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

by Tony Fletcher

  The excuse offered at the time, at least to the “replacement” who made it as far as the recording studio, was that there was a desire to record B-sides for subsequent Strangeways singles, but, even were that the reason, there was still not a need: the Smiths typically only took two singles from an album at most, and there were plenty of alternate versions sitting around to satisfy whatever demand might exist to fill out the last 12″. Why risk everything and change the lineup for a final “bonus” track?

  The guitarist who made it to the studio was, perhaps not surprisingly, Ivor Perry. After a barrage of phone calls from Jo Slee, acting as Morrissey’s point person in the absence of an official manager, Perry went to see Morrissey in Cadogan Square. There, he recalled Morrissey telling him, “I don’t think the Smiths should end,” to which Perry recalled responding: “I think they should end. There’s no way you can have a rock group where I replace Johnny Marr. It won’t be authentic. I’m not an idiot and I don’t play like him.” Morrissey, he said, replied, “It’s not set in stone but if you do a couple of B-sides I’ve got, you’ll get paid quite handsomely.” Perry said he received additional pressure from Geoff Travis; whether this was in a genuine quest for potential Smiths B-sides, or whether Travis (and Slee) were operating under the illusion that Rough Trade would continue to record and release either a Smiths or post-Smiths group, was never fully explained. Ultimately, Perry acquiesced. “I was intrigued by how it would sound,” he said, justifying it to himself as “artistically challenging and interesting.” After raiding his considerable stockpile of material, he attended a session in August, just as Marr’s departure from the Smiths hit the music press, at the Power Plant.

  The producer at that session was Stephen Street. Like the Smiths themselves, Street viewed Strangeways as his “favorite” album. (“I’d got better at my job, they’d got better at their jobs, and I just thought we’d made a fine-sounding record.”) He was also among several Smiths insiders to express amazement at the announcement of their breakup: “I really thought it was just a bit of a tiff, and they’d be back together within a year.” Knowing, however, that the Power Plant session was “an attempt to keep the Smiths going with a new guitar player,” Street’s reasons for participating as producer were as difficult to understand as those of the three remaining Smiths. “I said, ‘Obviously I want to help out but I hope Johnny doesn’t hate me for doing this.’ ” He ought to have known Marr’s response, and that it would serve to establish the previously unconfirmed supposition that Street had been Morrissey’s man all along.2

  Morrissey, Rourke, and Joyce should have known too that, in going ahead with a new guitarist already, they were ensuring that any last possible vestige of goodwill that still existed between themselves and Johnny Marr, any hope that some time away from the band would convince their guitarist to rethink his future, was about to be thoroughly eradicated. It was, to put it crudely, an ill-thought-out “revenge fuck”—and it had the same effect as such actions often do in a troubled romance. “I was really, really hurt,” said Marr. “To be replaced so quickly by your friends, before you’ve even had a chance to change your mind, was the end of it.”

  It turned out to be the end of it anyway. For one thing, Johnny Marr had no intent of letting the others use the name of the Smiths, which he co-owned. For another, the session was a disaster. Despite Perry being impressed by Morrissey’s ability to rearrange his music—“He went, ‘The verse is the chorus, the chorus is the verse, and the middle eight is the start,’ ”—the chemistry was not there. Street and Perry already knew that they didn’t like each other, from a failed attempt by Street to produce Easterhouse for Rough Trade; this was far from the productive relationship Street had enjoyed with Johnny Marr. After two days, Morrissey abandoned the session and returned to Manchester. He left it to Mike Joyce to inform Perry. As one of the Smiths’ greatest fans, Joyce had stepped into the prospective position of musical director in large part because he had no intention of letting his favorite group (and with it his career) grind to a halt without giving it everything he had. But he did not relish telling one of Morrissey’s own friends that Morrissey had fired him. Perry, predictably, was outraged not to be informed in person. “I was aware of his relationships with other people where he doesn’t like conflict, he just cuts people out. And we were good friends. So I wrote him a harsh letter. He really was trying to keep the Smiths going, and he hadn’t been straight with me.”

