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

by Tony Fletcher

  “Death of a Disco Dancer,” meanwhile, though one of the album’s genuine musical leaps, was to prove quickly outdated. Morrissey’s cry, “If you think peace is a common goal, that goes to show how little you know,” may have been true of the British meat-market discos of old, but as the rave generation took to flooding the nation’s nightclubs in smiley-face T-shirts, popping pills that led them to hug complete strangers, it came to seem oddly archaic.

  Inevitably, it was “I Won’t Share You” that proved subject to the greatest posthumous scrutiny. Morrissey was rarely so tasteless as to name his lyrical subjects (which was why his attacks on music-business figures were so distasteful), and the presence of a female character in the lyrics helped diffuse the obvious suggestion that it was addressed to Johnny Marr. But between the title and its follow-on lines like “With the drive, the ambition, and the zeal I feel this is my time,” it was hard not to hear it as a closing statement to his partner of five years. Quizzed about it in public, Marr would typically respond, defensively, “I’m not anyone’s to share,” but pushed to recognize that the lyric might not have needed a response as much as an acknowledgment, he was more giving: “That’s the intrigue about that song, isn’t it? Only one person knows. But I do feel like … Thank you. Thank you for that. If it is true, thank you.”

  Ultimately, the most sincere way to praise Strangeways, Here We Come was to acknowledge it as a transitional album. It was the sound of a group escaping the formula that had made it successful, displaying occasional flashes of brilliance and inspiration on its way to an undetermined future destination. The next Smiths album would have placed Strangeways in full and proper context—but of course that next album never arrived.

  Strangeways, Here We Come rose to number 2 in the British charts, the fourth of the six Smiths albums on Rough Trade to do so. (It would become five out of seven a year later, when Morrissey compiled the live album Rank from the BBC’s tapes of the Kilburn National show.) To promote “Girlfriend in a Coma,” a video was hastily put together by Tim Broad that featured Morrissey, and only Morrissey, singing in close-up over a backdrop of scenes from 1963’s The Leather Boys, one of his favorite movies. It was as if, the group having collapsed around him, Morrissey—the man who had railed against the promotional video for four solid years, who had wheedled his way out of making them, who had criticized those made without him, who had cost himself tens of thousands of dollars in royalties and contributed to the breakup of his band by failing to show for the most recent of them—could turn his back on his career principles now that he was Morrissey, the solo artist. The record, it was worth remembering, was by the Smiths.

  The same with the next single. The intent had been to release “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before,” probably the most commercial song on Strangeways after “Girlfriend,” but a deadly shooting spree in an England that was not familiar with them caused it to be dropped at the last moment due to its use of the phrase “mass murder.” It was replaced with “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish”—but used the same video.7 Tim Broad shot it on Sunday, October 18, bringing together a dozen Morrissey “apostles” and lookalikes (quiffs, Smiths T-shirts, NHS glasses), along with their idol, on a bicycle tour around various Smiths-related Mancunian landmarks (in the rain, of course): rundown Hulme council flats, the Salford Lads Club, boarded-up Coronation Street, Victoria Station, and the Albert Finney bookmakers in Salford. Again, the other Smiths were heard but not seen.

  “Girlfriend in a Coma” proved a significant hit; it was as sweet a song (musically, if not lyrically) as the Smiths ever presented to mainstream radio. “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” struggled for similar acceptance; it didn’t have quite the same swing as the intended “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before,” although the unearthing of the Troy Tate production of “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” complete with cello, served as a modest incentive to hard-core fans.8 With support from Morrissey, who said that “if there was yet another opportunity to infest the airwaves I thought it should be done,” Rough Trade then broke with all Smiths tradition and released a third single from the album right on its heels. What anyone hoped to prove, other than that the Smiths could release five singles in a calendar year, or that Morrissey could finally put Billy Fury on the front of a Smiths sleeve, was never clarified. Neither was the choice of song: “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” may have been their great studio epic, but it was hardly the sound of Christmas cheer, and no video was produced to offer any other message. The instrumental piano introduction was edited out; the B-sides drew on old Peel sessions. Under the circumstances, the fact that it scraped into the top 30 had to be construed as a success. It was the Smiths’ seventeenth single in four-and-a-half years. It was the last to be released under that name for just as long.

