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

by Tony Fletcher

  Friedman then suggested that Morrissey and Marr reconsider the distribution of royalties. The new manager had learned of the inequities almost as soon as he had assumed the reins. “Mike’s dad was calling, saying, ‘You tell Morrissey and Johnny that they need to honor their commitments.’ Lecturing me.” Friedman, as ever, went to U2’s Paul McGuinness for advice. What he was told was simple: Give them an equal share. That, Friedman knew, was never going to happen: “Johnny would have done it, he wanted it to be a group. Morrissey would have just hired two other people.” The new manager’s suggestion was either to secure the rhythm section 10 percent of everything, including publishing, or to at least get them paid directly by the label so that there could be no suggestions of impropriety. “Johnny said, ‘Yeah, great idea!’ ” recalled Friedman. “And Morrissey said, ‘Excuse me,’ and I never heard from him again [about it].”

  That left just about one area in which Friedman felt he could properly influence the group’s future: touring. As far as the new manager was concerned, the Smiths had barely scratched the surface of their global potential. And if they wanted to capitalize on this popularity, he figured, they needed a more powerful agency than All Trade Booking. “The problem with Mike Hinc,” he said, “was that he never stood up to the group. At all. He never said, ‘You must do this.’ ” From Friedman’s perspective, the Smiths needed to be with Wasted Talent, whose founder Ian Flooks (had) represented not just Friedman’s own clients Simple Minds but also U2, the Clash, Talking Heads, R.E.M., the Pretenders, and the Eurythmics. This was such a significant crop of big-money acts that it enabled Flooks to effectively control the European festival circuit, which the Smiths had willfully ignored based on early bad experiences with billing. If they went with Wasted Talent, so they were now assured, they would be booked no lower than second on the bill to one of Flooks’s headliners. A handful of such appearances at the major European festivals and they wouldn’t have to worry about the petty Continental club dates that had been the bane of their earlier existence. Plus, Flooks had no problem with them staying with Ian Copeland in the States, who was eager to get the Smiths back over to pick up where they had left off the previous summer. Then they could start looking at the continents they had yet to visit but where they had a fanatical following, from Asia to Australasia to South America. Marr, said Friedman, seemed more than amenable to the change, and reported back that Morrissey would also go along with it. “So I sacked Hinc,” said Friedman. “It was hard, it always is. He was their mate. But I felt I needed strong people around us to be able to convince the group to do things. And Flooks was the best agent out there.”

  “Ken spent three months telling me how good it would be when he got to manage them,” said Hinc, “and then when he got to manage them the first thing he did was to sack me.” As far as Hinc was concerned, this said everything he needed to know about Friedman’s credibility.3 In the end, which Hinc was to find perfectly ironic, Wasted Talent only booked the Smiths into one show—the San Remo Festival in Italy, a “playback” (i.e., lip-synced) performance for national television. It involved appearing on a rotating stage alongside many of the pop acts the Smiths claimed to detest, in which there were definite echoes of the disastrous previous visit to Italy two years earlier; this time, perhaps as an act of good faith for Friedman, they went ahead with the “performance.” But they were not exactly impressed by it.

  Neither, in retrospect, was their new manager. “They should not have done San Remo, it was not cool,” Friedman admitted, claiming that he was “pressured” into it, which was exactly how the group had felt in so many similar scenarios over the last four years. “Being American, I didn’t know how uncool it was. That it was really very pop. The Smiths were the least likely group to do it.” And yet, he maintained of the weeklong stay, which included lavish record-company dinners and various red-carpet affairs, “It was fun, and Morrissey came out of his shell. He socialized with other pop stars.” Those included the Pet Shop Boys, Style Council, and Spandau Ballet, though when Friedman unwittingly tried to introduce Morrissey to his nemesis Bob Geldof, he witnessed the singer’s fear of confrontation for himself. Friedman recalled that he and Marr tried to make the most of Morrissey’s rare socializing to get him to indulge in some of the vices that tended to find their way to pop stars, with but limited success. The San Remo Festival marked the last time the four Smiths stood onstage together outside the UK.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Q: Can you ever see yourself writing any songs with anyone else other than Johnny Marr?

