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

by Tony Fletcher

  At Radio 1, the release of yet another Smiths 45, only six weeks after the last one had underperformed in the charts, was viewed as too little, too soon. “Shakespeare’s Sister” still made the UK top 30, but not because anybody heard it frequently on the radio, and certainly not because anyone saw them perform it on Top of the Pops. For the first time since the Smiths had made the charts, they were not extended the invitation to appear on television’s most influential music show. The single was gone almost before it had arrived. Even the Smiths’ many foreign licensees had to admit that they could no longer keep up. “Shakespeare’s Sister” was released in but a handful of countries.

  This might not have mattered if the Smiths as a whole accepted responsibility for their actions, and the consequential (lack of) results. “I personally never had a problem that the singles didn’t go in the top 20, ever,” insisted Johnny Marr, who has never publicly renounced the choice of single. “What was important was that we did good, heady stuff.”

  Morrissey took an entirely different view, contradicting his partner’s casual ethos. “Shakespeare’s Sister” was, said the singer, “the song of my life. I put everything into that song and I wanted it more than anything else to be a huge success.” When that didn’t happen, he looked for people to blame. “It was blacklisted by the BBC because I denounced the BPI Awards,” he told Danny Kelly of NME, who immediately recognized that as a blatant conspiracy theory and demanded some better excuse. “I think Rough Trade released the record with a monstrous amount of defeatism,” Morrissey then obliged. “They had no faith in it whatsoever. They didn’t service it or market it in any way.… Rough Trade have done their job and no more. They’re bored with the Smiths now. I’ve seen maximum evidence of this.”

  Considering that Meat Is Murder had just dislodged Bruce Springsteen from the top of the charts, and without the benefit of an accompanying single, the label, naturally, felt otherwise. “They were incredibly prolific,” noted Rough Trade’s Richard Boon of the Smiths, “but you saturate your own market to a degree, rather than broadening it, and you can’t keep up. And their expectations became increasingly barmy.”

  “The band wanted more,” said Rough Trade’s Simon Edwards of the Smiths’ approach to promotion in 1985. “They wanted more professionalism, whatever it was. They wanted full-page ads, which we started doing [though] everyone knows mean fuck-all, really. It’s an ego thing. So then they have to be in color. The demands grew.”

  The most disputed of these demands was for “fly-posting” the streets, “which Geoff Travis thought was a waste of money,” said Mayo Thompson, the group’s new label manager at Rough Trade. Thompson, the American-born vocalist of the Red Krayola, loved the inherent creativity of Rough Trade, but he also understood the importance of business. “Advertising is ephemeral, but the symbolism is important,” he noted, siding with the Smiths. “If you market a record without buying advertising, you’re going against the grain of the economy. Then there’s some philosophical excuse which is convenient for the identity of the self-righteous record company that won’t advertise, and you can talk that up into … political idealism if you want to, but the price that you pay is that everything is fine—as long as you have enthusiasm.”

  Enthusiasm had, at least until now, always been self-evident among staff at the Smiths’ label. “If you talk to people who worked at Rough Trade, they’ll say it was the most exciting period of their lives,” said Richard Scott of distribution. “By a mile. It was so intense.” But now, he felt “that was suddenly going to come to an end.” In part, he blamed changes in the market: nobody quite knew what the release of Meat Is Murder on compact disc portended, for example, and some might claim not to have cared, given that the format was expensive and appeared of interest only for those hi-fidelity buffs who could afford the equipment, not the kind of Smiths fans who still rushed out to buy 7″ singles. But for those who were paying attention, it was evident that digital music had arrived, and that there was no turning back. More poignantly, Richard Scott saw the writing on the wall for the company’s halcyon days because of its relentless focus on success for the Smiths at all costs. “The people I was dealing with at the Cartel, and others, were upset … that they were going to have to gear up in market areas in which they weren’t that interested.” For many of the people working the phones, a job in “sales” at Rough Trade Distribution had never been about chart positions; it was about the buzz of selling new and exciting independent music into record stores so that people could find it, hear it, and buy it. But now, on chart days, said Scott, Travis would arrive first thing, fuming about the Smiths’ latest position, demanding to know of Scott and his team, “Why aren’t you on the phone already?” Distribution would have to explain that there were preapproved days and times of days to call certain wholesalers, and the moment after the chart had been announced was not one of them. Mayo Thompson recalled that by the time he came back to work at Rough Trade, for a second stint, in 1983, “distribution was an armed camp and the label was an armed camp and they had an inimical relation to each other. It was like the United States Congress.”

  Ultimately, it all came down to the question of whether Rough Trade was incapable of delivering the Smiths the consistent hit singles they deserved, or whether it was, in fact, the other way round. “Why isn’t ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’ in the top ten?” asked Richard Boon rhetorically. “There’s a very simple answer to that. It’s not a very good record. Why make a point?” (Actually, it was a very good record. It just wasn’t a very good single.)

