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

by Tony Fletcher

  Meanwhile, with the American tour looming very large on the near horizon, it appeared increasingly likely that Andy Rourke’s recent drug arrest would prevent him from receiving a work visa. The Smiths were again faced with the prospect of a substitute bassist, and again, Marr did not shop around; he offered his new friend Guy Pratt the part-time job instead. Pratt recalled the invitation as demonstrating Marr’s own capacity for a quotable turn of phrase: “Guy, how do you fancy coming to the States to play punk rock and fall over?” Pratt duly showed up for the tour rehearsals, at a luxurious farmhouse near Gatwick Airport—to find that he was being taught by none other than Andy Rourke. “If I can’t play the bass lines,” figured the temporarily exiled Smith, “I want whoever else plays them to do it right.”

  “We were all laughing about it that night; craziness ensued until dawn,” said Marr. “Andy can’t have felt any long-term threat, or he would have been too sad to do it. And nobody would have been callous enough to make him do it.”

  “It felt fantastic,” Pratt recalled of his new assignment. “I was very cocky. I turned up not feeling daunted at all.” He was astute enough, however, to notice that “the dynamic of the band was Johnny and Andy. I thought as long as those two were cool everything else was cool.” As such, he was under no illusions about being hired for anything longer than the American tour—unlike Craig Gannon, the fully fledged fifth Smith. Pratt lacked the new boy’s down-to-earth northern sensibility and matching haircut (Andrew Berry came to Sussex to give Pratt a suitable Smiths bob), but he had something that Gannon lacked: the confidence of personality by which he could hold his own within such a tightly knit unit.2 That confidence occasionally overextended itself, as when he hammered on Morrissey’s door in coke-fueled enthusiasm one early morning at the farmhouse, mistaking it for Marr’s room instead—and his failure to connect with the singer was partly why he suspected all along that the chance to join the Smiths, if only for one tour, was “too good to be true.” After the last day of rehearsals Andy Rourke heard, to his considerable surprise, that his visa had come through. He would be going to America after all.3 It was just as well: the addition of Craig Gannon presented enough of a shift in the group’s previously emphatic lineup without audiences being subjected to a session bass player (even one of Pratt’s caliber) in place of the real thing.

  Pratt received the news from Mark Fenwick, Bryan Ferry’s manager, who, in the wake of Marr’s appearance on his client’s album, put his name forward for the same job with the Smiths. Fenwick was of particularly well-bred stock (his family owned and operated the department store of the same name), and though he took meetings with the group and was assigned some American preproduction tasks in consideration of a fuller appointment, Morrissey and Marr recognized that his worldview, and that of his company EG Management, was too far removed from the down-to-earth sensibilities of the Smiths. Like Matthew Sztumpf before him, and Ken Friedman waiting in the wings across the Atlantic, he was not invited into the negotiations with EMI, which were busy being finalized by Alexis Grower. In the midst of all the chaos of tour preparations, the concern about Andy Rourke’s availability and auditions with Guy Pratt, the acclimatization of Craig Gannon, and the high-profile warm-up dates in the UK and all the attendant aggravation, that contract was delivered to Morrissey and Marr on the very eve of the tour and “signed and sent off from the airport,” said Marr. The Smiths left England as a Rough Trade band licensed to Sire in the States. They arrived in America in the knowledge that their future, so they thought, lay with EMI.

  The week before the band arrived in America, The Queen Is Dead shot up twenty places in the charts to become the Smiths’ first top 100 album there. That achievement was rendered all the more impressive by the fact that, although “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” had been something of a dance hit, Sire had not released another official single in advance of The Queen Is Dead. (It seemed pointless without a video.) They promoted the album the old-fashioned way instead, investing in the group’s evident strengths: their live reputation, their credibility with the press, and their popularity at college and in “new music”/“modern rock” radio. (“Bigmouth Strikes Again,” “The Queen Is Dead,” “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and then “Panic,” which the label released as a 12″ 3-track single at the end of the tour, all showed up on a number of stations’ end-of-1986 lists for most-played songs.) In the meantime, “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” appeared to be taking on a life of its own, thanks to its inclusion not only on the bestselling Pretty in Pink soundtrack but in yet another John Hughes hit film, the outright comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, this time as an instrumental performed by British band the Dream Academy.4 And in no small part due to the patronization of Hughes, the “jocks”—the approximate American counterpart to the football fans in England—began showing up to the Smiths’ concerts in packs.