  A: Not really. I don’t really think about that; it doesn’t really seem necessary. I’m perfectly happy.

  —Morrissey to Mark Radcliffe, Piccadilly Radio, November 1986

  Morrissey’s my best friend.

  —Johnny Marr, New Musical Express, February 1987

  The New Year of 1987 saw a new look to the Smiths. Gone were the designer suits and casual New Wave jackets, the shades and peroxide crops; gone too was the Gibson Les Paul, that totem of rock stardom that Marr had used for two solid-bodied years. All four members now sported a similar Andrew Berry haircut—a tightly shorn quiff—to match, as best as possible, the cover shot of Elvis Presley on the “Shoplifters” single, taken by the King’s own hairdresser all the way back in 1955. (In a moment of inspired marketing, Rough Trade had shipped copies of the single inside a plastic bag emblazoned with the image of Elvis on one side and the word “shoplifter” on the other. It helped the single continue the Smiths’ renewed run of top 20 UK hits.) It was in this manner that they appeared on Top of the Pops promoting the single in February, Johnny Marr back on a Gretsch, Morrissey wearing denim jeans and jacket over a T-shirt of the Presley image, suggestively swiveling his hips per early Elvis. This back-to-basics image was reinforced with a memorable cover shot by Lawrence Watson for NME a couple of weeks later, for which they posed outside Albert Finney (Senior)’s betting shop in Salford, looking for all the world—especially given the paper’s astute use of a sepia duotone—as if they belonged in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

  The cover story interview itself was conducted not with Morrissey but Johnny Marr, who additionally took on the role of Smiths spokesman in interviews with Hot Press and The Face. The singer was left with the decidedly unglamorous Record Mirror. “I don’t court publicity,” Morrissey had insisted to Mark Radcliffe on Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio back in November, at the end of the British tour in which his onstage injuries had been reported in the tabloids. “I honestly don’t care if people don’t want to interview me for another twenty years.” An exaggeration, perhaps, but Morrissey did seem somewhat chastened, if not fully silenced, by his overreaching sound bites the previous summer to Frank Owen. Comparing his comments in Record Mirror with those of Marr in NME the same week made for fascinating reading, especially given that they were asked essentially the same questions. About EMI, Marr was anything but apologetic when it came to the financial incentive: “I’m not going to get defensive about it—why should I? Obviously the money’s part of the reason we signed.…” On this same subject, Morrissey was supremely modest: “It’s a very touchy issue and let’s say I’d rather just get on with it rather than dissect it.” About Rourke’s drug habit (which had only just become a matter of public record a full year after he’d been evicted and then reinstated), Marr denied nothing and explained everything, whereas Morrissey offered, “I don’t really know that it’s my place to speak on Andy’s behalf, because it is quite personal.” On the success of the Housemartins, who had just enjoyed the number 1 Christmas single, it was the singer who was positively charitable: “I’d rather have them in that position than anybody else.” Marr laughed them off the front pages. “If they really are our closest rivals it’s no wonder I’m so confident about The Smiths!”

  It would be fair to say that Marr approached the Smiths’ new album from a different standpoint from the others. “I had this new clarity and a sort of passion, but a health
y objectivity, I think,” he said later, “because I knew that if things went bad, I’d decided inside myself that I had a life without the group. I had no idea what that life was, and it was giving up everything, but there was an answer.” This could be interpreted as advance knowledge that he was making his last Smiths album, but he insisted that was not yet the case; if anything, like the others, he had every reason to hope that, especially with the new manager and the looming switch to EMI, and given the group’s impressive return to commercial form, things would continue to move upward and onward. But he was determined to no longer assume the weight of the world on his shoulders, or to make himself sick with overwork as had been the case with The Queen Is Dead. Equally, he was adamant that the Smiths progress musically. In revamping the “Panic” groove, “Sheila Take a Bow” had certainly not lived up to these intentions, which was partially why it did not show up on the subsequent album. Another new song recorded at the same session, “Girlfriend in a Coma,” did do so, however, and the Smiths’ first task of duty once they moved into Wool Hall Studios near Bath, in March, far enough from London that they couldn’t be easily distracted, was to complete the song that would turn out to be their follow-up A-side.

