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

by Tony Fletcher

  In what was truly the English game’s darkest hour, the 1986 World Cup Finals offered a slight ray of hope. Held in Mexico through the month of June, too far away for most of the violence seekers to travel and cause mayhem, they saw the England team reach the quarterfinals for the first time since 1970, losing out to the eventual winners, Argentina. Scotland also qualified for the finals that year, and as a result, normal life in Britain pretty much ceased to exist for the month as people gathered around their television screens to watch live transmissions from the other side of the world at various odd times of the day and night. Though few bands dared tour during a World Cup, the Smiths included, The Queen Is Dead was released in the very middle of the tournament and in its subtle theme of (decaying) British Empire, served as an unofficial soundtrack. The reference to a Mr. Shankly (as the Scottish-born manager of England’s most prominent, and currently most discredited, club) was just one of many coincidental reasons for this association—though when the tabloids reported the band’s anti-monarchy sentiments, it fed into the prejudices of the far-right-wing nationalists who had maintained a significant presence on (and typically recruited from) the terraces throughout the game’s decline. The confluence of these circumstances, and then the unveiling of the anthemic single “Panic,” ensured that the Smiths now meant something very different to the vast majority of young male football fans from when the Deabills and Gatenbys of their world had been ridiculed for their love of the band. All of a sudden, and regardless of whether they fully understood them, the Smiths became the band for these people to see.

  The Smiths encountered this shift in audience during the handful of British shows they played in the middle of July. After a typically rowdy opening night at the Glasgow Barrowlands, the second concert in Newcastle saw the group met by rare hostility from a violent minority; it was assumed, though it was always difficult to prove, that they were Sun readers who had come to express their loyalty to the queen. By various accounts, Morrissey was heckled, had pints of both beer and piss thrown at him, and was additionally spat upon throughout. He held on as long as he could, only storming off during the final encore of “Hand in Glove” when phlegm caught him in the eye. The Smiths had enjoyed a long and profitable relationship with the city of Newcastle; apart from their headlining performances, they had visited The Tube’s studios three times and only just raised the roof at the City Hall during the Red Wedge tour. It appeared in this case that their audience was not just changing but that it had been infiltrated, creating a pressure the Smiths had never had to deal with before.

  Two nights later, attention turned to an entirely different set of rivalries as the Smiths performed at Manchester’s Festival of the Tenth Summer, in honor of the pivotal shows by the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade Hall a decade earlier. The weeklong “festival,” the brainchild of Tony Wilson, featured ten events “to celebrate Manchester,” from an art show (featuring Peter Saville’s designs, naturally) to a fashion show (held at the Haçienda of course); a photography exhibition (by Kevin Cummins); and a book (put together by Richard Boon with Cath Carroll and Liz Naylor). All these helped confirm Manchester’s significantly improved cultural status in the years since it had been written off as a dying postindustrial wasteland—and that nothing spoke to Manchester’s national standing as much as its music. Concerts across a variety of venues included the bands James, Easterhouse, the Jazz Defektors, the Durutti Column, Andrew Berry’s new group the Weeds, and Factory’s new signings the Happy Mondays, a rambunctious group of hedonistic hoodlums from the city’s north side whose first single for the label, “Freaky Dancin,’ ” suggested that the intent of Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke’s group Freak Party had lived on elsewhere within the city’s music scene.

  The festival culminated on July 19 with a massive concert at the G-Mex Centre: the recent revamping of the former Manchester Central Railway Station, which had lain dormant since 1969, was itself significant in the city’s gradual turnaround. The Smiths headlined alongside New Order and the Fall, Pete Shelley and John Cooper Clarke, A Certain Ratio and the Worst, and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders (the only act on the bill to have topped the American charts). Sandie Shaw and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, for their connections with the Smiths and Factory respectively, performed as honorary Mancunians. It was the culmination of much that the Smiths had set out to achieve and much that Morrissey could not have dared dream of back when he attended those two famed Sex Pistols shows a decade earlier, or back when he was considered the outsider even in a scene full of outsiders, back when Tony Wilson didn’t reply to his letters and Rob Gretton thought his band was “shit.” That band, the Smiths, were now the biggest noise in Manchester, and Manchester itself was making some of the biggest noise in England, and that ought to have made it a night to savor. But though they acquitted themselves admirably in a vast hangar that had been purpose-built for exhibitions, not concerts, Morrissey remained typically uncomfortable about the concept. “I didn’t really feel any sense of unity or celebration,” said Morrissey. “Certainly not backstage.… Nobody put their arms around me and said, ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ ”