  The Smiths continued to voice complaints in America about a lack of commercial-rock airplay, the absence of hit singles, and an album chart position they saw as incommensurate with their ticket sales; it was the familiar charge from foreign bands who didn’t understand that in America it was possible to be a cult act on a scale of perceived stardom. That the Smiths were in fact following the classic American upward trajectory can be verified by comparing their progress with the two major rock groups of their generation who would stay together and go on to multiplatinum global stardom. When U2, who played America consistently, had promoted their third album, War, in 1983, their tour concluded at Pier 84 in New York; when America’s own alternative/independent heroes, R.E.M., who likewise toured America almost without a break, had released their third album, Fables of the Reconstruction, in 1985, they moved up to New York’s 6,000-capacity Radio City Music Hall. The Smiths in 1986, similarly promoting a third studio album but on only their second American tour, were able to book both these New York venues—and sell both out. (They were even treated to the sight of Mick Jagger dancing at the side of the stage at Pier 84.) Outside Boston, they played the 15,000-capacity Great Woods Amphitheatre (or “shed,” as such vast outdoor arenas, with additional lawn space, were commonly known in the States). Their profile was equally high on the West Coast: the 1986 tour included two sold-out shows at the 6,000-seat Los Angeles Universal Amphitheater, and saw a return to the previously conquered open-air locations in San Diego and Irving Meadows. It remained no coincidence that these were the same markets serviced by the leading commercial “new music” radio stations; generally speaking, the Smiths sold considerably fewer tickets on their initial ventures north into Canada’s Ottawa, London, and Montreal; south to Miami, New Orleans, and Houston; and as far into the American heartland as Phoenix, Dallas, and even Nashville.

  All told, the tour was to last a full seven weeks and involve playing to well over 100,000 people—far and away the longest, most prestigious, and, depending on final figures, either lucrative or costly run the group had ever embarked upon. As such, it needed to run like a well-oiled machine—and for that, the Smiths needed both an experienced band manager in an office and an equally experienced tour manager on the road. They had neither. The first, of course, was by choice—though it was evidently not a smart one. The second was a direct result of Stuart James leaving the fold after the Irish tour. He did not fall out with the group; in fact, James would later live with the Marrs in Bowdon. But he did not consider tour managing his natural vocation and, given the constant pressure, opted to return to the recording studio. His replacement for the American tour was Sophie Ridley, who had worked her way up the tour production ranks and came with ample qualifications but had never worked with the Smiths prior to the UK warm-up shows.

  Relations got off to a bad start at the production rehearsals in London, Ontario, where neither the right equipment nor the crew’s paychecks showed up. Rather than take their problems to Ridley, the proper chain of command, or perhaps because she was unable to satisfy their complaints, the crew descended on Johnny Marr, who for h
is part appeared equally incapable of either relinquishing or delegating such responsibilities. After a heated standoff—the crew had grown in size to include several newly hired hands—Marr had to call Warner Bros. to say, “We are not going to play a note until these guys have … their wages in advance, and the staging is right.” While the label had put some financial tour support into a dedicated account (to be repaid at the end of the tour, should it turn a profit), it was not required to deal with production specifics or crew payments. The fact that the conversation so quickly became skewed like this reflected Marr’s belief that “the tour manager we had was very, very weak,” though as he also noted, “I don’t know if anyone could have been up to it.”

  Andy Rourke was more sympathetic to Ridley’s plight. “She was put in this unfortunate position to manage the unmanageable band,” he said, noting that she had the additional task of handling his prescription medications. “She was like my nursemaid, babysitter—she had a lot on her plate and she did what she could.” At Warner Bros., Steven Baker was positively enthusiastic: “Sophie was the greatest,” he said. “She was like this great energy. Sophie was like the manager for me.”

