Similarly, Scott Piering reported that “television is largely there for the asking,” and as proof, he secured the Smiths highly prestigious slots on The Oxford Road Show and Whistle Test. It was somewhat easier to book Granada Reports, for which the band was forced to stand up to Tony Wilson’s typically brash form of questioning, which carried hidden levels of meaning for those who knew of the awkward relationship between the Factory boss/TV presenter and the former Factory acolyte/Smiths singer. Interviewing the group during rehearsals for their upcoming tour in a Chorlton-cum-Hardy basement, Wilson first sat down with the rhythm section, immediately demanding to know if they ever “get annoyed at the attention given to Morrissey,” and refusing to accept Rourke’s insistence that “he deserves the attention” as a good enough answer. He then castigated the Smiths for being “a northern group who are traitors ’cause you moved to London,” noting that the move back north was “about time.” A brief interview with Marr, playing guitar, helped explain some of the method behind the guitarist’s technique before Wilson sat cross-legged on the rehearsal-room floor with Morrissey and bantered back and forth. Morrissey, naturally, gave as good as he got. In particular, asked what right he had to “comment on political and local affairs,” the front man offered one of his more eloquent responses: “I feel that if popular singers don’t say these things, who does? We can’t have any faith in playwrights anymore; we can’t have any faith in film stars. Young people don’t care about those things, they’re dying out. And if you say, ‘What right do you have?’ the implication there to me is that popular music is quite a low art, it should be hidden, it can be there but let’s not say anything terribly important; let’s just, you know, make disco records or whatever. So I really feel that we do have an obligation. And I know that people respect it and they want it and it’s working to great effect.”
With all this coverage, the Smiths turned down a repeat visit to The Tube; they had grown wary of live television’s sound limitations and refused now to perform without lip-syncing, a curious philosophical contradiction given the group’s excellent stage reputation. Scott Piering made clear that he was treading warily with the visual medium as a whole. “TV is particularly draining of their limited energy and time resources,” he wrote. “I am loathe [sic] to change their minds about a particular show because there is a good chance that it will be a disaster in the outcome whether they do it or (worse yet) cancel suddenly before the show.” These were to prove prescient words.
As preparations got further under way for the tour, which was to conclude at London’s Royal Albert Hall, a prestigious, historically classical venue only recently (and rarely) added to the rock circuit, Piering found himself frequently attending meetings in official capacity as the Smiths’ “management representative.” And yet whenever he tried to secure this standing with the band, he found himself stalled.
“He would sit next to me on a plane,” said Marr, “and I would know this conversation was coming: ‘I really need confirmation, we need to put this in writing, I’m getting mixed signals.’ ” The personal dynamic between Morrissey and Marr remained closed to outsiders; the pair had moved their initial friendship into what appeared an unshakeable partnership, to the point that if either one put his foot down on an issue—whether it be abandoning a European tour at the airport or refusing to officially appoint a manager—the other would support him out of instinctive solidarity. So while Marr could later claim, “I wanted Scott as manager,” it was never to the extent of attempting to override Morrissey’s reticence. If anything, Piering’s insistence on forcing the issue backfired. While Marr acknowledged the pseudo-manager’s inability to secure confirmation of his status that “there’s someone I liked, being upset,” he also felt that “the problem was that they would put themselves in the position where they were being very needy, and that wasn’t good either.”
In September 1984, Piering had received a check from Smithdom for £3,500—approximately six months’ salary at the old, pre-Smiths, pre-hit record Rough Trade, but barely enough money to cover the transatlantic phone bills he was now racking up as American agencies fought for the lucrative rights to book the Smiths in the States. Unable to secure any further commitment, let alone commission, from the band themselves, Piering turned to Rough Trade, which agreed (perhaps due to the lack of a producer taking the same) to put him on a sliding scale of “points” for Meat Is Murder.1 As this would be considered a promotional expense, to be equally absorbed by the Smiths prior to the profit split, Rough Trade nonetheless pointed out that the offer would need to be sent to Smithdom “in the hope of their input leading to an agreeable settlement on all sides.” Smithdom, of course, was registered to the same address as Scott Piering’s promotion company Appearing; he opened its mail and composed the responses—but only with Morrissey and Marr’s permission. The royalty agreement was never finalized.
