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

by Tony Fletcher

  The group then headed to the other side of the nation for a series of predominantly Scottish dates (after the grueling experience promoting their album, the Smiths consciously broke their subsequent schedule into regional tours over the course of the year). Stuart James, more of a self-confessed “Factory type” than a guitar-band aficionado, was quickly learning that such hysteria was merely business as usual: “If they didn’t have a stage invasion, they thought it was a shit gig.” (The invasions were rendered that much easier by the Smiths’ contractual insistence on a lack of crowd barriers.)

  Sure enough, a stage invasion took place when the Smiths performed at the Glastonbury Festival on June 23. Far from its subsequent status as an annual carnival for the entire British nation, Glastonbury in 1984 was only just emerging from its long-standing reputation as a hippie gathering while still maintaining its commitment to all musical cultures; the Smiths found themselves playing on a Saturday afternoon bill in between Brass Construction and General Public, their set shortened by the late arrival of pop-reggae band Amazulu and impeded by audience hostility from some quarters. “It’s not something that, quite honestly, I’d like to relive,” said Morrissey later. “We’re very much a live group and it was always very intimate and personal, something we couldn’t capture at Glastonbury.”

  “We never ever fancied playing a festival,” said Marr. “We had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do Glastonbury.” Much to All Trade’s annoyance, the Smiths canceled an appearance at the major Roskilde festival in Denmark the following weekend, where they had been advertised low down on a bill that included New Order and Lou Reed but also Johnny Winter and Paul Young. A conscious decision had been made. The Smiths would progress at their own pace, and very much under their own auspices. They would subsequently turn down just about all festival offers, eschewing the annual traveling circus show of mismatched acts performing in variable weather conditions to equally unpredictable audiences, in favor of the security of headlining appearances in an environment of their own choosing.

  By rights, the release of a quality post-album single should have been enough to allow for time off, if not for good behavior then certainly for good deeds. But Morrissey and Marr recognized that they had been handed their “moment,” that they should act on new songs as they wrote them rather than putting them aside for a future album. In this regard they saw the Smiths as a throwback not just to the furious work rate of the first generation punk bands, but to that of Marr’s 1960s icons—the original rock groups who frequently stopped into studios between gigs on tour and emerged with historically important 45s.

  “Musically I felt quite boundless,” Marr recalled of that immediate period after the first album. Andy Rourke felt much the same way: “At that time, we felt invincible. We could do anything.” Unlike early days, said Marr of his latest compositions, “I wasn’t looking over my shoulder thinking, ‘How is this going to sound in the Haçienda?’ but ‘How is this going to sound in our fans’ bedrooms?’ A lot of that comes with the confidence of [having] the backing of your audience.” In the spring of 1984, he and Angie, successfully reunited after the brief breakup over New Year in New York, had followed Morrissey to London, renting a flat in the genteel Georgian terraces of Nevern Square. (Angie left home in the process.) The Earls Court location was not a great distance from Morrissey’s home in Kensington, but it was sufficiently far from the distractions of Central London nightlife that Marr was able to maintain his workaholic lifestyle when not otherwise on the road or in the studio. (Rourke and Joyce, befitting their lower-income status, roomed together in northwest London’s less desirable suburb of Willesden.) In a mammoth attempt to compile multiple musical ideas, Marr recorded several instrumental songs onto his Portastudio at the start of June. Morrissey then added enough words to two of those ideas that, in July, when the group went into Jam Studios with John Porter, they formed the basis of the most productive single session of their careers.