  If it was Ridley’s difficult challenge to try to corral a famously contrary band that had no higher authority than its two leading musicians, it was Craig Gannon’s near impossible task to try to fit in both professionally and personally with this group. The tour party commenced, in Ontario, in something of an ominous manner when the Smiths’ rhythm section decided that Gannon should celebrate his twentieth birthday by downing a cognac for every one of those years. “We nearly fucking killed him,” said Rourke. “I went to his room the next day and it had all been taped off. He’d done this projectile vomit everywhere.” Gannon’s first North American show with the band took place that same night, and in the way of rock ’n’ roll on the grand American scale, the tour promptly rolled on as it had begun. “It got pretty chaotic with the drinking with everybody except Morrissey,” Gannon admitted. Or as Mike Joyce himself adroitly put it, “Bar Morrissey, we were certainly burning it at both ends. And in the middle.”

  Despite the excesses, Gannon admirably fulfilled his onstage role, which was to play a multitude of highly complicated guitar parts, on a variety of guitars, and allow Johnny Marr the physical and musical space to expand upon that. Marr noted that “cometh the hour, he did exactly what he was meant to do.” Andy Rourke considered the appointment a success on all fronts: “I don’t think anyone else could have pulled it off,” he said of the new addition, noting that “Craig was this meek and mild guy but also massively talented. He looked cool as well. He made it look effortless. He’d wake up every morning with this perfect quiff.”

  “It felt really comfortable,” confirmed Gannon. “I didn’t feel like a spare part or that I didn’t deserve to be there. I felt like I was a part of this band and I didn’t feel out of place. Being young and foolish, you think, ‘This might be permanent.’ Well it was supposed to be permanent.”

  Nonetheless, those just outside of the group, even as they complimented his playing, saw Gannon cause a notable shift in the Smiths’ previously tight dynamics. Mike Hinc, who had known Gannon since he was with Aztec Camera, said that “to be the fifth member of that band would have been a nightmare for anyone, and Craig was just … he was an ingénue. Lovely kid but an ingénue.”

  “It must have been an incredibly difficult position to be in,” said John Featherstone. Having helped produce a forty-foot re-creation of The Queen Is Dead album cover as a backdrop for the tour, Featherstone was still wrestling with the placement of Gannon onstage. “He just stood at the bottom of a couple of steps leading up to the drum riser. And I think it was in no small part due to Craig’s reserved style, he just kind of stood there almost as if—as one person uncharitably said—he looked like he’d been left behind by the opening band.”

  “Craig Gannon was a brilliant idea on Johnny’s part, and I thought he really worked well,” said Grant Showbiz. “In essence, Craig Gannon is the subtlest of guitar players. His remit was just to play what Johnny had played on record, and he did it very, very well. Musically he didn’t tread on anyone’s toes.” All the same, “he was on to a loser from day one trying to join the gang at such a late stage. And being a slightly diffident, shy sort of guy, he wasn’t going to jump in with us. He probably drank a little too much alcohol to overcompensate for that. But onstage he was just what they needed, because he didn’t rock out. The person who was rocking out was Johnny.”

  This was true. Though it was something he disputed as the kneejerk reaction of long-term fans to the addition of a second guitarist, it is hard to deny that Marr developed a rock-star persona in 1986. The case can absolutely be made that, if it’s what he wanted for himself, then as the most talented young guitarist of his generation he had every right to strap on his Gibson Les Paul and pull some familiar guitar-hero poses onstage, to stand aloft on the drum risers if desired, to start jamming with members of the Rolling Stones during his spare time, to appear on Bryan Ferry’s records, to wear Yohji Yamamoto suits, to get drunk on champagne cocktails and Rémy Martin, and to get high on marijuana and, if he desired, cocaine—especially as the last of these, on an American tour, was almost impossible to avoid. (“They put it out with the deli tray basically,” quipped Andy Rourke. “You get your cheeses, your olives, and there’s your mound of cocaine.”) The drug has always been tempting for touring bands and their crews because it allows them to maintain their post-concert high, to stay up all night and keep drinking and talking, to feel good about themselves and their place in the world. But because cocaine is essentially an ego drug, it is the sworn enemy of musical subtlety. (In an interview with Simon Goddard for an Uncut magazine special about The Queen Is Dead, Marr offered a retrospective view on substance abuse: “Too much has been made of this partying thing over the years. Yes, on tour, absolutely. Copious amounts. But in the studio, I was really together. Cocaine has always been a disaster for people’s music, and alcohol ain’t too clever, either. But smoking pot till it came out of me ears I never had a problem with. Pot, hash, was really good for the sounds, and I think you can hear that. But it’s not like I was sprawled all over the mixing desk. That just wasn’t the case.”) And in America in 1986, with Craig Gannon on board to fulfill the rhythm role, there is no doubt that Johnny Marr lost much of his performing sensitivity.

