Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy, “A New England,” which would later be taken into the top 10 by Kirsty MacColl, the daughter of the legendary Salford folk musician and writer Ewan MacColl. As such, he could afford to be initially wary of the buzz surrounding the Smiths, until he attended the Electric Ballroom show just before Christmas. “I went with a fanzine writer who’d been telling me they were the new Beatles and I was saying
, ‘Yeah, and I’m the new Bob Dylan.’ But then I saw them.…”

  Bragg had gained visibility in part because he was such an inexpensive, uncomplicated live act for promoters, and despite the fact that he’d had the number 1 indie album, he agreed to open for the Smiths at their London Lyceum show in February. A few days before, he had heard “What Difference Does It Make?” at a soundcheck and asked the DJ to play the B-side as well: it was “Back to the Old House.” “I suddenly realized they weren’t just a great live band, and they weren’t just a great-sounding band. There was a real quality songwriting team there.” Until this point, Bragg had been, by his own admission, “trying to compete with Elvis Costello, and you can’t do that.… I couldn’t keep up with him. But with the Smiths, I understood where they were coming from, and the things they were riffing on. So it was much more feasible for me to measure myself against what they were doing: that kind of tough and tender thing that I was also trying to touch upon, the ability to be powerful but also personal in what you’re writing about.” (If the Smiths were seen at this point to represent a northern sensibility, Bragg was already cursed by his accent to be viewed as representing a southern one, and so the deep and lasting friendship that quickly formed between the two acts helped serve as a unifying force.) In the meantime, Bragg took to covering the B-side to “This Charming Man,” “Jeane.” Morrissey’s tale of typically unsatisfied love was a two-chord rocker that gained extra poignancy from its sparse accompaniment. “I loved the simplicity of it, the powerful imagery of it, and I just loved its whole velocity. There’s a lot of stuff that Johnny played that can’t be replicated, but ‘Jeane’ was four to the floor, and I can do that.”

  The tour’s original schedule (before the canceled shows were tacked back onto the end of it) called for it to conclude with two triumphant statements. One was a headliner at the Free Trade Hall, the seat of so much cultural and political history in Manchester, not least those shows with the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks; the other was a second London headliner, a sold-out show at the 3,000-capacity Hammersmith Palais. That the Smiths had, already, achieved just about every ambition they had dared fix their gaze upon was confirmed when they brought out none other than Sandie Shaw to sing “I Don’t Owe You Anything”—which she had just recorded for a single, with the Smiths as her backing band.

  Sandie Shaw had not had a hit single in fifteen years, but contrary to the Smiths’ subsequent suggestions, neither was she exactly in exile. In 1982, she had been coaxed back in to the studio by the British Electric Foundation to record “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” the Bacharach-David song, for an album on the Virgin label, whose cofounder, Nik Powell, she was dating. In the summer of 1983, it therefore proved relatively easy for Geoff Travis to meet with Powell, now Shaw’s husband, and press upon him a letter from Morrissey and Marr, along with their home recording of the song they wanted her to consider. The fact that Marr had written the music to “I Don’t Owe You Anything” not only as “something that Sandie Shaw could sing,” but in direct imitation of another Bacharach-David song “Walk on By,” would hopefully have come across on the demo. (Burt Bacharach and Hal David, after all, had also composed “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me,” the song that Shaw had taken to the top of the charts when she was all of seventeen.) But if not, then the title itself ought to have intimated a degree of obsessive knowledge; in 1967 Shaw had released an unsuccessful single entitled “I Don’t Need Anything,” and the fact that Morrissey and Marr referenced its B-side in their letter to her demonstrated that at least one of them knew as much.

  Indeed, the letter was almost extreme in its evident heroine worship. “It is an absolute fact that your influence more than any other permeates all our music. Without doubt we are incurable Sandie Shaw fans.… We have strong ideas about the musical backing which should accompany ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’… We feel that your future needs an injection of high spirit and vengeance.… We would be honoured to provide material for consideration.”

