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

by Tony Fletcher

  As a result, when it came time to tour the States, it became apparent that the Smiths could afford to bypass the clubs and appear directly in American theaters. To this end, both Mike Hinc and Scott Piering had entertained eager approaches from all the major American agencies, and though Piering did not agree with the choice, ATB awarded the subcontract to Ian Copeland of Frontier Booking International, FBI for short. Copeland had made his name on the American success of his brother Stewart’s band the Police. He had then established his credibility by taking on R.E.M. while they were still unsigned. In 1984, R.E.M.’s second album, Reckoning, had matched its debut in sales, helping solidify the group’s standing as America’s great alternative hope. Their unapologetically independent stance, refusal to compromise for radio or MTV play, willfully obtuse album covers, and, most important, consistent touring, all made FBI a natural home for the Smiths, too, given that they shared so many of these attributes. Copeland duly booked the Smiths on a tour through the month of June that focused on the Anglo-centric East and West Coasts, especially those areas with prominent alternative commercial radio stations, plus Toronto, Chicago, and Detroit. The theaters in question typically ranged from 2,500 seats on the East Coast up to 4,400 on the West Coast (and many more in Toronto), but the level of anticipation surrounding the Smiths immediately allowed for second nights to be added in New York and Los Angeles and even for a show at Irvine Meadows in Southern California, where the Smiths would be playing to as many as 10,000 people and earning over $50,000. Indeed, it was a mark of the Smiths’ already fanatical following that these were many of the same theaters that the chart-topping, multiplatinum Tears for Fears were playing during the same month.

  The Smiths’ sudden entry into the big leagues (as well as Copeland’s oversized personality) became evident when the agent received the group’s stage requirements and concluded that they “would seem to describe a Ping-Pong table compared to the stages on this tour.” But he didn’t take into account the Smiths’ fixed sense of proportion. “The band always wanted to maintain that sense of being in proximity to each other,” said John Featherstone. “There was a relatively compressed sweet spot where everyone wanted to be. We never had a wider stage opening than forty feet.”

  As the tour grew closer, the lack of an authoritative management figure became a much greater issue of concern. Scott Piering had experience of touring the States dating back to Bob Marley and Third World, but because he had neither the time nor the capacity to tackle the logistical intricacies for the Smiths, he recommended the group hire a long-term professional acquaintance, top tour accountant Hector Lizardi, who planned to maximize the band’s revenue by having local promoters supply the PA and lights for every venue. The group’s crew, having developed a specific stage presence for the Smiths, preferred the more expensive option of renting their own equipment for the entire tour and having it trucked from city to city. Piering sent Morrissey press cuttings about Lizardi, noting, “Unlike anyone you now work with, he is not out of his depth and is not a gold-digger.” (Paranoia in the Smiths camp, evidently, was no longer confined to the singer.) In classic Smiths fashion, days and then weeks passed with no decision. Tickets went on sale; concerts sold out. Promoters, agents, and de facto management alike began to pull their hair out.

  The likelihood of the tour going ahead as planned was dealt a further blow when, in early May, Morrissey stood up an interviewer from People, arguably America’s most prominent magazine, with readership in the thirty-million range. Rough Trade’s good-natured and eternally patient press officer, Pat Bellis, had brought the journalist up to Manchester for the occasion, only to spend the entire day sitting in the Britannia Hotel while frantic phone calls were made to London and Phil Powell dispatched from Marr’s house in Bowdon to Morrissey’s at Hale Barns to try to locate the singer. (Naturally, there was no reply.) The next day Bellis, professionally embarrassed by the experience, sat down to express her disappointment. “Morrissey,” she pleaded in writing, “all I ask is that if you do not want to do an interview or whatever, please, please just say so or even if you change your mind at the last minute to telephone someone to let them know what is going on—it is then our job to make the excuses on your behalf, which although that is hardly a pleasant task in itself, is far better than leaving people sitting around waiting for your arrival.” As with Piering’s fears about television, Bellis concluded, “I am now more than ever concerned about arranging interviews or press for you as I can never be sure that you will turn up,” and signed off by sheepishly apologizing for the need to vent. Nonetheless, the People magazine interview was rescheduled, Morrissey showed up this time, and a two-page spread appeared in the midst of the American tour. The journalist, Fred Hauptfuhrer, turned out to be a major fan, and the piece, other than references to Morrissey’s close relationship with his live-in mother (who “thinks all her son needs to make life complete is a good woman”), was complimentary in the extreme, with no mention of his maltreatment first time around. Pop stars, Hauptfuhrer probably knew from experience, could get away with such behavior. Journalists could not.

  With the fate of the American tour still uncertain, in the middle of May 1985, the Smiths visited Italy and Spain for the first time. The two territories were among the more problematic in Europe, the former susceptible to unscrupulous promoters, the latter still recovering from four decades of military dictatorship. At Heathrow Airport, Rough Trade employees personally begged the group to fulfill a promise to appear on an Italian TV show; Jo Slee, as European licensing representative, then joined the Smiths on the plane to Italy in part to ensure it took place and in part to foster relations with Rough Trade’s new licensee there, Virgin. The visit got off to a bad start when the band rejected the Mediterranean-style hotel that the promoters had booked, complete with tile floors and traditional furniture and insisted on a generic, American-style hotel instead. (They moved to the Sheraton, nearer the airport.) The concert at the Tendastrisce turned out almost par for the course—it took place in a large circuslike tent rather than the theater everyone thought they were playing—but went off extremely well nonetheless, with the Italian audience engaging in stage invasions and frequently pulling Morrissey’s microphone out from its cable.