  They never spoke again. (Nor was Perry paid.) But Morrissey did reply. Perry summarized his letter as saying: “Your tunes were too good to be B-sides. It was just time to move on.” Morrissey had been giving a series of interviews promoting Strangeways, Here We Come in which he had been pushed by the press to justify continuing in Marr’s absence, and he had given it his best shot. “There’s certain things I don’t have any specific control over and I really can’t stop them happening, like Johnny’s departure,” he told Chris Heath of Smash Hits, assuring him, “the few people who’ve stepped forward for the job have been very good, very interesting and certainly possible so it’s just a matter of making a slight mathematical calculation.” When an incredulous Dylan Jones from i-D (the magazine that had conducted the very first Smiths interview) insisted that Johnny Marr was “half of the creative team,” Morrissey tried to comfort him: “I know, and it’s distressing, but it’s not the Smiths’ funeral by any means.”

  But it was. On Friday, September 4, Mike Joyce released a statement saying he had “fulfilled his role” with the Smiths. The next day, Pat Bellis, having resumed her role as Morrissey’s spokesperson (despite the fact that it conflicted with her job as press officer both for the Smiths and for Rough Trade itself), announced that the singer had now confirmed what Marr’s lawyers would have ensured anyway: the end of the Smiths. When the news made the following week’s music press, it should have put an end to the previous month of rumors and denials, yet it was accompanied by all kinds of fresh inaccuracies: that Joyce and Rourke had gone over to Marr’s musical side, and that “the auditions to replace Johnny were never taken really seriously.” But one central element proved entirely correct: Stephen Street had stepped up to write songs with Morrissey, who would be recording under his own name for EMI. Other than the speed of it all (again, why the rush for Morrissey to record what was, for him, a third album’s worth of material in just eighteen months?), this made sense; it was, perhaps, how things were meant to pan out. With Street on bass, the singer was to turn for guitar work—at the suggestion of Geoff Travis, who proved unable to relinquish involvement—to Vini Reilly, the Wythenshawe boy and Durutti Column recording artist who had first come to attention on the cover of that 1977 Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds single, wearing a blazer from Johnny Marr’s secondary school. It was odd how the world turned. But turn it did. Morrissey’s debut album would be finished before Christmas.

  Marr, meanwhile, followed up on almost all the opportunities that came his way. After participating in the Talking Heads session (he appeared on four songs on the album Naked), there was the Bryan Ferry single to promote. Chrissie Hynde then invited him to join the Pretenders, and Matt Johnson, figuring that it was now “the perfect moment,” invited him to join The The; he agreed to both, even though for a while it meant literally going from one band’s recording session to the other’s in the same day. (He may have resisted the responsibility of leading another band, but he could not resist the temptation to work too hard.)3 In September 1987, though, before he started on these new ventures, Marr returned to the States and hung out on the Echo & the Bunnymen/New Order co-headlining tour. Both of these northern English groups were going through their own personal turmoil, which they handled in markedly different ways from the Smiths. Ian McCulloch would leave Echo & the Bunnymen in 1988; in this group’s case, an equal distribution of income did not save a band from its personality clashes. Once it was evident that he was not coming back immediately, the remaining Bunnymen allowed themselves to be talked into auditioning replacemen
t singers by their record company, WEA; the subsequent album was laughed all the way into the remainder bins. McCulloch would eventually rejoin the group after a couple of poorly received solo albums, but it could never be the same; the legacy had been irrevocably damaged.

  New Order decided not to announce a split when they took a well-needed break from one another in 1989, thirteen years after the original members first played together. Instead, with no set date (or even a firm agreement) on when to return to the band, they took on side projects, the most prominent of which saw Bernard Sumner team up with Johnny Marr to form Electronic. In the short period since the Smiths had split, the indie guitar riff had met the rave dance groove on the Haçienda dance floor and produced what Factory Records’ Happy Mondays labeled “Madchester”—a hedonistic, bacchanal state of mind(altering drugs) that pulled the Stone Roses, the group put together by Si Wolstencroft’s old college friends John Squire and Ian Brown, along in its wake. As Madchester became the capital for a new generation of club-going, ecstasy-popping indie kids, the supposedly gloom-laden, guitar-based music of the Smiths suddenly sounded very old-fashioned. Electronic, though, did not, and “Getting Away with It,” as sung by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, secured Marr his first American top 40 hit.4