In the meantime, the distraction of “How Soon Is Now?” did not prevent the various parties from working frantically to cover all bases to guarantee the success of Meat Is Murder. Five hundred copies of “Barbarism Begins at Home” were pressed up as 12″ singles for club DJs (some with an additional 7″ edit), in a unique picture sleeve showing Viv Nicholson at a coal front, which was about as close as the Smiths came to commenting on the nearly year-old, increasingly violent and divisive miners’ strike. (Curiously, for all of Morrissey’s political commentary, he had rarely been brought into this debate publicly. This was a shame. While his aversion to work for the sake of work stood in stark contrast to the National Union of Mineworkers’ apparent party line and may have contributed to his silence, it was presumably countered by his open emnity for the Thatcher government and their draconian attempts to break the country’s most militant Union. Yet, while the likes of Billy Bragg and others played multiple benefits for the striking miners, the Smiths restricted their political appearances in 1984 to the lone GLC Jobs for a Change festival, for which they were still paid £1,200.)
Additional promotional ideas included an interview between Jon Savage and Morrissey, with the intent of pressing it on vinyl and sending it to European outlets—but although the interview was conducted and edited down to appropriate length, it never saw release. The renowned multimedia American artist Denis Masi, then living in London, whose work dealt with societal power structures, agreed to produce subliminal videos that could be included in London’s most prominent shop window, at the HMV store on Oxford Street, which Rough Trade was willing to pay for; this, too, never met with final approval. More successful was the invitation to various fanzine editors to share an afternoon with Morrissey in London—the conversation moderated, with cavalier disregard for the fanzines’ independent nature, by the editor of Melody Maker. And mainstream journalists were invited to hear Meat Is Murder at the Rough Trade offices over “wine, beer and (ahem) non-meat snacks,” as the press release put it, less than two weeks before the album hit the shops, with the assurance that final review copies would be distributed “closer to the release date.”
Somehow, it all came off. In the middle of February, Meat Is Murder not only entered the British charts at number 1, but in the process it dislodged Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, the emblematic major-label release of the era. The sales (gold certification for 100,000 upon the day of release) and the number 1 entry position were the stuff of dreams, but much the same had happened to the debut album and it had not carried the same resonance. The more important aspect regarding Meat Is Murder’s success, then, was the artistic triumph. Meat Is Murder jelled not merely as a collection of tracks, but as an album, in the proper sense of the form(at)—a coherent musical statement. Scott Piering went so far as to tell the Whistle Test host, Mark Ellen, that it was their Sgt. Pepper’s, forcing an embarrassed Johnny Marr to deny such a claim on camera. Even he knew it was not that good, though the stylistic leap from The Smiths to Meat Is Murder was equivalent at least to that made by the Beatles between A Hard Day’s Night and Revolver. Thanks in part to exc
ellent sequencing, the musical vicissitudes proved quite harmonious. The amphetamine rushes (“What She Said” and “I Want the One I Can’t Have”) were balanced by a folk ballad (“Well I Wonder”); the rockabilly rumbles (“Rusholme Ruffians” and “Nowhere Fast”) offset by a funk workout (“Barbarism Begins at Home”); and the all-politics-is-personal statements of opposing musical moods (“The Headmaster Ritual” and “Meat Is Murder”) complemented each other as bookends. There was even an official centerpiece, a lengthy, brooding waltz (what Americans sometimes call the “power ballad”) entitled “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore,” which opened, acoustically, with sufficient space for all four members to stretch out and breathe—encouraging Morrissey, in particular, to turn in one of his finest vocals yet—before concluding with a lengthy, busy coda full of psychedelic guitars that included a fake fade for additional haunting effect. In setting out to make an album that reflected their own cultural values rather than worrying about the contemporary musical climate, the Smiths avoided long-term issues of timeliness; there was little here, musically, apart from a small dose of the era’s otherwise pandemic overuse of reverb, to date it to 1984–85. (And even then, “There’s meant to be too much reverb on the guitars,” said Marr. “It’s meant to sound good when you’re stoned, and if you’re not, then it sounds good too.…”)
As a political statement, Meat Is Murder further distinguished itself. In preparing the public for the new album, Morrissey very clearly established the new topics of conversation: his sexual proclivities, while not entirely off limits, were to be replaced by a discussion of terrorism, animal rights, domestic and societal violence, nuclear war, the working class, royalty, famine, Thatcherism—and a bold attempt to link them all together. “So many groups sell masses and masses of records and don’t raise people’s level of consciousness in any direction and we find that quite sinful, especially in these serious times,” he explained on Whistle Test in a typical example of setting the political guidelines for the interview to follow. Asked then how he would like people to react to the title of the LP, he appeared quite conciliatory. “Well, if they eat meat I’d like them to just think about it and just to take it from there really. Because there doesn’t really seem to be anything else in modern life that makes people think about this subject really. I think many people are still under the assumption that meat has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with animals—animals play in fields et cetera and meat is just something that appears on their plate. Which is quite strange because on many, many other issues I think people have become very aware and very enlightened. But on this, this very brutal, barbarous issue …” The TV footage quickly switched to a studio lip-sync of the song “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore.”