  It would also turn out to be their shortest, their softest, and certainly among their most sublime. Marr would make a lot of the fact that it was inspired, musically, by “Young, Gifted and Black,” the 1970 reggae hit for Bob and Marcia, so frequently referencing how much he and Morrissey “adored it” that it seemed as if he was deliberately trying to counter the singer’s recently pronounced hatred of the genre. The reggae reference was patently apparent in the original recording from Good Earth, and it was a shame that this arrangement could not have been kept, as it was the only recorded evidence of the band (or at least Johnny Marr) delving into a Jamaican groove. Still, the subsequent acoustic rhythm guitar, acoustic picking, and electric high-life flourishes gave the Wool Hall master a lightness at deliberate odds with its cruelly hilarious lyrics, which offered an extreme take on the ancient pop culture of “death songs” such as “Tell Laura I Love Her” and “Leader of the Pack.” The addition of Emulator strings afforded extra drama in what passed for a chorus, while Morrissey’s confession that “there were times when I could have murdered her” offered a conscious throwback to the sentiment of “Bigmouth Strikes Again.” As an exercise in “levity,” in all senses of that word, “Girlfriend in a Coma” was one of the Smiths’ greatest triumphs.

  Strangeways, Here We Come, as the new album would be titled (“Because,” said Morrissey, “the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was in prison twelve months from now”), was to mark the first time in the Smiths’ career that so much material was finalized in the studio. It was also to be the last time. As a result, there were those close to the band who posited that if the Smiths could have played a few shows around its recording, the fire that smoldered deep within them would have been rekindled and the subsequent split potentially averted. It’s a good theory, even if it must remain hypothetical. But it has to be countered by the band members’ insistence that the mood at Wool Hall was overwhelmingly positive. “I think it had the best atmosphere of any album that we’d recorded,” said Mike Joyce, “because by that time we were old hands: we’d finally honed the recording technique.”

  “We’d record two, three songs a day then have big playback sessions till three or four in the morning, drinking crates of beer,” recalled Rourke. Indeed, drinking was no less restrained than ever, other substances continued to abound, and post-recording hours were relieved by performing the greatest hits of the hilarious This Is Spial Tap fake rock documentary; even Stephen Street was brought into the proceedings. (Morrissey, who kept to his daytime hours, was not.)

  The argument against playing more live dates also had to take into account that neither Morrissey and Marr, both worn out from their experiences in 1986, were desperately keen to resume touring, and that even had they been willing to test new material via some low-key performances, Wasted Talent was none so equipped as All Trade to hastily set up a series of club dates or Scottish village halls. It was, in fact, a deliberate policy that the new songs be largely formulated in the studio rather than at soundcheck or in concert—a means by which the group sought to change things up—but the process was inherently challenging. Once “Sheila Take a Bow” was released in April, that would make ten songs that the Smiths had recorded and released since The Queen Is Dead. The self-imposed pressure to release an album a year (what Stephen Street likened to the annual “fashion house collection”) now meant that they were going to have to come up with their second new album of material in less than twelve months. This would have been difficult enough even under the best of circumstances—an invigorated partnership of Morrissey and Marr sitting down for old-fashioned writing sessions in Bowdon, for example—but it soon became apparent to all concerned that while Marr had completed some instrumental demos, and while he had distributed some of them to Morrissey, the pair had ceased writing face-to-face. “I was aware that these songs had not been written, they hadn’t worked them together,” said Stephen Street. “It was a case of, ‘Try this, is that key OK? Fine, is this speed OK?’ You could tell that this was the first time that they were all coming in together.”