  It wasn’t for lack of trying. Ruth Polsky had made the journey over to see several of her American acquisitions in one place and at one time, and by the singer’s own admission, approached Morrissey seeking a hug. As he later wrote to his close friend and Polsky’s former employee Amanda Malone, he refused. The nonencounter was to be his last vision of her. (Polsky was killed that September by a runaway taxi outside a Manhattan club where she was promoting a show.)5 The relationship between the pair had been tainted by Polsky’s aggressive attempt to secure the Smiths’ management, and as far as Morrissey was concerned, she was too promiscuous for comfort. But Morrissey’s reluctance to excuse supporters for their character traits meant that he was steadily alienating those who, like Polsky, had been highly generous to the Smiths: Cath Carroll recalled Morrissey turning his back on her at the Red Wedge show, still smarting from an incident regarding an (unpublished) negative write-up by Liz Naylor almost three years after the event, yet only months after Carroll’s own latest positive Smiths review in NME. All the same, Morrissey wrote to Tony Wilson after the G-Mex event, stating, “The Smiths need a manager” and asking if he knew of “any handsome bastard willing to tackle haughty and unmanagable [sic] swines such as we?” If he was personally beseeching Wilson to apply for the position, the Factory and Haçienda founder chose not to follow up on it.6

  To balance the forbidding scale (and ticket price) of the G-Mex event, the Smiths played their own show at Salford University the following evening. Salford was hardly lacking for prodigal sons: Mark E. Smith, Tony Wilson, John Cooper Clarke, Bernard Sumner, and Peter Hook were just a few of the G-Mex show’s luminaries to hail from there, yet Salford hosted few concerts of its own due to a lack of viable venues and an unstated concern about its social reputation, which was seemingly borne out for the Smiths by an audience comprised of rowdy male youths who made the most of the rare occasion, stripping off their shirts, clambering on one another’s shoulders, and throwing themselves about the ill-equipped university hall with total abandon. “The atmosphere was such that if somebody lit a cigarette lighter, the place would have exploded,” said Phil Gatenby. “There was part of you worried that you were going to get your head kicked in by these hooligans, but at the same time these hooligans were singing and acknowledging very effeminate songs.”

  Notably, the crowd followed almost every Smiths song with the same chant of territorial support for their home city: “Salford, Salford.” It was partly a provocation to fans from neighboring Manchester and may have been connected to the group’s visual appropriation of their own Salford Lads Club. And it made for a volatile mood. “At a football match you’re all in your own pen, so though there’s tension you know it’s not going to kick off inside,” said Gatenby. “But this was tension at a gig. We’re all here for the same reason but you’ve got this Salford element that’s waiting for so
meone to shout ‘Eccles’ or ‘Gorton’ and then it would all kick off.”

  In the end it fell to Morrissey to respond: just before “The Queen Is Dead,” he feyly proclaimed his own neighborhood: “Stret-ford, Stret-ford.” From anyone else that night it would have led to a fight; from the star of the show, it successfully defused tensions. Having ripped off his “Hang the DJ” shirt (emblazoned with the image of DJ Steve Wright), Morrissey concluded the show stripped to the waist, leaping around as furiously as any of the teenagers who had now clambered onto the stage in dozens and who were prevented from overrunning the singer less by the phalanx of security kneeling nervously in front of them than by their own apparent respect. The evening ended with Johnny Marr standing atop the drum riser during a frenzied finale of “Hand in Glove,” and Craig Gannon playing on resolutely from in front of it, almost buried by the fans but loving “the vibe”: Aztec Camera, the Bluebells, and the Colourfield had never seen anything like this. Phil Gatenby, having been separated from his friends, “ended up dancing with this lad, bare-chested and muscled, and at the line ‘I’ll probably never see you again,’ we actually hugged each other!”

