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

by Tony Fletcher

  Geoff Travis denied this. “I remember loving it,” he insisted. “I can remember going to the studio, I can remember sitting there, listening to it. I can’t imagine why my reaction wouldn’t have been ‘Well that’s quite good.’ It doesn’t make any sense. Maybe I was in a really bad mood that day. It’s been known. I’m not right every time.”

  This was a key point. It was thanks to Geoff Travis that the Smiths had got a record deal; he had heard something sufficiently exciting in a cassette tape of “Hand in Glove” to release it as-was. It was thanks to him that the Smiths had had a hit; he had heard “This Charming Man” being recorded at a Peel session and instantly suggested it as a single. He was now being asked to enthuse about an eight-minute jam—in very rough form—that most certainly was not the Smiths as he knew them, and he was facing a studio crew that had been getting by these last few days on equal parts speed and weed. (Travis, by contrast, was close to straight-edge.) If he chose to play it guarded this time around, then that was his right—and to some degree, his manner. “Maybe I didn’t say very much. That’s much more likely. In a studio situation, it’s very difficult to say much, because it’s so intense.”

  Certainly, by this point the Smiths were masters of their own domain. Had they wanted to earmark “How Soon Is Now?” as a single—perhaps the follow-up to “William”—that was absolutely their prerogative. As it was, there were certainly no objections from Rough Trade to mix it along with the projected A- and B-sides, and the production team subsequently decamped a few days later to Marcus Studios, where Porter, having already bounced the drum parts down to the point where he could no longer mix them in isolation, decided that “the toms weren’t loud enough” and, “rooting round in the tape store,” unearthed a master recording by the reggae band Aswad. Finding some tom sounds to his satisfaction, he “dumped it into a sampler, and added it into the drums.” Marcus Studios did not have automation, however, which meant that he and Wallis worked their way through a seven-minute mix with hands on faders at all times. Porter delivered the mix, figuring that his work was done, only to get a call from Geoff Travis a few days later. Morrissey, apparently, did not like the vocals. There was no choice but to go back in and do another mix, from scratch.

  And just as well. Somehow, down the line, the Marcus mix of “How Soon Is Now?” was released in Italy, and it turned out to be not a patch on the final version; as much as anything, the slide guitar was largely inaudible and the vocals not only lacked for the warmth of the eventual mix but included a whole section, around five minutes in, where Porter and Wallis had attempted (but failed at) a dub section, over which Morrissey was heard yodeling ineffectively before the faders cut completely so that his quizzical “OK?”—intended for the producer’s ears only—was heard in isolation. (That was the part to which the singer really objected, and understandably so.) All this indicates that until the final mix, “How Soon Is Now?” might not have been the classic we now know it as (and that Geoff Travis might well have been asked to judge it unfinished).

  Porter went into Eden Studios, where he had successfully finished up the Smiths LP a year earlier, and which had an automated desk; there he set about reconstructing the arrangement from the ground up—including a fake fade-out after five minutes—and this time, he pulled it off. This final mix of “How Soon Is Now?” was handed in to everyone’s satisfaction only just in time to be released—as a bonus track for those who bought the 12″ version of “William, It Was Really Nothing.”

  Almost as soon as that decision was made and the record hit the shops, everyone involved realized that they had made a mistake. “William, It Was Really Nothing” was received well enough: it made the top 20 (though it halted the previous steady progress up the charts of each successive single) and there was a temporary frisson of controversy when Morrissey appeared on Top of the Pops, live, to strip off his shirt and reveal the words “Marry Me!” scrawled on his chest in marker pen. “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” was received even better; the unique modal structure of this ballad, its waltz tempo, its brevity, and the inspired use of the mandolin all helped it transcend the Smiths’ reputation as a rock band to become ultimately the most frequently covered and widely distributed of all their songs.

  But “How Soon Is Now?” was instantly recognized as something else, something quite beyond anything that the Smiths had yet attempted or released, something beyond what anyone had attempted or released: something entirely unique, a piece of music quite unlike any other, it propelled them into a different league entirely. And as “William” dropped out of the British top 20 almost as quickly as it had entered, there was an awful realization that it had been wasted.

