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

by Tony Fletcher

  Increasingly exasperated, Johnny Marr called an emergency meeting of the Smiths at Geales, an upscale fish-and-chips restaurant in Notting Hill. There, he laid out his immediate concerns: he had been invited to play on the Talking Heads’ new album, which was being produced by Steve Lillywhite; Bryan Ferry was gearing up to release his album Bête Noire, featuring “The Right Stuff” as the lead UK single, and had asked to involve Marr in its promotion. Marr planned to say yes to both of these opportunities, and others that were coming his way. He saw neither the need to seek permission nor make apologies for doing so, especially given the roadblocks he felt Morrissey was putting in the way of the Smiths’ career. But first off, he wanted to take a proper holiday, something he hadn’t allowed himself in the five hectic years—almost to the day—since he had knocked on Morrissey’s door.

  The others heard all this as Marr’s resignation speech. “Let’s just do one more album,” suggested Mike Joyce, as a knee-jerk reaction. It was, he later admitted, “probably the worst thing I could have said.”

  Morrissey’s reaction was more circumspect. “One night, we had a conversation about it,” he said, recalling these discussions a few months later, “and he was saying, ‘I think it’s about time’ and ‘I’ve had enough’ and I was saying, ‘Yeah, I understand,’ but I didn’t really mean it. I didn’t think that he’d completely pull the plug.”

  “I don’t remember if I said that I was going to leave the band or not,” Marr said years later of that summit, acknowledging the conflicting memories of it. “But I said that we needed a break, and that we needed to rethink what we were doing. Because I wanted to do other things, and one of them was to go away for a couple of weeks. We’d just done a record that I thought was the best thing we’d ever done. And we didn’t have a tour on the horizon, and it just seemed like a really smart move. They could have sat there and listened to me being re-enthusiastic about a reinvention of my life, and their lives. Or they could have heard me say those words as ‘This is the end, I want out, I’m not coming back.’ Which is what they did.” Andy Rourke’s typically droll pronouncement that “we actually broke up in a chippy” confirmed that they heard it the latter way.

  “The Smiths broke down because of strain,” said Morrissey, not long after the breakup. “I think Johnny simply had enough of the intensified pressure and wanted to play music.… He just really wanted to play music and get on with it. That’s why the Smiths ended.”

  Marr would not have denied this, but, confirming Morrissey’s original supposition of the meeting, neither was he yet certain that he wanted to leave. “I loved the way we worked,” he said, “which was me and Stephen Street with the band’s input, but I also really loved the idea of working with Steve Lillywhite with the Talking Heads.” His insistence on spending a few days in Paris on what would turn out to be that group’s final album together appeared only to open a chasm of what he called “insecurity and paranoia,” which naturally fed back on him. “The more they insinuated that I was being disloyal, the more I got upset about that insinuation, and then communication broke down. It really pissed me off to be talked to like I was about to be treacherous.”

  Morrissey would deny that he, for one, was unsupportive of Marr’s musical side ventures. “I was always the only person who encouraged him to do extracurricular activities,” he insisted just a few months later, though by that point he had claimed that he knew nothing of the Talking Heads session until after the fact, which seemed highly unlikely. Either way, it was Marr’s recollection that in the wake of the Geales meeting, the other Smiths came back to him with a demand of their own: that they record B-sides for “Girlfriend in a Coma”—and now, before Marr took his break. The group had always functioned best as a cohesive unit in the studio, more so than on tour, and there may have been a hope that a relaxed B-sides session would renew the team spirit. There might also have been the supposition that Marr, who was typically so eager to record that he had recently done so while in a neck brace, would welcome the opportunity to ensure that everything was lined up for the album. But while the need for B-sides was genuine (unlike The Queen Is Dead, there were no tracks left over), the urgency was forced: the release of the single was still months away. Besides, Marr’s well was dry; he had no new material to offer. In addition, just like the last album, the process of recording and mixing Strangeways, Here We Come had left him exhausted, which was all the more reason he wanted a holiday. The only reason he could see that the band was insisting on doing the B-sides now was out of a fear that he wouldn’t return to them—which he took as a provocation. And in coming to him as a united front, it was evident that something had taken place that would never previously have been suspected: collusion between Morrissey and the rhythm section.

  Andy Rourke and Johnny Marr had been best friends for a decade now, through thick and thin, through fame (for both of them) and fortune (for one of them), through sickness, drug addiction, and in good spirits, if not always in health. Yet somehow, they had stopped communicating. “Some of it was my fault,” said Marr, “because I’d got too far away from him. And my relationship with Morrissey got even more exclusive. But Andy created some of that by getting very, very distant because of his drug issue. Years later I realized that his role in the band, my friendship with him, in being part of my roots, and in a way my refuge, was no longer there.” He was left to wonder whether “had me and Andy not got so estranged, things wouldn’t have got to such a boiling point.”

  Rourke agreed. The bass player noted that the subsequent split “was a culmination of a lot of things: the pressure of us not having a manager, the musical direction that Morrissey wanted to take was different from the one that Johnny wanted to take.” In particular, though, he said, “the solidarity that we had in ’83, ’84 had gradually been knocked down by outside pressures, and I think had we still had that, the band would have carried on, but we weren’t communicating with each other as well as we should have been doing.”