  For Gatenby, who had always been around such lads, the Salford show was possibly the best that the Smiths had ever played—and there were those in the band who felt much the same way. The frail boys and girls who had bought into the sensitivity of the Smiths found themselves, in the thrust of the newly energized five-piece and its increasingly aggressive following, being forced, once again in their lives, to the back of the crowd.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I like to wear sunglasses, I play guitar in a hip group and I’m skinny, with dark hair. Sounds perfect to me!

  —Johnny Marr, Record Mirror, June 1986

  The Smiths were making up now for lost time. In June 1986, before The Queen Is Dead had been released, let alone “Panic,” the group again returned to the studio, again with John Porter. Their new focus song, “Ask,” maintained the simplicity of “Panic,” from its title through to its uncomplicated musical structure, but otherwise offered an immediate counterpoint to that song’s voluminous, fast-paced approach, and would prove all the more rewarding for the change in mood. Singing in a somewhat higher key than usual, Morrissey opened “Ask” with an acknowledgment of shyness and coyness, later referring to a pen-pal youth spent “writing frightening verse to a buck-tooth girl in Luxembourg,” a classic example of his confessional style combining with his exaggerated wit, all while singing about a subject to which his audience could relate. Kirsty MacColl returned to contribute backing vocals. On “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” the group had substituted her voice at the last moment for the high-pitched, digitally harmonized Morrissey vocal, which had afforded that song a particularly unique sound. This time around, especially given the inherent femininity of “Ask,” MacColl’s understated accompaniment fit perfectly. Behind the two vocalists, the twin guitars of Marr and Gannon maintained a warm, semiacoustic accompaniment. Profoundly commercial without seeming to advertise itself as such, “Ask” was an obvious single.

  With “Panic” and “Ask,” the Smiths would take a solid step toward solving their “video” conundrum. Mayo Thompson at Rough Trade, figuring that “the only way we’re going to pull this off is with someone they cannot refuse because of his reputation,” approached Derek Jarman, the controversial British director of Jubilee, The Tempest, and the soon-to-be-released Caravaggio, with the idea of making not a video but a “film.” This was more than mere semantics: rather than shoot the group in performance or repose, Jarman would be left alone to provide an uninterrupted accompaniment to “The Queen Is Dead,” “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and “Panic.”1 (He later made an additional film for “Ask.”) It wasn’t an especially original idea, as Thompson well knew: Jarman himself had done precisely the same thing for three songs from Marianne Faithfull’s acclaimed 1979 album, Broken English, in the pre-video era. Still, Jarman’s fast-cut style, veering between the literal (grainy shots in various urban locales, with beautiful individual boys, girls, women, and men as visual ciphers) and the impressionistic (colorful crowns, roses, guitars), served up a hefty dose of visual credibility for the band, although whether it was “great art” or not remained a matter of debate. After being unveiled at the Edinburgh Festival in August, Jarman’s fourteen-minute film was given its television premiere on BBC2’s Rock Around the Clock in September and subsequently shown in cinemas alongside the Alex Cox biopic Sid and Nancy.

  As part of their stockpiling of new songs, the Smiths had recorded the rambunctious “Sweet and Tender Hooligan” during the “Panic” sessions, and at Jam Studios for “Ask,” they added a mid-tempo quasi-rockabilly number entitled “Is It Really So Strange?,” which Morrissey and Marr had written face-to-face during their recent trip to Los Angeles. Neither song was finished to the band’s satisfaction; the B-side to “Ask” featured instead, and for the first time, a cover version. This was at Morrissey’s suggestion, and understandably so; having recently endured a couple of instrumental B-sides over which he didn’t feel sufficiently inspired to write words, he may have figured that if he wasn’t going to claim a royalty, he might as well sing someone else’s tune entirely. He chose, not surprisingly, a song from his childhood: “Golden Lights” by Twinkle. The arrangement was very much a product of its time, 1965, but the subject matter—fame, fame, fatal fame—said plenty to Morrissey about his situation, especially as Twinkle was perhaps the only female pop star of that era to have written her own material. Marr and Gannon, gamely, played acoustic guitars and mandolins in a bossa nova style, and Kirsty MacColl again accompanied Morrissey on vocals. Rourke and Joyce were not included. Porter played bass, and once more programmed the rhythm on the LinnDrums, something he had also done with Marr’s two most recent B-side instrumentals, much though it jarred with familiar Smiths sensibilities.

