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

by Tony Fletcher

  The story of the young man taking his future in his hands in a strange and forbidding London was as old as Dick Whittington, of course, but the impressively vivid lyrics took on new light at a time when the economically depressed northern English cities (and pit villages) were experiencing a mass exodus of unemployed youths heading to the capital—easy prey for drugs, prostitution, and crime, and often to be found sleeping rough and begging in the streets. Accordingly, “London” served as one of the more aggressive and abrasive of Smiths songs, launched with a squeal of a train whistle feedback after which Marr holds down the dirty Stooges-style riff while Gannon provides the jangled overdubs using Nashville tuning. By comparison, “Half a Person” appeared more sympathetic to the narrator’s migration in its comfortable mid-tempo, a deliciously sweet arrangement helped along considerably by Gannon and Marr recording their guitars in tandem.

  Stephen Street took a liking to Gannon. “I got on fine with him, I think he was a really nice guy,” he said. “When we did ‘Half a Person,’ he had an acoustic, Johnny had one, I had ’em left and right in the speakers and it sounded great, and I thought everything was hunky dory. He kept his head down, just got on with it, did his job.” The feeling was mutual. “I felt like I clicked with him straightaway,” said Gannon of Street. “I just thought he was a really decent person. He made me feel dead comfortable.”

  As they were packing up on the last day, Street complimented Gannon’s guitar work to Johnny Marr. “Between you and me,” Marr responded, “Craig’s not going to be around very much longer.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SIX

  I’m not really out to have an easy time. To make a contribution is more important to me, a significant contribution. One that’s provocative, not necessarily in an irksome way. To be provocative doesn’t always mean to be violent or revolutionary, but really to make people think that at least if you hate or you adore the Smiths, that they stand on their own. That’s all.

  —Morrissey, Piccadilly Radio, November 1986

  It remained the five-piece Smiths for the British tour through the second half of October; James Maker’s new band, Raymonde, unsigned and highly hyped as a “new Smiths” (much like the band James the previous year) came along as the support act. Marr still wore his suits, still flexed the Gibson Les Paul, still occasionally overdid it on “How Soon Is Now?” Morrissey was seen to take the stage in sunglasses himself on occasion. But whether by accident or design, a change in heart or the change in audience, the worst of the musical excesses were mostly tamed in the UK without sacrificing the best of the athleticism. It was still difficult for some of the long-term fans to accept the new Smiths as so much bigger and bolder an act than the old one, but others understood that the circumstances now seemed to demand it of them. Besides, the Smiths remained musically adventurous when it came to the set list, which varied from night to night and included the unreleased songs “London” and “Is It Really So Strange?” at almost every show.

  It was, all the same, an odd jaunt, due largely to the aggressive new crowd that had first made itself known in the warm-up shows in the summer. “Your band reaches this tipping point, where they go from being this undiscovered jewel that people feel like sharing to this bandwagon that people feel like they want to jump on, and everyone has their own agenda for wanting to jump on it,” noted John Featherstone, who could observe as much from his vantage point at the light board. “And I feel the edginess of Smiths gigs was somehow used as a resting place for some of the people that had enjoyed some of the borderline violence and aggression of the Clash and a lot of their contemporaries, and they were looking for places they could go to crowd surf, balcony jump, stage dive. Certainly I remember looking at some of these audiences, the gigs at St. Austell, Gloucester, and Newport, and thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”

  It was at the Newport show, on October 19, that an accident long waiting to happen finally occurred. Morrissey was holding out his hand as ever to members of the front row reaching up to him when he was pulled from the stage and disappeared into the audience. Retrieved and taken backstage for treatment, he was reputedly advised by the on-site doctor not to continue with the show. Grant Showbiz came on to apologize on behalf of the band and received a bottle in his face for his troubles; he was taken to the hospital while the crowd rioted, the police were called, and six people were arrested. Newport was a tough Welsh city rapidly losing its dock and ironworks jobs, and Smiths fans were always excitable by nature, but this (over)reaction (arguably on both sides) seemed to represent a breach in the long-standing trust between group and audience. The same in Preston, just outside Manchester, toward the end of the tour, when Morrissey was hit in the head with an object after the opening number, and the set cut short as he was rushed to the hospital for treatment. While this crowd did not riot, there remained considerable confusion about what had actually transpired. The group (and their agent) were certain that Morrissey had been hit with a sharpened 50-pence piece and that it was the work of right-wing troublemakers. But there were those in the crowd who believed that it was the drumstick that Johnny Marr routinely used to beat the guitar with at the beginning of “The Queen Is Dead,” and which they said he had thrown into the crowd himself. Either way, the show’s cancellation—and that of the following night’s show in nearby Llandudno, Wales, while Morrissey recovered—meant that three of the short tour’s thirteen concerts had been adversely affected. That was not an encouraging average.