  Rourke was not an instigator. His personality was to go with the flow. And if the flow of his continued musical career depended on siding with his new best friend, Mike Joyce, alongside Morrissey—rather than with his original but perhaps now former best friend, Johnny Marr—then that would have been his natural path of least resistance. More curious, especially considering what would transpire down the line, was Mike Joyce’s decision to side with Morrissey, in effect taking over Marr’s role in the band while Marr was still in the band. This shift would become clear when Marr succumbed to pressure—but unwillingly, which hardly helped proceedings—and agreed to spend a week in the middle of May recording B-sides at his friend Fred Hood’s studio, the Cathouse in Streatham, South London, with Grant Showbiz producing. On the first day, Marr recalled, Mike Joyce came up to him to announce that they would be recording Cilla Black’s “Work Is a Four-Letter Word” from the critically panned 1968 hit movie of the same name.

  “That doesn’t happen,” said Marr. “No slight on Mike. I’m sure he was only doing what he thought was right. He was given the arrow and he stuck it in.” As far as Marr was concerned, the only person who could advise him what to record would be Morrissey, “who would have suggested it in exactly the right way.” That, said Marr, “was the first part of that problem. The second part of it is the actual song.” The very notion of covering “some silly Cilla Black song” was anathema to Marr’s forward-looking agenda (especially after the disastrous Twinkle cover). In addition, he took “Work Is a Four-Letter Word” at face value and “as a very pointed sort of choice.”

  The lyrics bore out his concern. They could, at that point in time, have been written directly from Morrissey’s hand to Marr’s ears, perhaps none more so than the lines “If you stay I’ll stay right beside you and my love may help to remind you to forget that work is a four-letter word.” But if Morrissey intended any of that to be a signal of his devotion, Marr took it, instead, as an insult. “I defy anyone to think that my dedication and hard work was ever in qu
estion. No way. So you expect me to go along with that, not just perform it and produce it, but actually take that shit? That I’ve been anything other than driven, to an insane degree? My back just went up.”2

  Grant Showbiz was thrilled at finally being able to record his main employers. From his vantage point at the mixing board on tour, he had heard many a Smiths song come together at soundcheck and imagined it sounding different on record. “With that ego you have as a producer, I thought, ‘I know this band really well, if I could just get the chance to get in there and show my mettle we could create beauty and wonder.’ ” Instead, he found himself trying to wrestle a couple of finished mixes out of five different songs (including a cover version of Elvis Presley’s “A Fool Such As I” and two incomplete and formulaic instrumentals) attempted over a weeklong session that felt a lot longer. Though he insisted that it wasn’t “that awful a time,” it was still the first occasion he had seen Morrissey and Marr snap at each other: “To suddenly see this entity fighting itself was very peculiar.” On one occasion Morrissey got drunk, stumbling around with a bottle, insisting, “Let’s go do this song.” Marr shouted back at him, “What song? We haven’t got a bloody song.” Showbiz had often hung out in the studio with the Smiths; it was the first time he had ever seen them dysfunctional. Nonetheless, like Street before him, the fact that he didn’t know any more about the state of their relationship than what boiled over in public indicated the extent to which the group continued to close ranks—even in front of one of its very closest confidants.

  In hindsight, Showbiz realized, “Johnny’s nature and drive to hold the Smiths together and make it work was fighting a complete disillusionment in the whole thing. He was drowning, not waving.” Marr himself saw of the session that “it very much came down to a standoff that was three against one. I was sleeping under the mixing desk, trying to get stuff finished, songs I didn’t like. And then the three of them would convene and come in together, en masse. That was the first time that had happened, and that was a statement—and that added to me feeling really alienated. I was feeling very unloved.”

  For those who knew neither of Marr’s determination to move away from such music nor of Morrissey’s message to him via the lyrics, “Work Is a Four-Letter Word” came across as a faithful rendition of an archetypal piece of ’60s cinematic melodrama; saved from the pointless trickery of “Golden Lights,” it was Smiths lite, perhaps, and a throwback to the jangly sound of old, but it had the air of the easygoing, mildly throwaway cover version that adorned many a major band’s B-side. The session’s lone surviving original composition, “I Keep Mine Hidden,” turned out to be the last of the Morrissey-Marr song-writing partnership, and in that sense, an apt follow-on from “I Won’t Share You,” although it would ultimately precede the album track into the record shops. Two minutes of Madness-meets-the-Kinks, knees-up, upright piano, guitar, bass, and drums, with Morrissey playing the whistling milkman at the front end, it was rightly considered the Smiths’ ultimate music-hall statement. It could have been a perfect pub sing-along, perhaps an encore performance at the London Palladium. It would never get the chance. In the lyrics, somewhat buried in a mix ultimately handed to Stephen Street, Morrissey confessed to his repressed personality: “Hate love and war, force emotions to the fore, but not for me of course, of course, I keep mine hidden.” The object of his affections, however, was either praised or accused (or perhaps simply informed) of the opposite trait.

