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

by Tony Fletcher

  Similarly, while “Unhappy Birthday” retreated to the semiacoustic guitars and straightforward band performances of many earlier Smiths songs, the addition of an effects-heavy electric guitar and harmonium distinguished it from previous albums. “It’s still introspective,” observed Johnny Marr, “but there’s a wistfulness to it. There’s a carefree aspect to it.” That latter attribute lay behind the original intent of “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish,” which, it was not surprising to discover, given its almost juvenile glam-rock rhythm, had begun life as a jam during the “Sheila” session. Augmented by hammy horn blasts from the Emulator, and with a digital snare beat for additional glitter-band feel (Marr offered that Sparks’s “Amateur Hour” was his actual inspiration), it included all kinds of guitar bursts, drum breakouts, and special effects, and concluded with the rare sound of Morrissey in the booth: “OK, Stephen, shall we do that again?” (The answer, evidently, was “no need.”) Given its exuberance, it came as something of a surprise to discover that the song had provoked one of the only studio arguments in the group’s entire recording career, when Stephen Street took a rough cassette mix to Morrissey’s adjoining cottage only to return with the news that Morrissey didn’t like the arrangement. “Fuck him,” Marr shouted. “He can think of something then.” It was, said Street, “the only time I ever really saw Johnny flash,” and if he took that as a sign that tensions were beginning to bubble to the surface, it was equally a mark of the partnership’s long-standing harmony, for there were few bands whose members didn’t occasionally erupt at each other in the studio as part of the familiar creative push and pull.

  All along, the plan was for the undisputed epic, “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me,” to conclude the album—until a more poignant song popped up from nowhere at almost the very last moment, when Marr decided to dust off an old Autoharp sitting around at Wood Hall. “It again was one of those things where I was just playing how I felt,” said Marr. “There’s a melancholy in there, but it wasn’t weighed down by any other instrumentation.” Using a familiar chord pattern, such as the one that had informed “Ask,” Marr hit on something magical, and recorded it immediately. Street remembered that in this particular case, Morrissey was present in the studio and quickly asked for a cassette. When he returned to sing his vocals (eventually augmented by a restrained bass line and little else other than vocal harmonies), it was as if he had found in its simple structure the potential for a true torch song, another of the “searing ballads” he was so keen to perform. He called it “I Won’t Share You,” and the others recalled that as he sang it, shivers shot down their spines. For aside from the beauty of his performance, the manner in which he once more so deftly matched his songwriting partner’s musical motif, it raised the question: who was he not willing to share?

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-NINE

  Q: What are your defence mechanisms?

  A: Sudden illness. It never fails.

  —Morrissey to Andrew Male, Mojo, April 2006

  All the no-shows and blowouts that happened, particularly over the last two years of the band, were a very significant factor in my decision to quit the band and a huge factor in my no longer feeling the same friendship with Morrissey.

  —Johnny Marr, March 2011

  The majority of major rock bands demand to be left alone while recording an album. Tours can be penciled in for further down the line, and the occasional business meeting held with management over dinner, perhaps, but otherwise the artist typically desires peace and privacy to focus on his or her art. The Smiths, however, were too famously hyperactive, and too infamously disorganized, for this to ever be a possibility. Though they didn’t enter Wool Hall Studios until they had wrapped up the promotion for “Shoplifters of the World Unite” and The World Won’t Listen, they did not manage to complete the album before promotion kicked in for “Sheila Take a Bow.” (The option to delay the single until they were done with Strangeways appeared not to have been taken into consideration.) Significantly, at the end of March, right in the middle of the session, Sire unveiled its own double album compilation, Louder Than Bombs, comprising everything the Smiths had not released on an American studio album.1

  It was an astonishing body of work: twenty-four songs in all, going as far back as the single version of “Hand in Glove” and coming right up to date with “Sheila Take a Bow.” That the sequencing appeared random was part of its charm: it careened from ballad to rocker, from early Peel session to latter-day glam anthem, all with the unpredictable rush of a future iPod set to shuffle. Given the quality and quantity—and the scope—of the material, it could lay claim to being the finest of all Smiths records released during the band’s career. Sire certainly thought so—which was why the label once again approached the thorny issue of a promotional video.

