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

by Tony Fletcher

  Morrissey and Perry grew close, the guitarist frequently coming over to Kings Road to hang out. “He was very interested in how I fitted into the world,” said Perry. “And how I fitted into the music, and what I thought of his music, and he was very complimentary of our music.” Specifically, the pair bonded over literature, Morrissey loaning Perry his copies of Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Female Eunuch. “We read,” said Ivor Perry. “It was what bound us together. It wasn’t just, ‘I want to be a rock star.’ There was more to it than that.”

  Now, two years later, Easterhouse had just ended a short and unpleasant relationship with a major label and were relieved to find themselves among like-minded souls on Rough Trade. It was a shock, then, to find out that the Smiths viewed their world differently. “It was suddenly, ‘We’re carrying the can for all these whack groups on Rough Trade,’ ” said Perry. “But there’s always been whack groups on Rough Trade. Surely their idea is to put out loads of records that will sell five hundred, and let the bands flourish or not.”

  Record-company travails did not stop the Smiths granting Access All Areas passes to Geoff Travis, Scott Piering, and Martha DeFoe and almost forty others—a number that reflected not only the increased demands on the Smiths’ entourage but also the band’s desire to consider certain people as part of the family. Among them were Fred Hood, drummer with major-label signees the Impossible Dreamers, whose new single “August Avenue” came with a big sticker on the picture sleeve announcing Johnny Marr’s credit as producer, and a long-standing female Japanese fan who went by the name of Oska, as in Wilde, and who became something of a Morrissey confidante, often sitting with him on the tour bus.

  The seven-date tour saw the Smiths at their very best. It took in the famous sweat box and sprung floor of the Glasgow Barrowlands, which many in attendance (including Geoff Travis) considered to be the finest Smiths’ show ever; Easterhouse manager John Barratt spoke of Morrissey that night “being up there with Jagger” and of the Smiths making U2 look “weedy” by comparison. At the other end of the tour, the Clickimin Centre in Lerwick saw the Smiths play to an audience of seven hundred people that included pretty much every young person in the town, regardless of their musical tastes (most of which, apparently, veered toward hard rock). The shows also took in the Edinburgh Playhouse—a theater in the vein of those they had recently played in Manchester and Liverpool—and what was advertised as the “largest sports centre in Europe,” the Magnum Leisure Centre in Irvine. Morrissey was in particularly vivacious form throughout, perhaps enjoying the tour’s relative distance from the media spotlight; it was probably no coincidence that he chose Lerwick for the rare treat of drinking with the entire entourage in the hotel bar through the night. Unlike James (whose debut single, “What’s the World,” the Smiths began performing on the Scottish tour, their first onstage cover version since 1982), Easterhouse could party as hard as the Smiths. At an end-of-tour celebration in Inverness, the champagne flowed, and Perry and Marr ruffled each other’s feathers, as they had done all the way back at Dingwalls. It could not have gone unnoticed that Easterhouse’s lone single on London Records featured guitar playing not dissimilar to that of Johnny Marr; the Smiths’ influence upon their generation was becoming increasingly apparent.

  Part of the onstage confidence and offstage exuberance may have come down to the fact that the recording sessions at RAK had already produced such a wealth of wonderful new material. Throughout the tour, and often back to back, the Smiths performed not only the new single, “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” but fully complete renditions of “Frankly, Mr Shankly” and “Bigmouth Strikes Again.”6 The Smiths additionally used the tour to introduce a verse of Elvis’s “His Latest Flame” into “Rusholme Ruffians,” and Morrissey frequently introduced “Nowhere Fast” with a put-down of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s child, Prince William. The singer, it appeared evident, had no interest in toning down his attacks on the royal family.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  I never really like to say, I never really like to pin it down. Do you understand that? I mean, there’s someone in Huddersfield who might have a fascinating, fiery explanation, and then I go and shatter it by saying it’s about greyhound racing. Their life collapses.

  —Morrissey on lyrics, Record Mirror, February 1987

  Throughout the saga of the Smiths, only one central figure to the story was able to demonstrate an ability to manage the personalities of both Morrissey and Marr equally, to be appreciated by each of them equally, and to survive with his reputation unscathed, at least until the band broke up. That person was Stephen Street, credited as their recording engineer though unofficially recognized as their coproducer through three of their four studio albums.

  “Street was straight down the middle,” said Johnny Marr, “totally partisan” in his relationships with the group members, a viewpoint confirmed by Andy Rourke, who stated, “Stephen was very attentive to everybody, and that’s why we all loved him.” These playing members had had no qualms with John Porter, either, but Porter had nonetheless been unable to secure the trust of Morrissey. By succeeding in this regard, Street revealed not only his considerable talents as an engineer, but the people skills necessary to satisfy, support, and motivate the most difficult of artists.

  “You’ve got to be very attentive to Morrissey,” said Street. “You’ve got to make him feel that he’s special, and I did, because he is special. I didn’t have to fake it. When the guy came in to do his work, he was brilliant. I was very keen on making sure that everything that Morrissey wanted, to make him happy in the studio, I would do.” But Street applied the same philosophy to the other members too. “When it’s their point in the recording where it’s important, I try to make each person really, really feel as if they’re the most important thing in the band at that point.”

