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

by Tony Fletcher

  The managerial uncertainties were not rendered easier by the fact that Joe Moss had been quietly but firmly insisting on payment for the money he had fronted the group, a total of £6,000, including the cost of the PA. Moss found it hard to understand how his protégé, Johnny Marr, could not negotiate a second signature on a check for such a relatively trifling amount, and to the extent that he harbored disappointment with a group he had successfully managed and mentored for eighteen months, it was directed not at the singer—“I never expected anything from him”—but the guitarist, whom he had employed and housed in addition to professional management for which he was not even seeking commission.

  All this paints an unpleasant picture, especially so long after the event. The reality of the situation in 1985 was that Morrissey, having never owned a checkbook before the Smiths (because he never had enough money to need one), was now generating vast sums of income as a very public icon—and yet he was a highly private individual of infamously poor social skills, who had chosen to buy a house for and then move back in with a fiercely protective mother who was vocal in her own assertion that the music industry was “full of sharks.” The reality, equally, was that Johnny Marr was only twenty-one, and despite the fact that he had the people skills his partner may have lacked, was only marginally more experienced in business, and living the life of a newly minted rock star at full throttle. He pushed the band to record new singles before new albums had even been released; he agreed to touring schedules that gave little time for recuperation in between. He did not eat properly, let alone sleep. Nocturnal by nature, he was also given to partying hard, and while that was never at the expense of his creativity, he did not allow himself time to sit back, accumulate, regenerate, and make sensible, sober, conscious decisions about the band’s business setup. Besides, to do so would mean confronting Morrissey, and his unwillingness to do so over the hiring and firing of managers was in line with his refusal to do so over the split of the band’s internal profits—and which was met with similar regret years down the line.

  “We were very foolish,” said Marr a quarter century later. “We made many mistakes. We made some mistakes that we shouldn’t have made throughout our career.” One of those, he said, concerned the role of Piering: “Scott should have managed us.”

  The Smiths’ ongoing manager “problems” looked particularly ridiculous given that they’d had, not once but twice now (with Moss and Piering), much better qualified and more experienced representation than either of their primary independent peers. After all, Rob Gretton had grown up as just another Wythenshawe bootboy/Bowie kid turned punk turned local club DJ, but that didn’t stop him successfully managing the band that became Joy Division (and then New Order). As for Depeche Mode, they didn’t even have a manager; they entrusted Daniel Miller, despite the potential appearance of conflict of interest based on his dual role as their record label, to advise them on all important business decisions.

  It’s not so much ironic that of these three significant British independent bands of the era, on the three largest and most significant independent labels, all operating on 50–50 profit splits, it was the band that had signed a binding contract—the Smiths with Rough Trade—that decided to move on. It’s more that it’s hard to imagine under what moral or legal basis Morrissey and Marr thought that they could terminate the Rough Trade agreement. Having begged for the chance to sign with Britain’s leading independent label, they had been rewarded with a number 2 and a number 1 album (with an additional compilation making the top 10) and, including the Sandie Shaw collaboration, a run of seven consecutive top 30 hits after their initial introductory release. Neither New Order nor Depeche Mode (nor, for that matter, the Cure, the Bunnymen, or even U2) could boast anything like such a consistent combined run of successes so early in their career. Admittedly, sales were more modest in other countries, where Rough Trade dealt with a multitude of licensees of varying degrees of efficiency, and a major label might have been able to make more of the band in this regard, but the Smiths were hardly putting in the necessary legwork overseas to encourage anyone to push harder on their behalf.

  The actual contract with Rough Trade was technically messy, what with all its handwritten queries and addendums, but the one aspect never in dispute was the initial three-year term. Even had the band (or its lawyer) believed that Hatful of Hollow somehow fulfilled their initial obligations of three albums (which was not the case, given that the contract specified “previously unrecorded material”), Rough Trade would still have had the option to renew the deal for another year (and another one after that). And for its own part, the label had no interest in letting the group go.