  But all this was in the future. In the autumn months of 1987, both Morrissey and Marr were going through periods of great unhappiness and uncertainty. “He knows that at the end of the Smiths I was in a very, very depressed state—and that possibly the fact that he broke up the Smiths could have killed me,” Morrissey told the Observer fifteen years later, still hurting. He was right, which was why Marr had asked Grant Showbiz to visit Morrissey in Cadogan Square. “There was genuine concern about where Morrissey’s head was at,” said Showbiz. “I can recall no conversations about what had happened, and just a series of delightful aphorisms, and tea. Logic dictates that if he was depressed then Johnny was showing some concern. But it was also ‘I’m backing off this, I’m not doing this.’ ”

  Sandie Shaw, in her memoir, also talked of visiting Morrissey around the time of the breakup, where “he looked disheveled and worry-laden.” Determined “not to take sides as I did not want to alienate Johnny,” she nonetheless found her former suitor “exasperating.” “From where I was standing, all Morrissey’s problems started with himself—his insecurities and the way they made him behave. He seemed never to have learnt the art of friendship, and I felt desperately sad for him, imprisoned in his self-imposed solitude.”

  For his part, Johnny Marr insisted that throughout the yearlong breakup process, “I always felt incredibly clearheaded. And focused and relaxed.” Grant Showbiz confirmed that “when I spoke to Johnny directly after it happened, he was so happy. You could just feel like this weight had been lifted. There wasn’t any sadness about it at all. At the time I probably felt sadder about it than he did.” All the same, Marr was heartbroken that the Smiths had tried to carry on so quickly without him, and equally upset that he was depicted as the villain in the story, as the man who had broken up Britain’s best band. This media perception would last for years; one of the reasons Marr engaged in so much side work (as opposed to starting his own project) was in an attempt to avoid the attentions of the press.5 “A lot of people turned their back on Johnny at that point,” noted John Featherstone, who stayed with Marr in Bowdon after the split, in large part to support his friend while holding out hope for a poetic ending to the Smiths. “Morrissey could have, with perfect movie-script irony, knocked on Johnny’s door rather than the other way ’round like it was at the beginning, and said, just, ‘Hey, thanks for everything.’ Or, ‘Can we just talk about this?’ Or, ‘What can we do to make this move forward?’ I remember sitting there going, ‘He’s going to show up. He’s going to knock on the door.’ ”

  He didn’t. But in the midst of this period of bitterly frozen relations, it was nonetheless Morrissey who sought to break the ice. He called Johnny Marr on the phone and suggested the Smiths play a farewell gig, at the Royal Albert Hall. Marr declined.

  Morrissey continued to hold out the olive branch—or the prospect of one—as he conducted interviews for his first album on EMI, provocatively entitled Viva Hate, released in the spring of 1988 and yielding the top 10 singles he had always suspected would have been the Smiths’ by right had they too been signed to a major label. “I would be totally in favour of a reunion,” he told NME’s Len Brown in February. “As soon as anybody wants to come back to the fold and make records I will be there!” The rhythm section, otherwise engaged at the time with Sinéad O’Connor, would heed his call later in the year, and so would Craig Gannon, the three of them joining Morrissey and Stephen Street to record several songs, two of which would make the UK top 10. When, on December 22, 1988, Morrissey finally stepped onto a stage again, playing a concert in Wolverhampton that granted free entry to those wearing Smiths or Morrissey T-shirts, the musicians appearing alongside him were Mike Joyce, Andy Rourke, and Craig Gannon. Morrissey wore a Smiths T-shirt himself, and came onstage to the sound of Prokofiev. Apart from Morrissey solo material, the group played three latter-day Smiths songs, carefully choosing ones that their former band had never performed in concert.6 With stage invasions taking place throughout, it appeared like a happy reunion of the Smiths in all but Marr and name. But it was not to be. Mike Joyce, Andy Rourke, and Craig Gannon were by then already in the process of taking both Morrissey and Johnny Marr to court for disputed and/or unpaid royalties.