  “They weren’t making music that was going to sell twice as much, three times a much,” insisted Simon Edwards. “The dots were being ticked. You might have ticked that dot a little bit better and that dot a little bit worse. I don’t think it would have made that enormous leap to mega-stardom.”

  “I think if you listen to the Smiths,” said Travis of the group in 1984–85, “they’re not as populist as the records that are populating the top five. They’re too good, they’re too clever, they’re too left-field. There isn’t a lineage to the Smiths that is in the subconsciousness of the British public.” Citing the success of Pigbag and Depeche Mode as evidence that “the system was in place,” he asked a rhetorical question of his own: “Would they have had greater singles success anywhere else?”

  Seymour Stein certainly didn’t think so. “I was lucky to sign Madonna,” he said of the artist who had become one of the biggest global superstars by 1985. “She would have happened with anybody. I don’t think the Smiths would have happened without Geoff Travis.… He put his life on the line for them.”

  “Rough Trade did what they could for us,” agreed Andy Rourke, saying of record sales, “if we’d been on Virgin or any other label it would have been the same. But there has to be a fall guy. So if our record didn’t enter in the top ten, then somebody got it in the neck.”

  “Shakespeare’s Sister” was that record. And so, if the single was to be remembered for anything (other than adding to the group’s already considerable musical catalog), it was for officially marking the souring of the relationship with Rough Trade.

  For their six-week tour of England in the spring of 1985, on which every venue but one sold out in advance, the Smiths again invited James along as their support group. The two acts had bonded on the Irish tour, and in his own end-of-year polls, Morrissey had named James his “Best Act”—no small endorsement considering that they had gone the whole of 1984 without releasing a record. That was to be corrected on the eve of the Smiths tour with a twitchy new single on Factory (“Hymn from a Village”), which won James major press coverage and the interest of every major label in the country—for James had decided that despite their own refusal to compromise commercially, Factory was no longer an appropriate home for them.

  Together, the Smiths and James presented something of a united front to the public: single-syllable, common-name bands from Britain’s leading musical city, on Britain’s two leading independent label
s, and ardent vegetarians each, an important point of principle for a tour named Meat Is Murder. As a further sign of solidarity, and as an unpublicized act of continued independent principle on their own part, the Smiths refused to consider the typical record-company “buy-on” of a support act—by which they could have sold off that opening slot for at least £20,000—and instead paid James a nominal nightly fee.

  The presence of James on the tour had one possibly unintended side effect. The major labels that were showing up in force to secure the opening band’s signature on a long-term contract were doing so not necessarily because they understood the group but because they saw James’s marketing potential as “the next Smiths.”2 As the auction reached astronomical proportions, it could not have been lost on Morrissey in particular that if James were worth £150,000 upfront to MCA (as they claimed to have been offered), then the Smiths, with their proven hit singles and chart-topping albums, had to be worth that much more. In the end, James signed directly to Sire. (They insisted it had nothing to do with the Smiths being on that label in the States.) If they could have seen into the future, James might have wanted to tell the Smiths that they came to regret this decision, that they ended up asking themselves what they ever saw wrong with Factory in the first place. By the time they realized as much, however, it would be too late for both groups.

  There is a period in every successful band’s career where it is visibly, audibly, emotionally, and viscerally on top of its game—and the Meat Is Murder tour represented that moment for the four-piece Smiths. Last time they’d crisscrossed Britain in earnest, many of the venues had been colleges; now they were playing major theaters, and not just the converted old former Apollo and Gaumont cinemas, but the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool, and the Palace Theatre in Manchester. (The latter choice of venue was “to do with history and tradition,” said Marr. “The Palace is where you went to see the Hollies.”)

  Each night, the group warmed up backstage to a compilation of Buzzcocks singles; for the audience, the signal for the band’s impending arrival onstage came with the sound of Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” from the ballet Romeo and Juliet, played at blistering volume. (Introduced in 1984, the Prokofiev had replaced Cilla Black’s “Love of the Loved.”) The show, relatively short by some standards, reflected the group’s desire to look forward, not backward: there was no “This Charming Man” and no “What Difference Does It Make?” but as always, new and, for much of the tour, unreleased material in place of these obvious hits. Johnny Marr had taken to using a Gibson Les Paul both in the studio and now onstage as well: though it was the perennial choice of hard-rock guitar gods, “I always had it that I could make the Les Paul cool.” Rather than engage in power chords or volume for the sake of volume, he played it much as he would a semi-acoustic, with a purposefully clean sound that leaned toward the jazz arena at times, a process aided by Andy Rourke’s increasingly adept playing. (Nonetheless, the use of the Les Paul was, Marr admitted, considered “treachery of the highest order” by some of his indie contemporaries.) The lone special effect was a mournful guitar slide line played on a foot pedal for “How Soon Is Now?” which took on a more desolate air than the pulsating dance groove of the recorded version. By comparison, “Hand in Glove” had mutated from the original, roughly hewn 7″ into something of the perfect pop song, the guitar riff turned into a distinctly simple melody. “Miserable Lie,” one of a handful of other older songs, had gradually developed a new introduction of its own. Most of the set, of course, drew from Meat Is Murder, the only one of its nine songs routinely excluded from the set being the difficult-to-replicate “Well I Wonder.”3