  “I couldn’t think what we had done wrong,” said Travis. “If I had thought that we had failed them I would have said, maybe, ‘Good luck to you guys,’ but I thought, ‘Not only have we done a good job, but we have done above and beyond what anyone else would have done in terms of time and commitment.’ ” After attempting (unsuccessfully) to resolve the issue internally, Rough Trade initiated legal proceedings in early July to protect their investment, seeking an injunction preventing the Smiths from delivering their recordings to any other label but Rough Trade. In the meantime, everyday business with the Smiths continued apace. “It’s a farce,” said Travis of the process at the time, citing the comedy movies that had been such a part of Morrissey’s upbringing. “It’s like a Carry On film—except the lawyers are involved! That was normal Smiths life, like a Carry On film.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  Most music reminds people of when they first heard it, but the music of the Smiths—this is what we were.

  —Matt Miller, All Men Have Secrets

  The Smiths were the most perfect idea I’d ever heard. Or seen.

  —Marc Spitz, How Soon Is Never?

  A few days after he was fired, Stuart James was asked to resume his role as tour manager, at higher wages, and travel to America with the band. On Concorde. By the time they transferred airports in New York to connect with a domestic flight to Chicago, where the tour was to commence, the crew had beat them there by conventional jetliner. While the group decamped to the Aragon Ballroom for rehearsals, Stuart James and his new production manager, Mark Gosling, who had been loaned from All Trade in the wake of the Lizardi fiasco, holed up at the Ambassador Hotel, as made famous by both The Blues Brothers and North by Northwest, to belatedly and furiously “advance” a tour that was now all but sold out. The crew had won its fight to rent PA and lights in Chicago and truck them around America. The band had won its own battle to install James on tour as opening act, despite the fact that their friends had yet to release a record in the States. Shortly before the tour was due to commence, James pulled out: their guru, Ishvara, had announced that he would be coming to Manchester (all the way from Basingstoke) to lead a retreat, and “that was more important than doing an American tour with the Smiths,” said Tim Booth. Only later down the line would he recognize Lifewave as “the standard archetypal cult.” Morrissey, however, was “so upset” by the news of James’s cancellation that “he went AWOL for a day and a half and said he wasn’t going to do the American tour,” recalled Booth. “Geoff Travis called us at one point and asked if we knew where he was.” In the meantime, a call went out to Billy Bragg, whose “Between the Wars” EP had just gone top 20 in the UK. He was winding up some American dates of his own and was able to join the Smiths through the first half of the tour. Morrissey asked for (and succeeded in getting) drag queens to open for the Smiths, lip-syncing in cabaret style where Bragg could not perform; the reaction was as hostile as one might have been expected.

  Into this chaos stepped a new manager. Matthew Sztumpf was gainfully employed looking after Madness, whose transition from cheery ska-pop band to sensitive political troubadours had proven so complete that they had just about lost their original audience—though not before running up an impressive catalog of UK top 10 hits, and a couple of American crossover singles that gave
Sztumpf experience in dealing with that country’s labels, agents, and media from a position of temporary power. Given that Madness comprised seven strong and demanding personalities, Sztumpf had every reason to believe that he could manage the four within the Smiths. By all accounts, he acquitted himself perfectly well.

  Despite the fact that it would have been his job to handle the record company, Sztumpf was unable to prevent Morrissey from a rare case of voluntary confrontation backstage at the opening show in Chicago, where, Steven Baker from Warner Bros. recalled, “he was totally blunt and told me what he thought” about the label’s handling of “How Soon Is Now?” Morrissey repeated his complaints the next day in Detroit when he sat down with Creem magazine and turned what should have been a victory speech regarding the band’s American reception into a vindictive one instead.

