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

by Tony Fletcher

  Once he and Morrissey were back in Britain, they let July pass by with no attempt at formulating either an exit strategy or a continued game plan. Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce saw each other all the time, as usual, but there was almost no other communication. And there was nobody in a position to communicate for them. Everyone had taken sides, including the crew, the agents, the managers, the record companies. It didn’t take long for word to spread around Manchester that Morrissey and Marr weren’t talking.

  Bizarrely—and this has to appear as confirmation of the north-south divide, even within the politically correct music business—that word failed to reach the offices of the London music papers. It was only when the NME stringer Dave Haslam, a long-term Smiths fan, a journalist, a Haçienda club DJ, and close friend with Andrew Berry and, by extension, part of Johnny Marr’s circle, was on a phone call pitching ideas to features editor Danny Kelly in late July, that the news finally traveled to the capital. “I’m not a cutthroat journalist,” said Haslam, who only two years earlier had been one of the fanzine editors “moderated” by the Melody Maker editor for their collective interview with Morrissey. “I’m not the kind of person who’s going to ring up the NME and say ‘I’ve got a scoop.’ I just remember a conversation where I said, ‘You do know that Johnny Marr is not working with Morrissey anymore and the general implication seems to be that they’re not going to be working together again in the future?’ And he said, ‘I didn’t.’ ”

  This was all the more surprising given that NME had only recently published an interview with the Cradle, the new Manchester band put together by former Easterhouse guitarist Ivor Perry, who had grown frustrated with his brother’s overpoliticization of that band, and none other than Craig Gannon. A discussion about Gannon’s time with the Smiths quickly turned to his nonpayment for that role, and manager John Barratt was forced to interrupt before anyone said anything legally damaging, accidentally letting on to journalist Len Brown in the process that “the Smiths are going through great personal turmoil.” Nobody appeared to pick up on it.

  For his part, Danny Kelly had conducted both of NME’s last two cover stories on the Smiths, one with Morrissey, the more recent one with Marr, and may have felt that he knew them as well as anyone in the press. One would like to believe he was enough of a fan that he did not want to see the group break up. But his first loyalties appeared to be not so much to his musical tastes or even that of the paper’s readers as much as to his own pursuit of the big story. For their August 1 edition, NME trumpeted the rumor “Smiths to Split?” on the cover. Inside, on page 3, the paper used the same three words but minus now the question mark, as if a statement of fact. Kelly’s uncredited news story was hardly the height of music journalism, but neither was it a total lie. It may have been true that Marr was fed up with “the singer acting the self-centered star,” though the guitarist was not the type to put it that way in public. And it may equally have been correct to state that Morrissey was “not pleased with the company that Marr is keeping,” but neither would the singer have put it so bluntly. The assertion about Marr “interrupting Smiths recording sessions to fly to the States to record with Talking Heads, and using Rough Trade money to pay for the trip” was a damaging fabrication. And the revelation that Marr was “acting the guitar hero” by “playing on albums by Keith Richard [sic], Bobby Womack and Bryan Ferry” was tabloid hysteria worthy only of the Sun: the first two collaborations never emerged (Marr had joined Womack on playing with Ron Wood in private), and the third should have been old news already, given that the Smiths had conducted a world tour and recorded one album and three additional singles in the time since Marr had recorded with Ferry. But taken together, it was enough to fan the flames of controversy. Unable to contact any members of the band, Kelly quoted Mike Joyce’s girlfriend instead (“he doesn’t want to talk about that” she had reputedly told NME on the phone, inadvertently giving the game away). And they eventually got an official denial from Morrissey, through Rough Trade, which nonetheless had the hollow ring of desperation: “Whoever says the Smiths have split shall be severely spanked by me with a wet plimsoll.”

  When NME hit the stands, Johnny Marr, his paranoia now rampant, concluded that the story had been planted as a further provocation, and “I just couldn’t work out any way that that could have got to the newspaper without it coming from one of the other three.” The fact that it might, if only inadvertently, have come from someone in his own camp never occurred to him. Rather than call Morrissey to ask as much, or to clear the air, or even to confirm his departure before making it public; failing to heed Ken Friedman’s advice; too impetuous to call anyone else to talk him out of it, Johnny Marr picked up the phone, dialed NME, and confirmed the rumors.

  He did so calmly, countering Kelly’s hyperbolic claims one by one, and then, concisely, offering an explanation for his departure. “There are things I want to do, musically, that there is just not scope for in The Smiths.” The infamous “musical differences”? asked Kelly. “I’ve got absolutely no problem with what The Smiths are doing,” Marr replied. “The stuff we’ve just done for the new album is great, the best we’ve ever done. I’m really proud of it. But there are things that I want to do that can only happen outside of The Smiths.” Any fan with any sort of brain, reading as much, would have felt compelled to ask: why was it not possible to do both?

  The same evening that the paper was published, Janice Long had the honor of unveiling “Girlfriend in a Coma” on Radio 1. She preceded this exclusive with the announcement that the Smiths had split up.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY

  It was a special musical relationship. And those are few and far between. For Johnny and I, it won’t come again. I think he knows that and I know it. The Smiths had the best of Johnny and me. Those were definitely the days.