  As Morrissey and his dozen apostles packed up their bicycles on the evening of Sunday, October 18, a last supper of sorts took place in the form of the ITV South Bank Show on the Smiths. It was an appropriate form of highbrow recognition for the band, given that it was the airing of the South Bank Show’s Leiber and Stoller episode back in February 1982 that had led Marr to Morrissey’s door in the first place. In that sense, the reverential treatment should have been considered a triumph; sadly, it had to be viewed instead as a swan song. There was no reference to the split except in the host’s preamble and a hastily reedited final five minutes; otherwise, the group was perceived and presented instead as a fully functioning unit. Several of the Smiths’ closer friends or allies were brought in to provide perspective, including John Peel, Nick Kent, Sandie Shaw, and Jon Savage. The singer himself, though he had no part in the editing, nonetheless dominated proceedings; interviewed primarily at a desk laden with books (and also in an armchair, wearing a rugby shirt), he appeared the very personification of the intellectual pop star. In his conversation and confidence, his presentation and wit, this was a man absolutely on top of his game, dedicated to his craft, in love with his career, and clearly harboring no idea that it was about to come crashing down around him. (Johnny Marr, sporting the tight quiff from early in the New Year, seemed somewhat more animated, even antagonistic in his own interview; Mike Joyce provided the kind of good-natured banter that, as always, sounded better than it looked written down; Andy Rourke was nowhere to be seen.) It was as if Morrissey’s whole life had been leading up to this moment, when this “child from the ugly new houses,” as “Paint a Vulgar Picture” had put it, this working-class son of Irish immigrants, this lapsed Catholic, secondary modern dropout, this celibate/asexual/gay social recluse and former candidate for suicidal tendencies could finally demonstrate his greatness on a stage worthy of the acclaim.

  The producers’ choice of closing statement, in their eventual acknowledgment of the Smiths split, saw Morrissey return to a theme and a theory he had frequently tested over the years: “The way I see the whole spectrum of pop music is that it is slowly being laid to rest, in every conceivable way.… So with the Smiths, I do really think it is true, I think this is really the end of the story. Ultimately, popular music will end. That must be obvious to almost everybody. And I think the ashes are all about us, if we could but notice them.” At which he gave that winsome smile of his. Even in this farewell, he was able to provide inspiration, if not for quite the reason he might have hoped; a pair of teenage best friends from Colchester, Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon, Smiths fans both, sat down to watch the show in eager anticipation but found themselves offended by Morrissey’s insistence that “the Smiths were the last group of any importance,” as Albarn interpreted it. He walked home that night, hatching plans, insistent that “No one is going to tell me that pop music is finished.” Albarn and Coxon would soon form the band Blur, signing to an independent that was itself signed to EMI, and with Stephen Street as their producer, eventually led a “Britpop” movement that, over the course of the 1990s, took the Smiths “indie” aesthetic (minus its femininity, tragically) to the top of the cha
rts; there, pitted against the Manchester group Oasis, who Johnny Marr brought to the attention of his post-Smiths’ management in the first place, they even made it onto the national news.

  Other than Morrissey himself, the star of the South Bank Show was Linder, Morrissey’s mentor, muse, and eternal comrade in feminism and art. She painted a perfectly pleasant picture of her now decade-long friendship with Morrissey, of afternoon walks with him through Southern Cemetery, nights on the periphery of the Manchester dance floor, and daytimes spent with their noses pressed up against high-street glass, “looking through a store window at somebody.”