Morrissey would not be silenced. “Violence towards animals, I think, is also linked to war,” he explained in the trial-by-fanzine Melody Maker cover story, explaining the connection between the album’s title and its sleeve design. “I think as long as human beings are so violent towards animals there will be war. It might sound absurd, but if you really think about the situation it all makes sense. Where there’s this absolute lack of sensitivity where life is concerned, there will always be war.”
And yet, being Morrissey, he managed to contradict himself almost immediately. “It seems to me now that when you try to change things in a peaceable manner, you’re actually wasting your time and you’re laughed out of court. And it seems to me now that as the image of the LP hopefully illustrates, the only way that we can get rid of such things as the meat industry, and other things like nuclear weapons, is by really giving people a taste of their own medicine.… Personally, I’m an incurably peaceable character. But where does it get you? Nowhere. You have to be violent.” (In one of his only comments about the miners’ strike, which was soon to end with ignominious defeat for the unions, Morrissey replied to the question “Do you sympathize with the miners and the way they’ve been violent?” with the words “Completely. Just endless sympathy.”)
He was walking a thin line (between love and hate) and he knew it. When Smash Hits, Britain’s biggest-selling pop magazine, put Morrissey on the cover cuddling a kitten, the singer used the interview to justify the tactics of the Animal Liberation Front, which had recently announced that it had poisoned the nation’s Mars Bars. (It turned out to be a hoax.) “Polite demonstration is pointless,” said Morrissey. “You have to get angry, you have to be violent otherwise what’s the point?” This tied into a subsequent discussion in the same interview about the public perception of vegetarianism. “I can’t think of any reason why vegetarians should be considered effeminate,” Morrissey said. “Why? Because you care about animals? Is that effeminate? Is that a weak trait? It shouldn’t be and I think it’s a very sad reflection on the human race that it often is.”
This was a key point behind Meat Is Murder, and though Morrissey had problems articulating it at times, it gradually seeped through the media and the music and established itself as the message. Morrissey was standing up for the cause of vegetarianism, but not at the cost of testosterone. His insistence that one could become a vegetarian and yet maintain one’s militant attitudes proved especially encouraging to a fan base that had been brought up experiencing violence on a daily basis (per “Barbarism Begins at Home” and “The Headmaster Ritual”) and which could not easily renounce violence as a necessary (and not always a last) resort. But that audience could be inspired to think about the necessity (or lack thereof) of eating animals, and instigate a vegetarian diet as a first step toward personal and collective peace.
And that’s very much what happened. Despite the fact that the media trod warily around the album’s title, a number of Smiths fans digested the Meat Is Murder lyrics, read the accompanying interviews, discussed the subject with their friends and/or their families, and made a decision to turn vegetarian. Some of these people eventually relapsed despite their best intentions, but countless others stayed vegetarians in perpetuity.2 Letters to the band at the time articulated as much; anecdotal evidence over the next several decades confirmed it. In that regard, Meat Is Murder was more than just an album that marked a band’s musical maturation, or its commercial consolidation. It was an album that, quite literally, changed people’s lives.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Q: Why do you want to be a pop star?
