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

by Tony Fletcher

  Marr had additional motives for taking Rourke on the Red Wedge dates: to “keep an eye on him.” Rourke’s drug problem, it turned out, had been getting steadily worse over the course of the Smiths’ success: as the bass player succinctly put it, “I got money, so my heroin addiction got bigger.” By the point of recording The Queen Is Dead, it was a problem that should no longer have been ignored—except that the group had no manager to attend to such issues; Rourke’s best friend, Johnny Marr, was becoming sick through overwork and poor sustenance himself; and his other ally, Mike Joyce, felt unable to discuss the issue. (“You want your mate to be all right,” said Joyce, “but you don’t know the right steps to take.”)

  Morrissey, as far as these three were concerned, knew nothing about Rourke’s habit—in part because the bass player did such a good job of keeping it hidden, but also because the singer rarely socialized with the rhythm section. In his widely circulated Time Out interview earlier in 1985, Morrissey had declared, “I’m not a rock ’n’ roll character. I despise drugs, I despise cigarettes, I’m celibate and I live a very serene lifestyle.” Many Morrissey fans took this as a manifesto of sorts, against which the other Smiths’ affinity for alcohol and cannabis/marijuana and casual indulgence of other substances was always going to look like a contradiction. (Morrissey’s own fondness for a drink somehow escaped inspection.) For a member of the Smiths to use heroin would have been perceived by Morrissey as a betrayal of his audience’s trust—and would likely have endangered the group’s respect within the musical community, where the drug was so frowned upon that the band New Model Army had taken to wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ONLY STUPID BASTARDS USE HEROIN. In fact, the scourge of heroin among British youth was such that the health authorities had taken to placing full-page ads in the music papers detailing the drug’s adverse effects. The previous spring, during the Melody Maker trial-by-fanzine editors, Morrissey was asked specifically if he would be “taking part” in “the anti-heroin crusade in pop.” He responded that he had officially declined. “I think people get into drugs simply because they want to,” he declared. “I don’t believe people who say ‘I’m trapped, I can’t stop this.’ It’s a lot of bosh really.”

  If Rourke had read that piece, he would surely have wished he could have explained to Morrissey that it was not as simple as that. “I had this monkey on my back and I wanted to shake it off,” he said. “I wanted rid of it.” During the recording of The Queen Is Dead, in deepest suburban Surrey, he tried going cold turkey. “At some points I hadn’t slept for nearly two weeks, because I was withdrawing from heroin. I couldn’t sleep. The only thing that saved me was going in the studio and playing these songs.” Ironically, he delivered some of his best performances during this period: neither “The Queen Is Dead” nor “Cemetry Gates” would have sounded anything so effective without his contribution. “When Andy was required to be in the studio he was fantastic, and his bass playing on that record was brilliant,” said Stephen Street, who was able to look back and conclude, “If he was on [heroin], I was completely oblivious to it.”

  “I couldn’t tell anybody about it,” said Rourke. “OK, I’m sure the rest of the band members knew. But I didn’t complain. I couldn’t say, ‘I’m going cold turkey here, I’m withdrawing.’ I had to suffer in silence.” He did well enough that Morrissey as well as Street remained unaware of his addiction; Marr and Joyce, who knew about it, remained unsure how to deal with it. After all, said Marr, “He took care of business. He never goofed off. He never let me down. So my opinion of his lifestyle was just my opinion.” Or, as John Featherstone, a self-confessed “control freak” who eschewed hard drugs, put it, “With all the best intentions but in hindsight with poor execution, everyone validated it by ignoring it.”

  And so it continued. At times during The Queen Is Dead sessions when the call proved too powerful, Rourke would take the shuttle from Heathrow to Manchester, the one place he knew where to score, spend £200 or so on heroin, and fly back again the same day. As the New Year dawned, and with The Queen Is Dead held up in litigation, the typically hectic work schedule by which Rourke was saved from his own worst enemy—himself—was found lacking. Hence Marr’s invitation to come on the Red Wedge tour, a period that Rourke could only recall as “a really low point in my life.”

  It was about to get lower. The Smiths had lined up three shows in Ireland. Rourke, unwilling to take heroin into another country and determined not to score once there, visited a Harley Street doctor, who loaded the bass player up with valium and sleeping pills. The problem, said Rourke, “was that I’d take a load of valium to ease the withdrawals from the heroin, and then I’d get so wasted on the valium that I’d forget I’d taken the valium and I’d take some more, and then I’d go onstage.” By his own admission, by the time he played at the Dublin National Stadium on February 10, only forty-eight hours after the Liverpool show, he was “wobbly.”

