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

by Tony Fletcher

  In somewhat similar fashion, Morrissey took the role of the quintessentially fey Englishman, acting all embarrassed and shocked by body parts and their recreational/procreational functions (think Michael Crawford in the theatrical romp No Sex Please, We’re British and the equally enduring TV comedy Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em) for “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others,” a simple statement of biological fact that Morrissey nonetheless presented as if a revelation. Refusing to capitalize on its opening tease (other than conjuring up the image of a camp Mark Antony), it served as an unexpectedly lighthearted conclusion, very much at odds with “Suffer Little Children” and “Meat Is Murder” on the preceding albums. But it also served as a deliberate juxtaposition to The Queen Is Dead’s opening song and title track, the number that has come to be revered as quite possibly the Smiths’ greatest studio performance.4

  That title had been lingering in the air since America, where Morrissey had ad-libbed it at the end of “Barbarism Begins at Home.” Once Marr learned that it was to be used for a Smiths song, he took the phrase as overdue opportunity to combine the violent guitar work of Detroit’s highly politicized MC5 with the minimalist repetitiveness of New York’s apolitical Velvet Underground, specifically their 1969 outtake “I Can’t Stand It,” which had been released post-breakup on the album VU within the past year. As with “How Soon Is Now?,” the song “The Queen Is Dead” ultimately bore little outward sign of these influences, and as with that other confirmed Smiths studio classic, it came together through a series of fortuitous experiments resulting from a lengthy studio jam. “Sometimes you can go into the studio and you can play for a whole day and nothing will happen,” said Andy Rourke. “That day the magic happened and we came up with this amazing song that became the theme of the whole album.”

  “The Queen Is Dead” was propelled by the Smiths’ rhythm section at their most inspired, Joyce holding the beat with a ferocity born of his punk days but a finesse that could only have been acquired with the Smiths, and Rourke discovering a rumbling, rising-octave bass line that anchored the track and gave it the vital element of danger. Once the initial backing track jam had been recorded, Marr delivered his most savage guitar performance to date, heavy on the wah-wah pedal, returning to the control room “shaking” at his own intensity. As the group settled down to listen back, they noticed that the pedal had been left open when Marr had thrust the guitar back on its stand, producing a ghostly harmonic that the guitarist now rushed back to capture on tape, opening and closing the pedal in time with the music. The effect was kept throughout the song, providing an ambience that subtly but crucially distinguished it from just another flat-out rock performance.

  Upon Morrissey’s request, “The Queen Is Dead” opened with the sound of actress Cicely Courtneidge singing “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty” from the 1962 kitchen-sink drama The L-Shaped Room.5 Though the novel and movie were set in a boarding house of that postwar era in West London, the song in question dated from World War I, and thereby conjured up images of some ancient and venerable Britain that Smiths fans would never have known and certainly no longer have recognized. This alone made it a perfect sample for the conflicted feelings that Morrissey (and so many of his listeners) held toward their home nation, but those who had seen the movie—and that naturally included the singer—would have been able to gather much more relevance from the scene in question. Coming together in their landlady’s room on Christmas Day, the tenants of the boarding house represented the outcasts of late ’50s/early ’60s British society, all engaged in a daily battle to survive against an institutionalized nation whose past glories meant little with regard to their own present lives. Their numbers included a pregnant Frenchwoman (for which role actress Leslie Caron was nominated for an Oscar); a couple of prostitutes (one played with especial vigor by the erstwhile Coronation Street and “Shakespeare’s Sister” cover star Pat Phoenix, whom Morrissey interviewed in 1985 for Blitz magazine); a failed male writer; a young African; the tempestuous landlady and her lover man; and Courtneidge herself as an aged stage girl, and a lesbian at that, a revelation that, even in 1962, could only be rendered in a movie by the confession that “it takes all sorts, dear.” In this, the “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty” sing-along suggested an additionally subtle hint at the album title’s intended double entendre. For while “The Queen Is Dead” would be taken at face value as wishful thinking on Morrissey’s part with regard to the British monarch (understandably so, given the line “Her Very Lowness with her head in a sling, oh it sounds like a wonderful thing”), its roots lay in a lengthy, disturbingly decadent chapter of that same name from one of Morrissey’s favorite books, Hubert Selby’s 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, which followed the travails of a transvestite hooker, her friends, and their attempts to drink, drug, and seduce a group of avowedly heterosexual street toughs.