  Of the two, “William, It Was Really Nothing,” unveiled at the Jobs for a Change festival, had already been pegged as the A-side. It opened with a flamenco-tike flourish of competing acoustic guitars (one of which used Nashville tuning, in which the higher-octave strings from a twelve-string guitar replace those on a six-string), an intro as short as the original Radio 1 version of “This Charming Man.” It then set out to see if it could cram several dozen chord changes, multiple guitar parts both electric and acoustic, and an entire kitchen-sink drama into just two minutes—and succeeded quite marvelously. Lyrically, it conjured up images of the classic 1963 British movie Billy Liar, in which Tom Courtenay had played an undertaker’s clerk (William Fisher) with a penchant for fantasy/fabrication that somehow failed to deter him from attracting the opposite sex (most notably the sophisticated Julie Christie, for whom the movie served as her big break). Morrissey’s immortal line, mid-song—“Would you like to marry me? And if you like you can buy the ring”—could have been delivered by the foul-mouthed café waitress Rita (played by Gwendolyn Watts), whose determination to capture Fisher in marriage offered a frighteningly vivid reminder of the loveless social contract at the heart of too many young working-class families of that era. But it was Morrissey’s additional talent to throw a wrench into his words, and as with “Girl Afraid,” the song seemed to switch gender in the chorus, giving rise to a rumor that the William in question was the singer for the Associates, Billy Mackenzie, whose friendship Morrissey discussed in print at the time of the single’s release. (That Mackenzie later wrote a song entitled “Stephen, You’re Really Something” would suggest that at least one of them saw some truth in that supposition.)

  If “William,” like its predecessor “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” evinced Morrissey’s sense of humor, its B-side, “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” presented him at his most deadly serious. The notion of a newly crowned pop star begging, “for once in my life, let me get what I want” might once have been laughed out of town, but Morrissey had already established his persona—that odd combination of historical self-doubt masked by hysterical self-belief—to the extent that listeners, even beyond the hard core of Smiths fans, were willing to take him at his word. And as a result, in this song more than most other Smiths songs, it seemed hard to separate the singer from his subject matter.

  The lyrics were all the more effective for matching the mood of Marr’s lilting arrangement, a 6/8 waltz that the guitarist readily admitted was an attempt to capture a sentimental nostalgia for his childhood Irish holidays. The first time he had presented a ballad in this tempo (“Back to the Old House”), Porter had electrified it and added drums, and it had proven an error. The mistake was not repeated. “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” was augmented by simple electric guitar overdubs that emerged under and around the bridge sections, but an absence of percussion afforded it the feeling of an entirely acoustic performance—serving to spotlight Marr’s creative chord structure in the process. The song started with a major seventh, uncommon in most pop music, and ended equally unusually with a mandolin solo that concluded on the dominant chord rather than the tonic, ensuring, by the mathematics of music, that the song—and by extension, its lyric—went “unresolved.” Would Morrissey get what he wanted? Would the listener? Would they ever?

  Among the instrumental demos Marr had recorded at Earls Court in June was one he entitled “Swamp.” Once the A- and B-sides had been fully realized at Jam Studios by the Smiths as a band, then Marr, Rourke, Joyce, and Porter got down to recording it. Morrissey tended only to come in when vocals were required, and by all accounts the words had not yet been fully constructed for this song; his absence probably allowed the others free rein to indulge their growing experimental tendencies. The session that followed resulted in what would become their most acclaimed song, its unique structure the result of a particularly complex process that requires a detailed telling.

  Johnny Marr’s writing style, as the two short songs for the initial A- and B-side
exemplified, typically saw him picking his way through the strings with his right hand and instinctively moving a finger here and a finger there on his left hand, creating multiple but subtle chord changes in the process, frequently two or more to the measure. “Swamp” was built around more of a solid, strummed riff, closer to the conventional chord structures of the blues. (It was also built around a groove, as per the unrecorded “Barbarism Begins at Home.”) This was especially attractive to John Porter, who “was very into music that didn’t have a lot of chord changes,” and who saw an opportunity in “Swamp” to slow the chord progression down further, to keep the initial F-sharp chord going as long as sixteen bars rather than the original four or eight. Once this idea had been set, and multiple “ambient” microphones set up at varying distances from the drums to magnify the “swamp” mood, Porter withdrew to the control room and got the tape running.