  For the most part, the new approach paid off. (And it was new only for the Smiths; many groups write in the studio as a matter of course, especially as they get older and take more time off from one another.) It was hard to imagine “Death of a Disco Dancer,” for example, being constructed anywhere other than in the studio. A lengthy jam on one repeated chord pattern (loosely based on the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence”), it turned into something of a free-for-all at the three-minute mark, once the vocals had made their point (namely, as per the misunderstood intent of “Panic,” that the English disco was a deadly environment). Mike Joyce laid claim to one of his finest Smiths contributions, providing something of a shattering conclusion late in the song as he erupted—methodically, without showing off—around the kit. Morrissey subsequently returned to the studio to record his first-ever instrumental overdub, a cascade of piano keys that were just tuneful enough to maintain some semblance of melody but abrasive enough to contribute to the song’s sense of foreboding. Marr topped it off with an Emulator drone. As he had done with the previous album’s major statement, Street wisely edited a minute out during the mixing process.

  “A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours” exuded a similar sense of creativity, not least because it was the first Smiths song (other than “Asleep”) to omit the guitar, for which its placement as Strangeways’s opening track would serve to purposefully confound expectations. Constructed around an upbeat piano riff, loaded with Street and Morrissey’s favored “reverse echoes,” rounded out with Emulator flutes and marimbas, and including a syncopated Emulator piano part similar to the digital piano riffs of contemporaneous groundbreaking house and techno classics (listen to Rhythm Is Rhythm’s “Strings of Life,” also from 1987, for evidence), it presented the Smiths’ opening address on the group’s broadest of musical envelopes.

  The song title was taken directly from the writings of Oscar Wilde’s mother, who had published it, under the pen name Speranza, in the Irish newspaper The Nation at the time of the Potato Famine. “One bold, one decisive move,” she had written. “One instant to take breath, and then a rising: a rush, a charge from North, South, East and West upon the English garrison, and the land is ours.…”1 But if Morrissey was hoping to inspire a similar united uprising against the modern English garrison, it would prove too late: Thatcher was elected to a third term as prime minister in the period between the song’s recording and its release. (So much for Red Wedge.) Besides, the song itself did not expound much upon its title; rather, the lyrics quickly diverged into the first of Strangeways’s many songs about failed love.

  The best of these, at least from the point of studio arrangements, was “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me,” which both M
orrissey and Marr would repeatedly claim as their favorite Smiths song of all. Morrissey had spoken the previous November of wanting “to do some very searing ballads,” and Marr had made it clear of his determination to progress musically; the merger of a hefty ambient piano mood piece with a dramatic 3/4 ballad subsequently satisfied both demands, calling up in the process just about every piece of studio sophistication in the Smiths’ arsenal: BBC Sound Effects albums, vast Emulator orchestras, deep resounding sampled bass notes, arpeggiated keyboard melodies balanced against those of the guitar, syncopated drum inflections, and an exploratory guitar solo deep in the mix at the song’s conclusion. It was hardly surprising to discover that the song was worked on, steadily, for two weeks or more at Wool Hall, and that it was largely finished before Morrissey came in to deliver his vocals, which, despite the title suggesting a repeat of his long-standing formula, served instead as his final word on the subject—at least within the Smiths. Simon Goddard referred to it, fairly enough, as the “shattering hopeless resignation that this merciless solitude is the protagonist’s life sentence,” and concluded that “Morrissey’s voice is all the more affecting for its lack of hysteria, baring his soul with an almost unbearable reconciled sincerity.”

  Strangeways was certainly not all high drama. “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before,” as its playful title inadvertently suggested, brought back the melodic guitar formula that had served the early Smiths so very well, from the use of hand-picked arpeggios to the dropping of kitchen knives on open strings. But it was more artfully arranged than its predecessors, as was “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” which, though it was essentially the sound of the unadorned four-piece band, would have sounded too sophisticated on any of the previous albums—in part because it included a clearly defined guitar solo, although not without ironic recognition of this fact; the drums even dropped out to highlight rhythmic handclaps as accompaniment to this rare break with tradition.