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

by Tony Fletcher

  Following Morrissey and Marr’s closed-door decision, the Smiths and the close members of the crew, equal parts relieved to have ended the tour at last and disappointed not to have finished it as intended, chose to deal with their exhaustion by contributing further to it: they had the drinking session to end all drinking sessions. Andy Rourke, already doped up on painkillers, experienced hallucinations and he eventually hit the beach, valium in hand, to watch the sun come up with his old school friend Phil Powell. The pair were woken by Jim Connolly many hours later, badly sunburned already, to be informed that their plane was leaving in a matter of minutes. The Smiths, all nursing horrendous hangovers, boarded a Concorde flight from Miami back to London.7 New York’s Radio City Music Hall, along with the cities of Miami, Atlanta, and Nashville, would have to wait until next time.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Q: What are you driven by?

  A: Hate largely. This will sound almost unpleasant but distaste for normality. I’ve never really liked normal people and it’s true to this day. I don’t like normal situations. I get palpitations. I don’t know what to do.

  —Morrissey to Paul du Noyer, Q, August 1987

  At the start of 1985, when NME readers had voted the Smiths as Best Band, proclaimed Johnny Marr the Best Instrumentalist and Morrissey and Marr the Best Songwriters, the papers’ critics took a very different view of the year’s stars. Their collective poll hailed Bobby Womack’s Poet 2 as best album of the year, Womack & Womack’s “Love Wars” as Best Single, and demonstrated further high regard for American R&B over British independent rock in ranking additional records by James Ingram, Prince, and the Staple Singers all above the Smiths. The disparity at NME represented a significant standoff in the culture wars that took place through the early 1980s, accelerated by the onslaught of so many style magazines that reported from nightclubs worldwide and celebrated the music of the global dance floor, which was pulsating to music that ran the gamut from New York hip-hop and electro to DC Go-Go and Chicago house, with plenty of underground funk and slick R&B from around the rest of the United States. As such, when “Panic” was released, it was considered a provocation by those who already felt antagonistic toward the Smiths and what they saw as the group’s persistent championing of a dying genre, rock music. Paolo Hewitt, a leader of NME’s “soul boy” brigade, critiqued the lyrics on face value. “If Morrissey wants to have a go at Radio 1 and Steve Wright, then fine,” he wrote. “When he starts using words like disco and DJ, with all the attendant imagery that brings up for what is a predominantly white audience, he is being imprecise and offensive.”

  He had a point: Morrissey had made no explicit mention of the radio in his song, and his lyrics could therefore be construed as reviving the racist and homophobic “Disco Sucks” campaign of late 1970s America. Of course Morrissey was anything but homophobic and, given his professed love of Motown and his leftist values, it was assumed he was no racist, either. For British Smiths fans, the “disco” of “Panic” was generally presumed to mean the long-standing city center meat market, which suggested exclusivity by demanding patrons wear a tie, or at least to “dress smart,” but where drinks were overpriced, fights routine, and both the disc jockeys and the commercial top 40 music that they played almost embarrassingly disconnected from the neighboring streets. Then again, when the Smiths performed “Panic” to nearly 15,000 mostly white American college kids, outdoors in the suburbs of Massachusetts, such reference points, vaguely stated in the first place, were easy to misconstrue.

  As it turned out, NME was not close to being the New Morrissey Express of some cynics’ insistence; it put the Smiths on the cover just four times in five years. It was fellow IPC publication Melody Maker—long considered the most traditional of the music weeklies—that made frequent cover stars of the Smiths, and it was for yet another such feature that journalist Frank Owen was flown to Cleveland, early in the American tour, to interview Morrissey “on the road.” Owen was, like Morrissey, a Mancunian of working-class Irish stock. He had come of age alongside Morrissey in the city’s thriving post-punk environment, and had played in the band Manicured Noise, of which Morrissey had been a fan. A devotee from childhood of disco, reggae, and soul, and already a keen proponent of house music, Owen sought in his feature to establish the connection between punk rock, gay clubs, discos, black music, the Smiths, the DJ, and “Panic.” Given the hastily written nature of the British music weeklies, he failed to pull it off successfully. Verbally, however, he gave it his best shot. After an initial back-and-forth about Morrissey’s “no sex” agenda (Owen dared suggest in writing that in years to come, Morrissey would be into “fisting and water sports”), he raised an accusation recently made by Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, that “the Smiths and their ilk were racist.”