  Much was subsequently made about Rourke’s performance that night. To the extent that he was below par, he was not cited as such in reviews. The group played its full set, including two encores, and the crowd reacted much as would be expected for an honorary Irish band. But it was not their best show. There was one specific mishap, when Rourke played “Cemetry Gates” (only its second public airing) a full tone higher than it had been recorded, creating such confusion that Johnny Marr stopped playing until he could figure out the problem and adjust his capo accordingly. The explanation was relatively simple: ever since the early days when the band had tuned up to accommodate Morrissey’s vocal range, Rourke typically had two basses on hand, one in concert E, one in F-sharp. In Dublin, Rourke was sufficiently with it to play “Cemetry Gates” note for note; he was sufficiently out of it not to notice that he was using the wrong guitar. There was an additional delay after “What She Said,” at which Marr resorted to playing the song “Walk Away Renée” on guitar to keep the crowd entertained. Then there was something of a backstage postmortem at which Rourke was well and truly blamed for the mistakes. The following two nights’ Irish concerts—one a hotel ballroom in Dundalk, the other a major headliner in Belfast—were completed successfully; the latter show was, without question, magnificent. In fact, tour manager Stuart James said that he was “oblivious all the way through” to Rourke’s habit. “They all used to have a smoke. Maybe I just thought he was stoned. But certainly not on heroin. He looked fine. He was eating OK.” Regarding the mishaps in Dublin, and the subsequent reaction, “I was thinking ‘Bloody hell, that’s a bit tight, considering the amount of shows we’ve done.’ ”

  James’s comments only served to confirm the extent to which the Smiths were extraordinarily self-contained in their decision-making process, and the extent to which they kept secrets even from other members of their inner circle—not just Stuart James but Stephen Street, for example. Nonetheless, with Morrissey now aware of Rourke’s habit, the bassist was summarily fired on the group’s return to Manchester. He discovered as much, he said, when he found a note on his car outside his new home in Altrincham. “I woke up and there was what I thought was a parking ticket. But my car was parked in the driveway. There was an envelope with a postcard from Morrissey. It said, ‘Andy, you have left the Smiths. Good luck and good bye.’ ” He never found out who placed it there; Morrissey, he said, “wouldn’t have had the balls.” That night, he recalled, he went over to visit Johnny Marr, his best friend and his talisman, “and cried in his arms.”

  The decision to fire Rourke had been executed callously by Morrissey. But it had not been taken lightly by the others. If carrying Rourke around the world with his addiction had not worked to cure it, the hope was that by dropping him—by expelling him from the one thing that he needed more than the drug—he would be jolted into sobriety. Precisely the opposite happened. Barely two weeks after being ejected from the Smiths, Rourke drove to Oldham to make a purchase of heroin. Fortunately—as it turned out—his dealer was under surveillance: “the doors went down, twenty policemen came in,
” Rourke recalled, and he was arrested for possession. The news traveled, via Granada Reports (though oddly, not via the music press), as far as Majorca, and the public shame of being busted for hard drugs and the threat of jail time proved effective where the quiet ejection from his band had not: it was enough to convince Rourke to get clean.

  It appeared, however, that he was too late. Johnny Marr briefly hosted Andy Rourke at his house during this period as a friend, but as the band’s musical director he was determined that the Smiths would not slow down. Despite the fact that the release of The Queen Is Dead remained in legal limbo, the group was pressing forward with the understanding that the situation would have to be resolved sooner rather than later. Plans were already afoot to return to America, and for a much longer tour this time. Marr got on with the process of hiring a new bass player.

  He didn’t look far. Si Wolstencroft told him about Craig Gannon, a Salford boy with whom he had just completed a tour as part of the Colourfield. Gannon was all of nineteen years old, a talented prodigy along the lines of Marr himself at that age. He was as diffident as Steven Morrissey had been at that age. He wore a quiff better than most of the Smiths. Prior to the Colourfield, he had been in Aztec Camera, with whom he had toured large venues in the States, opening for Elvis Costello, and had also played with the Bluebells, who had enjoyed a top 10 hit in 1984 with “Young at Heart.” His guitar-playing credentials were, evidently, impeccable. Marr invited Gannon over to Marlborough Road for an evening, where they talked about their various professional experiences and mutual respect for Roddy Frame.3 Gannon, as a young professional touring musician, had heard little of the Smiths other than what he had caught on the radio, and did not, prior to listening to The Queen Is Dead tapes in Marr’s home studio, consider himself a fan. Marr ended the evening by explaining that they were letting Andy Rourke leave due to “problems,” and that Gannon was welcome to join the band—as bass player.

  This would have made sense—but for the fact that Gannon had, by his own admission, “never played the bass.” Whether Marr had seriously considered the implications of this invitation or merely acted on a whim would prove hard to ascertain; the circumstances surrounding Gannon’s inclusion into the Smiths were to shift over time. Gannon recalled that at this point he neither accepted nor declined the offer, though he stayed over for drinks, and once Mike Joyce came over to join them, he and Marr got the guitars out finally and found that their playing styles were compatible. They left it that they would get together again soon, and the call duly came for Gannon to join Marr, Joyce, and driver Phil Powell for a meeting with Morrissey, at his new flat in London. He did so, and the process proved remarkably smooth. “I got on with Morrissey really well, got on with everyone, got back in the car, and Johnny said, ‘That’s it, you’re a Smith. As much a Smith as me, Mike, and Morrissey.’ ” The crew then booked into the Portobello Hotel in London’s Notting Hill for a few days to get to know one another better. Gannon still hadn’t been auditioned.4

  In 1895, the Cadogan Hotel on Sloane Street had served as the scene for Oscar Wilde’s arrest on charges of “gross indecency” after his libel case against the Marquess of Queensbury broke down. It may have been pure coincidence that Morrissey chose Cadogan Square, just around the corner, as his new London address, but it added a certain cachet to his credentials once Morrissey realized that he desperately needed—in a very fundamental sense, and despite Marr’s stated fondness for their northern roots—a residence that validated his reputation. Just as with his previous London home on Campden Hill Road, his fashionable new address in the heart of Chelsea was soon to play host to interviewers—though this time only for the more favored of journalists. “If I couldn’t have really beautiful furniture I’d sleep in a shoebox,” he told one as he showed him around.