  The tour felt like a communal celebration of the Smiths’ success, with stage invasions no longer just routine but increasingly out of control. Tim Booth of James used the word “ecstatic” to describe the audience’s reaction to Morrissey in particular, and in very much the religious sense. “It was more like coming to see a guru, laying flowers down at his feet.” Given that Booth had a guru already (he and other members of the group had subscribed to a meditation cult called Lifewave, led by a former SAS wireless operator who now called himself Ishvara), Booth knew what he was talking about. So he could see how adulation was taking on frighteningly noncritical proportions. “Some nights I’d see them not have a very good gig, or Morrissey look like he was really scared onstage, and be very shy, and then other nights I’d see him when he was clearly having a good time, and enjoying it, and being out there. I could see the variety because I knew him well enough. But it didn’t make any difference to the audience: they were just seeing the great Smiths.”

  For Booth, it was a shock to find that he could no longer converse with his friend Morrissey in the manner that had still proven possible on the Irish tour. “He became a prisoner of hotel rooms, and security. And that stuff is really confusing. I remember feeling quite sorry for him, it was just overwhelming.” James looked up to the Smiths: “We loved them as people, they were just the kindest to us, trying to help us, trying to promote us”—but that didn’t mean they wanted to be the Smiths. “We saw what was happening with the Smiths and we purposefully avoided it. It was too scary, too much of a roller coaster. People look from the outside and they think, especially young boys or girls, that you want that level of adoration, but when it comes, at that level, and you’re close to it, there aren’t that many people who are that desperate to want that.… I don’t think any human beings get through it without being fucked-up to some level.”

  The tour’s finale, at the Royal Albert Hall, intimated as much. For the audience, the low stage and wide-open space created perfect “sight lines”; for the performer, there was the sense of being completely exposed, with no wings in which to hide, if even for a moment. For the Smiths in particular, the sense of “occasion,” especially as the last night of the tour, turned into a distraction. Everybody wanted a ticket, and Rough Trade couldn’t oblige, not being the sort of record company that bought up large numbers of seats in advance. The label nonetheless treated it as their own victory parade and put the group under additional promotional pressures. “There was an awful lot of fuss,” said Marr, “which is never good when you’ve got something really important to do. And it sounded lousy on the stage. It was very, very difficult. Morrissey was having a real hard time doing what he does. And I think he had a battle going on.”

  “We probably chose the wrong venue,” Morrissey admitted to the audience at the start of the encore. Nonetheless, he then brought out on stage, to join him in singing “Barbarism,” Pete Burns from Dead or Alive. The move was perhaps not a complete surprise: the Smiths singer had frequently expressed an almost fanlike enthusiasm for the vocalist from Liverpool, who had come of age in the same scene as Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, themselves the biggest hit band in the UK in 1984. More recently, Burns had made his own transition from Gothic post-punk to the flamboyant, camp merry-go-round of mid-’80s dance pop; while “Shakespeare’s Sister” struggled to gain a commercial foothold during the March tour, Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” spent most of it at number 1. The pair had met a few years earlier at a Cramps show, where Morrissey noted that Burns “looked stunning but he didn’t strike me as particularly concerned about music. And these things matter.” If so, it didn’t matter so much anymore, which made the two singers’ subsequent friendship appear, from a distance, an unusual one, hard for purist Smiths fans to accept. As always, Morrissey was unapologetic. “He’s one of the few people I can feel a great affinity with. Namely because he says what he wants to, which, of course, is a national sin within music, especially considering the things he wants to say.” The friendship between Morrissey and Burns would persist and, later in the year, lead to a shared front cover on Smash Hits.

  Still, during the final encore that night at the Albert Hall, “Miserable Lie,” Morrissey left the stage early, and Marr was forced to beat a hasty retreat himself to console his partn
er behind closed dressing-room doors. For Marr, this was one of the key moments in the Smiths. Everything about the band peeled away. “It came right back down to 1982,” said Marr. “Because ’82 was me and him.” (“There was a long old time when it was me and Morrissey, struggling,” he elaborated of that period.) Whatever else the pressures, in 1985, Morrissey and Marr remained unquestionably devoted to each other.