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

by Tony Fletcher

  The first meeting between Morrissey and EMI’s David Munns took place on “a Sunday afternoon for tea at a very out-of-the-way little country hotel in Oxfordshire somewhere,” recalled Munns. The pair had spoken on the phone briefly a couple of times by now, and enough negotiating had taken place with Alexis Grower for Munns to know that EMI was in the lead for the group’s signature. Morrissey and Marr were impressed both by EMI’s financial offer (in the mid-six-figure range per album, though for a major label “it wasn’t an incredible amount of money,” said Munns) and also their degree of commitment, which was for four albums, “firm.” This was one more even than Rough Trade had built into their contract and represented an enormous degree of faith on EMI’s behalf in the Smiths’ long-term commercial viability: “No one had ever signed an act for four albums firm before,” said Munns. It also raised precisely the same problem the band had had with its current label—that they would be locked into a long-term deal even if it soured. Nobody seemed to question that aspect.

  Certainly, there were some business concerns. Though Geoff Travis had calculated that the 50–50 profit split (75–25 overseas) was equivalent to “about 21 to 22 percent royalty,” almost double the standard 12 percent rate and beyond even that of proven superstars, Munns believed that it came in significantly lower than that, and felt that by offering the Smiths a conventional but consistently high royalty rate, it would prove more beneficial for the band in terms of stability. He could also dangle the assurance that the Smiths would never have to endure Rough Trade’s cash-flow problems. “EMI is a public company,” he was able to tell Morrissey. “You can audit our accounts. Whatever arguments you may hear about us, there is no question that EMI doesn’t have the money to pay your royalties.”

  There were aesthetic concerns, too, and for these, Munns brought in A&R man Nick Gatfield, who had recently quit his job as saxophonist with Dexys Midnight Runners, largely in frustration at front man Kevin Rowland’s mercurial nature. As a musician, Gatfield could communicate with Morrissey and Marr in a manner that Munns could not, though Gatfield recognized immediately, from his own experience, the delicate nature of the various relationships. The Smiths “were obviously the most important band in the country at the time,” he said. “They were the darlings of the indie scene; the idea of coming to a major was not something I would consider an easy sell, though I think they recognized at the time that their career opportunities might have peaked at Rough Trade and that they needed to be on a bigger platform. That was the premise, and we were very careful about how we couched that, because for Morrissey, particularly, it wasn’t necessarily about cash, it wasn’t necessarily about worldwide support. He wanted to be left alone, and I think he had that luxury at Rough Trade. Johnny, on the other hand, was a more commercial animal, just a much more approachable character. You could take him down the pub and have a drink, have a bit of a laugh. Be much more upfront in regard to where we could go, what we could do with the project.” Marr’s conviviality was interpreted by Gatfield as him having “bigger aspirations of rock stardom than Morrissey did.”

  “To be fair,” said Marr years later, “you get excited about the prospect that ‘OK, now we can go and be on the same label as the Beatles.’ We were seduced, and a lot of it was just wanderlust. It wasn’t thought through, it wasn’t personal, it wasn’t sinister, it was almost like a novelty. It certainly wasn’t for the money.” For Morrissey, however, and despite Gatfield’s belief, money had almost everything to do with it. “We have to move to EMI for financial reasons,” he insisted just a few months later. “It’s not that we want more, but just that we want some. We’ve made lots of records which have done really well and we’ve never seen any money for them. And we’ve never ever made a penny on tours which have always been really successful.” This plea of poverty seemed somewhat at odds with Morrissey’s multiple residences, and the general air of wealth that surrounded the Smiths as a thriving business enterprise.1 All the same, “Most of our focus was on wooing Morrissey,” said Gatfield, “as the more difficult one to convince that the move was right.”

  That wooing had now paid off, and the conversation came down to, quite literally, the choice of label. Munns ordered up from the pressing plant actual labels of every single imprint within the corporation and sent them to the singer. “And two days later I heard back: ‘I want to be on HMV.’ ” One could almost have predicted as much: more than merely the name of a prominent Oxford Street record store, this was the label of “His Master’s Voice,” as it had originally become known for using the “Nipper” image of a dog listening to a nineteenth-century gramophone. When first revamped as a label in 1955, HMV utilized (and therefore authenticated) the word “POP” as its catalog number prefix; a year later, HMV released Elvis Presley’s first UK single. Morrissey recollected it as the home to Paul Jones, Johnny Leyton, and literally “hundreds” of other records from the 1960s. The only problem was that HMV was now a classical music label. “A huge fight ensued, because the classical people went mad,” said Munns. “I said, ‘Who cares? Too bad. We’re not going to stand in the way of this just because of the guys in the classical division thinking Morrissey is not highbrow enough to be on the HMV label. In the end they would have to climb down.’ Somehow or other I got to talk to Morrissey and say, ‘It’s fine, you can be on the HMV label. Let’s make a deal.’ And we did.”