  There are two great tragedies surrounding the release of Strangeways, Here We Come (other than the fact that it was the Smiths’ last album, of course). One is that none of the songs was ever afforded the opportunity to develop onstage, at least not as performed by the Smiths. The other is that nobody but the group’s inner circle ever had the luxury of listening to the album without knowing that it was the Smiths’ swan song. That knowledge sullied the experience for many. Short of a controlled scientific experiment with a new generation of historically uninformed Smiths fans, nobody will ever be able to offer a completely neutral perspective.

  The individual Smiths’ eternal insistence that it was their finest work has occasionally seemed like a retroactive defense against obvious inclinations to hear it as the work of a band on the brink of breaking up. But that decision had not yet been made when Morrissey told Melody Maker, in the summer of 1987, that “Strangeways perfects every lyrical and musical notion The Smiths have ever had … It’s far and away the best record we’ve ever made.” Sonically, at least, he was not wrong. The progression in production values from The Smiths—even from The Queen Is Dead—was emphatic. “Death of a Disco Dancer” and “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” were studio masterpieces. The delicacy of “Girlfriend in a Coma” and “Unhappy Birthday” reflected Marr’s assertion that “there’s air in that record.” The ambitious arrangements of “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before,” “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” and “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” failed to underscore their playfully direct sense of purpose. And few could dispute that “I Won’t Share You” captured a beautiful sense of mutual melancholy in both words and music. The band had every right to feel proud of themselves.

  But that’s not to say it’s what the fans wanted to hear. Strangeways sounded too much like a group that was experimenting in the studio and not enough like a group that had previously recorded as if their every breath depended upon it. There was nothing in its grooves with the urgency of “The Queen Is Dead,” just as there was nothing with the melody of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” Nothing to match the funk of “Barbarism Begins at Home”—or the fury of “What She Said.” The general problem with Strangeways—one that was rarely noted at the time—was that the album did not properly coalesce as an album. The Smiths, for all its complicated recording history, was still a series of songs enjoined by their leitmotif of social and sexual desperation and isolation. Meat Is Murder was an album about violence—domestic, instituti
onal, social, genocidal. The Queen Is Dead was, in enough places to render it conceptual, a flamboyantly witty eulogy to a collapsing empire. Strangeways had no such unifying theme. Even the album cover—and title—felt disconnected from the music. Strangeways was ultimately a series of disparate songs collected together on a single long-playing record. And not even that long: barely thirty-seven minutes at a time when the compact disc was increasingly pushing albums toward the hour mark. This might explain why, in the absence of an eleventh finished song to take its place, the group included “Death at One’s Elbow,” a conventional and uninspired rockabilly stomp quietly tucked into the penultimate position, as if in the hope that nobody might notice it there. The Smiths had often released tracks that some of their fans did not like; that, in a way, was a mark of their ambition and appeal. But until now, at least on album, the Smiths had never been guilty of releasing anything inconsequential.

  Regarding the lack of unifying theme, it might not be too strong to suggest that Morrissey’s words on Strangeways said nothing to the fans about their lives. To his credit, the singer was trying to write more by way of narrative, and songs such as “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before” and “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” were positively intriguing in that respect. (It was entirely possible to read the latter as a summary of Oscar Wilde’s seduction of the young Lord Douglas, which would explain its placement immediately after the song named for Lady Wilde’s writings.) But for all the wicked humor of “Girlfriend in a Coma” and the wrought personal confession that was “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me,” Strangeways found Morrissey trading, uncommonly so, in absolute negativity. “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” for example, asked the fans to join him in condemning the music business’s rapacious greed, which was a little strong coming from someone who had just abandoned the independent sector and whose personal avarice was now a poorly kept secret; his use of the words “sycophantic slags,” even if intended ironically, saw him bordering on a sexism he had always so pointedly opposed. As for “Unhappy Birthday,” for the first time in what had always been a bitterly humorous lyrical balancing act, he appeared to have crossed the line into outright spite.