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

by Tony Fletcher

  2 Durkin prefaced that observation by saying, “Andy won’t mind me telling you this.”

  3 There is no evidence that he managed to make it inside the club; the drinking age was eighteen at the time in New York, and strictly enforced.

  4 In the 2000s, the image was purchased by the Tate.

  5 Morrissey’s typically cruel but hilarious observations merit further discussion. Despite the fact that punk was considered a working-class revolt, still it came under common attack from those at the very bottom of Britain’s clearly defined social strata. “The whole idea that punk was a street music was bollocks,” said journalist Frank Owen, who was raised in Manchester and played in the band Manicured Noise at the time. “The street kids were the Perry kids, the football hooligans, the kids with the jumbo cords and the Stanley knives, they were the street kids living in the council estates. The kids who were punks were more likely to be upper-working-class, their dads had good jobs in the factories, they had a little bit of money.… The whole idea that it was lumpen proletariat on the council estate, that was bullshit. Those kids hated punks.” It’s for this reason that Slaughter & the Dogs, generally written out of punk history for being the kind of uncouth yobs to whom Owen refers, are so important: their second single, “Where Have All the Bootboys Gone?” glorified the very culture that most punks, theoretically, opposed.

  6 On the cover to the Nosebleeds single, Vini Reilly wore a borrowed St. Augustine’s school blazer, compulsory wear at the time for Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke.

  7 It’s been reported that Morrissey also sang with the Nosebleeds in April, at a Rabid Records night that included Slaughter & the Dogs, Jilted John, and John Cooper Clarke. If so, the Nosebleeds went unbilled. They did not go unbilled at the Ritz, where their name appeared on a poster, contradicting Morrissey’s later assertion in The North Will Rise Again that it was Duffy’s venture, under a different name, and only mistakenly reviewed in NME as the Nosebleeds.

  8 This was much kinder than a subsequent observation by Morley, printed in Mojo, June 2004, and elsewhere, that “Morrissey was always laughed at in Manchester … he was the village idiot.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1 Morrissey has repeatedly tried to play down his involvement with the Wythenshawe punk scene. “Local history has me down as an ex-member of Slaughter & the Dogs or the Nosebleeds, which is ridiculous,” he told John Robb for The North Will Rise Again. Members of those bands are under no illusions regarding his membership, however short-term it may have been.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1 The couple was still together, married with children, more than thirty-two years later.

  2 Robertson suffered a premature, alcohol-related death.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1 “I suffered greatly from depression,” said Morrissey on the documentary The Importance of Being Morrissey. “It was very serious when I was a teenager and when I was in the Smiths, so I took prescribed drugs for a long time.”

  2 I assure readers that I was customarily guilty of the same throughout the 1980s.

  3 When the Nosebleeds broke up for good, drummer Phillip “Toby” Tomanov promptly joined Ludus. Morrissey was sure to give him a personal shout-out in his first Ludus review.

  4 Upon Exit Smiling’s eventual publication, in Morrissey’s original typed manuscript, complete with handwritten corrections, Morrissey issued a statement asking fans not to buy it, giving the clear impression that he had never wanted any of the three books to be published, at any point, and dating their composition back to the 1970s, which seems unlikely. His disowning of the books raises the question as to why he sent the manuscripts to a publisher to begin with; his letters to Tony Wilson suggest that he was in fact desperate for some form of literary recognition.

  5 Boon remains adamant about this cassette, and Johnny Marr has expressed his belief in its existence, though there doesn’t appear to be a song with the title “Wake up Johnny” in Bessie Smith’s catalog.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1 “Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag” spent some seventy weeks on the indie top 50 and eventually, a solid year after its release, crashed into the top 3 on the national charts, a major achievement for its primary distributor, Rough Trade.

  2 Among those to show up at Wolstencroft’s house was someone dressed exactly like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (bootleg tapes of which had been doing the rounds thanks to the commercialization of home VHS machines), down to “the eyelashes, the baseball bat, the jockstrap,” as Rourke recalled it. The droog’s name was Ian Brown, and he had been singer in a band at South Trafford College called the Patrol, alongside Wolstencroft and guitarist John Squire.

  3 Generally spelled in Smiths literature as “Decibel,” it initially had a French spelling due to its owner, Philippe Delcloque. The former Mill eventually became the location for one of Manchester’s preeminent post-rave nightclubs, Sankeys Soap.

  4 Marr has often talked about this session as having taken place on New Year’s Eve, knowing that the studio would otherwise be empty. Dale Hibbert was frequently recording bands overnight, without the owner’s knowledge, as a means of improving his engineering skills. Though the session may have taken place in winter, it was almost certainly not on New Year’s Eve.

  5 Anyone who has heard the Jam’s early 1982 chart-topper “Precious” knows that this is no idle aside.

  6 The riots did not surprise Morrissey at all. “Manchester is destroyed,” he wrote to his friend Lindsay Hutton. “But still, isn’t it nice to know that the Royal Wedding is almost upon us? If Charles is so concerned, let him get married in Moss Side or Toxteth.”