  This impartiality was noticed beyond the four musicians. Grant Showbiz, himself an active producer in between Smiths tours, observed, “Stephen could balance up Johnny and Morrissey in a studio managerial way better than John Porter.” And Geoff Travis lamented how one of the major disappointments of the Smiths is “that they didn’t find a manager that managed to get a balance in a way that Stephen Street did between the two of them—or the four of them.” The ongoing lack of permanent management was to hover menacingly throughout the group’s continued recording career, but Street expressly forbade it from intruding on the actual sessions. “Why should I get involved in the business side of things?” he asked. “All I wanted to make sure was that I was just making as good as possible a record.”

  Street’s selfless attitude had already produced results with Meat Is Murder. When the session at RAK studios in August 1985 proved equally rewarding, he took the initiative to ask Johnny Marr, directly, if he could get a royalty. Typically, this was not something requested by a mere engineer, but by now Street recognized, “I was making some key decisions towards how the records sounded.” Marr and Morrissey evidently agreed; after conferring for a few minutes they granted his request, and the paperwork confirming Street’s single percentage point was subsequently completed and signed, something that not many people around the Smiths (including the rhythm section) were ever able to claim.

  Suitably encouraged, Street returned to work on the new album—tentatively titled Margaret on the Guillotine, though Morrissey later substituted the stark image of Thatcher’s execution for The Queen Is Dead—with increased vigor.1 From Street’s perspective, the sessions—which got under way in earnest, after the Scottish tour, at Jacob’s in Farnham, Surrey—were “a happy time,” which perhaps also reflected Marr’s understanding of Street as an ideal collaborator. “The closest we got to a relaxed presence was Stephen Street,” he said, “because even though it was a real roller-coaster ride making the records with us, he had enough of a sense of himself. He was able to get out there in the stratosphere with us mentally, but he was always very, very grounded.” For Marr’s own part, however, the new al
bum was to prove a markedly different experience: “I was so completely immersed in The Queen Is Dead,” he recalled. “The other band members will agree that you couldn’t be as immersed in that as I was.”

  They did. Mike Joyce told Johnny Rogan of the sessions, “Johnny became insular and detached from myself and Andy. He was taking on a lot and wanted to do it himself. I remember him not wanting us around for a while.” Fred Hood, Marr’s friend in the Impossible Dreamers (and Grant Showbiz’s future musical partner in the hit act Moodswings) observed that he’d “never seen anyone so under pressure as Johnny was when they were doing The Queen Is Dead. Johnny was writing all the songs, then arranging for Morrissey to get to the studio when nobody else was there, such were Morrissey’s stipulations. And Johnny was beginning to have a good time outside of that … he was beginning to enjoy being in more normal musicianly surroundings. The Smiths were abnormal because they were hermetically sealed.” Distracted perhaps by the group’s lack of management, which meant that he was not only assuming the task of administering the various studio bookings but frequently being called away to phone calls or discussing business with Morrissey, Marr’s main motivation was nonetheless that of the twenty-one-year-old wunderkind who had only just told Melody Maker in their cover story on him: “I just look at what we have done and it all seems so tiny and we still have the universe to go.”

  Jacob’s, one of Britain’s premier facilities at the time, was set in a Georgian mansion with a sizeable swimming pool and in-house catering; its two separate studios included a former drawing room and a converted stables, and its residences included a cottage where Marr holed himself up with demo equipment that, when not in the main studio, he used to complete some compositions and start others from scratch. He would get up around lunchtime, start work, and then “drive myself and drive myself” through the day and way into the night. In fact, he had become almost completely nocturnal by this point. “It was the only way I could get any peace and quiet.”

  Morrissey’s daytime hours, meanwhile, suited Stephen Street, who, by having the singer to himself, managed to secure additional vocal takes from the singer. “Sometimes I would make out it was my fault, that there was a problem with a compressor or whatever. I’d just find a way of getting a good vocal performance out of him, and I think he appreciated that when he listened back to the record at the end of it all. I often got a postcard from him afterwards, congratulating me on my efforts and saying, ‘Well done and thank you.’ ”

  The first song to be worked up at Jacob’s was “I Know It’s Over,” which Morrissey and Marr had written in Bowdon over the summer (alongside “Frankly, Mr Shankly”) and which had already been recorded as an instrumental demo at RAK. When Morrissey delivered his vocals at Jacob’s, as was often the case it was without sharing them with the group in advance: Marr described watching Morrissey’s delivery as “one of the highlights of my life.” Continuing the morbid theme that ran through so much of his work in 1985, “I Know It’s Over” opened with the memorable line “Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head,” which had to be presumed as metaphorical given the narrator’s lucidity through the rest of the song, bemoaning his romantic isolation in the face of (supposedly) contented married couples, and who was further humiliated by questions hurled at him, presumably by the object of desire, along the lines of, “If you’re so funny, then why are you on your own tonight?” In whatever way this song may have been personal to Morrissey, the listener was welcome to project this series of questions instead toward anyone he or she had ever disliked or envied.

