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

by Tony Fletcher

  From the public perspective, then, the tour was perceived as a complete and total triumph, confirmation of the Smiths’ standing as the most important group in the nation. Privately, it appeared to have pushed Morrissey over a certain edge. The very day after the Albert Hall show, a Sunday at that, when he could (and probably should) have taken a rest day away from the band and its various issues, the singer sat down and wrote to Chris Wolfe, his financial point person at Rough Trade. In his letter Morrissey demanded payment for all Smiths sleeves, presumably for their design; queried the label’s own list of shared promotional costs; and took them to task for their treatment of the Smiths the previous day, noting that of all Rough Trade employees, only Jo Slee was seen applauding the Smiths at any time. That the label couldn’t or wouldn’t arrange a post-show party was seen as additional proof that “Rough Trade are bored with the Smiths success.”

  Responding to previous dialogue about the label’s tour support (which had been pegged at £5,000 on the assumption that a sold-out tour would turn a profit), he wrote, “The fact that there is a limit to the costs Rough Trade are willing to share simply shrieks of pettiness. However, we’re sorry, and we promise never to go on tour to promote our records again.” And in reply to something in Wolfe’s previous correspondence, he concluded: “Your constant reference to Smiths ‘management’ was amusing. If the Smiths had management I would never need to write these letters.”

  The letter was duly passed on to Scott Piering, the Smiths’ putative manager, who must have read it and wept.

  “In interviews, nobody asks me about music,” Morrissey complained in Jamming! at the end of 1984 to Jonh Wilde, a music journalist whose adopted last name afforded him a certain commonality with the Smiths’ singer. “Only as the spokesman for a generation, which is quite appealing, but quite strangulating also.” There was something revealing about this, for it was true that Morrissey had become the “spokesman” for his generation: Paul Weller had abdicated the role when he broke up the Jam, Ian McCulloch didn’t want it, and Bono couldn’t cut it with the British working class. But it wasn’t so much that Morrissey was awarded the crown by default as much as that he appeared to actually crave it.

  Nowhere was this more apparent than in an interview that ran in Time Out in early March 1985. The London listings magazine was hardly the most important media outlet in the nation, and its editorial inattention was confirmed by the lazy headline “This Charming Man.” The writer, Simon Garfield, however, was sharper (and funnier) than most, given neither to casual hyperbole nor cheap criticism. In a piece that could be praised for balancing personal opinion with professional neutrality, Garfield supplied Morrissey with a platform from which the new generational spokesman showed himself at his cleverest and wittiest—and yet simultaneously, revealed a paranoid and vindictive streak.

  The former character traits were, of course, the more appealing. Morrissey reveled at the opportunity to explain his lyrics about the queen from “Nowhere Fast.” “I despise royalty,” he said. “The very idea of their existence in these days when people are dying daily because they don’t have enough money to operate one radiator in the house, to me is immoral. I’ve never met anyone who supports royalty, and believe me I’ve searched. Okay, so there’s some deaf and elderly pensioner in Hartlepool who has pictures of Prince Edward pinned on the toilet seat, but I know streams of people who can’t wait to get rid of them.”

  It was classic Morrissey, conjuring up a comical, even farcical image of northern decrepitude to justify his didactic beliefs—which, as he was right to insist, were hardly those of a small minority. And to the extent that it pitched him yet further against the perceived mainstream, it was a comment inherently connected to his views on Band Aid, the group of wealthy pop stars who had come together at the end of 1984, at the urging of Boomtown Rats front man Bob Geldof, to record a charity single to combat famine in Ethiopia: “I’m not afraid to say that I think Band Aid was diabolical,” stated Morrissey. “Or to say that I think Bob Geldof is a nauseating character.” This, in early 1985, was akin to slandering Mother Teresa, and as with his comment about royalty, he followed it with an absurdly witty epigram: “One can have great concern for the people of Ethiopia, but it’s another thing to inflict daily torture on the people of England.” In turn, one could observe that even had the Smiths’ music been forgotten as quickly as some of the Band Aid singers, that particular quote would still have lived on in infamy.