A: Well, it doesn’t make life worse. That’s all that I can say. You should try it someday.
—Morrissey to Tony Wilson, Granada
Reports, February 1985
At the same New Year session at Ridge Farm at which they’d recorded the instrumental “Oscillate Wildly,” the Smiths had put to tape a riff that Marr had only introduced to Morrissey on the way back down to Surrey from Manchester. Though Marr was trying to emulate the feel of his favorite mid-’60s Stones singles, the rhythm and the style were more stylistically indebted to early rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly, the guitarist referencing the Chuck Berry song “You Can’t Catch Me” in particular. Immediately inspired, Morrissey worked up what seemed like a fevered suicide note of sorts, and somehow shoehorned the words into the allotted space. The lyrics were in fact an artful ode to one of his favored feminist tracts, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which argued in part that if Shakespeare had had a sister of equal natural intellect, she would have been driven to suicide by her lack of opportunities in Elizabethan England, and the song was titled, accordingly if cryptically, “Shakespeare’s Sister.”
All four Smiths rose to the occasion in the studio, though none more than Mike Joyce, who replicated his agitated performance on “What She Said” with an equally confident series of tight fills alongside a rapid-fire snare trill. Andy Rourke picked up the cello again, in addition to the bass, and Johnny Marr couldn’t help but layer multiple electric and acoustic guitars with the familiar arsenal of accompanying effects. The result, all of 130 seconds long, was a frenetic, frantic rush of blood to the head that would have made a marvelous late additi
on to Meat Is Murder or a perfectly fine B-side. But the Smiths were so genuinely excited by it that they insisted “Shakespeare’s Sister” be released to the public, in the middle of March, in the midst of the UK tour, as an A-side. (The equally frenzied “What She Said” was selected as an appropriate flip.)
In fact, the Smiths were so enthused by “Shakespeare’s Sister” that they unveiled it on the Oxford Road Show the week of Meat Is Murder’s release, when they were meant to be performing “How Soon Is Now?”—a decision that certainly didn’t help that particular song’s chart progress. To the concern that neither of these songs was featured on the new album, the Smiths did not appear unduly worried. They were, it could be argued, following again in the hallowed footsteps of ’60s bands like the Beatles, who habitually released new non-album singles (for example, “Day Tripper”/“We Can Work It Out”) the very same week as they released a new album (for example, Rubber Soul).
Had “Shakespeare’s Sister” had the trappings of that sort of hit there would have been few complaints. But it didn’t. “I don’t think the song was up to the standard required to be a single for the Smiths,” said Stephen Street, who as session engineer did not yet carry the authority to say as much to the band. “Considering the standards they’d set themselves, I thought it was a little slapdash.” The Smiths had never traded in the typical verse/bridge/chorus/middle-eight format, but their initial run of top 30 hits had all benefited from the song title’s frequent refrain. Like half the material on Meat Is Murder, however, the title of “Shakespeare’s Sister” never showed up in the lyrics, and the closest it came to any sort of hook was a rather simplistic “Oh Mama let me go …” By contrast, the song that they then returned to the studio to record as the 12″ bonus track, “Stretch Out and Wait,” not only had a proper chorus that incorporated the title and a lovely little dip into the minor key as Morrissey sang it, along with a gorgeous, lilting 6/8 arrangement that nonetheless moved just fast enough to avoid the familiar “ballad” association, it also included Morrissey’s finest lyrics yet about the sexual act. They were an update of sorts of the groundbreaking 1961 Goffin-King composition “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” in which a female protagonist prepares to give her virginity. Morrissey similarly projected the argument of sex-as-nature onto what appeared to be the song’s female object: “Ignore all the codes of the day, let your juvenile impulses sway.”1 It was one of the clearest, most empathetic, and poetic lyrics of his life, one of the band’s better arrangements too, and with the Smiths’ typical disregard for posterity, it was condemned to relative obscurity.
A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths Page 39