  It was the third of the summer’s co-compositions that would prove the most endearing and enduring. Written in a minor key, and played several frets up with a capo, allowing for those higher, almost flamenco-like frequencies that were so familiar to Smiths fans, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” opened with an intro lifted from both Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike” and the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again.” Over Marr’s comparatively uncluttered chords (barely five of them, all easily figured and fingered), Morrissey projected himself back into the passenger seat of “This Charming Man,” but this time as an already infatuated if apparently unconsummated romantic partner. As the verses unraveled, there were hints at an unhappy home life to which the passenger had no desire to return, and an almost tangible sense of longing for the driver, including a beautifully illustrated example of missed opportunity: “But then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn’t ask.” Every word was perfectly situated, forming the spine of a narrative without fleshing out the body too much, and it was all in thrall to the chorus, the narrator’s willingness to be struck by an oncoming bus or truck: “to die by your side, such a heavenly way to die.” In those few words, Morrissey somehow summed up the thoughts of all those who had ever loved and lost or never loved at all; they were to become among the most commonly quoted of all Smiths lyrics.2 The song’s title itself was then left to stand alone, repeated frequently during the outro but never fully explained. (Years later, an earlier recording would emerge with a slightly different vocal, which concluded, “There is a light in your eyes and it never goes out,” offering an elucidation that was never actually required.)

  As a pure love song, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” was rendered that much more potent by its rare reliance on compositional convention: intro, verse, verse, quick bridge, chorus, verse, verse, quick bridge, chorus, outro, fade. This seeming simplicity would have counted for nothing, however, without Marr’s regal chord structure, Morrissey’s devotional lyrics, and a studio arrangement that cast aside any attempt at pretense or protest and dived headfirst instead into all the classic pop-ballad production techniques. A tear-jerking string accompaniment introduced itself on the first chorus (performed on the Emulator, a state-of-the-art sample keyboard of its time, the strings were essentially authentic but fell digitally short of a full orchestra’s occasional overkill), and an Emulator flute melody (with a touch of delay) on the third verse, the strings and flute then combining and counterpointing over the traditional instrumentation during the lengthy outro. The Brill Building–era songwriting partnerships and the mid-’60s Svengali producers alike would have been proud.

  A modest amount of detective work would subsequently reveal that the first verse of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” borrowed a line from the movie Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (“Why don’t you take me where it’s lively and there’s plenty of people?”) and that the second used a couple from the New York Dolls’ “Lonely Planet Boy” (“How could you be drivin’ down by my home when you know I ain’t got one?”), but it really didn’t matter; as Oscar Wilde biographer Arthur Ransome wrote of his own subject, “He stole freely, but often mounted other men’s jewels so well that they are better in his work than in their own.” In fact, Morrissey chose to confront accusations of his plagiarism head-on, and with almost giddy delight, on another song, the purposefully misspelled “Cemetry Gates.” Over another simple acoustic chord sequence and recognizable song structure (ABBCBCA), Morrissey offered a nostalgic recollection of his graveyard wanderings at Manchester’s Southern Cemetery with Linder and others, before allowing his protagonists to have at each other with their literary idols. “Keats and Yeats are on your side,” sang Morrissey, but “Wilde is on mine,” acknowledging at last in lyric his most frequently cited influence. Deliberately misquoting Shakespeare, and inventing an alliterative nonsensical quotation of his own, Morrissey’s words were a tumbling torrent of a tease, defying the odds in maintaining some semblance of melody as they danced in and around Marr’s busy guitar work.3 “If you must write prose poems, the words you use should be your own,” he sang with impressive conviction for a line so disingenuous. It was a work of almost impossible self-confidence, a gleeful poke in the eye of his detractors—and a sublime piece of music to boot. Recording it, recalled Stephen Street, “the vibe was just wonderful.”

  Morrissey’s impishness and impudence was additionally evident in
“Vicar in a Tutu,” and it’s of no small import that this song became a last-minute replacement for a somber ballad entitled “Unlovable.” When the latter showed up as the B-side to “Bigmouth,” it was rightly dismissed as a very rare case of the Smiths underperforming musically and conforming to lyrical cliché; had it been included on The Queen Is Dead, it would have served the additional dispurpose of tipping the album over to the dark side. (The inclusion of a lumbering 6/8 ballad, “Never Had No One Ever,” though full of menace and to become much loved by Smiths fans in concert, already threatened that emotional balance.) In its place, “Vicar in a Tutu,” set to a spaghetti rockabilly skiffle riff enforced by Mike Joyce’s syncopated snare rolls, offered lighthearted relief, and yet it was saved from pure comedy by Morrissey’s underlying empathy for the cross-dressing clergyman (“He’s not strange, he just wants to live his life this way”) and his antipathy for religious structure to begin with (literally so, his narrator “lifting some lead off the roof of the Holy Name Church” as the song opens). It was throwaway popular music of the highest order, and became one of Morrissey’s favorite Smiths songs.