  It was when the group showed up for the TV show the next day that things went badly awry. From Virgin’s perspective, it was the prestigious equivalent of Top of the Pops. From that of a northern European band not used to the gaudy nature of Italian television, it was not even close. “The stage set was ridiculous,” said Andy Rourke. “There were kites and fake decaying pillars.” After attending rehearsals, they decided not to perform. “Morrissey said ‘I’m not going to humiliate myself.’ He stormed out, we stormed out.”

  Again, Johnny Marr backed his partner’s decision to bail on their commitments. “The easy option would have been to do it,” said Marr. “It took some real insight and perception to go, ‘I don’t want to be seen doing this.’ I’m really glad [Morrissey] saved my bacon. Sometimes he took one for the team.’ ”

  That was not how the record company saw it. Virgin disowned the Smiths for the foreseeable future and its new licensing relationship with Rough Trade was badly damaged too. “And there was never any sort of apology,” said Richard Boon, who called it “a very significant incident” and one that gave Rough Trade “the reputation of unreliability across the board.” Stuart James, meanwhile, as tour manager, was “annoyed that I hadn’t been let in on the discontent initially. It would have been a lot easier to say, ‘We’re not doing it’ instead of getting all the way there and even doing a bit of a run-through and then canceling at the very last minute.”

  The next day, as the group sat around in the hotel lobby preparing to fly to Spain, a disappointed Jo Slee vented at Mike Joyce that if she wasn’t going to be allowed to do her job properly, she might as well quit. “ ‘Well, if it’s not you, it’s just going to be someone else,’ ” she recalled Joyce saying, concluding for her own part, “Coming from
the drummer, that told me everything I needed to know.… Dealing with them was like going up the down escalator all the time and they seemed to take every excuse to sabotage what Rough Trade were doing.” Slee flew back to England to quit licensing for production, where she could work alongside Richard Boon; she took over handling the Smiths’ artwork, dealing directly with Morrissey, with whom she developed a close association. The Smiths flew on to Barcelona for a successful club show that was also filmed for television. They then moved on to the Spanish capital, Madrid, on May 18, for a major outdoor concert at Paseo de Camoens, sponsored by Madrid Town Hall to celebrate the holiday for the local patron saint; this concert too was being filmed for television.

  Unbeknownst to many people surrounding the band, the Smiths had just hired a lawyer, Alexis Grower of Seifert Sedley Williams, who, on May 16, after the group had left for Europe, wrote to Scott Piering, care of Smithdom, announcing his appointment. He had, he wrote, “today dispatched letters to Rough Trade and telexed Sire in accordance with my instructions.” Those instructions were the equivalent of a nuclear bomb dropping on Collier Street: as it was later noted by the label, “the Smiths had ‘by way of letter from the Artists’ solicitors’ dated 16 May, contended that their original agreement from 1 June 1983 had been terminated.” In other words, the Smiths were announcing their intent to leave Rough Trade, effective immediately.

  The letter from Grower to Piering further clarified that the solicitor was in direct contact with Ian Copeland regarding the American merchandising deals and dealing with a third party to ensure proper tour accounting, which marked the end of any association with Lizardi. In closing, he wrote, “If there are any matters which you wish to discuss with me and which I am able to discuss with you bearing in mind the confidentiality of my Clients’ instructions I will be happy to speak to you.” It was difficult for Piering not to read all this as his formal firing, and he decided to get on a plane and fly to Spain to confront the band about it: “I was their conscience, and they had to deal with it.”

  Mike Hinc also flew out to Madrid, in large part to try to keep Piering and the band apart. (Peter Walmsley, Rough Trade’s head of licensing, additionally came out to Spain; whether or not he had yet received Grower’s letter announcing the band’s proposed termination of its contract, he chose not to make a scene of it.) In recent months, while each maintained his loyalty to the greater cause (formerly Rough Trade, now the Smiths), Hinc and Piering had been at constant loggerheads. Hinc’s distrust of Piering reached its nadir when he saw that one of their conversations was being recorded; Piering later told Johnny Rogan that he taped it because he felt he could not trust the agent to keep his word to begin with. Matters were hardly helped by a familiar conflict of allegiances. Johnny Marr liked Scott Piering but not Mike Hinc; for Morrissey, it was the other way around. Morrissey won the day. When the Smiths arrived at their Madrid hotel, they found Piering waiting for them, asleep in the lobby. They quickly changed hotels. While Piering spent the waking day trying to secure some form of meeting, the band did its best to avoid him. Piering recalled to Rogan: “I hung out and didn’t pressurize them. I let them know I was there, made myself available and had a few words with them, but they just didn’t deal with it.” Eventually, Mike Hinc took Piering aside for a necessary “talk” about the group’s decision. “I don’t think our friendship ever recovered from that,” said Hinc.