  “I feel we were signed originally as a gesture of hipdom on [Sire’s] part, and that was really it,” he told Dave DiMartino. “And they had no intentions of the Smiths ever meaning anything on a mass level. And they still don’t. And they’ve made several marketing disasters which have really been quite crippling to us in personal ways.” There was the “abhorrent sleeve” for “How Soon Is Now?” There was the complaint that “they released the album Meat Is Murder with the track ‘How Soon Is Now’ unlisted, without printing the lyrics,” which was true of the LP, initially marketed with a sticker advertising the bonus addition of “How Soon Is Now?” And there was the additional assertion that “they released the cassette without the track ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore,’ ” which was entirely false.

  Morrissey reserved his greatest ire for the promo clip. “It had absolutely nothing to do with the Smiths—but quite naturally we were swamped with letters from very distressed American friends saying, ‘Why on earth did you make this foul video?’ And of course it must be understood that Sire made that video, and we saw the video and we said to Sire, ‘You can’t possibly release this … this degrading video. ‘And they said, ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t really be on our label.’ ”

  Such a conversation, in more general terms, might possibly have taken place; it was not beyond an American record company boss to let an English group know, typically via their manager, that if they weren’t willing to sell themselves then maybe the label should not be spending money on them. And it was ironic that Morrissey’s major complaint about Rough Trade, a lack of apparent promotion, had now been flipped with regard to Sire. Still, “I felt like I fucked up,” allowed Baker, who took responsibility for some of these decisions. “I’m sure it was a big deal to them. As a marketing person you’re supposed to listen to the group and represent their interests in the company and make sure that things aren’t done that don’t represent them properly. I think I was just so happy that the label was interested enough to make a video.…” When the Creem story was eventually published—fortuitously, perhaps, after the tour had concluded—Baker took the comments in the spirit of what he now understood to be the “compelling … drama” surrounding the Smiths, all of which “translated that this was a group that was seriously independent in every possible way” and therefore contributed to audience fanaticism, which in turn fed back into record sales: “If he wasn’t giving those quotes to the press, if he wasn’t being who he is, it wouldn’t be the Smiths.”1

  “We took an adversarial position toward the American record company,” confirmed Marr, “and with good reason. Because people would show up and quite obviously didn’t understand the group, and didn’t care very much. And we felt like it was so much lip service.” Like Morrissey, Marr was frustrated that “the video didn’t look like how we were really representing ourselves,” though he subsequently allowed that it “was incredibly ahead of its time.” But he was more frustrated “that they had tagged ‘How Soon Is Now?’ onto Meat Is Murder.… We felt on that issue that even if we were wrong, we were the artists and it was our prerogative to not put it on. The fact that they rode roughshod over us, we felt, patronized us and pulled rank. That really did infuriate me. We had sequenced that album very, very carefully. We felt it was really tacky and that it messed with art.” Sire was only acting in a time-honored American label manner (none of the Beatles’ first half-dozen albums came out with the original British running order, and Sire had just compiled a Depeche Mode album out of bits and pieces to capitalize on that band’s growing success), but that mattered little to him at the time. “It was all very well them coming to a show and telling us how much they loved us but when it came to a standoff, they just said, ‘Deal with it. We’ve done it.’ ”

  As with many of the issues that riled the Smiths, time would temper some of the anger. “We didn’t understand that it was about the market,” Marr was ultimately able to admit, “and really our arguments were purely aesthetic and we couldn’t argue about the market because we didn’t know about the market.… Years and years later, I know that people are vegetarian because ‘How Soon Is Now?’ had been snagged on the front. I would have preferred they had not done it. But a lot of good did come from it, thankfully.”

  But back in the summer of 1985, the Smiths were so infuriated that Morrissey had Stuart James call Seymour Stein and tell him he was off the guest list in New York.