  “We were limited in airplay because there were only so many (radio) stations that were playing the Smiths, and only so many that were set up to play artists like the Smiths,” said Steven Baker of Warner Bros. On the other hand, “MTV was interested in the Smiths, so that was part of our frustration. Here’s a company that’s an important part of the marketing of the groups, but we couldn’t deliver to them the video that other alternative groups were making.” Over the last couple of years, MTV had play-listed the likes of Lloyd Cole, the Woodentops, and Pete Shelley—all considerably less significant to the station’s audience than the Smiths. In late 1986, New Order, the Smiths’ equally obstinate Mancunian counterparts, had allowed the artist Robert Largo to direct a video for their single “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and the fast-cut, colorful result had broken through in America in a way that the claustrophobic Derek Jarman Smiths videos simply could not. Also the previous year, MTV had launched a weekly Sunday night “alternative music” show, 120 Minutes, which, especially for those who lived in remote areas without access to alternative radio, immediately developed a fanatical following; again, the Smiths were obvious contenders for focused rotation. “Anytime the Smiths got one video spin on 120 Minutes or one play on KROQ it turned into immediate reaction,” said Baker of the Smiths’ fanatical appeal. “Anything we got was worth a hundred times what some other band might have gotten.” Now, with “Sheila Take a Bow,” an anthemic single that was to be featured as the second song on Louder Than Bombs, Sire/Warner Bros. pushed once more.

  The label recommended to Ken Friedman that the band work with a young female director, Tamra Davis, who described herself as “the director that companies hired to get the video out of somebody that would never make a video.” In this capacity, Davis had already delivered videos to Warner Bros. for Depeche Mode and New Order. “I always came to it that I was a big fan, and that I worked with bands that I loved. My work was not big and commercial, it was more artist-inspired.” Of the Smiths, she declared the same impossible devotion as did hundreds of thousands of others: “I was the biggest fan in the world.” For the Anglophile Davis, this was a dream assignment.

  For Friedman, it made sense too. As he attempted to line up tours—one of the European summer festivals and another of the American sheds—on the back of Louder Than Bombs, he found Morrissey, in particular, resistant to the idea. “It’s true, if I’d nodded, a world tour would have happened,” the singer admitted less than a year later. “But I wasn’t prepared to become that stale pop baggage, simply checking in and checking out, not knowing where I was or what clothes I was wearing, and quite ritually standing onstage singing.” This was frustrating not only because touring was the manner by which rock bands were typically expected to promote their records, and not only because the Smiths were so incredibly good onstage, but because Friedman wanted to show that he could line up a tour of America that would prove lucrative, and absent the drama that had caused the 1986 tour to run out of steam. Yet the more he had come back to Wool Hall with reduced schedules and increased financial projections, the more he appeared to be irritating one of his clients. Stephen Street recalled “Ken trying to have meetings with Johnn
y and Morrissey to plan out what they were going to do, as any manager would want to do when they finish an album, and you could just tell Morrissey was not interested.” Friedman himself recollected Morrissey saying to him, “I’m in the studio trying to create art and you’re here trying to talk business with me. It’s messing me up. I can’t do both. Get out.” With time running out to confirm live dates, a video or two became all the more important.

  Davis was flown over to England, with the clear message from Warner Bros. that, as she recalled it, “the band really has to support this record and participate in the video, and if they mess up they’re going to have to pay for it,” meaning that the entire cost would be added to the Smiths’ account with the label. Davis and Friedman went down to Bath and stayed in a house near Wool Hall. “The plan,” said Davis, was that “we would spend a few days with them, get them familiar and comfortable with me. This was why I loved doing music video, because I was always came at it with my heart: ‘What do you want to do?’ ”