  The atmosphere in the studio was one of hedonistic self-confidence. “We used to smoke dope from getting out of bed to going back to bed,” said John Porter. Or as Marr put it, “It was just like, you’re from Manchester, you smoke weed till it comes out of your ears.” Unlike some other people drawn to the drug, the playing members of the Smiths found that they could still make music while stoned. But it wasn’t the only substance at hand. Engineer Mark Wallis recalled of the session that followed that “we were up at least two nights through the day and carried on working through the next day,” and that they were able to do so by constant dabbing at a “large supply of ‘fish heads’ ”—that is, “really shit speed.” Joyce recalled that they even switched the light-bulbs out for red ones to further add to the ambience.

  By Porter and Wallis’s recollection, they recorded just a couple of takes of “Swamp” but amassed an entire reel of tape in the process, including at least one fifteen-minute run-through. For the Smiths, the realization that they had created such an epic groove immediately opened up endless possibilities for overdubs. The first—and most important—addition was the creation of a tremolo effect on the guitars, something that did not exist on the demo. Marr approached it with three reference points in his head. One was essentially generic: the Bo Diddley syncopated shuffle. The others were particular to his childhood: the guitar that ran through Hamilton Bohannon’s “Disco Stomp,” from 1975, and the twin guitar groove in the instrumental section of the German band Can’s surprise British hit of 1976, “I Want More.” What the Smiths came away with was something very much of their own creation, and they achieved it by running the initial, dry guitar track back out from the studio desk into three separate Fender Twin Reverb amplifiers, with the vibrato controls on each one set to create a particular “wobble” effect. Marr and Porter then stood duty at the amps (each miked up individually), adjusting the rotary “speed” knob by hand to keep in time with the track. When their handiwork went out of sync regardless, Wallis would rewind the tape and punch the pair back in, sometimes for as little as ten seconds at a time. It was a laborious process and worth every painstaking step: the tremolo effect became the song’s instant trademark, one of the more recognizable guitar intros in modern history.

  To ensure a steady beat, Porter had already programmed a rhythm track on the LinnDrum, including “a percussion track with shakers and tambourines and congas and cowbells”—not instruments that Joyce included as part of his regular arsenal. One of these percussion parts was now set to sixteenth beats, and used to “trigger” a Drawmer noise gate captured from the vibrato guitars, creating what Porter called “a swirling signal”—a brief digital pulse that balanced the analog tremolo effect and in the process ensured the track’s meticulous rhythm. These multiple guitar parts were then bounced down onto a couple of stereo tracks so that they became their own instrument (this was in part due to logistics; there were only twenty-four tracks available on the tape, after all). At some point the initial fifteen-minute jam was trimmed and edited down to a more manageable length, although given that it was already evident this would not be the typical Smiths song, it was still up at the eight minute mark or so. At that point, recalled Porter, “we looked at each other and said, ‘It sounds fucking great, let’s keep it like that.’ ”

  With the ambitious mood proving contagious, the guitar parts for the song’s second of two identifiable sections were now run through a Leslie speaker, typically used for the swirling sound of a Hammond organ. Marr then added some additional top-end lead guitar flourishes, but with his almost inherent aversion to playing solos, they were kept to a minimum. Recognizing that the track had latched onto something as futuristic as it was nostalgic, the guitar parts were fed into a new piece of equipment, an AMS DMX 15–80 that was all the rage in studios that could afford it. Marketed as a stereo digital delay, and often referred to additionally for its capabilities as a “harmonizer,” its ability to store what seemed at the time like a magical 1.2 seconds of delay was quickly realized by technicians of the day as a primitive “sampler” instead, arguably the first of its kind. (“They invented the sampler by mistake,” said Porter of the DMX’s British manufacturer Advanced Music Systems.) In this particular example, the brief guitar runs were stored in the DMX, then punched back into the track where needed—a process that, in 1984, seemed nothing less than revolutionary.