  As revealed by this comment, and by the address itself (and by the fact that the Cheshire house with his mother remained very much intact), Morrissey was hardly hurting for money. But that did not mean he was willing to give up the fight with Rough Trade. The label’s successful injunction indicated that the recording contract had held up to initial legal inspection; Geoff Travis recalled, “The lawyers were quite proud of it when it was eventually waved around in court.” But given its multiple scribbles and lack of specificity, it was always possible that a further challenge would find in the Smiths’ favor, and Rough Trade could ill afford such a conclusion. The company had even drawn up an in-house study, “The Effects on Rough Trade and the Cartel of Ending Our Relationship with the Smiths,” which only confirmed what everyone already knew: that the band’s departure would be catastrophic, not merely to the Rough Trade label but to the entire independent distribution network, which had come to rely on the group’s constant (though modest) hit singles to sell other independent records into the high-street chains.

  Somewhere down the line, in a fit of intoxicated late-night frustration, Johnny Marr had decided that he would retrieve the tapes on behalf of the group. He and Phil Powell set off from Bowdon in the early hours of a harsh wintry morning, and made it to Jacob’s around music-business breakfast time; Powell stayed in the driver’s seat with the engine running, and Marr went in search of the tape cupboard. He was confronted by a bemused studio manager, who had no intention of releasing the tapes until they were fully paid for. Marr and Powell drove the two hundred miles north somewhat chastened by their own false optimism.

  Desperate to break the legal deadlock, Morrissey and Marr turned once more to Matthew Sztumpf. The Madness manager had been left in the lurch after the previous year’s American tour, but at least he had been paid for it, and, aware that the group had not hired anyone else in his absence, he agreed to address the Rough Trade situation with a firm view to keeping the managerial job this time. Under pressure from Morrissey, he even agreed to move his management business away from Madness’s own offices and into a neutral space. The group could have used Sztumpf to additionally address Andy Rourke’s problems, securing him some professional medical help, and also to suggest how to approach Rourke’s replacement, especially with regard to payment. But the Smiths viewed internal band issues as just that, and appeared to entrust Sztumpf with little more than negotiating their way out of the Rough Trade mess.

  There was, in reality, little to negotiate. Rough Trade was not set up to pay royalties on anything other than a profit share, which benefited the Smiths over a fixed royalty anyway. The list of acceptable “costs” could certainly be better defined, and more upfront money secured for the Smiths as per a traditional contract, but that was about it. Ultimately, the most important issue for Morrissey and Marr was the term itself, which currently ran to five studio albums, of which the Smiths had completed only three. A standoff ensued, but Rough Trade blinked first, and agreed to shorten the contract by one album. With that, each side could declare victory and move forward.

  While the exhausting, months-long process was officially handled by the lawyers and managers, Jo Slee had maintained unofficial contact with Morrissey throughout: “I’d tell him where we were up to on our side, and he would tell me about where they were up to on theirs.” When the Smiths’ lawyer continued to “raise further objections,” which Rough Trade considered “a smokescreen,” it became apparent that if an agreement were not finalized now, the album might have been put back until after the summer. “I phoned Morrissey and told him about the further objections and he said that he appreciated all we had done and that my calls had helped keep him sane in the bad times,” Slee told Neil Taylor in Document and Eyewitness. “We all went home and about 11 o’clock that night Morrissey rang back very angry and very determined: ‘Please can someone … bring the contract over tomorrow morning and we’ll sign.’ ”

  Geoff Travis was in America at the time. Peter Walmsley, head of licensing, brought the contract over instead. “It was probably the first time Morrissey had properly acknowledged me,” Walmsley told Taylor. “The whole thing had been a silly argument. It was not only soul-destroying bu
t it put the whole company at risk.”

  From Rough Trade’s positive spin on the proceedings, they still had the Smiths, and for two more albums, of which they already knew The Queen Is Dead to be a classic. It was time to get to work. Although Geoff Travis hoped for “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” as a single (it had been announced as such on the Irish tour), Marr pushed equally hard for “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” not merely because it was the original choice back in the autumn but because it sent a stronger, more authoritative musical message. As ever, the Smiths won the fight, and what was surely their most commercial song was to remain forever “buried” on an album. (Then again, the “failure” to release what might well have become their biggest-ever hit prevented them from the perception of “selling out” and perhaps losing their hard-core following as a result.)

  One thing was certain—that after just one more studio album, the Smiths would be free from their commitment to Rough Trade. The call finally came in to David Munns at EMI: Morrissey is ready to talk.