  That question was never going to be easily answered by someone as mercurial as Morrissey. “It was this very bizarre thing. I spent two, three days with him, sitting in his bedroom, sitting on his bed, and I had this feeling, ‘Is he really crazy and odd, or is he just trying to convince me?’ I couldn’t work it out if it was an act or not.” This was becoming an increasing concern around the singer, as those who knew him better than Davis worried that his affectations were taking over his true instincts. All the same, Davis found what she presumed was common ground. “We bonded on our love of old Hollywood and glamour.” A decision was reached: as well as handheld footage that she had shot around the studio in Bath, she would film the band in proper performance mode in London (none of the halfway measures of “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”) and “intercut it with old Hollywood movies.” But even as she made those plans, she remained confused by her subject. “I definitely found this disassociation between what he was doing and what the band was doing.” Morrissey’s daytime lifestyle and the other members’ nocturnal habits were testing the limits of their mutual work time; Street observed that they often didn’t start recording until the afternoon, which “Morrissey found a little bit annoying, having to sit around waiting for things to happen.”

  At the very beginning of April, as mixing got under way at Wool Hall, Johnny Marr, Mike Joyce, and Andy Rourke arrived for the video shoot at a soundstage in Battersea, South London, on schedule. Morrissey—you can guess—did not. At first it was presumed, or at least hoped, that he might just be running fashionably late, but given that Morrissey was the diurnal member of the group, this seemed unlikely. In the meantime, the production crew of cameramen, sound operators, caterers, and various technicians and assistants stood around aimlessly, totting up a bill that ran into thousands of pounds per hour.

  Davis was panic-stricken, Friedman furious, both aware not only of the considerable cost of the production but also its importance to the relationship with the American label and the industry at large. Without the promo clip, Morrissey’s demands for greater exposure in America would be greatly hampered, and the label’s enthusiasm for the group in general perhaps equally damaged. (And Sire, it had now been determined, certainly did have additional Smiths albums under contract; the effort they were putting into Louder Than Bombs suggested that it intended to make the most of them.) With Johnny Marr unable to offer any explanation, the three of them descended on Cadogan Square.

  “Somehow we know he’s there,” recalled Davis. “But he won’t open the door. And Johnny is saying, ‘We cannot be a band if this is how you’re going to act. Come on outside right now, we’ve got to do this, we’re responsible for this video, it’s costing us money.’ I remember very distinctly that I had no idea if Morrissey was standing behind that door laughing at the three of us pleading with him, or crying, also being upset. Because he was making this sound, like a cough. I didn’t know. My heart was broken. Tears were running down my face. You’re breaking up the band? Don’t do this. Ken was trying to hold it all together. I’m crying so hard. Johnny was like, ‘That’s it. The band is over. Ken, it’s over.’ And he walks away.”

  Time and again over the years, Marr had instinctively protected Morrissey when his partner had failed to show, circling the wagons over issues like the Wogan nonappearance, studio absences, and abrupt European tour cancellations. On this occasion, he could not do so. “For me to be treated just like everyone else meant that … why should I back you up? Because you’re treating me like a camera guy I’ve never met.” The three of them headed off to the Portobello Hotel to get “absolutely hammered,” as Davis described it, a process that was accelerated and exasperated by the presence there of New Order, who were headlining the Brixton Academy themselves that week.

  In the wake of the following day’s hangover, Marr did not break up the Smiths. But he had reached the end of his emotional tether. The disharmony went some way to explaining their somewhat subdued performance on The Tube the following Friday, April 10, where they introduced “Sheila Take a Bow” alongside “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” It was to be their last live performance.

  In the days before or after The Tube, Marr insisted on a meeting with Morrissey, at the latter’s flat, to discuss their future. It was Morrissey who delivered an ultimatum: Ken Friedman had to go. The singer and the new manager had grown extremely exasperated with each other over recent weeks, and it was impossible not to conclude that Morrissey’s video no-show had been his way of expressing displeasure. That there were cheaper and more politic ways of doing so should have been obvious, but no longer mattered.