  It was true that Marr wore his emotions very much on his sleeve, and that didn’t always make him an easy person to be around. “I’m not saying by any means that throughout the band, that I was never a pain in the arse,” he admitted. “I’m sure I was. I’m sure they had to put up with stuff from me.” But at the Cathouse, he felt that he was being subjected to passive-aggressive behavior that did nothing to convince him to stay with the Smiths after his holiday.

  All the same, Showbiz left the session relatively optimistic. “There were wonderful and amazing moments in it and it wasn’t an incredible grind. There would be that kind of antagonism and then everyone would be back in the mold.” As far as he was concerned, “you could quite easily have expected that band to go off and rejoin up in a few weeks’ time.”

  In a normal scenario, he would have been right. But Marr saw it differently. “The last night I was in the band,” which was the last night at the Cathouse, “I turned to Andy and said, ‘You know the way this is going to end?’ and he looked up and said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ And I took that as approval. And it was outside of being in the Smiths. It was just two people who knew each other very well.”

  Morrissey was not present in the studio that day, May 22, which was his twenty-eighth birthday—and his last, as he might have suspected by then, as a member of the Smiths. The following week, Marr and his wife flew out to Los Angeles, where Louder Than Bombs had just peaked at number 62, the Smiths’ highest chart position yet, on its way to being certified gold for sales of 500,000 copies—without the benefit of a proper video, let alone a single live date. In the absence of any other necessary activity, Morrissey took a holiday in the same location. The partners and best friends of the last five years did not see each other while in the City of Angels. They would not see each other for many years to come.

  If anybody at Rough Trade suspected anything was amiss, they certainly weren’t about to publicize as much. The label went ahead and scheduled “Girlfriend in a Coma” for release in early August, and Strangeways, Here We Come for late September, the first Smiths studio album to be released in the busy end-of-year season. Morrissey, as ever, put together the artwork: East of Eden actor Richard Davalos on the album, and for the single, Shelagh Delaney, who had also been featured on Louder Than Bombs and who was widely presumed to have been the subject of “Sheila Take a Bow” (not that Morrissey’s lyrics were so direct as that). Notably, the sleeve for “Girlfriend in a Coma” contained the additional credit “Love and Thanks to Angie Marr.” This was the first printed acknowledgment of her integral role—with Johnny, with Morrissey, and with the band as a whole—and it suggested that someone knew they were running short of opportunities. Still, while in Los Angeles, Johnny Marr stopped in at KROQ, where the Smiths were nothing short of gods, and offered no hint of strife. “I haven’t seen him for a week and I really miss him,” he said of Morrissey, which, if it wasn’t an outright lie, deserved some sort of action upon his return to demonstrate as much. For his own part, Morrissey gave a major interview to the new monthly music magazine Q, in which he appeared perfectly relaxed and confident, although his confession that the thrill of live performance had “totally, totally gone … and I don’t really know what to do about it” came as a surprise to those who knew him to say that he only truly became himself onstage. Perhaps this comment, like Johnny Marr’s, demonstrated a desire to paper over a chasm.

  While much of the Q interview was taken up with his usual aphorisms on daily life, Morrissey appeared inflamed about the fallout with Ken Friedman. “He lasted five and a half weeks,” said the singer. “And he’s not going to go down without a hideous great big dirty fight. It’s very depressing for instance to think that he is going to fight for fifteen per cent of everything we earn for the next twelve months. He’s not going to get it but fighting him off is going to cost an enormous amount of money and physical hardship.” Friedman had had little opportunity to commission a group that had consciously signed its major-label deal in between managers (and apparently paid a price for it, literally, in terms of legal fees) and who had not played a show under his jurisdiction. But he would have had a legal claim on the royalties for Strangeways, which had been recorded during his brief period in charge. He ultimately settled for a one-off payment, largely at Johnny Marr’s insistence that Morrissey, as he recalled, is “going to make your life miserable, just give it up.”

  Friedman’s stint with UB40 had already come to a similarly chaotic premature demise when the group’s bassist, Earl Falconer, was charged in the drivin
g death of his brother, the group’s sound engineer and dub producer, a problem that put Andy Rourke’s drug bust in very minor perspective. As UB40 took a sabbatical, Friedman closed up his office and returned to California. The other Smiths were concerned that Marr had fallen under Friedman’s spell and that the choice of Los Angeles as a vacation destination was a first step toward relocating in the rock capital. On the second fear, they were right: he did, in fact, move there for a while, the following year. On the first, however, they were wrong: while Marr was in California, Friedman was in Nepal, trying to clear his head in high altitude. When he returned and Marr explained what had happened to the Smiths, Friedman offered him sound advice based on how he had seen the Police handle their own breakup: “Don’t make an announcement. There’s no upside. The press will not let the truth get in the way of a good story. They will write whatever story they want. If you say anything, what’s the point? Except getting it off your chest. In which case, write it down and throw it away.” In the meantime, Friedman lined up a meeting with the president of Capitol, Marr’s future American record company. Marr, uncharacteristically, failed to show: presumably there was nothing he felt he could say for himself that the label would want to hear.