  It was Morrissey who came up with a solution: Hatful of Hollow, a sixteen-song, budget-priced compilation that gathered up the 1984 non-album singles, the various previous non-album B-sides, and a hodgepodge of the 1983 Peel and Jensen session recordings—presumably those that he thought were better than the versions on the debut LP (which served as a rebuke to John Porter in the process). “As far as we’re concerned, those were the sessions that got us so excited in the first place and apparently it was how a lot of other people discovered us also,” said Morrissey in the official press release. “We decided to include the extra tracks from our twelve-inch singles for people who didn’t have all of those and to make it completely affordable.” Syntax aside, he had summarized it perfectly.

  Other than the fact that it was bookended by the latest single’s A-side and B-side, Hatful of Hollow appeared to have been sequenced by a roll of the dice. “How Soon Is Now?,” for example, all seven minutes of it, was crammed into the middle of Side 1, in between songs from two different Peel sessions. In that respect, Hatful of Hollow had the delightfully random quality of the Who’s Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy or, more notably, the Rolling Stones’ Out of Our Heads—a compilation that had been released similarly early in that band’s career, admittedly before the birth of the album as an artistic statement.

  The risk paid off. As an (unstated, but clearly noted) admission that the debut LP had failed to live up to expectations, Hatful of Hollow offered fans a welcome opportunity to own better versions on vinyl. For those who were put off by the very notion of 12″ “bonus” cuts and those who didn’t buy singles much to begin with, the compilation of various single tracks on an album was equally appreciated. The gatefold sleeve with the warm picture of the group on the inside (Andy Rourke, to the foreground, with bass in hand, looking very much like the unnamed Cocteau model on the front sleeve) made up to some extent for the rather cold presentation of The Smiths. And if the compression of almost thirty minutes of music onto each side was far from an audiophile’s delight, that was countered by excellent mastering and a “Pay no more than £3.99” sticker on the front sleeve. Hatful of Hollow was released in the middle of the Christmas market—and quickly became the Smiths’ second top 10 UK album of the year.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I’d rather be remembered as a big-mouthed failure than an effete little wimp.

  —Morrissey, No. 1, April 1984

  Over the course of 1984, it became increasingly impossible—in the UK at least—to open a newspaper or magazine, or turn on the television or radio, without reading, hearing, or seeing Morrissey hold forth in some capacity or another. All of the Smiths were charming and handsome, to use Morrissey’s favored adjectives for song titles, but the rhythm section were not employed to speak to the media, and despite the fact that Johnny Marr joined Morrissey at the early majority of interviews, it was quickly evident who gave better copy—and quickly generated more of it. For while Marr had that timeless look of rock ’n’ roll insouciance about him, it was often hidden beneath a fringe or, especially through 1984, round mirrored shades; Morrissey presented his genuinely pretty face unadorned by more than the occasional NHS glasses, his brow fully visible thanks to his rising quiff, and that sense of openness made him a comforting visual prop in teenybopper ma
gazines and on daytime television.

  Marr claimed not to mind that the singer soon stole the limelight. “That was another example of me and Morrissey working in sync,” he said, preferring to see it instead as an ideal division of partnership responsibilities. “Straight off the bat, when we entered the pop world, Morrissey got in there, and engaged with it, and that took a lot of energy, getting up every day in his place in London to deal with that—the likes of Smash Hits, and a David Jensen interview, and this interview and that interview. It was very exciting for him without a doubt and I’m sure he wouldn’t have had it any other way. But he went out and brought this energy, and a lot of character and a lot of ideas, and got in the room with all these other pop stars, and just wiped the place out. I was happy to do that on the guitar. We were both like … seesawing in a way. I just watched him do that, with awe. Again, it was like a partnership; one of you goes and does that, and one of you goes and does another thing. ‘All right, see you at teatime, we’ll reconvene. I’ll busy myself getting the demos together for the next songs and you go slug it out with Smash Hits.’ ”

  The media attention was so pervasive that there was the inevitable concern of overkill, but if anything, Morrissey took the opposite tack, telling Jamming! at the beginning of 1984, “We want to reach as many people as possible, we’ve hardly begun.” Citing specific examples of both highbrow and lowbrow contemporary British entertainment shows that he had his eye on, he insisted, “We think we can do these things and walk away with enormous credibility because we are very strong-willed characters and our belief is very deep-rooted.”