  Morrissey not only took the bait, he swallowed it hook, line, and potential career sinker. “Reggae … is to me the most racist music in the entire world,” he was quoted as responding in part. This was no more true of a genre that admittedly had its share of black nationalist Rastafarians than it was true of rock music, which likewise had its share of white supremacists performing under the Oi! banner in Britain and infiltrating the hardcore scene in America. Not content to leave it there, Morrissey went on to express how much he detested the “black modern music” of Motown descendants Stevie Wonder, Janet Jackson, and Diana Ross, stating, per the lyrics to “Panic,” that “in essence this music doesn’t say anything whatsoever.”

  Owen claimed to understand this thinking. “When NME and Melody Maker started putting black acts on the cover,” he recalled, “there was a huge backlash to it. I used to get letters all the time. And it wasn’t explicitly ‘We don’t want blacks on the cover,’ it was more like ‘This is our scene and what do blacks have to do with it?’ ” And so, in his Melody Maker feature, as a response to Morrissey’s own response, Owen tried to answer that question: “What it says can’t necessarily be verbalised easily,” he wrote. “It doesn’t seek to change the world like rock music by speaking grand truths about politics, sex and the human condition. It works at a much more subtle level—at the level of the body and the shared abandon of the dancefloor. It won’t change the world, but it’s been said it may well change the way you walk through the world.” Within a year or two, as acid house exploded (the kindling lit on the Haçienda dance floor) and the rave movement emerged in its wake, a large section of British youth would come to share Owen’s sentiment, the Smiths’ Johnny Marr and New Order’s Bernard Sumner among them. In the summer of 1986, though, Morrissey was still the voice of his generation, which was perhaps why he then dared issue the most ludicrous comment yet of a continually outspoken career: “Obviously to get on Top of the Pops these days, one has to be, by law, black,” which he followed up with an equally ridiculous claim of personal persecution. “The last LP ended up at number two and we were still told by radio that nobody wanted to listen to The Smiths in the daytime. Is that not a conspiracy?” As a simple point of fact, the Smiths were on Top of the Pops, in absentia, the very week before Morrissey and Owen conducted this interview. And while it was true that the Smiths were treated cautiously as a pop act with regard to daytime airplay on Radio 1, they received all due attention and respect as a rock band across the BBC’s many channels, with televised concerts, in-studio performances, on-air interviews, radio sessions, and unedited Derek Jarman premieres.

  Even the singer’s attempt to restore proceedings mid-interview sounded suspect. “My favourite record of all time is ‘Third Finger, Left Hand’ by Martha and the Vandellas,” he said, citing a (black) Motown single from 1966, “which can lift me from the most doom-laden depression.” And yet this was as stereotypically romantic, conventionally sexist, and thereby nonfeminist a song as had ever been written. It would have said nothing about Morrissey’s life when it came out, and said even less about his life and that of his fans twenty years later. He was in essence employing a double standard, based on what Owen cor
rectly referred to as a “nostalgia … that afflicts the whole indie scene.” A subsequent debate about the use of technology in music, especially the rhythm of rap, revealed what could only be described as Morrissey’s Luddite attitude: “Hi-tech can’t be liberating. It’ll kill us all. You’ll be strangulated by the cords of your compact disc.”