  “I hated him for three or four years afterwards,” confirmed Piering of Hinc; the erstwhile caretaker manager treated himself to a week’s holiday in Madrid as part of his post-Smiths recovery process before returning to London, where he nonetheless continued his role as their plugger. Before all that, he attended the concert in Madrid, held outdoors in front of several thousand at the end of the vast Paseo de Camoens Boulevard, which came off almost perfectly despite the day’s behind-the-scenes machinations. (The TV footage remains the only quality video souvenir of the entire Meat Is Murder tour.) This proved just as well, for the next day, minus Hinc, Piering, and Walmsley, the Smiths moved on to San Sebastian for a Sunday-night concert. There it turned out that the venue had been supplied with the wrong equipment rider. Stuart James again found himself frozen out of the dialogue; after a frustrating soundcheck, “the crew went beyond me and went straight to the band and said, ‘We can’t do the gig.’ ” The Smiths returned to their hotel, and James stayed with the crew at the venue, which came under attack from disgruntled fans waiting outside, once it was announced that the concert had been canceled. In the meantime, back at the hotel, the press, who had been quickly alerted by the promoters, cornered the group to explain themselves. “It all got very nasty,” said James. “We weren’t being blackmailed into doing the gig, but we weren’t really being given any assistance, either. All the band wanted to do was get the hell out.” The police arrived to deal with the crowd disturbances, and there was talk of the crew being arrested; the promoters ultimately defused that scenario, but with contact between venue and hotel restricted, the group resorted to making phone calls to the British consulate. Eventually, band and crew alike were allowed to leave and caught a dawn flight home from Bilbao. The next day, Stuart James called Mike Hinc to resign as tour manager. He was told that he couldn’t; the band had already fired him. The American tour was now two weeks away.

  It is symptomatic of the lack of communication even within the very heart of the Smiths that there should have been so much confusion regarding Scott Piering’s dismissal. “Maybe he pushed too hard for that Italian television performance … maybe that became something that he got wrong,” surmised Marr. As far as he recalled events, “No one said, ‘Scott’s out,’ ” which would suggest that he either didn’t know about, didn’t understand the implications of, or ultimately forgot about the solicitor’s letter sent on his and Morrissey’s behalf while the group was in Europe.2 “For whatever reasons,” said Marr of Piering in 2011, “he withdrew.”

  This was evidently not the case, and there were those within the group who wished that Piering had in fact been allowed to officially assume the managerial role. “Scott did a lot of work for us that was not recognized, in my eyes,” said Andy Rourke. (Among other things, Piering had called into question the financial fairness of the Smiths’ internal business arrangements.) “I would say that for at least a year, a year and a half, he did manage us. And never got any recognition, never got paid. He put his heart and soul into it. I think he never got any thanks for it. I think he busted his balls to try and do everything for us.”

  “I loved Scott,” said lighting director John Featherstone, who recalled that Piering’s office “was almost like our clubhouse when we were in London. I think Scott is due a lot of credit and probably more credit than he gets, for really stepping into the breach and fulfilling the role of manager.” For Featherstone, that was about more than just business; it was about artistic integrity, too. “He could say to me, ‘That’s a great idea but I saw the Velvet Underground do it, and it didn’t work.’ ”

  As the stakes had grown ever higher around the Smiths, Piering may not always have been the music industry’s notion of the ideal manager. “Scott wasn’t on the ball all the time,” said Grant Showbiz. “He was overdriven. He would be doing too much stuff for too little money for too much of the time.”

  Johnny Marr offered similar memories: “He was no saint. He would be late for things. He was often quite flustered.” And this was true. If it was something of a surprise to Steven Baker at Warner Bros. (for whom “Scott was the band’s manager as far I was concerned”) that Piering never flew to America to plan the campaign for Meat Is Murder, it was more of a shock when Piering occasionally told him that he’d have to cut their phone calls short because they were costing him too much money. And Piering’s ill-fated efforts to organize the Meat Is Murder American tour had been marked by increasingly desperate communication methods that were quite at odds with the more measured presentations and reasoned language used by other staffers when communicating to Morrissey
—or indeed, than from Morrissey himself. Of course, the very fact that Morrissey went over Piering’s head to deal directly with everyone else at Rough Trade only exemplified the supposed manager’s impotence. Geoff Travis, curiously, said that Piering “never really represented himself to me as their manager. [Within] the conventional parameters of what a manager would do, I don’t really remember anything coming from [Scott] towards us. Nothing like ‘You’ve got to spend more money’ or ‘We need full-page ads.’ None of that.” For those issues, Travis would talk directly with Morrissey—who “pretty much got what he wanted all the time.”

  By taking on the role under such circumstances, Piering was always operating from a position of weakness in regard to his relationship with Morrissey—and he knew as much. “The last thing he wanted you to be was clinging,” Piering told Rogan. “As soon as people were clinging [Morrissey would] shun them. He’d get you in that position where you’d try to say, ‘What about me? What about my role?’ And he’d make you feel embarrassed for doing it. It was a very clever psychological maneuver.”