  Marr’s demo had incorporated a slide guitar line, albeit “a prettier version” than the one that Porter now suggested—which was to play it on the lower strings of the guitar, add a second harmony track, but then to add a couple of additional notes to each of these tracks by using the AMS harmonizer.3 Porter recalled that he may purposefully have only recorded the delay rather than the actual note on these digital harmonies so that “there were these slight anomalies … an element of weirdness.” Given that Porter claimed to have played at least one of the slide parts himself, it was perhaps not surprising that he would look back and say, “I thought that song was as much mine as it was theirs.” Marr, who disputed that Porter played any guitar parts on this song, nonetheless gave him due credit. “He worked incredibly hard on that song, he pieced together all the sonics. It was like he was piloting the plane on that session, which is what a producer does.”

  The final instrumental touch was Marr’s relatively simple melody—the high notes heard at the end of each “verse”—which he played using the electric guitar’s natural harmonics. An almost precise replica of the synthesized vibraphone sound heard loudly on Lovebug Starski’s 1983 12″ “You’ve Gotta Believe,” this was Marr’s nod to Starski as both a distant hip-hop influence and an immediate welcoming presence when the Smiths appeared at Danceteria. Such subtle notations were his way of countering the Smiths’ public perception as ’60s revivalists and rock purists.

  Morrissey, of course, had much to do with this image of the Smiths; his negative proclamations about synthesizers and other studio trickery had sounded suspiciously close to a fatwa. But that was the beauty about the Smiths: that what seemed at times like diametrically opposed forces could find a common musical ground, the resulting combination of which could then appeal to all comers. Morrissey, who was often fulsome in his praise for his bandmate’s musical compositions, would rarely reveal his true feelings for this, the Smiths’ most experimental, club-based track to date. (The song’s 96 beats-per-minute tempo was actually much slower than conventional “dance music,” though it was right in the ballpark of most hip-hop.) But he knew that they were working on “Swamp” and had long been tinkering with prospective lyrics. Porter, as was often his custom, dropped a cassette tape of the eight-minute mix through the singer’s letter box on his way home after this lengthy session, and when Morrissey returned to the studio, with his book of prospective lyrics, he delivered his most emotive and personal vocal yet. After borrowing his opening lines from George Elliot’s Middlemarch, Morrissey met the group’s dark dance-floor groove head-on, singing of a nightclub where “if you’d like to go, you could meet someone who really loves you”—except, of course, that in his case precisely the opposite happens: the protago
nist leaves on his/her own, as always, forlorn and suicidal. It may have been mere coincidence, given that it formed part of a longer lyrical theme of resistance to unseen forces, that Morrissey should have chosen this track, with all its digital trickery, to insist, “I am human and I need to be loved,” but the effect was the same regardless: it sounded as if his very life (or indeed, his death) depended on it. Between the painstaking but euphoric construction of the backing track and the meticulous but cathartic delivery of the vocals, the Smiths had created something quite unlike—and totally beyond—themselves. As with “Barbarism Begins at Home,” and several other songs the Smiths were working on at the time, the song was awarded a title that had not once been uttered in the actual lyrics: “How Soon Is Now?”

  The Smiths were so excited by their new creation that they called up Rough Trade and invited Scott Piering and Geoff Travis to come and hear a rough mix. From Porter’s perspective, part of the song’s initial attraction was its American vibe. “I was much more interested in breaking into the American market than they were,” he said of the Smiths. As such, he was keen to get Piering’s response: “I always trusted Scott’s sensibilities to a certain extent because he was American and had a slightly different attitude.” Piering, Porter duly recalled, was visibly excited by “How Soon Is Now?”—and Travis was not. “He was like, ‘What are you doing? This isn’t the Smiths.’ I remember feeling totally deflated, going home that night thinking, ‘I really thought we’d got something great here.’ ” Mark Wallis, whose contribution to the session was rewarded with a rare engineer’s credit on the record, confirmed that the reaction of “the business heads” was “It’s not really the Smiths.”