  This made it all the more disconcerting that Morrissey felt the need to defend himself from similar attacks on his own character. His thoughts on Band Aid were not new; he had been making them ever since the record had been released. But for Geldof to say something negative about Morrissey—as he had done just before the Time Out interview—necessitated the application of a different standard. “It was totally unprovoked,” said Morrissey. “The fact that Bob Geldof—this religious figure who’s saving all these people all over the globe—can make those statements about me and yet he seems quite protected, seems totally unfair. But I’m not bothered about those things.…” Unprovoked? Unfair? Not bothered? If the reader wasn’t so keenly awaiting Morrissey’s next character assassination or witticism, he or she might have thrown the magazine aside in disdain.

  Sadly, Morrissey was beginning to exhibit a similar suspicion for the world at large. “People,” he suggested, somewhat amorphously, “want to throw a blanket over even the slightest mention of the Smiths.” Such a comment would have been laughed out of the court of public opinion had a trial proven necessary, given that it was impossible to avoid the Smiths between the group’s hectic release schedule, considerable chart success, constant touring, and, yes, blanket coverage in the media. And the only evidence that “the music industry absolutely detests the Smiths,” which he insisted was the case, was that Radio 1 did not greet each new single of theirs with as much fervor as it did, say, the latest record by Duran Duran. This was not a bad thing: the Smiths’ frequent appearances on Top of the Pops needed to be offset by some last bastion of establishment resistance. After all, the band’s fans worshipped the Smiths largely for their independence—political, musical, and ethical—which made it all the more upsetting that Morrissey appeared to be additionally including his record label in his list of perceived enemies: “We were really their last vestige of hope,” he told Garfield. “I’m convinced that if The Smiths hadn’t occurred, then Rough Trade would have just disappeared.” If any of his other comments could have been taken with a pinch of proverbial salt (in Morrissey’s defense, much of what he said in print came across that much more Stalinist than in person, where politeness typically prevailed and one could almost catch him sniggering at his own ridiculousness), this attack appeared to hit below the belt. The notion that a label that had put out so many culturally significant records (several of which had made the national singles or albums chart along the way) would somehow have collapsed without signing the Smiths appeared something of a cheap shot at the company’s considerable A&R, marketing, and distribution capabilities. If there was any semblance of truth to Morrissey’s statement, it was that Rough Trade had now fallen into a very major-label trap: it was investing too much of its time and its effort into its biggest-selling act at the expense of the rest of its roster. The success of the Smiths had already seen fellow Mancunians the Fall pack up and move elsewhere, and though Travis and company were investing heavily in the likes of the Woodentops, Microdisney, and Camper Van Beethoven while continuing to release a number of excellent reggae records (though “reggae is vile,” Morrissey had noted in his 1984 NME poll), none of these acts were selling in remotely similar quantities. The label would surely not have “disappeared” without the Smiths, but at the same time, it could no longer afford to do without them.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Morrissey sang like he was as miserable, terrified and as poorly designed as the rest of us. He captured it perfectly.

  —Joe Pernice, Meat Is Murderr />
  America had been waiting for the Smiths. Not just in the literal sense, in that there were some people who had latched onto “Hand in Glove” when it came out in 1983 and had spent the subsequent twenty-four months eagerly anticipating the announcement of an American tour. But in a less tangible manner, a certain Stateside audience had long been looking for a band like the Smiths to come on the scene and, to use the sense of religious fervor that was often applied around the cult of Morrissey, to save them.

  The Anglophile musical tastes of a significant percentage of young Americans were part of a cultural continuum that had begun with the Beatles and the original British Invasion and had continued on through years of hard rock, to the point that the introduction to punk rock and New Wave came for many not through native acts such as the Ramones and Richard Hell but the likes of the Clash and Elvis Costello. Indeed, in large parts of the States, the thriving American punk independent scene was all but ignored for the constant flurry of new musical activity from the UK. This was a bone of significant contention for those American acts who traversed the country on a shoestring budget through the early 1980s, opening up and then servicing an entire new network of venues, fanzines, radio outlets, and record stores. But then, most of these acts were noncommercial by design (R.E.M. being a notable exception), the tag of “hardcore” adopted by many as an antidote to the era’s perceived domination by Reaganites and yuppies.

