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

by Tony Fletcher

  This was true. So too was the fact that, coming off the hysteria of the UK tour, the number 2 album, the constant media attention and adulation, and lacking the level of touring organization that a band of their caliber and popularity already required, the initial dates in Europe prior to the Sandie Shaw Top of the Pops appearance had been an enormous letdown. “I think we were feeling like they just didn’t quite get it,” said Marr. “It’s not news that young British bands that are on top of the tree [in the UK] get quite a shock when they go to other countries who aren’t on the same page—yet. I think we all just felt fucked. I can’t speak for Mike and Andy.” (Harper recalled them being immensely “frustrated.”) “I didn’t feel disappointed. I felt like, ‘He’s expressing what we all feel. We were trashed.’ ”

  The Smiths/Sandie Shaw collaboration made for ready media fodder, and the two acts continued to do the rounds of press, radio, and TV.4 Ideally, the professional relationship would have continued as well, and even more so with patented compositions; the great shame of the Morrissey-Marr writing partnership is that they never gave material to another artist without releasing it in their own name first. When Morrissey finally brought Amanda Malone into the studio, in April 1984, it was as if he was trying to repeat the Sandie Shaw formula: he had Malone sing “This Charming Man” and a new song that the Smiths had just recorded as a B-side, “Girl Afraid.” While both songs would have taken on new light sung from a female perspective, the recording, at the Power Plant, with Geoff Travis nominally in the producer’s chair, was something of a disaster. Amanda Malone had never been in a recording studio before; Sandie Shaw she was not. “Geoff Travis, as soon as I met him, had animosity towards me,” she recalled, and while Marr, Joyce, and Rourke were never anything but friendly toward her, they “were not into it” either.

  All concerned recognized the possibility of reversing what was otherwise a fairy-tale story of increasly high chart success and critical acclaim; the fact that no less an icon than Paul Weller was engendering serious credibility issues for persisting with his own untutored female teenage protégée (Tracie) would have been very much on Travis’s mind. The single was duly shelved, and Morrissey, afraid as always of confrontation, neglected to tell Malone until she pushed him on the matter during a visit to Campden Hill Road—at which point he admitted that “Geoff Travis hates it.”

  Malone, “stressed at the idea” that the single might actually be released, assured Morrissey that if anything, she was relieved to hear that it had been canned. She had been living in England for three months already, in a bedsit in Battersea, while awaiting her studio appointment, and she decided to stay on in London. Malone developed a close friendship with Morrissey away from the day-to-day rigmarole of the Smiths, a female companion similar in some regards to those he had back in Manchester. Morrissey’s sartorial sense of mischief had not been left in the north; on one occasion, he told Malone to dress up and meet him in Notting Hill for a formal lunch, at which, equally well attired, he walked them from his flat to the cafeteria at the British Home Stores on Kensington High Street—for a downmarket version of the afternoon teas he’d once enjoyed at Kendal Milne. That he was constantly interrupted by fans appeared not to be a problem—yet. “He was always charming and kind, no matter how many there were or how long they were there,” said Malone. “He really got that he was lucky to be in that position, he really enjoyed it—and enjoyed being loved. Not just in a conceited way, but that to these people in some way he meant something. It wasn’t like he was full of himself.”

  Sandie Shaw had gamely promoted “Hand in Glove” despite having only recently delivered a daughter, but she soon became pregnant again with a son. Still emotionally affected by her first bout of stardom as a teenager, she decided to focus on family over fame, and subsequently retreated from the spotlight for the next two years. In the meantime, she maintained her friendship with Morrissey, visiting him in Kensington and learning to circumvent his tendency of hiding from the doorbell by whatever means necessary. It was while they were still promoting the “Hand in Glove” collaboration that Johnny Marr received a phone call from Scott Piering, with what was becoming a familiar cry for help. An important piece of publicity had been scheduled, requiring Morrissey and Shaw together, but the singer was nowhere to be found. Marr went to Campden Hill Road; he was the one person Morrissey would always open up for. Marr recalled his partner that day looking “stubbly and wrecked, obviously not slept. Burned out.” (This would have been within weeks of the illness that caused the cancellations on the British tour.) It was on occasions such as these that Marr’s presence was required to bring him around to the day’s duties.

  What was most surprising to Marr that day was not Morrissey’s appearance but what he saw outside the kitchen window: their beloved 1960s teenage pinup, Morrissey’s ultimate pop idol, no small heroine to Johnny Marr, the person they had once dreamed of writing a song for, was now standing on a fire escape, having taken the long way around to try and attract the singer’s attention and get him going on the publicity jaunt.

  “Oh, look,” said Marr to Morrissey, “there’s Sandie Shaw outside the window.” And they both waved to her. It was, he recognized later, “one of the most amazing moments of my life.” As confirmation of how far they had come in such a short while, and what Morrissey’s personality still had in store for them, it was also among the most surreal.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  We’ll never be a flavour of the month; I think we’re just a little bit too clever for that.