  —Morrissey, Select, July 1991

  I think my life has turned out as it was meant to be. And I would suggest that Morrissey’s has too. Absolutely. I really would.

  —Johnny Marr, March 2011

  After recording seven albums in less than four years, releasing countless non-album singles in between, and almost coming apart at the seams after a chaotic world tour, the biggest band in Britain announced that they were taking three months off from one another. It was September 1966, and that band was the Beatles. John Lennon acted in a movie; Paul McCartney made music for a movie; George Harrison went to India to study with Ravi Shankar; and Ringo Starr stayed home. The press, both in Britain and America, had a field day speculating on their likely breakup. But when the “trial separation” ended, the Beatles quickly reunited. “I didn’t meet anyone else I liked,” said Paul McCartney. They spent the next three years making some of the greatest records in the history of popular music.

  Could the Smiths have benefited similarly from such an officially sanctioned sabbatical? Those close to the group certainly thought so. “If they’d only just let Johnny go on holiday for three months, they’d still be playing,” said Geoff Travis almost a quarter century later. With equally lengthy hindsight, Grant Showbiz was able to observe of his fateful production session with the band, “It has to be said that cancelling those sessions and giving [Johnny Marr] a break would have been the answer.” John Featherstone saw the problem as, “There wasn’t anybody saying, ‘Hey, it’s OK to take a break. It’s OK to slow down.’ All the band had done was record, do live shows, record, do live shows.… Nobody had connected the dots that you could do something else.”

  Other bands had connected those dots, and not just the Beatles twenty years earlier. The Smiths’ American counterparts, R.E.M., had recognized from the outset that, hard as they worked (an album a year for six years straight, plus much more consistent touring than the Smiths), they each had a life outside of the band. For their hyperactive guitarist, Peter Buck, that meant playing with other musicians at every opportunity; not on the scale of Johnny Marr’s A-List requests, perhaps, but moonlighting all the same. He was given that crucial
leeway in large part because the rest of his group, but especially singer, lyricist, college generation idol, and Buck’s cofounder in the band, Michael Stipe, had enough self-confidence to know that his guitarist would return, happier and healthier as a result. It’s the tragedy of the Smiths that Morrissey appeared to lack such self-assurance to allow his partner similarly free rein. But it’s an equal tragedy—at least for fans who wanted to see them stick together—that Marr couldn’t play the Peter Buck role so well. As Ken Friedman, who would later attract U2 and Michael Stipe as investors in his New York restaurant, observed, “Johnny is such a good guitar player. Johnny’s better than [U2’s] the Edge, he’s better than anybody, but Johnny’s ego is too big to take a back seat to any lead singer. I blame Morrissey for ninety-eight percent of the Smiths breaking up, but Johnny should have known how to just let Morrissey be the lead singer. Just be the guitar player. Johnny wanted to be the equal, and it’s never really that way. Michael Stipe and Peter Buck aren’t really equal.”

  Perhaps not; perhaps the reference point should be Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Though this pair would ultimately come to be seen as sharing equal power, responsibility, and credibility in the Rolling Stones, that was not an immediate observation on the part of the fans, or even within the group. It was not until a power struggle throughout the late 1980s, more than a quarter century after they had formed, that Richards was able to demonstrate his unequivocal importance, and only after waging a war of words in the press with his childhood friend and releasing a more positively received solo album than Jagger’s. Marr, evidently, did not have the patience for such a long marriage.

  Morrissey seemed to understand as much. “When he left,” he said of Marr not long after the event, “he wanted to make a name for himself, which he did. He wanted to be recognized as Johnny Marr. He was no longer satisfied with a secondary role of living in my shadow. He knew that if he stayed in the group he would always be the guitarist. That wasn’t enough for him anymore.”

  Of course, it’s easy to point the finger at the real problem in this failure of communication and empathy, the inability to trust each other to take time away from each other: the lack of management. U2 and R.E.M. each had managers on board from the beginning, trusted individuals who not only maintained professional relations with record companies and ensured smooth travels on tour but could run interference between members when relations ran sour, and could rally the troops when the occasion demanded. Johnny Marr was eventually able to admit that calling NME to confirm his departure from the Smiths “was one of the many things that would have been handled better had we had an objective, guiding, wiser head around us. Like Joe [Moss].” (One of Marr’s first acts upon leaving was to settle the Smiths’ debt with Moss.) But Morrissey would never put sufficient trust in any qualified manager for long enough to let one offer such guidance. As such, he had only himself to blame when there was nobody around to talk Marr into staying.