  As it turned out, Owen wasn’t particularly put out by Morrissey’s comments in defense of “Panic.” “I never thought Morrissey was a racist,” he said. “I always thought it was just a big put-on, that it was just a way to wind people up, the same way that punks wore swastikas.” Morrissey’s subsequent, considerable anger over the published interview, Owen felt, was inspired by the section that followed, in which the journalist tried to engage the singer in a walk down Manchester’s gay-punk-disco memory lane. “Morrissey is the biggest closet gay queen on the planet,” said Owen, “and he felt that I was trying to ‘out’ him by bringing this up. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that if you were a punk rocker in Manchester, you couldn’t go to straight clubs ’cause you’d get the shit kicked out of you. So there was a very close relationship between the gay scene and the punk scene. Like the Ranch … it was essentially an old gay club, like one of those cowboy gay clubs. That’s why it was called the Ranch—it had saddles for seats.”

  On this issue, Morrissey did not take the bait. “The gay scene in Manchester,” he said, “was a little bit heavy for me. I was a delicate bloom.” If he wanted to play coy, that was his prerogative, although with Thatcherite policies coming down increasingly hard on homosexuality, many other artists had decided to “come out” in response.1 As Len Brown wrote, “It was a time when everyone—artists and journalists—seemed to be asking the question (politically and sexually) ‘Whose Side Are You On?’ To which Morrissey insisted on being individual … a card-carrying member of nothing but his own cult of personality.” Worse than that, in this Melody Maker feature, he appeared to be projecting some prejudices of his own. When the interview was published, it caused, understandably, a more heated and visceral reaction than any previous Smiths feature. Some Melody Maker readers vowed to boycott the band’s music; over at NME, Morrissey’s comments appeared to confirm the “soul boy” brigade’s worst suspicions. There were, nonetheless, those who believed that Morrissey had been quoted out of context; their numbers included the singer himself. “He called up Melody Maker, said that I had invented those quotes, and they were going to sue us for libel,” said Owen. “So I said, ‘Fine, here’s the tapes.’ We gave them to Melody Maker’s lawyers—and of course he never sued.”

  The “racist” charges were not the only ones being hurled at the Smiths. The same week that Melody Maker published its controversial interview—and in a way it served as a useful distraction—the music papers also revealed that the Smiths had signed to EMI. Rough Trade initially feigned surprise: “We knew they were talking to EMI but no one told us that papers have been signed,” claimed Rough Trade/Smiths press officer Pat Bellis; “The contracts have been signed,” crowed EMI in response. As the story unfolded over the next couple of weeks, it became apparent that everyone involved in the deal—including the Smiths—was perfectly aware that Rough Trade still had a fourth studio album due under contract, and that Geoff Travis had no intention of giving it up. When EMI offered what it arrogantly called “an amount that would exceed monies that Rough Trade could possibly hope to recover from the record’s release,” he merely dug in his heels. The knowledge that he could prevent EMI from releasing a Smiths record anytime soon helped mildly soften the blow caused by their defection.

  There was, nonetheless, a palpable disappointment felt across the national music scene that Britain’s biggest independent label had lost its most credible band to Britain’s largest major record company. It signified, for many, a sense of disloyalty and avarice on the band’s part, an acknowledgment that everyone had their price. (Travis certainly felt as much: he accused the band of “excessive greed.”) And of course it threw the future of the independent music scene into doubt, especially as no other act appeared to be waiting in the wings to assume the Smiths’ mantle. This had been somewhat confirmed in the spring, when NME (ironically, given some of its writers’ opinions on such music) had decided to revisit the British independent scene five years after the groundbreaking C81 only to discover that it had turned in on itself, creating a musical ghetto. And that the Smiths had much to do with it.

  In fairness, not all the groups on the NME’s C86 promotional cassette were influenced by the Smiths, and of those that were, not all were influenced only by the Smiths, but still it had to be said: the Bodines, the Pastels, the Close Lobsters, and the Shop Assistants, to name but four, all opened their songs with gently strummed, semiacoustic, slightly reverbed guitar riffs as if in apparent tribute to the Smiths’ early run of hit singles, before giving way to vocals that were purposefully restrained and borderline tuneless, as if exaggerating the original Morrissey style. The one obvious difference from the Smiths circa 1984 was the gleeful amateurism that ran through the C86 roster. This approach proved so readily identifiable that C86 became shorthand for a new sound of “shambling” guitar bands.