  Morrissey’s misgivings aside, there were those who had heard one of those instrumentals, “Money Changes Everything,” as crying out for a vocal. Prominent among them was Bryan Ferry, in the midst of recording a new album when the track crossed his path (quite possibly sent to him by Warner Bros. Music with the idea in mind), and who quickly sought and received permission to write an accompanying lyric. If Morrissey feared that the first Smiths track not to feature his name as a cocomposer might now show up with that of a 1970s idol in his place, he had further cause for concern when Ferry’s group concluded, after much trial and error, that they couldn’t possibly emulate Marr’s handiwork and invited the guitarist in to rerecord it himself.

  Marr had already made a small name for himself as a ready and able guest musician. But his previous studio appearances had all been on behalf of friends (Everything but the Girl, Quando Quango, Billy Bragg) who were nominally part of an alternative/independent scene. Bryan Ferry, on the other hand, especially in 1986, represented commercial pop music at its most sophisticated and slick. Additionally, Marr had only recently bad-mouthed Ferry, in his Melody Maker cover interview, for his performance at Live Aid, complaining that Ferry “used the event for personal gain.” Nonetheless, Marr accepted the invitation.

  The subsequent collaboration, renamed “The Right Stuff,” fulfilled Smiths fans’ worst fears, emerging as either a caricature or archetype (depending on taste) of mid-’80s mid-tempo glossy pop-rock. That it was (finally) released in the immediate wake of the Smiths’ breakup, with an appropriately lavish and hollow video (in which Marr appeared, alongside many dancing female models), would do little to improve the guitarist’s credibility at that point with disappointed Smiths fans. In the spring of 1986, however, the collaboration seemed most important for another relationship Marr developed in the studio. Like Johnny Marr, Ferry’s bass player Guy Pratt was a highly prodigious young musician, encyclopedic in his knowledge of pop culture, an outgoing character of considerable wit and panache, and given to excessive self-indulgence in the name of rock ’n’ roll hedonism. A South Londoner raised on the
Who, Pratt had extricated himself from the mod revival’s cul-de-sac to play with the likes of Womack & Womack, Icehouse, and Robert Palmer (as well as Ferry), developing the haircut and the fashion sense—and indeed, the bass-playing style—to go with it. “I loved that shiny techno pop thing, and I was really into being a good funky player,” he said. In short, he had missed out on the Smiths, which meant that witnessing Marr at work in the studio—“this amazing orchestral rock ’n’ roll player”—was nothing less than a revelation. “He wasn’t bound up in tradition, and he wasn’t into boxes with flashy lights. He knew how to get the exact tremolo sound of an old Fender Twin. And that really wasn’t what was happening at the time at all. He was the real deal. In a way, he made me feel ashamed, that I had lost touch in something.” The pair became instant best friends, aided by the fact that Pratt’s steady girlfriend, Caroline Stirling, hit it off equally well with Angie, who was much the same age. The Marrs had recently moved back to London, in part because the Bowdon house had become overly popular with all sorts of visiting vagabonds and hangers-on, but also because Marr, like Morrissey before him, was feeling claustrophobic in Manchester and, it would be fair to say, sought some of the opportunities available to someone of his professional reputation. The Marrs were invited by Kirsty MacColl to use her vacant flat just off Holland Park Road (Marr took to calling her his “Electric Landlady”), and along with Pratt and his girlfriend, they soon added MacColl and husband Steve Lillywhite to a network that also included the Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood, with whom Marr would visit and play guitar, fulfilling another childhood dream.