  “Bigmouth Strikes Again” was not quite the hit that everyone had hoped it would be. Airplay, as always, was something of a problem; the group refused to make a video, and they weren’t invited to appear on Top of the Pops. In fairness to fans, it was known that the A-side was going to appear on the forthcoming album, and the B-sides were not amongst the Smiths’ best; under the circumstances, its top 30 status was something of a reassurance. Of far more importance was reaction to The Queen Is Dead upon its release in June, and in this regard, it did not disappoint. The size and positioning of the reviews, not just in the music papers but in the broadsheet newspapers and monthly magazines alike, saw the crowning of the Smiths as Britain’s premier rock act. Amongst the enthusiasts was Nick Kent, the rock journalist whose decadent Stones-Dolls chic in the pre-punk music scene had made him an early music press celebrity and earned Morrissey and Marr’s approbation as a result, only for him to run afoul of the band when he exposed more than they would have preferred in a cover story for The Face the previous year.2 Clearly harboring no sore feelings, Kent almost fell over himself in superlatives while reviewing the album for Melody Maker: “This group is the one crucial hope left in evoking a radical restructuring of what pop could—nay, should—essentially be moving towards … The Queen Is Dead, England in ruins, but here, in the marrow of this extraordinary music, something precious and innately honourable flourishes.”

  He was right. Debut album The Smiths had delivered a number of great songs not necessarily performed or produced to the best of their ability, and without a natural shape or substance. Meat Is Murder had corrected these errors and succeeded in its mission to declare the band’s political and musical independence, but to a fault; its lack of accompanying hit singles would ultimately affect its long-term reputation. By comparison, The Queen Is Dead appeared perfect, a step forward in every aspect, with no accompanying loss of credibility. It offered every available musical mood, every shade of light, and every touch of texture. It was additionally enhanced by its visual presentation: the cover shot of a prostrate Alain Delon from the 1964 French film L’Insoumis, while of little instant recognition to the Smiths’ audience, subtly summed up the lyrical imagery of various songs, and the particular two-color combination, a grayish-green for the photograph superimposed with a luscious pink for the typesetting, set a similarly appropriate tone. (The Delon image also harked back to that of another French actor, Jean Marais, on “This Charming Man” and thereby to the Smiths’ original glory.) The simplicity of the back cover—song titles in pink on green—was almost regal. And the use of a gatefold sleeve, the first for a Smiths studio L
P, served as an endorsement of the group’s importance, their status as a major act.

  On one side of the gatefold was printed, as always with a Smiths album, the lyrics; on the other was a band photograph. It had been taken the previous December, exactly a week before the injunction was served on the finished album (and before Gannon joined), by Stephen Wright, a Smiths fan and budding professional who had sent photographs of the group in concert to Rough Trade and been rewarded with this surprise commission. The locations for the shoot included Manchester Victoria Station and the Arndale Centre, but the one that it was to be remembered for took place, at Morrissey’s instigation, outside the Salford Lads Club. Eighty years after being established, the club seemed something of an anachronism of a bygone Britain—which was partly why Morrissey had suggested it, of course—and had fallen on hard times; there were those who would view the finished pictures, in which the group posed against iron gates and graffiti-splattered brick walls, and conclude that the Lads Club had gone out of business. The almost comically archetypal cold drizzle on the afternoon of the shoot furthered the atmosphere of northern depression, forcing Johnny Marr, looking haggard from hard work, to huddle into his clothes in an attempt to stay warm. Mike Joyce, meanwhile, cigarette burning at his waist, stared down at Wright’s camera with casual intensity while Rourke practiced his own artistic habit, one much beloved by rock photographers, of looking slightly askew from the lens. They were a good-looking band, the Smiths, but it was Morrissey who appeared most beautiful that day, and most at ease with proceedings, wearing an expensive cardigan by fashionable designers Body Map and an impenetrably enigmatic expression that Wright later likened to that of the Mona Lisa. Although the Smiths were not themselves Salford boys, the picture nonetheless seemed to sum up everything that Morrissey, in particular, wanted to say about his band in a single northern image—especially as he was afforded the additional bonus of the neighborhood’s Coronation Street signage next to that of the Salford Lads Club. In years to come, after the club initially disavowed any connection with the photograph due to the album’s anti-monarchy sentiments, it welcomed the steady stream of Smiths fans as potential allies, eventually establishing a “Smiths Room”—a shrine in which fans were invited to pin up their own re-creations of the famous photograph and leave written notes as tributes. Among them would be Morrissey’s postcard to the photographer: “A sweeter set of pictures were never taken.”3

  The Salford Lads Club was not the only organization to assail the Smiths for The Queen Is Dead. The tabloid media rose to the bait and once again accused the Smiths of being “sick” for their choice of title and lead track. In such a divided Britain as 1986, this served as only greater endorsement for Smiths fans—and other leftists who rallied instinctively to their side. Ironically, given its title, the reaction to and success of the album—it made number 2 on the British charts, and stayed around longer than Meat Is Murder—would herald what has been widely referred to, including by the Smiths themselves, as their “imperial” phase.