  “He’d say, ‘Do you think they’re really happy?’ and I’d say, ‘I think so, I hope so.’ And he’d say, ‘Could I ever be like that?’ But no, of course not, he could never be happy.” At this Linder laughed. “I pray to God that one day he’s happy—but it’s taking a long time coming.”

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1 As a comparison, during the same period at the beginning of their recording career, the Beatles recorded eighty-six original Lennon-McCartney compositions, and though their repertoire was significantly boosted by cover versions and George Harrison compositions, it’s worth remembering how much quicker the recording process in the 1960s was—and how many years the Beatles had been together before signing a record deal.

  2 Of British pop and rock stars, only Sir Cliff Richard has enjoyed a similarly high profile with any equal claims to celibacy, though in Cliff’s case, this was not publicly stated throughout much of his long career.

  3 Johnny Marr, however, proved none so reticent. Asked at a major awards show in March 2012, yet again, about a Smiths re-formation, he responded, “If this government steps down, then I’ll re-form the band.”

  4 Not unconnected to knowledge of my own impending biography, Rogan and his publishers opted to update Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance with a Twentieth Anniversary Edition in 2012, adding almost two hundred pages of content to the original, and publishing it just in advance of A Light That Never Goes Out. At the time of going to press, I have not read Rogan’s revised book, but my initial point, regarding my motivation and intent with my biography, still holds.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1 According to Roger Swift’s book The Irish in the Victorian City, the Irish-born immigrants in Manchester already accounted for one-fifth of the population by the year 1834.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1 MacColl, a folklorist whose communist leanings put him under the watch of MI5 for a while, and who would later sire the singer Kirsty MacColl, composed that song for a locally based play of his own, Landscape with Chimneys, and therefore found it natural to specify Salford in the lyrics, too; but protests from the City Council at being associated with a “Dirty Old Town” resulted in the proper name being replaced by the adjective “smoky.”

  2 The weekly football pools were a popular form of gambling. Participants predicted the Saturday scores. The largest winnings went to those who correctly predicted tied games.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1 From Harper Street to Queen’s Square and later Kings Road, Steven Morrissey grew up in what was then known as the Municipal Borough of Stretford, which bordered the western side of the City of Manchester and the southern edge of the City of Salford. Old Trafford was one of many neighborhoods inside Stretford; Moss Side officially existed only within Manchester itself, though the Morrissey family laid claim to it given how close they lived to the Stretford-Manchester border. As a result of the Local Government Act of 1972, the relationship between Trafford and Stretford was reversed: the Municipal Borough of Stretford was abolished and instead swallowed up inside the newly established Metropolitan Borough of Trafford, one of sixteen such boroughs (the Cities of Salford and Manchester among them) that formed the equally new Metropolitan County of Greater Manchester. The new Metropolitan Borough of Trafford additionally absorbed, from the County of Cheshire, the Municipal Boroughs of Sale and Altrincham, and the Urban Districts of Bowdon and Hale—names that become familiar later on in the Smiths’ story. The Marr family’s subsequent home in Wythenshawe stood outside the Metropolitan County of Greater Manchester, but inside the City of Manchester.

  2 By 1978, the six doctors in the Hulme medical practice were prescribing some 250,000 tranquilizers a month.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1 Officially, the Tripartite System that had been in place since 1944 supported three formats: grammar schools, technical schools, and secondary moderns. In reality, few technical schools were ever built, and so the system came down to a simple process of (unintended) elimination.

  2 Margaret Clitherow was arrested for harboring priests, which was a capital crime, but she was executed for refusing to enter a plea to this charge, which was also a capital crime. (She claimed that she saw no crime to plead against.) Queen Elizabeth later wrote to the people of York to apologize for the execution of a woman.

  3 In 1984, Morrissey told Smash Hits that “a day rarely passes when I don’t listen to The Importance of Being Earnest. I have it on tape.” A major TV documentary in 2002, for which he provided unusually close access, was entitled The Importance of Being Morrissey.