  In sending the album artwork to Jo Slee at Rough Trade, Morrissey wrote, tongue somewhat in cheek, “It’s about the death of a panto queen … yes, it’s autobiographical,” but later elaborated to the press, with rare candor, that “there’s the safety net in the song that the ‘old queen’ is me.…” Camp references aside, Morrissey packed more of substance into “The Queen Is Dead” than anything else in the Smiths’ canon. The rolling visual narrative depicted a rain-swept Britain numbed by its subservience to royalty and religion, to alcohol and drugs, a place where a companion is invited for a walk to talk about precious things like “love and law and” not poetry but “poverty”—a place where, ultimately, “life is very long, when you’re lonely.”

  “The song is certainly a kind of general observation on the state of the nation,” Morrissey admitted after its release. Britain was halfway through its second term under Thatcher at the song’s point of composition, and the headlines made grim reading for those who, like the Smiths, had been brought up working-class. The miners had been defeated, and with them the power of the unions; unemployment had reached catastrophic levels in vast swathes of the country, and the governmental policy to shift from a manufacturing society to a consumer-based one saw minimum-wage labor replace former job security for those who could even find the work. Multiculturalism, sexual permissiveness, gay rights, and progressive education were all under attack. Locally elected left-wing councils were being abolished, spending on the welfare state reduced, government-owned industries privatized, council property sold off to those tenants who could afford it, and though neither the resultant wealth in the hands of the few nor the poverty endured by the masses was restricted to one part of England, still the party line in terms of parliamentary representation that ran across the middle of the country certainly appeared to suggest as much. “The Queen Is Dead” made almost no reference to any of this, and yet it somehow acknowledged all of it, and that was no small achievement.

  In his essay “The Smiths and the Challenges of Thatcherism,” Joseph Brooker offered some interesting parallels between Morrissey and Thatcher. “Both drew on their backgrounds in England’s regions to articulate their creeds. Both arrived in the centre of public attention with a messianic sense of purpose, determined to scourge established institutions. Both were provincial puritans, possessed of a zeal and self-belief that could reach absurd heights and inspire fanaticism in others. Their clarity of purpose and image lent themselves to caricature, which was one sign of their success. Both were defining figures of the 1980s.” This was fair comment, and it offered the unstated understanding not only that powerful political music typically arrives as a direct reaction to daunting political times, but that in Thatcher, Morrissey benefited from having someone as obstinate and unforgiving as himself to rail against. Yet Brooker also noted their defining difference: that while Thatcher was “notoriously, almost inhumanly devoid of humour,” Morrissey was “among the wittiest stars pop has produced.” It was this that helped distinguish the Smiths from almost all of their political peers (Easterhouse included), and nowhere more so than on “The Queen Is Dead.” If one of Morrissey’s
most audacious lines was to imagine a cross-dressing Prince Charles on the cover of the Daily Mail, it was outdone by the verse in which, replicating an incident from 1982, Morrissey’s character breaks into Buckingham Palace—with the incongruous combination of “a sponge and a rusty spanner”—to confront the queen.6 “Eh, I know you, and you cannot sing,” he quotes the monarch as saying (a clever touch by which Morrissey the songwriter acknowledges and promotes his infamy), to which he responds, “That’s nothing, you should hear me play piano.” One almost expects to hear the familiar cymbal-crashing acknowledgement of a punch line.

  If it was ultimately true that “The Queen Is Dead” did not match the political fury of the Smiths’ punk rock predecessors such as the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” it was partly because it was too witty for that, too clever, too poetic. Wisely, Stephen Street recommended editing (rather than fading out) the final recording; by removing just over a minute of the group’s outro jam, he saved it from overkill and ensured that the opening track to the Smiths’ third album would set the highest of possible standards for the rest of the record to (hopefully) follow.