  Those American youth who considered themselves outside of the mainstream but nonetheless wanted some melody in their new music and some flamboyance from their (preferably overseas) idols served as the ideal initial audience for MTV, which launched in 1981 and soon made stars out of image-conscious British acts like Culture Club, the Eurythmics, Adam and the Ants, Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, and so many more. Away from this mainstream so-called Second British Invasion, young Americans with somewhat more esoteric tastes were best able to hear new, independent British music either via the multitude of noncommercial college radio stations or the growing number of commercial “progressive” and “new music” stations. College radio could take the credit for leading the true cultural change over the course of the 1980s, eschewing the traditional habit of playlists in favor of individual DJ choices that largely focused on independent releases, including those from the American underground. But it was the increase in commercial stations that most emphatically benefited British bands like the Smiths.

  The arrival of this new radio format proved sufficiently organic that it lacked for an official name. (The term “modern rock” was not recognized as worthy of a distinct Billboard chart until 1988, after the Smiths broke up.) At KROQ in Los Angeles, which officially abandoned its stalwarts like the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd for a diet of solid New Wave in 1982, they called it “the rock of the ’80s.” On Long Island in New York, at WLIR, one of the original East Coast progressive rock stations and one that made a similarly permanent switch that same year, they called it simply “new music.”

  The immediate success of these powerful bicoastal stations quickly inspired others in similar territories to follow suit. In January 1983, 91X in San Diego switched to the “rock of the ’80s” after playing “Stairway to Heaven” one final, exhausting time. That spring, the owners of the Boston Phoenix weekly arts paper bought a minor local station, Y102, which had been successfully broadcasting New Wave music twenty-four hours a day for the past year, and boosted it into the highly influential station WFNX. Unlike college radio’s free-form tradition, the “new music” stations created their “own top forty and played the same songs sixty to seventy times a week,” said Matt Pinfield, who appeared as a DJ on the (New) Jersey Shore’s “new music” station WHTG (which switched from adult contemporary in 1984), maintained a college radio show, and also DJ’d several nights a week in the local clubs, where 7″ singles by British bands—sought out as imports at local independent record stores—frequently filled the dance floor.

  As this “new music” format gathered momentum, it discovered its niche: melodic British bands (the word “postmodern” was more likely to be used in the States than “post-punk”) that had been picked up by American major labels but had not been overly hyped by them, and which could cultivate a live reputation away from MTV’s image-conscious affiliations. To the extent that one could line up the leading acts musically, U2 stood at one end, Depeche Mode at the other, and the Cure, Echo & the Bunnymen, and New Order filled some of the more prominent positions in between. When the Smiths came along, it was as if they had been tailor made to appeal right across this spectrum. As a four-piece guitar band that eschewed the use of synthesizers, they were instantly credible with U2 and Bunnymen fans. As an act that proved immediately popular on the “alternative” American dance floor, they appealed to New Order and Depeche Mode acolytes. And as a band whose lyrics spoke vividly about (sub)urban alienation, sexual confusion, teenage angst, economic inopportunity, domestic violence, educational disappointments, and personal dysfunctionality, it turned out that, geographical origins be damned, they connected with an entire generation of American adolescents, for whom such subject matter was universal. “The stories of provincial England resonated somehow, impossibly, with my agonized adolescence in provincial Montana with all its hicks and jocks and repressed, meddling adults,” said Colin Meloy, then a “clumsy and shy” fifteen-year-old, who would go on to front the Decemberists, just one of many major American acts influenced by the Smiths. For him, “the carnival idyll of ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ could be the Last Chance Stampede and Fair with all its wheeling rides, desperate teens, and drunken toughs; the brute in ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ was my mustached, short-shorted gym teacher Mr. Trenary.”

  Throw in the fact that the Smiths initially put off touring America, that their “second” album, Hatful of Hollow, was available only as an import, as were so many of their additional singles, and that they had not even been seen on the fringes of MTV (having made no videos), there was an almost mystical element of intrigue about the Smiths. Instantly obsessed fans exchanged home-taped cassettes of import releases, which they then often played perpetually, to the exclusion of all other music; demand for the concert experience was such that VHS bootlegs of the Old Grey Whistle Test performance from Derby in late 1983 could be found on sale at import record stores on St. Mark’s Place in New York City.