  —Morrissey, New Musical Express, January 1984

  In some scenarios, the story could have ended there. For despite the Smiths’ exalted status within the independent world, still they would not have been the first group to generate incredible initial interest, sign quickly to a label, have their first single create a buzz, their second become a hit, their third capitalize on the second, and then their debut album storm the charts only for it to gradually seep in as a disappointment—at which, suddenly forced to write a second album as quickly as the first, they either deliberate over the follow-up to the point that the public loses interest or release substandard material in a rush to maintain momentum. The record books are, literally, littered with such examples—no shortage of them subsequently hailing from Manchester.

  In the Smiths’ case, though, precisely the opposite turned out to be true. The completion and release of the LP served to free the group at last to move forward, to start writing songs afresh. They had already introduced one such number at their last show of 1983: “Barbarism Begins at Home,” which would reach a considerably wider audience when they performed it live on The Tube in March 1984. It represented a return to the Freak Party beat, especially for Rourke, whose taut, melodic, funky bass line dominated its proceedings.1 Marr adroitly accompanied him with flexing disco chords while Joyce luxuriated in the freedom to be allowed to stretch out and groove; lest the whole song get carried away onto the dance floor, Morrissey (writing it in public over the course of several live shows, something he was subsequently careful to avoid) supplied grounding lyrics about how “unruly boys who will not grow up must be taken in hand.” “Barbarism Begins at Home” represented a break from Smiths “tradition”—a clear pronouncement, from the musical members at least, that they were not averse to dance music, and as the track settled into the live set, it rapidly expanded in length, from four minutes to seven, frequently returning as an encore at Marr’s behest. (Around this same time, Marr also played some extremely funky guitar for Mike Pickering’s group, Quando Quango, on their Factory single “Atom Rock.” It marked the first time that Marr met New Order’s Bernard Sumner, who produced the single, launching a friendship with long-lasting effects for all concerned.)

  Two more new songs were then introduced at the first show in 1984; each had been formulated by Marr on his Gibson 355 in New York, and though they appeared, on the surface at least, to be more conventional Smiths fare, when recorded in Ma
rch and released to the public in May one in particular revealed a new depth and sophistication to the group—and additionally, a new playfulness. Having toyed once already with Sandie Shaw song titles (turning “I Don’t Need Anything” into “I Don’t Owe You Anything”) without anyone noticing, Morrissey decided to do so again, taking another of her failed late ’60s singles, “Heaven Knows I’m Missing Him Now,” and replacing the verb and the object with the adjective “Miserable.” The title served as confirmation to the greater public that he knew their opinion of him and was quite willing to ham it up to drive it home. But it also served as an inside gag with Sandie Shaw. And the best thing about it? Nobody suspected a thing. (This was 1984, after all, and Internet search engines and digital music copying were still very much in the future.)2

  A similar sense of mischief ran rampant throughout the lyrics, quickly dividing listeners into two camps: those who laughed at the words even as they empathized with them, and those who saw them as confirmation of everything they inherently disliked about the Smiths in general, and Morrissey in particular. The couplet that offered the most universal appeal was the one that pronounced, “Two lovers entwined pass me by, and heaven knows I’m miserable now,” a feeling that had surely been shared by anyone who had ever experienced a romantic breakup (and, perhaps, many who had not). The one that caused most debate stated, “I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now.” In a Thatcherite Britain where unemployment—especially among the youth—showed no signs of decline, and attendant teenage poverty was therefore a constant concern, Morrissey’s critics (and there were many) wanted to know how he could object to the idea of work. But Morrissey had already answered that one in “You’ve Got Everything Now” and “Still Ill,” and while this latest couplet surely came from his own personal experience (via his unhappy shifts at the Internal Revenue, the Civil Service, and as a hospital porter), it resonated with plenty of other listeners who were, almost daily, engaged in a similar battle between the conflicting demands of job dissatisfaction versus the need to pay the rent. The subsequent chorus—to the extent that the Smiths ever dealt in conventional song structures, this one appeared to come close—only drove the point home: who among the greater public had not smiled on a daily basis, for whatever reasons, at people whom they’d much rather kick in the eye?

  And yet those who took “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” as affirmation of Morrissey’s permanent state of depression must have missed the subsequent lyrical non sequitur about making Caligula blush—a tease rendered that much more powerful by the image of Morrissey himself involved in the bedroom escapade. And it would seem certain that he understood as much and duly played it to the hilt, drawing the first-person “I” out to three syllables in the subsequent line.