  With this, the album should have been finished. But Street had been experimenting with digital recording on The Queen Is Dead, and when it came time to mix “Frankly, Mr Shankly,” he discovered “a huge dropout” on the tape, which the machine manufacturer, tape manufacturer, and studio all blamed on one another.7 “Ultimately, we had to rerecord the whole song. And getting the enthusiasm from everyone all over again was not easy.” The last to record his part, as always, was Morrissey, which rendered it somewhat ironic that when time ran out at Jacob’s, Johnny Marr chose to do the vocals with John Porter instead. The guitarist and the former Smiths producer had maintained their friendship over the past year and a half; specifically, as the process of recording The Queen Is Dead exacted a steadily increasing toll on Marr, the youth had come to rely on his elder for advice. Porter recorded Morrissey’s vocals, a perfectly fine performance that verified the producer’s own professionalism, at Wessex Studios, where the singer threw in a parting shot at the Shankly/Travis character as the group hit its final chord, growling, “Give us yer money.”

  It was a subject evidently on everyone’s minds, for Porter and Marr then recorded a track the guitarist had been working up at home, built around a mid-tempo blues-based riff that paid slight homage to “How Soon Is Now?” “Morrissey didn’t want to sign onto it,” recalled Porter, and with the rhythm section not present for the Wessex session, Joyce’s parts were played by LinnDrums, a poor imitation for the human spirit. The instrumental was subsequently credited to Marr only, saved for a future Smiths B-side, and entitled “Money Changes Everything.”

  Precisely. The Queen Is Dead was now complete, but its release was not yet sanctioned—not on Rough Trade, and not even to Rough Trade. On December 20, the label was granted an injunction requiring that the master tapes be delivered at last—to its solicitors. The injunction was delivered personally to Morrissey.

  Johnny Marr with Billy Bragg on the Red Wedge tour, January 1986. “Johnny was the one I always thought understood the sociopolitical role of what we were doing,” said Bragg. (Photo Insert i2.1)

  At the “From Manchester With Love” benefit at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool, February 8, 1986. “When the time came to actually mount the stage, it was almost as if this strange forceful character completely took over,” said Morrissey. “I actually stayed in the wings almost.” (Photo Insert i2.2)

  Morrissey as idol at the London Palladium, October 1986. “I always thought being famous was the only thing worth doing in life, and anything else was just perfunctory.” (Photo Insert i2.3)

  The five-piece Smiths relax on the American tour of 1986, which was cut short after twenty-four dates. “We were always OK when we were working,” said Andy Rourke. “But when we had time off it got messy.” (Photo Insert i2.4)

  Geoff Travis, founder of Rough Trade and the Smiths’ A&R man throughout their career. (Photo Insert i2.5)

  The Smiths’ road crew, backstage in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 31, 1986. John Featherstone and Phil Powell are in the foreground. Grant Showbiz is at the back of the right-hand row. (Photo Insert i2.6)

  Stephen Street in the studio in the 1980s. Street engineered or coproduced three of the four Smiths studio LPs and many of their hit singles. (Photo Insert i2.7)

  John Porter, with occasional Smiths engineer Kenny Jones, in the 1980s. Porter produced the Smiths’ first LP and most of their biggest hit singles.

  Angie Brown, Johnny Marr’s life partner. The pair were married in June 1985 in San Francisco, on the Smiths’ first American tour. (Photo Insert i2.8)

  Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke, and Stuart James, the Smiths’ longest-serving tour manager, at the Blarney Stone in Ireland, November 1984. (Photo Insert i2.9)

  The Smiths as a quartet again, outside Albert Finney (Senior)’s betting shop in early 1987—“looking for all the world as if they belonged in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.” (Photo Insert i2.10)

  Morrissey, Andy Rourke, Craig Gannon (playing his third gig), Johnny Marr: The five-piece Smiths at the G-Mex Centre in Manchester, July 9, 1986. (Photo Insert i2.11)

  The iron bridge across the railway tracks to Kings Road remains as it was—except for extensive graffiti added since the 1980s, almost every last word of which lovingly quotes a lyric by the most famous St. Mary’s “old boy” of all. (Photo Insert i2.12)

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-TWO

  There is a lot of worth in the Eighties. This generation is very honourable and valorous and quite a brave generation, certainly compared to the decadence of the late Sixties.