  The divide between independent and major was further emphasized by the success of the Housemartins, the nearest the Smiths had to any sort of new competition in 1986. By taking a more professional approach in the studio than the C86 acts, the four-piece band from Hull, in England’s northeast, scored a top 3 single the same month The Queen Is Dead was released: an up-tempo, guitar-based flip-off to normality entitled “Happy Hour” that sounded alarmingly similar to “I Want the One I Can’t Have.” The Housemartins made light of their provincial roots (they named their debut album London 0, Hull 4), dressed down in what looked like their dads’ cardigans (making 1983-era Morrissey look positively dandy by comparison) and were more avowedly political than the Smiths: they refused to support Red Wedge unless Labour made a campaign promise to nationalize the music industry. In this, they were arguably more hypocritical than the Smiths as well, for while their label, Go! Discs, which had made its name with Billy Bragg, presented itself as an independent, it was both funded and distributed by Polygram. The Housemartins’ significant success in the singles charts only clarified for Morrissey his displeasure with Rough Trade, and his belief that EMI would surely do a better job of rewarding the Smiths with similarly high placements.

  All of this made it that much more important for the Smiths to remain in the musical vanguard. Johnny Marr seemed little worried by the proposition. “The C86 scene,” he said, “the clichéd indie vibe, didn’t sound anything like what we actually sounded like at the time. It sounded like some weird Xerox of what we were supposed to sound like two years earlier. It might have our instrumentation, but it just didn’t have the darkness. Or the heaviness. I was trying to get further and further away from that.” The question was how the Smiths intended to do so. Would they turn into a major rock band (as per “Panic”), embrace commercial pop (as per “Ask,” which would also make the top 20 upon its release in October), or become more experimental? Was it possible to manage all three?

  In striving to maintain their musical momentum, the Smiths continued to bounce between John Porter and Stephen Street, a seesaw relationship that reached a farcical apotheosis at the start of October, when the group booked several days at Mayfair Studios in Primrose Hill and split them between the two producers. Porter came in first to handle “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby,” a joyously commercial pop song that was, so Morrissey later claimed, a direct quotation from Geoff Travis. (This was unfortunate, and not only because Travis did not use the word “baby.” It typecast a lyric that would otherwise have allowed multiple interpretations.) Throughout a song that owed plenty to the Clash’s “London Calling,” Marr and Gannon delivered a cascade of jangling guitars that were as effervescent as anything the Smiths had recorded—or that John Porter had produced for them. His final mix positively shimmered with clarity, and given
the song’s atypically orthodox structure and classic mid-song breakdown and build back up, it sounded like an obvious hit single—assuming that the Smiths wanted to return to, or follow, pop formula.

  The recordings that Stephen Street then worked on were not so obviously designed for airplay consideration, and yet were more faithful to the essence of the Smiths; in this, the Mayfair session ably revealed the true difference in the two producers’ styles. The songs “Half a Person” and “London” (for which Street received his first coproduction credit) were, in fact, of a lyrical pair, dealing as they did with the journey south to a capital city and a prospective better life. The former, finalized between Morrissey and Marr on the stairs in the studio, was written in the first person and contained a largely autobiographical declamation—“sixteen, clumsy and shy, I went to London and I booked myself in at the YWCA”—that nonetheless resonated globally. “London” was written in the second person, with Morrissey asking the protagonist, about to board a train to Euston: “Do you think you’ve made the right decision this time?” It conjured up the climax to Billy Liar, wherein William Fisher had promised to take a similar journey with his alluring Julie Christie girlfriend, only to cowardly disembark at the last moment—except that in the Smiths’ case, the young man stays on board, and it is his girlfriend who remains on the platform, hoping for his eventual return but already knowing better.