  Marr had little time for all the what-ifs and if-onlys. “I think the band needed to split when they split,” he said; the most he was willing to offer was, “Had we carried on, we would have split in the next year anyway.” His reasoning came down not merely to the nature of the Smiths’ musical direction, which was clearly coming into conflict, but the very essence of what had made the Smiths unique: the personalities. “As people we’re just too different. I have my way of doing things and he has his.” Marr considered himself “a studio musician who gets dragged onstage.” Morrissey, he said, “knows he’s a performer.”1

  If so, it took the singer a while to realize as much: more than two years passed between the last Smiths concert and the first Morrissey solo show. In the immediate aftermath of the Smiths’ breakup, Morrissey could not agree with his former partner that they had ended at the right time. “The Smiths were almost like a painting,” he explained eloquently to Len Brown in NME while the dust was still settling. “Every month you’d add a little bit here and a little bit there … but it wasn’t quite complete and it was whipped away. And I find it quite hard to adapt to that.” Time only somewhat repaired the wound: “I feel a complete sense of hopelessness about the demise of the Smiths,” he said in 1991. As late as 2004, talking to Mojo after seven years without a record release, he still insisted that he “was absolutely horrified” when the Smiths finished, but at least he was now able to laugh about it as he said so. “I’ve had the time to get over it,” he continued, “and I’ve had excessive counseling and I’ve picked up the pieces of my life and I’m marching on into … the abyss.”

  The regret nonetheless remained (and especially for the underpaid rhythm section) that the Smiths did not stay together long enough to properly capitalize on their credibility. They were still on an upward trajectory at the time they broke up, as proven by the fact that Strangeways, Here We Come sold just as well in the UK as its predecessors, and that much better in the States, where it would become their highest-charting (and second gold) album despite the absence of almost any valid promotional tool. In terms of American acceptance, the Smiths were right behind Depeche Mode and the Cure (who each went on to multiplatinum albums and stadium concerts), having already charged ahead of Echo & the Bunnymen and New Order; they were almost in lockstep with U2 and R.E.M. at similar points in their American careers. Had they been able to weather the storms that appear to challenge every rock group’s stability after five years’ constant hard work and the wanderlust that inherently calls out to its creative forces, they would surely have reaped the results.

  “They could have been one of the biggest bands in the world,” said Ken Friedman, who was hardly alone in expressing this opinion, and as the band’s final manager, was able to offer an inside perspective on their failure to realize as much. “I’m not convinced Morrissey didn’t want it. I think he was afraid of it. Morrissey is lazy. Morrissey doesn’t deal in reality. He won’t deal with the fact that you should pay people, or if you say you’re going to do it, you should do it. Morrissey loves money as much as anyone I know, but he just isn’t willing to do the work.”

  Others considered that the Smiths had already achieved everything that was coming their way. “Did they fail?” asked Billy Bragg. “Or did they stay true to what they believed in? I see that they did what they set out to do—which was to set the world on fire. What they didn’t set out to do was become the new Pink Floyd.”

  “The success would have been staggering and the trajectory would have been so clichédly brilliant if they’d had great management,” said Grant Showbiz. “But the fact that they didn’t and it still happened … The fact that the booking agency wasn’t that great, and the record label weren’t that brilliant, and Mozzer and Johnny didn’t know as much as they thought they knew—and thank God they didn’t know and thank God they thought they knew, because they took us to that brilliant place. What I always like is that the success of it is built completely on the brilliance of the music. And maybe some of the interviews. The Smiths is a miracle from beginning to end. That Johnny found Morrissey and that Morrissey had that loner thing but somehow was pulled into it all by Johnny and went along with it. And then stayed long enough to do all that. It’s the perfect story, because they made these incredible records. Maybe five years is good for a band?”

  Maybe it is. Indeed, for every R.E.M. and U2 who, with the right organization behind them, can slow down sufficiently to ensure their longevity, there are bands (typically British) like the Jam and the Clash who release a torrent of brilliant work in a blazing stream of exhaustive glory and fall apart after five or six years as a result. The Smiths joined that very short list of truly great groups who never embarrassed themselves either by persisting together into mediocrity, or by subsequently reuniting. By that, their musical reputation would remain intact.

  It was almost not so. The August 8 NME story that trailed the words “ ‘Why I Quit’ by Johnny Marr” on its front cover also carried a rushed statement from “the Smiths” via Rough Trade, one that was not approved by t
he band’s founding member. “The Smiths announce that Johnny Marr has left the group. However they would like to confirm that other guitarists are being considered to replace him.”

  Even all these years later, it is difficult to comprehend what could have been going through the remaining Smiths’ minds when they made this announcement—let alone that they then acted upon it. Leaving aside, for the moment, the highly thorny issues of creativity and credibility at stake by continuing without Marr, the essential question remains: why the hurry? Not only was Strangeways about to hit the shops, and presumably take care of audience demand for most of the following year, but it had been preceded by such a flurry of singles activity that both Rough Trade and Sire had released bestselling compilations of this material in the spring. The market was once again saturated; there was simply no need to flood it with further new music. The only logical reason for the Smiths—as led by Morrissey, and without Marr—to keep going at that immediate point in time would have been to tour the new album, but that was never mentioned to prospective guitarists; besides, Morrissey had all but announced his retirement from the stage in his Q cover story that month, when he stated, “I no longer feel that it’s something I want to continue doing.”