  —Johnny Marr, Melody Maker, August 1985

  The new year of 1986 saw the launch of a new British political movement: Red Wedge, spearheaded by Billy Bragg to coalesce the era’s left-wing musicians. Identifying the enemy was easy: Thatcherism. Figuring out an alternative to support and promote was that much harder: many musicians were inherently wary of aligning themselves with a Labour Party that had proven tragically out of touch with changes in the nation’s working class and its youth, a disconnect widely blamed for the ease with which Thatcher had been reelected in 1983. Bragg believed in being more proactive than that, and formed a tentative liaison between Red Wedge and Labour, which appeared to have been reinvigorated under the new leadership of Neil Kinnock, in the hopes of influencing policy. “All of us, myself included, were learning how to do politics as we went along,” said Bragg. “Our first impulse was to get out there and bring people together and try and focus peoples’ anger and solidarity, as we’d done in the miners’ strike.” A nationwide Red Wedge tour in early 1986 served, then, as something of a traveling left-wing Live Aid, an attempt to present a united front of high-profile musical voices to the people in the midst of what Bragg’s last minor hit had rather forlornly labeled “Days Like These.” The tour was anchored by Bragg, the Style Council, the Communards (featuring Jimi Somerville, recently split from Bronski Beat), soul singer Junior Giscombe, reggae singer Lorna Gee and, as DJ, the Specials’ gap-toothed songwriter Jerry Dammers. Lloyd Cole, Tom Robinson, Madness, and Prefab Sprout all performed along the way.

  Bragg was understandably keen to get the Smiths involved too, and was thrilled when Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke joined him onstage in Manchester on January 25 for one of his songs (“A Lover Sings”), one of theirs (“Back to the Old House”) and one by the Rolling Stones (“The Last Time”). “Johnny was the one I always thought understood the sociopolitical role of what we were doing,” said Bragg. “He didn’t see it as just being in the Smiths, he saw it as being in the Smiths during the miners’ strike, or during the years of Margaret Thatcher.”

  Marr and Rourke traveled on with the tour to Birmingham, after which show the guitarist called up Morrissey and Joyce and begged them to drive up to Newcastle, where the four-piece Smiths duly appeared, unannounced, performing four songs on the Style Council’s equipment, and st
ealing the show.1 After that, they went home. They had expressed their solidarity, though subsequently they confessed to some ambivalence. For Marr, “The Red Wedge gig at Newcastle City Hall was one of the best things we ever did,” though not necessarily for political reasons. “The atmosphere around the other bands on that tour was really shitty. They treated me and Andy pretty scrappily.” The arrival of Morrissey and Joyce therefore became a case of “my mates showed up and shut everybody up. I always felt very proud of us when there were other bands knocking about because I felt that we were the best.” Morrissey, meanwhile, confessed, “I wasn’t terribly impassioned by the gesture.” His cynicism regarding party politics was confirmed when he followed up by saying, “I can’t really see anything especially useful in Neil Kinnock. I don’t feel any alliance with him, but if one must vote, this is where I feel the black X should go.”

  A week later, the Smiths played another political benefit, alongside New Order, the Fall, and John Cooper Clarke, on behalf of the beleaguered Liverpool City Council; its youthful, outspoken, confrontational, and persistently well-dressed Marxist-Trotskyite deputy leader Derek Hatton had developed a profile to rival that of the Greater London Council’s leader, Ken Livingston, and was facing similar obliteration. (The GLC had just been abolished by Act of Parliament.) The concert at the Liverpool Royal Court, titled “From Manchester with Love,” was organized by Tony Wilson as an important gesture of friendship and unity from one rival city to another in the face of their common enemy. As Marr pointed out to Martin Aston in 2011, “By definition, if you were an indie group, you were against the government. And if you had a voice, you had to shout up for your own generation.” On this occasion, the Smiths played a full set, introducing several songs from The Queen Is Dead for the first time, but again, they came away disenchanted: Hatton and his cronies had demanded that the bands join them for a grandstanding finale, and the Smiths had resisted, forcefully. (“Nobody tells me when and what to play,” said Marr.) Via their music, and their mouthpiece Morrissey, the Smiths would continue to take a political position, but as perennial outsiders, they would shirk other benefits and causes until the very end of their career.2