  The changes were minor at first, but once the tour reached California, they became more pronounced. On “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want,” for example, the concluding mandolin part, played with a wistful flamenco flourish on record, was performed as heavy-handed, high-pitched notes on electric guitar. On “How Soon Is Now?” while Gannon played the tremolo rhythm part, Marr’s solo guitar tinkles, tucked away in the recorded mix, became a central constant. For “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” on which Marr had previously played only the chord changes in semiacoustic fashion onstage, he now performed the lead melody as a high-pitched electric solo that ran roughshod over verses and choruses alike. The bottleneck slide guitar line on “Panic” was mixed higher than on record. And so on. The American audiences, raised on guitar heroes, lapped it all up, not knowing that they were acting as enablers.

  It can be stated as fact that all rock bands who aspire to greatness must learn to meet the demands of bigger audiences, which can mean employing additional musicians (as the Smiths had done with Craig Gannon), video projections (as they could have done with the Derek Jarman films), and/or special effects (which the Smiths wisely opted to avoid entirely).5 It can also mean simply turning up the volume, puffing out one’s chest, and moving about the stage more emphatically, which the Smiths did as a matter of course. The lengthy American tour rendered them more polished, more professional, more athletic and anthemic, and this was arguably necessary and therefore positive, to a degree. The rest of the band was performing largely to the peak of its potential, and a number of songs, of varying musical moods (“The Queen Is De
ad,” “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” “I Know It’s Over”) were no more aggressive and yet all the better for the additional guitarist. Johnny Marr recalled “weeks of killer shows.” Grant Showbiz called the concerts “incendiary.” Craig Gannon noted that “it was just chaos in America,” especially compared to his previous experience touring the same venues with Aztec Camera. “I don’t know what it was: whether Morrissey whipping them into a frenzy, or just the charisma coming off the stage or the power coming off the stage.” And certainly, audiences did not forget them in a hurry. All the same, this was a drastically different Smiths from the one that had unveiled its five-piece self with impressive grace on Whistle Test just a couple of months earlier, and largely unrecognizable from the four-piece that had stormed through Scotland the previous autumn. Suggestions that the Smiths were turning into the Rolling Stones were not as lazy as the band subsequently claimed them to be. The lineup, after all, now matched that of the classic Stones quintet—and the hedonistic lifestyle seemed not that far behind.

  This much became evident once the group decamped to the Le Parc Hotel in Los Angeles for ten days, the first five of them without a concert to perform. “We were always OK when we were working,” said Andy Rourke. “But when we had time off it got messy.” While Morrissey used the time to visit his relatives in Colorado, the others invited wives and girlfriends over to join them. As a twenty-first birthday present for Guy Pratt’s girlfriend, Caroline Stirling, and something of a compensatory gift for Pratt not making it into the band after all, Johnny Marr flew the couple over to join the festivities. John Porter also came out for a week; Mike Hinc arranged a visit to his American girlfriend to coincide. The British band Eighth Wonder was staying at the same hotel, and various Smiths were distracted by the sight of vocalist Patsy Kensit, well known in the UK as a child actress and model before her teenage pop career, sunbathing topless. Guy Pratt introduced his friend Steve Dagger, the streetwise manager of both Eighth Wonder and Spandau Ballet, to Johnny Marr as yet another candidate for the vacant position surrounding the Smiths; Ken Friedman, though he resided in L.A., was off on tour with Simple Minds at the time and had to trust that his standing with Morrissey and Marr could survive his absence.