  And yet the audience aggression was not an entirely negative experience. At most concerts, it served to whip the group up into their own frenzy. At this particular point in the UK, it would be hard to imagine any band that could have matched the Smiths for energy or vitality, or indeed for volume: Rourke and Joyce, in particular, had turned into one of the finest rhythm sections in rock. Craig Gannon contributed to the group’s increasingly powerful onstage presence; offstage, however, he had by his own admission retreated “into my shell.” He had already sensed that the writing was on the wall regarding his future. “I started feeling like a bit of an outsider,” he said. “I didn’t feel comfortable anymore.” His personal life was in trouble, and he saw that “as the most important thing to me at the time,” but spending time with his partner “distanced me a little bit more from the band.” It was, he said, and this despite having what appeared to be, from the outside at least, one of the coveted jobs in the music world, “a pretty bad period in my life. I was probably a bit depressed at the time, and that made it even harder to speak to people.” Gannon figured he must have gone days at a time without even talking to anyone, and this on a sold-out tour.

  For Marr, the tour had many moments of discomfort, brought on by the audience aggression, the abandoned and canceled gigs, the personality problems with Gannon, and continued exhaustion brought on by self-abuse: the hedonism didn’t cease just because the band was now back in Britain. He had grown used to dealing with it all as (ab)normal life in the Smiths—until his reaction to one such moment of drama caught him by surprise. “Before I left the hotel one day for a gig that felt ominous, a little voice in my head said, ‘Well, it isn’t that things are impossible. There is actually a solution. If you can’t take any more of the drama and frustrations, there is actually a solution.’ ” The words sound like that of someone contemplating suicide, the subject so frequently addressed by Morrissey in song. But Marr was hardly the type to consider taking his own life. The thought that had entered his mind was what many would have considered professional suicide instead: leaving, or ending, the Smiths. The problem with this solution to his problems, he said, was that “when you start seeing things in a job or a relationship that you start not liking, you can’t unsee them.” All of a sudden—and it was sudden—the question for him was no longer one of whether he would leave the Smiths, but when.

  His bandmates and audience alike remained blissfully unaware of this subtle but pivotal shift in his attitude. And certainly, it all came (back) together for th
e three shows in London: one at the Kilburn National Ballroom, which was recorded by the BBC, another at the Brixton Academy, and one in between at the esteemed London Palladium. On a basic level, the Palladium show satisfied the desire to play formal seated theaters, as well as standing-only venues, for the Smiths to prove that they could excel in either format. And it was the London Palladium that had seen the birth of Beatlemania, back in October 1963, just days before Johnny Marr was born. There was no claim to similar importance in the Smiths’ appropriation of the venue, rather an unstated acknowledgment that here was where history was made. It didn’t harm the Smiths’ personal reputation that they opened their concert at such a regal venue with “The Queen Is Dead,” either, Morrissey waving a placard around with those words on it as if Manchester’s very own Joey Ramone. Interestingly, the audience that night verified John Featherstone’s observation that “there’s almost a requirement to behave that is sometimes imposed by the building itself.” As at Nottingham’s seated Royal Concert Hall earlier in the tour, where the stage invasion for “Bigmouth” was so good-natured that it was allowed to continue unimpeded for once, the Smiths fans treated the plush velvet confines of the Palladium with respect. Which is not to say that they were restrained. Smiths fans were never restrained. Except by force.

  The tour concluded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on October 30. The G-Mex show in the summer had been difficult, for all the obvious reasons of size and scope; the Free Trade show, their second visit to the historically important venue, was everything they had hoped for. A banner was placed at Morrissey’s feet that read WELCOME HOME, acknowledgment from the fans on how the Smiths were now perceived in Manchester. Morrissey in turn recognized the tribute. The Smiths opened the show that night with “Ask,” closed with “Big-mouth Strikes Again,” and in between, played seventeen other songs from across their four-year career. Minutes after the concert finished, Johnny Marr turned twenty-three. It was to be his last birthday as a member of the Smiths.

  The Smiths did not agree to participate in an anti-Apartheid benefit to appease the charges against Morrissey of racism; they had lined it up before the controversial Melody Maker story had hit the stands. But the announcement of the concert, to take place at the Brixton Academy just two weeks after the UK tour’s conclusion, with the Fall in the opening slot, did go some way to remind critics and fans alike that this was a group that had typically worn its leftist politics on its sleeve. This would also serve as the third concert alongside Mark E. Smith’s ever-changing lineups within the year, a proper gesture of professional respect for a group that had been so influential on the music scene, within Manchester and beyond. The fact that Si Wolstencroft had joined the Fall earlier in the year played no small part in the growing friendship between the groups, though the drummer was the first to admit that it was “crazy,” given his reasons for turning down the job with the Smiths, that he would end up somehow surviving in the Fall for the following decade.

  When fans arrived at the Brixton Academy on the night of November 14, however, those who hadn’t heard the last-minute announcement on local radio were shocked to discover that the Smiths would not be performing, and that this time it was not Morrissey who had been taken ill. A few nights before the concert, Johnny Marr had been out in Manchester with Mike Joyce and his girlfriend. Marr was driving—without a license. This was illegal, if not unusual: though Phil Powell was his official driver—and Angie his unofficial one—Marr was, as we have already surmised, frequently to be found behind the wheel. But Marr had also been drinking: tequila and wine, a deadly mix. After dropping Joyce off at his house on nearby Springfield Road, Marr returned to the Vicarage, which lay on a narrow road, close to a difficult intersection, a route that involved a couple of dangerous bends. He was listening to a cassette tape of his latest home demos, and when it flipped sides and a new track started up just as he arrived at his house, he decided to take a spin around the block to hear it one more time, at euphoric volume. “I popped my foot down,” he recalled, “and I just hit this bend really fast, and I bounced from one side of the bend to another. The car literally went off the ground, I hit this high old Victorian stone wall, whacked off the wall, and then bounced—and just as it was about to turn over [the car] landed on its side and then bounced again on the road, went straight down, and the front end of the car came right up.”