  4 It was pure coincidence that the week I finished writing this chapter, an essay on Wilde (“Deceptive Picture,” putatively about the variations in Dorian Gray manuscripts) appeared in The New Yorker, August 8, 2011, penned by Alex Ross, the magazine’s modern music critic. Ross’s findings confirmed my own writings. Most interesting was his observation, as a liberated (indeed, married) gay man of the twenty-first century, that “as recently as the late eighties, you could still find bookish young people coming to terms with their sexuality by way of reading Wilde.” He was talking about himself, but he could have been referring to Morrissey a decade earlier.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1 Graham Pink later became famous as a persecuted “whistle-blower” after he revealed the appalling standards of care in his local NHS hospital.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1 What can only be described as a propaganda film, produced by the City of Manchester in 1946, attempting to sell the attractions of Wythenshawe in comparison to the hardships of Hulme, made much of the fact that 270 tons of solid soot and dirt had been recorded in Hulme in one year (and 450 tons in Ancoats); by contrast, Wythenshawe had “only” 120 tons. The film, A City Speaks, on show at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, is fascinating for its stereotyping: while a clipped BBC voice sells the virtues of the new estates, and an almost indecipherable Mancunian from Hulme initially expresses his doubts but is swiftly convinced, the reel homes in on the very caricature of a poverty-stricken old lady huddled in her Hulme slum with a cup of tea, juxtaposed with a beautiful young wife enjoying her outdoor garden in Wythenshawe. Certainly, there were positives behind the process of slum clearance and forced relocations, and the Maher family appeared to benefit from them. All the same, it is worth recounting the memories of Jack Kirwan in Annals of Arwick, an independently published pamphlet unearthed at the Manchester City Library. Kirwan had the job of physically removing one such old lady from her Hulme home during what he called “the great destruction,” the period when both the Morrisseys and Mahers were relocated. “As I arrived in the morning, at the agreed time, she was there waiting, with all her possessions neatly wrapped and packed up. The house and the rooms were spotless. I knew instantly that, regardless of poverty, she had maintained the standard so essential to working class values. She was crying constantly and the situation made me feel helpless. She had been born in the house and had never lived anywhere else, had brought up a family there and all her life and memories were there. I attempted to console her the only way I could, and told her that she would have better facilities where she was going, although I knew it was too late for her to start again in new surroundings and among strangers.… I moved her to the high rise block in Bagnall Court, Northenden and I was told later she had died within a fortnight.”

  2 Fletcher and Duffy b
oth recalled a letter in a music paper from Morrissey, with his full address, seeking petitioners to get the New York Dolls’ Whistle Test appearance re-aired on the BBC, and that they wrote to him offering their support. I have not seen this letter.

  3 Marr has recalled that his very first show was Rod Stewart at the Belle Vue, near his old home in Ardwick Green, on the Tonight’s the Night tour, where he met Britt Ekland at the mixing desk. “I thought every gig I would go to from then on I would meet a famous actress.” That show was November 1976; the Wythenshawe Forum Slaughter & the Dogs concert is generally agreed to have taken place in August.

  4 The story has also been told that it was Rourke who was wearing the Neil Young badge; at this point in time neither man seems quite sure anymore.

  CHAPTER 7

  1 “The first year or so we didn’t really have that much contact,” said Rourke of his mother’s abrupt departure. “And then she invited us all over for some holiday. Because the guy she worked for, Joe, who became her partner for twenty-five years after that, he was away working, and she had this big villa in Son Vida in Majorca with a swimming pool. She invited all four of us down for the week. And we did a lot of talk about stuff and she explained her reasons, and why she left. And things have been fine since then.” Andy’s younger brother, John, later moved to Majorca himself, where he died, aged twenty-four, after the Smiths broke up, from “drugs and alcoholism.” Andy was at his brother’s bedside at his passing alongside their father, Michael.