  Within all this, it was no coincidence that the Smiths shared the same corporate umbrella as so many of their (supposed) British peers in the States. Alone among the American majors, Warner Bros. Records enjoyed a reputation for putting music first, which meant that even as the company was making its money from the likes of Van Halen, Foreigner, Prince, and Rod Stewart in the early 1980s, it created an environment whereby less commercial groups were allowed to develop at their own pace. Specifically, Warner Bros. distinguished itself by establishing and funding an “alternative marketing” department. For the Smiths, whether it was club promotion with the dance mixes of “This Charming Man” or the push to college and other radio of “What Difference Does It Make?” (which made the top 75 of 1984 at both KROQ and 91X), money was made available to connect the band with its potential audience. The 50,000 sales of the debut album may have been an absolute drop in the Atlantic Ocean compared to the 4,000,000 copies sold that same year by British duo Tears for Fears, but they were enough to confirm the existence of a following. And when “How Soon Is Now?” was released domestically as an A-side, on the strength of alternative dance-floor reaction to its import B-side, that foothold proved pivotal: driven by overwhelmingly positive listener reaction, it rose on the college and commercial new-music radio charts like the proverbial bullet. The week that Meat Is Murder topped the British album charts, “How Soon Is Now?” did likewise in the States on the highly influential CMJ (College Music Journal) retail charts. The song could additionally be found at number 3 on both CMJ’s “Progressive Radio” 100 and its combined “College/Non-Commercial” airplay chart.

  Singles in the UK, as the Smiths
knew all too well, tended to come and go in a matter of weeks. In the States, they built over the course of many months. (Depeche Mode’s “People Are People” came out on Sire in the summer of ’84; it eventually made the American top 20 a full year later, the first such hit by any of the key British “new music” acts.) So, once it became apparent that “How Soon Is Now?” had serious potential, the Smiths’ point person at Warner, Steven Baker, took the song to Jeff Ayeroff, recently appointed as head of creative services, a position most labels had established since the advent of MTV. Ayeroff listened, loved it, and decided to make a video.

  It wasn’t that Warner Bros. didn’t know the Smiths were opposed to videos. It was that, frankly, they didn’t give a damn. “How Soon Is Now?” had the makings of a crossover hit, and if producing a promotional video would help it cross over further, so be it; from the perspective of a label that may have prided itself on its musical reputation but which was foremost concerned with selling records, this decision no more required the consent of the band than did the inclusion of the single on Meat Is Murder (Side 2, Track 1) or using that inclusion as the album’s main advertising tag.

  Ayeroff hired a director, Paula Grief, who in turn employed a female model to act (and dance) appropriately disaffected and alienated, and spliced that footage in with chimney-smoke imagery—“collapsing buildings in Cleveland,” as Johnny Marr came to view it—that was presumably intended to illustrate the band’s industrial Manchester roots. Grief then further edited in grainy live footage—home video shot by Grant Showbiz from the side of the stage in Leicester in early 1984. To what extent the group knew about this was never fully established: Showbiz said that he was neither consulted nor paid for it, the band was to act as if stunned by the video’s very existence, and Piering, who would have been the obvious person to have supplied the footage, claimed that the video was made without the group’s permission.1 Regardless, the finished video offered a fair interpretation of, and visual accompaniment to, the song in question; in fact, given some of the videos that were then hitting the market—overblown stage performances or tacky narrative interpretations, intercut with what were perceived at the time as hi-tech edits but have subsequently come to look excruciatingly out-dated—the use of proper film (and Super 8) gave “How Soon Is Now?” an impressive realist edge. Delivered to the media with a major push, it secured reasonable coverage on MTV and other cable video outlets, gaining the Smiths further fans, many of whom duly bought Meat Is Murder, which quickly showed up in the lower reaches of the album charts. By any measure, the Smiths now had some seriously credible traction in America.