  If the Smiths’ relationship with their American record label proved a disappointment, the reaction from their stateside audience more than compensated. Although other British groups enjoyed a hysterical welcome in America through the 1980s, something about these particular four lads extended that much further into a certain American psyche. Fans at the American shows didn’t just cheer, clap, and holler. They actually screamed. Billy Bragg noticed immediately how “there was a kind of Beatlemania going on that I’d never seen before,” and that included the American tour he had undertaken with the Bunnymen the previous year. The same with FBI booking agent Steve Ferguson, who at the Beacon Theater in New York was “amazed on so many levels by the intensity of the fans.” He called it “like watching history in the making,” citing “this tidal wave” of fans invading the stage, “just worshipping and hanging on every syllable that Morrissey would sing. They were clearly different than just another English band coming from overseas. It was such a unique situation. I’d never seen people behave like that before. It was boys and girls. This was like going to church for them and Morrissey was the Messiah and people were just losing their shit.”

  “Morrissey’s lyrics were universal,” noted Andy Rourke of the singer’s appeal in America. “They talked about what nobody else in the music industry was expressing at those times. He said what everybody was feeling. The kids in America have to go to college, they’re ripped away from their home. Sure, there are lonely people there and people who don’t fit. And that was the main thing, that Morrissey’s lyrics spoke to those lonely people, those misfits.”

  “Particularly at that time, what he was doing was so different to what everyone else was doing,” said Billy Bragg, whose ongoing inclusion of “Jeane” in his set saw the Smiths reclaim it by the time they hit Boston. “The only other person I could ever think of who’d done that before was Bowie, when he was going through his androgynous phase. And I think some of the responses to the Smiths were about the same sort of level as people responded to Bowie when he first broke. Morrissey’s presence somehow allowed you to do things that you wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to do. There was something vaguely transgressive about Mozzer.” To this end, Morrissey’s quote in Rolling Stone the previous year in which he said, “I don’t know anybody who is absolutely, exclusively heterosexual, it limits people’s potential in so many areas,” appeared to have had a direct and positive impact on the Smiths’ potential audience and his own reception.

  “I was always so proud of our gender politics, and our Politics with a capital P,” said Marr. “And as we got bigger, I became more proud, but none more so than when we went to America, where it really flew in the face of the mainstream. It was weird to call a number-one album Meat Is Murder in England, but in Ame
rica in the mid-’80s it was really something.”

  If the Smiths, especially Morrissey, appeared exotic to the American fans, the reaction was no less profound in reverse. John Featherstone recalled collective astonishment when they made it to the San Diego Open Air Theater and looked out on the audience: “It was like being on Planet Beautiful,” he said of the Southern Californians, whose behavior was similarly alien to a band of working-class Mancunian Irish from poor backgrounds. “Americans know how to do many things. They don’t know how to do dark and northern. Watching the way that someone Californian tries to be dark and northern, it has an underlying exuberance to it which doesn’t have years of depressed economy and decline [as an] undercurrent to it.”

  It helped that, artistically, the group was absolutely on fire. “Everybody was talking up the Smiths all the time, nobody was talking them down,” said Mike Hinc, who was present for the Los Angeles shows. “But when they got there, they had the goods, and they delivered.” From his perspective, “It was the guitar that cracked it for America. Morrissey is critical to the band in all countries in all stages, but what opened the door to America was the guitar work.”

  “I felt from the minute I got there in America, it was difficult for me because I assumed they weren’t going to understand my approach to the guitar,” said Johnny Marr. “I felt under such incredible pressure in America. I was being heralded as the biggest thing, but I never played solos. And I didn’t play conventional rock guitar.” His fears proved unfounded. “From the very first American show, it worked out. The Americans loved it.”

  Indeed, the shows were phenomenal, running to an hour and a half, with the “Barbarism Begins at Home” encore frequently stretched to a twelve-minute funk workout as (some of) the crowd danced alongside the band onstage. Audiences seemed to know every song, from “Hand in Glove” through the Hatful of Hollow import cuts, down to every last word of Meat Is Murder. Even “Shakespeare’s Sister” elicited screams of recognition, in part because it had been included as a B-side on the 7″ of “How Soon Is Now?”—the song that, more so than any other, caused immediate hysteria in the mostly seated venues.