  It was a lyrical masterpiece, but it would never have carried the same emotional depth without the accompanying arrangement. “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” represented the first time that Johnny Marr managed to capture that bittersweet sensation of melancholia. (“It’s very beautiful, it can fill you up,” he said, describing it as a “tangible feeling,” as opposed to depression—which was an “emotion that was just about emptiness.”) Recorded at the Fallout Shelter, an Island Records studio in West London, with John Porter again serving as producer, Marr’s cascading guitar lines were given the space to breathe, to expand, to fill the song—but without cluttering it, as had always been a danger in the past. In that sense, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” was as much Porter’s achievement, the producer additionally coaxing a brilliant delivery from Morrissey, full of quavering vibratos and self-referential warbles and rewarding the singer by ensuring that these vocals were then placed louder in the final mix than ever before—a necessity for all great pop singles.

  The fact that a song entitled “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” could actually be viewed as a pop single was proven upon its release when it rose up the charts to graze (and grace) the top 10. (The ever-higher trajectory had now been maintained through the first four single releases.) A powerful antidote to the sentiments behind the number 1 single the week of its release (“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by Wham!), “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” also represented one of the few occasions that a Smiths “cover star” truly reflected the sentiments of the single within. The black-and-white image of erstwhile “pools” millionaire Viv Nicholson, her platinum-blond hairdo and expensive clothes offset by her naturally hardened expression and the poverty of her surroundings—an otherwise deserted northern terraced street—said everything about getting what you want and ending up miserable regardless.

  In the middle of May, the Smiths returned to Ireland for four concerts, including their first in Belfast. It was a matter of pride and principle for them, as a group of Mancunian Irish, that they establish a bond with the land of their fathers (and their mothers), and it was a visit that was greeted by ecstatic audience reactions and quasi-nationalist appreciation in the Irish press. Even before this visit, and based largely on the single show in Dublin the previous year, promoter Denis Desmond had been trying to secure the Smiths as headliners for a festival at Shelbourne Football Club’s ground in Dublin, on the premise that it would steal U2’s thunder and establish the Smiths as an equivalent or larger act. To this end, the Smiths were offered 15,000 Irish punts, almost five times as much as fellow hit act Aztec Camera (the Style Council, Lloyd Cole, and Billy Bragg were also on the proposed bill) along with 50 percent of all festival profits and merchandising. Ultimately, the Smiths declined the offer, the festival did not happen, and the band returned to Ireland later in the year to play a week’s worth of club dates instead.

  As the Irish offer intimated, the Smiths had reached a crossroads already in their career. Their relatively overnight fame had propelled them to the point where they could commandeer large sums of money playing to a significant number of people on the European festival circuit. And yet this was a band that had only just emerged from the clubs and was still acclimating itself to concert halls. Comforted by their familiar onstage intimacy, reassured nightly by friendly stage invasions, they had reason to doubt that they were ready for the larger stages. In addition, Morrissey was feeling the immense emotional and physical pressure that came with the reality check of achieving his dream of stardom in such suddenly glaring circumstances. These competing forces unraveled on a particularly troublesome visit to Finland for a festival at the beginning of June, with Morrissey succumbing to an attack of tearful depression. More than three years later, in one of his first interviews after Johnny Marr had left the band, he was able to reflect on the incident with unapologetic candor. Citing “a very horrendous plane journey” as the instigating factor, Morrissey said, “For some reason the floodgates just opened as they say—and didn’t stop for the rest of the day. On the plane, in the airport, in the hotel, at the soundcheck … I just couldn’t stop.” Confessing to embarrassment at the time, he observed (and not necessarily with any ill feeling) that the rest of the band “didn’t say much … They just put their Walkmans on and got out their in-flight magazines.” The Smiths’ performance, for which the group’s new tour manager, Stuart James, a youthful veteran of the Manchester scene, additionally handled sound duties in the temporary absence of Grant Showbiz, was then rained out midway through. It was a bad day all around.

  Circumstances were somewhat more favorable a week later, on Saturday, June 10, when the Smiths topped the bill at the Jobs for a Change festival in London. The free concert was held within the massive courtyard of the Labour-led Greater London Council, which had been thumbing its metaphorical nose at Thatcher’s government in the Houses of Parliament, directly across the River Thames, by constantly updating and publicizing, on the side of its building, the ever-rising number of unemployed. The event was not without incident; when the self-explanatory Redskins took to the stage, right-wing skinheads engaged in their familiar Nazi salute as provocation, provoking a major fracas that sent several people to t
he hospital. But after further sets by Billy Bragg, Misty in Roots, and Mari Wilson—a refreshingly varied bill—the Smiths took the stage as headliners to a crowd estimated at well over 10,000, some of whom scaled the courtyard walls via drainpipes to hang precariously from window ledges in imitation Morrissey stage poses that demonstrated the level of adulation now surrounding the singer. The sterling set they turned in that day (which included Morrissey’s proclamation from “Still Ill” that “I never had a job, because I never wanted one,” which effectively countered the purpose of the event), when combined with the crowd mania at what was far and away the highest-profile show they had yet played, and to their largest audience, helped confirm the Smiths’ status as the peoples’ band.