  This was evidenced with the release of the single “Panic,” unveiled to the public on July 5 on a special Eurotube extravaganza, for which the Smiths again braved the live studio performance, and this time in front of an audience. All of them were wearing formal jackets again, Morrissey’s clothing considerably more fashionable now than the ladies’ blouses and torn jeans of old; Marr and Rourke both wore shades indoors, and the bassist unveiled a new peroxide look. They opened with “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” clear recognition of its popularity as an album cut and credibility as a live song, and returned later in the show to announce the campaign to “Hang the DJ” with the addition of a professional child actor masquerading as an old-fashioned schoolboy in shorts and blazer, wearing a hearing aid and singing along with Morrissey in the chorus.4 The schoolboy was something of a distraction, but he was not the only one. The group themselves were frequently blocked from the camera lens by young men dancing to the Smiths atop of each other’s shoulders. And therein lay the group’s new dichotomy: with imperialism comes an army.

  It would be simplistic, a lie even, to suggest that the Smiths’ audience changed overnight in 1986. Despite the fact that the Smiths’ core crowd was presumed to be that of students, loners, and depressives, the sexually confused and socially inadequate, still the presence of Johnny Marr as guitar hero (even a decidedly postmodern one) and the s(t)olid sight of the down-to-earth rhythm section, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke—and to a certain degree, Morrissey’s additional persona as someone very attuned to the underbelly of working-class life—ensured that the group had always had a following of what had come to be known, though not exactly in the manner that the Salford Club had originally used it, as “lads.” One such fan, Stuart Deabill, viewed himself at the time he encountered the Smiths as “a fully fledged teenage Chelsea casual, going the length and breadth of the country following the team … and getting caught up in all that,” meaning the violence that was part of the routine for a lot of young male traveling football fans. Old enough to have been into the Jam but too young to have seen enough of them, Deabill was initially attracted to the Smiths by the sight of Marr’s Rickenbacker, but then the first album came out, and “I realized I had more in common with Morrissey than I thought, with the lyrics of love lost (or not found), and ventured deeper into reading all the old interviews and discovering a mind-set, something quite alien but totally unique.” As Deabill vocalized his passion for the Smiths, and Morrissey in particular, “The train journeys with my football pals were littered with [comments like], ‘You still wanking off over that miserable northern poof?’ ” Confident in his own status, Deabill brushed off the taunts: “I used to thrive on it, as it stood me out from the crowd!” Instead, Deabill teamed up with a couple of like-minded friends and followed the Smiths around the UK, taking in the mainland Scottish dates in ’85 and the Irish tour of ’86, where they feared that their London accents and rival football allegiances might cause problems, but were instead embraced as fellow Smiths fans by similarly hardened football casuals from Edinburgh and Glasgow. (They were also welcomed by the group, whose warm attitude toward fans rewarded and simultaneously reinforced their loyalty.)

  Phil Gatenby, an ardent fan of Manchester City, likewise traveling around the country to follow his team during the 1980s, found himself attracted to all aspects of the band. Musically and visually, it was the performance on The Tube of “This Charming Man” that won him over, especially that line “I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear.” (Gatenby later started a football fanzine, This Charming Fan, and later still, put together tourist guidebooks on Morrissey’s Manchester and started the Manchester Music Tours.) He heard “Reel Around the Fountain” for the first time on his twenty-first birthday, in the midst of an affair with a woman in her mid-thirties; for him, the line “It’s time the tale were told, of how you took a child and you made him old” had nothing to do with pedophilia. When he moved back to Manchester from his childhood home of Coventry, primarily because of his football allegiances, “I literally knew just two people.… It was a case of going to a club and standing on my own and going home alone.” Combined with the fact that his older brother had turned him on to the kitchen-sink dramas of the late ’50s and early ’60s, it was as if the Smiths had been tailor-made for him. “I didn’t become a fan and say, ‘I need to fit this mold.’ I was in that mold and they came out and sang for the people who were in that mold.” Like Deabill, Gatenby had to endure a certain amount of ribbing on the terraces for his fandom. “If you wore the Smiths shirt at the football it was either ‘Nice one, mate,’ or ‘You poof—where’s your daffodils?’ ” And like Deabill, he endured the abuse with pride.

  That sense of otherness, even among the lads who could hold their own in a fight, was about to change. In the three years since the Smiths had formed, English football had reached its nadir, the territorial violence that had been growing on the terraces for the last fifteen years combining with the
decaying state of fifty- to one-hundred-year-old grounds to deadly results. In May 1985, at a major match in the Yorkshire textile city of Bradford, an ancient wooden stand (with copious combustibles having accumulated underneath over the years) caught fire; fifty-six people were killed in the inferno. Just weeks later, traveling Liverpool thugs at the European Cup Final in Belgium attacked rival and neutral supporters on the terraces and of those trying to escape the assault, thirty-nine were crushed to death when a wall collapsed under the pressure. English clubs were banned from Europe indefinitely, with Liverpool extended an additional three-year ban. Thatcher declared her own war on the hooligan culture, calling for national identity cards and encouraging football grounds to erect impenetrable fencing around the playing areas.