  Friedman had, it was fair to say, operated like the proverbial “bull in a china shop” since taking over the Smiths, replacing the group’s long-standing booking agent and press officer as well as their accountants all in a matter of mere weeks. “We could always have done with someone more mellow,” observed Marr, citing the examples of Scott Piering, Joe Moss, and Matthew Sztumpf—but then none of those managers had satisfied Morrissey either. And Friedman insisted that he had not made the changes purely for the sake of it, but with the clear intention of elevating the Smiths to the level they deserved. (Besides, it was not he who had decided that they needed to leave Rough Trade for EMI, the most dramatic shift of all.)

  The only possible conclusion was that Morrissey did not want to be managed. This was the understanding that Marr took away from his summit with his partner: Morrissey, Marr recalled, suggested that “things should go back to the way they were, which was that I was running it. And I just wasn’t prepared to accept that responsibility. Finding a bass player and a drummer, and a lead singer, and then the lighting guy and getting a record deal, and writing the music and producing the records, I could do. But managing one of the biggest bands in the world, and dealing with agents, dealing with lawyers, renegotiating big record contracts, getting the band around eight-week tours—and it was only going to get even bigger—was something that not only was I not prepared to do, but I didn’t have the capabilities to do, even if I wanted to do it. I’ve never met anyone who thinks that the twenty-three-year-old guitar player of a really big band should be the manager.”

  Yet Morrissey felt a similar weight of responsibility. “There were so many creative ideas that came from my head and no one else’s,” he explained a decade later. “Apart from singing, creating vocal melodies and lyrics, and titles, and record sleeves, and doing interviews, there was always more to consider. Most of the pressure fell on my shoulders.” If Marr was absolutely insistent on delegating some of his long-standing (and long-suffering) responsibilities, Morrissey felt equally adamant that he could not do likewise; his were the tasks demanded of the Artist.

  The pair, then, had reached an impasse. Though Marr accepted that Friedman would have to go if he and Morrissey were to stay together, he refused to carry out the execution. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it because … It wasn’t my decision. Again. And it was another person I liked. And particularly
because of what happened with the video. I’d already had Ken’s fury and all the phone calls from everybody, the money it was going to cost us. I just wasn’t prepared to go through another massive breakup with someone I’d just spent weeks hanging out with. Too tough.”

  Marr suggested, instead, that he and Morrissey get an annulment, in the hope of seeing “a massive weight off his and my shoulders.” By becoming separate business entities, ran Marr’s way of thinking, they could appoint their own managers (Friedman recalled that they were already looking for separate lawyers), make their own financial decisions, be responsible for their own actions, and still make music together as the Smiths. Morrissey could not contemplate all of this being conducive to the notion of the Smiths as a functioning band, let alone Morrissey and Marr as a creative partnership, which might be why, in the immediate aftermath of Marr’s eventual departure, while promoting the release of Strangeways, Here We Come, the singer would observe, “It was brewing for a long time, and although many people didn’t realize it, I certainly did. It was less of a blow, really … not terribly surprising.”

  Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, however, remained in the dark. As far as they were concerned, they were finishing off the best album of their career, and the most recent costly no-show was just that: the latest in a long line of them. The Smiths came together again to perform “Sheila Take a Bow” to tape on Top of the Pops on Thursday, April 23, their rockabilly look abandoned now for casual jeans, with Johnny Marr in a beret, playing on a stage pumped with dry ice and decorated with balloons to an audience wearing party hats as if it were the Christmas season. In this crass presentation, it was almost a return to the group’s introduction on the show with “This Charming Man” just three and a half years earlier, and the Smiths looked both as incongruous and as comfortable as they always had in this format. (In fact, they would prove sufficiently happy with the performance to include it on an eventual compilation in place of the “official” American video that Tamra Davis apologetically cobbled together for Warner Bros. from nonconcurrent live footage.) The following week, “Sheila Take a Bow” rose to number 10 in the charts, a position the Smiths had only previously achieved with “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” Louder Than Bombs had just launched itself straight into the American top 100, The World Won’t Listen was still riding high in the UK, and the prestigious South Bank Show was in the middle of producing a documentary about them. Though they may not yet have known it for certain, the Smiths had chosen what was quite possibly the peak of their career to make their last public performance.