  His BMW was not just wrecked; it was accordioned. “You would not believe someone could survive that,” said Marr. “I had no idea how I ended up with my legs or my chest.” With the adrenaline rush that comes from danger, Marr was able to extricate himself, run home in his severely damaged Yamamoto suit, and get help from Phil and Angie to clear and explain away the wreck. (The subsequent press announcement had it that Angie was alongside him in the car; she was not.) Amazingly, his injuries were comparatively minimal, requiring little more than a fitted neck brace and a period of recuperation. The day after the accident, Marr was called into the local police station, where he should have been charged on several counts. The policeman, it turned out, was a Smiths fan and a budding guitarist. He let Marr go.

  Near-death experiences have a habit of redirecting ongoing lives. Two years after R.E.M.’s drummer Bill Berry suffered an aneurysm onstage, in 1995, he quit what was by then one of the world’s top two or three bands, choosing to become a hay farmer, leaving behind a trio that quickly likened itself to a “three-legged dog.” Marr wasn’t looking that far ahead as he realized that he was “very lucky to be alive.” But all the same, “I changed after that,” he admitted. “I just really got my act together. And got my attitude together. And my disposition. The car crash—it wasn’t just about behavior behind the wheel, drinking and all of that. It was like an epiphany.” The long-term repercussions would only slowly become apparent. The short-term effect was much more pronounced: a feeling of total clarity and purpose. “It absolutely reset me in such a fabulous way,” he said. One of the first things he did was to mend the damaged relationship with journalist Nick Kent, putting in a call before it was even announced that the Brixton Academy show would have to be canceled.

  One thing he did not do was take a break. “There was a level of exhaustion that Johnny never really caught up from,” said John Featherstone. “I don’t think he ever really, being the workaholic, driven guy that he is, allowed himself to really recover all the way from his accident.” Marr denied that this was an issue for him, but either way, before the month was out, and still wearing the neck brace, he booked the Smiths into Trident Studios in London to record another new song, “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” which he now favored as a much darker choice of single over the eminently commercial “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby.” That he and Morrissey might, in the process, be risking once more the Smiths’ run of hits did not occur to him as much as did making the right artistic choice. “I would do a single, and then almost pathologically, not care about it once it had been released,” he said. “At all. Just purely the fact that it exists, and people who are interested can hear it and judge it and like it or not, is the job done for me. That may be negligence on my part, or cavalier, or puritanical, which is the way I am.” Stephen Street was not available at such short notice, and so for the first time, Marr decided to produce a Smiths track—and take sole credit—himself. He was happy to be aided in his quest by a highly capable engineer, Alan Moulder. He was less pleased to find out that the Trident studio that the Smiths were booked into was not the famous room used by the Beatles, David Bowie, and Lou Reed, but the adjoining “jingle” room. The Smiths had to wait for the secretaries to leave so they could set up the drums in reception—“and not because it had great acoustics.”

  When “Shoplifters” was released, there were observations that it was attempting to emulate “How Soon Is Now?” but Marr claimed otherwise. “It’s just what I was playing at the time. It’s rhythmical and it’s mid-tempo and it’s swampy, but I would never have been so gauche as to try and re-create any of our songs.”
As far as he was concerned, “the vocal was the best part of it.” And it was true, Morrissey gave a particularly strong performance, even harmonizing with himself in the absence of a Kirsty MacColl or any digital effects. Though the title and chorus appeared to be yet another in Morrissey’s long list of provocative calls for attention (and publicity), Morrissey explained that he was referring to shoplifting purely in the “spiritual” sense and left it at that. It was a murky summation for a murky song that featured the surprising exaltation of a twin guitar solo, in the style of Thin Lizzy, right where one might otherwise have expected a third verse to come in. Though barely fifteen seconds in length, and more melodic than it was dexterous, the solo was to be considered by some as sacrilege, which would only serve to increase Marr’s concern that he was being typecast in the Smiths.

  The Smiths returned to their original four-piece lineup with this session. Given the personal dynamics over recent weeks, Craig Gannon was not unduly surprised to find that he had been fired. Given the chaotic state of the band, it might not even have been a shock that nobody called to tell him as much, that he heard the news from a friend in Easterhouse. But it was to serve as a disappointment, once his departure finally broke in the media, when he was bad-mouthed in public. “His involvement, recording wise has hardly been anything at all,” Rough Trade’s Pat Bellis was quoted as saying to the music press. “He just didn’t seem very interested and there were times when he didn’t turn up for rehearsals.” A simple statement from the band confirming his departure and expressing thanks for his contribution would surely have sufficed.