  His convictions would quickly be tested—and proved correct. He appeared on Pop Quiz, the self-explanatory BBC TV game show, alongside people he’d (presumably) much rather kick in the eye. There, squirming in his seat on a “team” alongside Alvin Stardust and Kim Wilde, he answered spoon-fed questions about Billy Fury and the Bunnymen, and visibly recoiled at the suggestion that he would come back to appear on the show again. And yet he compensated for his evident embarrassment by sitting down with the TV-am morning magazine show and engaging in genuinely intelligent conversation about his opposition to the promotional video. “It’s a complete matter of principle,” he said. “I think it’s pantomime, I think it’s trivial, and I really believe the record itself should be all the prop—if prop is the word—that one should need.”

  Similarly, he and Marr engaged in a piece of frivolous regional TV exposure by visiting the latter’s old primary school, Sacred Heart in Wythenshawe, where the guitarist’s considerably younger brother Ian, a pupil there, was (“anonymously”) selected to ask them, “Why do you hold flowers when you sing?” and the producers were so clueless about the phenomenon of the Smiths that they trailed the singer’s name as Paul Morressey [sic]. And yet Morrissey still seized the moment to talk above the children’s heads and criticize the Catholic school system to which he had returned for the day: “Lots of the words I write are about school and about the horrible times that I had, and in a strange way it’s like revenge on all those horrible teachers that made life miserable for me. So I think it really should be a lesson to all present day teachers that they really do have to treat their pupils with maximum care.…” Even a ludicrous expedition on an open-top double-decker bus with a group of schoolchildren (this one including Elvis Costello’s son) for the TV show Splat! paid off once they reached their destination, Kew Gardens, when Johnny Marr picked up his acoustic guitar, Sandie Shaw appeared as if from nowhere to start singing and, sitting cross-legged on the grass, in front of the audience of bemused primary-age kids, the two performed a spine-tingling rendition of “Jeane.”

  It was the same story with the music press. While Morrissey allowed Smash Hits and No. 1 magazines to picture him in soft-focus pinup mode, and contributed to such childish standard fare as “If I Ruled the World,” he also agreed to the latter magazine’s suggestion that he sit down in Liverpool with his rival motormouth, Ian McCulloch. The Echo & the Bunnymen singer—surprisingly—admitted to feeling threatened by the Smiths (“they sell more records than we do already,” he said, which was not actually true) and perhaps to book some insurance against Morrissey’s own sharp tongue, accompanied his challenger back to Manchester afterward. (Sadly, nothing appeared to come of this potential friendship.)

  Ultimately, though Morrissey proved adept at providing filler, he loved nothing so much as to pontificate on serious issues in the music press. “The focal point for me is loneliness,” he explained to Roger Morton in Debut, confirming that he wrote “for people who wouldn’t normally go to concerts, watch television, buy records or listen to the radio.” This was the Morrissey for whom the decision to wear a hearing aid on Top of the Pops was inspired by a letter from a deaf fan, and duly interpreted by other acolytes as a statement of solidarity with society’s less fortunate, which might explain why, when he next appeared on the show, rather than hide behind his customary contact lenses, he sported standard National Health Service glasses—a simple but powerful act of ordinariness that encouraged countless teenage viewers to take similarly public pride in their own impaired vision.

  Loneliness led to talk about suicide, hardly the typical concern of a newly crowned pop star. “There’s an hour of every single day, a silent hour, where I pray for another world,” he told Jim Shelley in Blitz. It was a subject he elaborated upon in some detail in his return to the gay press for an interview with Manchester magazine Square Peg. “I look upon suicide as this incredibly brave thing, having maximum control over one’s body,” he said. “Yet ludicrously suicide has been looked upon as some severe disorder of somebody who doesn’t know what s/he’s doing. I always saw it as the height of self-awareness and control over one’s destiny.” For now this was primarily a conversation piece; Morrissey would begin to tackle the issue of suicide in his lyrics over the next year, with inevitably controversial results.