  Shaw was honored too, but also somewhat taken aback: the Smiths, after all, had only just released “Hand in Glove” and were hardly household names. As such, it may not have been purely her desire to get acquainted with Morrissey and Marr that delayed any formal commitment until after the success of “This Charming Man.” By that point Shaw would have been foolish to reject their approach, assuming that she had any desire to return to the charts. And she did. The collaboration was duly talked (and written) up—especially by Morrissey—over the last weeks of 1983 and into the New Year, at which point a recording session with John Porter at Matrix was shoehorned into the space created by the cancellation of the February live shows.

  Once that session had concluded and the completed songs were played back, it was not “I Don’t Owe You Anything,” but an exuberant reinterpretation of “Hand in Glove” that was chosen as the A-side. Morrissey was not opposed to this decision; he had always believed that the song deserved to be a hit, and this was his best opportunity to be proven correct. But it could also be viewed as a missed opportunity of sorts: in this particular guise, afforded a production very much of its period, “Hand in Glove” was reduced to a piece of ephemeral pop music. There is nothing wrong with that as a matter of course, and Shaw’s distinction as a singer was highlighted by her remarkable ability to draw out the syllable at the end of each verse across several bars—but there was none of the youthful desperation of the Smiths’ original version, nothing about the recording to confirm Morrissey’s original belief that “those words had to be sung.” (The fact that she insisted on changing “you little charmer” to “ ’cause you’re my darling” did not, apparently, sit well with the original lyricist.)

  On the other hand (and single side), “I Don’t Owe You Anything” sounded exactly as intended: as if it had been written for Shaw, and Shaw alone. She sang it with sincere tenderness (though her voice remained frustratingly low in the mix), and Porter and Marr surrounded her ample vibrato with an arrangement that positioned a Hammond organ against a distinct electric guitar twang. With Rourke’s bass frequently rising an octave to demand attention and Joyce’s refreshingly restrained drumming a sign of his increased confidence, it became the definitive version of the song. The need for a “bonus” track saw Shaw stopping in on the next Smiths’ session too, where she sang “Jeane”—accompanied for the most part only by Marr’s acoustic guitar (and the occasional background wail by Morrissey)—with such frightening sincerity that it quickly became a cult classic.

  Upon release in April, Morrissey’s long-standing faith in “Hand in Glove” was vindicated by the new version’s immediate airplay, and the Smiths had barely commenced their very first European tour when they were offered the opportunity to back Shaw on Top of the Pops. They didn’t have to do it: the solo female singers of the 1960s were often depicted lip-syncing alone under the TV spotlight. And Morrissey was superfluous to official requirements: in theory, he could have converted any airfares home into a couple of nights at a five-star hotel and gone sightseeing around a European capital. But Top of the Pops was sacrosanct, and Morrissey wanted to be part of the celebration even if he was not to actually appear on the show with her. The three instrument-playing members of the Smiths duly accompanied Sandie Shaw on television that day in memorable fashion, performing barefoot in homage to Shaw’s 1960s image. The singer kept her own shoes on but stole the entire show by collapsing on the floor and writhing suggestively. For those three minutes at least, Shaw was by far the coolest thirty-six-year-old mom in the nation, and the Smiths the coolest young band for fronting her comeback.

  The next day, Dave Harper picked up various members of the group and brought them to Heathrow to resume the European tour. Morrissey, he noted immediately, “was in this really dark mood.” Though the group checked in for their flight, they declined to go through to the departure lounge, sitting around instead, partaking in furtive private conversations. Harper’s sinking feeling proved well founded when, he recalled, Morris
sey turned to him and said, “I’m not getting on the plane; I don’t want to do the rest of the tour.” Morrissey’s band mates appeared unable or unwilling to convince the singer otherwise (one is reminded of James Maker’s memory of Morrissey, “arms folded, unbudgeable”) and all too aware that he lacked the authority to make any demands of his own, Harper retrieved their bags, drove them back into London, and returned to Rough Trade to deal with the fallout. (It was, he said, “the first time I saw Scott [Piering] really angry.”) Five shows were cancelled, four of them in Germany, where Rough Trade had its own division which had bankrolled the tour. “They lost a lot of money on it,” said Mike Hinc, and the Smiths in turn lost considerable credibility with the German label and media (though they were coaxed back out a week later to play a full concert for a prestigious German television show and stop off in Paris for a scheduled concert on the way home). “There was a failure of anybody at that stage to see the importance of Europe as a market equal in both cultural and commercial terms to the UK.”