  While the feature writers were generally happy to allocate space to such subjects, their first point of reference was typically Morrissey’s sexuality. The singer professed surprise at this—“Simply to concentrate on one small distasteful aspect really belittles everything else we do,” he told Zigzag—though the truth was that almost all the songs on the first album seemed to concern sex in some form or another. Inevitably, the subject of his own sexual activities—or rather, the lack of them—was raised in almost every interview: “I announced that I was celibate … so now, journalists telephone me day after day, to see if anything has changed,” he told Jamming! toward the end of the year, and he was only half-joking. Asked by Square Peg whether celibacy was a choice or a dilemma, he said, “It would take a great deal and something really quite serious to drag me out of it now, I think.” And yet when Blitz’s Jim Shelley asked whether, “after seven years of celibacy,” a love affair would have to be sexless, Morrissey responded, “Not at all.… Celibacy medallions don’t interest me, I’m not after a specially inscribed trophy.”

  At least the focus on celibacy diverted attention from what he saw as insinuations about his specific sexual leanings. “I hate this ‘festive faggot’ thing,” he complained to NME’s Barney Hoskyns of his public reputation at the start of the year. “I hate that angle, and it’s surprising that the gay press have harped on [it] more than anyone else. I hate it when people talk to me about sex in a trivial way.” He was, therefore, horrified when one of his most important profiles yet, in Rolling Stone, for which the journalist Jim Henke was flown to London for the occasion, opened with the assertion that Morrissey “admits that he’s gay but adds that he’s also celibate.” Morrissey had admitted to many things over the course of his extended honeymoon with the press, but homosexuality was not one of them, and Henke did not produce a supporting quote from the singer. He did, however, subsequently receive a chastening piece of correspondence from Morrissey, who understood all too well that Rolling Stone carried enormous influence across the United States, and that it would take a lifetime of denials to correct an early sta
tement of “fact” in such a high-profile publication.1 What Morrissey appeared unable to grasp was that a vast number of American alternative music fans, eager for any voice of authenticity, latched onto that interview as if a key to another world—or at least, another viewpoint. It’s no coincidence that in musician-writer Joe Pernice’s marvelous novella Meat Is Murder, the (heterosexual) high school narrator is remonstrated by his older (homophobic) brother with the following insult: “God, this music is too fucking miserable for me. Instead of Morrissey, you should listen to Morrison or Clapton … And really, how can anybody be gay and celibate at the same time?” (The narrator replies, “I don’t know, Jerry. How do you do it?”)

  Henke was not the only one at Rolling Stone to make a presumption about Morrissey. In the same issue as the interview with the Smiths’ singer, Kurt Loder opened his (four-star) review of The Smiths with a reference to “Glad to Be Gay” singer-songwriter Tom Robinson before asserting that Morrissey’s lyrics “probe the daily aching of life in a gay-baiting world,” and the “sometimes heartless reality of the gay scene.”

  The question of Morrissey’s sexuality was clearly impossible to ignore—for fans, critics, and even friends, some of whom felt that his insistence on presenting himself as celibate was a cover. “I knew he was gay from the off,” said Amanda Malone. “I think that if he said he was gay that would have been OK, and if he’d said he wasn’t gay that would have been OK, but when he set himself up as being celibate, that was very silly—because I don’t think he was.”

  “I think it came from a real exposure to feminist literature about men having feminine sides and sexuality being fluid,” said Liz Naylor of Morrissey’s championing of a “fourth sex,” as in the initial breakthrough Sounds interview and periodically thereafter. “I think it comes from quite a kind of intentional place.… Those kinds of ideas were interesting intellectually. So the idea of celibacy is an intellectually stimulating experiment.… But in terms of his own sexuality, what I knew of it wasn’t really congruent with what was presented.”