  7 Eighth Day mutated into a still-thriving health-food store on Oxford Road. The expression also mutated, around the late 1980s, into “And on the Eighth Day, God created Manchester.”

  8 To any argument that Morrissey and Marr’s meeting was not quite as magical as legend would have it, given that they had been formally introduced four years earlier at the Patti Smith concert, it should be noted that Leiber and Stoller had spoken on the phone prior to their first meeting, and that Leiber’s appearance at Stoller’s door was far from unexpected.

  9 Steve Pomfret’s role has certainly been downplayed over the years. Habitually, Marr has given the impression that he had made the journey to Kings Road on his own. To this author, Marr talked about how “Steve and I knocked on the door, and Steve Pomfret literally did take several steps back to the gate and said good-bye. He didn’t come in the house with me.” In rare interviews, specifically with Johnny Rogan, Pomfret has given no cause for doubt that he was in fact part of the conversation upstairs in Morrissey’s room, just as he formed part of the Smiths’ initial rehearsals.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1 In fact, he had said, “I schtip to funk,” meaning that he screwed to it, which one might have thought a positive referral. However, in a much later edition of The Face, in which the magazine’s Manchester stringer, David Johnson, wrote up Swing in its own right, and by which point the Smiths were happening, Johnson was willing to rewrite the intent as “meaning the music was only fit for screwing to.”

  2 A silent, minute-long clip of the finale can be found on the Internet.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1 An edited version of “Suffer Little Children” that has long done the rounds on the Internet is sadly lacking these elements; the author has heard the complete mix and indeed the individual multitracks.

  2 In the interest of disclosure, the author, who was involved at this point in releasing records for the Belfast band Rudi, stayed on Mike Joyce’s floor in March 1982, after Rudi had opened for the Jam at the Manchester Apollo that night. Curiously, Morrissey and Mike Joyce were both guests of the Irish band; if they met and conversed that night it has never been publicly recollected.

  3 Though it’s tempting to think the Smiths might have waited to make the EMI tape before playing anything to Factory, Hibbert is adamant that he recalled Morrissey and Marr making an appointment with Tony Wils
on, and making it equally clear that he was not invited.

  4 Further disclaimer: I was in a band of my own at the time, Apocalypse, which was courted by EMI during exactly the same period. This band was, likewise, afforded demo time in early 1983, and after much prevarication, eventually signed to the label, by an A&R manager working under Hugh Stanley-Clarke. The advance was no more than the Smiths received for signing to Rough Trade, though the author’s group had an indie hit, radio and TV exposure, and national touring under its belt. However, at that point, the paths certainly diverged: it was not until the end of 1983, many months later, that the author’s group was finally put into the recording studio to make a single. Ironically, this turned out to be the lavish residential facility Jacob’s, where the Smiths recorded The Queen Is Dead, though the expensive studio did not contribute to a better record and, with momentum stalled in the interim, the group broke up shortly after it was released. During that same twelve-month period, the Smiths signed to Rough Trade, released two singles, one of which was a hit, recorded their debut album (twice), recorded four BBC radio sessions, appeared on television and on the front covers of the music papers, and made it to New York as the hippest band in the UK. The perennial question—What would have happened to the Smiths had they signed to EMI in 1983?—can perhaps be answered by the author’s own experience of sudden stasis. And the equally perennial question—Did the Smiths do the right thing by forging their path on an independent label?—appears purely rhetorical.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1 The single sleeve noted that it was recorded in March, but by all accounts the recording date was actually February 27. Other history books state that “Hand in Glove” was first played live at the Haçienda. But allowing that the Manhattan Sound gig the week before was intended as a warm-up, and that no set lists survive, it seems a reasonable assumption that it had in fact been unveiled at the earlier gig.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1 To further confuse matters, while allowing that Rourke was on Marr’s shoulder throughout the exchange, Travis recalled Joe Moss being present as well—and Moss was as certain of the fact that he was at Rough Trade that day as Rourke and Marr were insistent that he was not. “He had to be forced to listen to it and he listened to it there and then while we were there,” recalled Moss of Geoff Travis. “He did like it. We said quite cockily that if he wasn’t going to put it out, we were going to put it out.”

  In 1988, in an interview with Richard Boon for independent distribution magazine The Catalogue, Morrissey delivered a humorous description of the first meeting, in which he inserted himself into the escapade to London: “We waited for hours to be then be told Geoff couldn’t see us, so Johnny said, ‘Who is Geoff Travis?’ and someone pointed to a looming figure swarming down a corridor and Johnny raced after him and forced him to listen.”

  This, then, is the biographer’s curse—that there is no such thing as fact when it comes to individual memories. That is why, as Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) said in the movie 24 Hour Party People, when confronted with the legend or the truth, always print the legend.

  2 The reviewer, Jim Shelley, was subsequently thanked on the debut album’s sleeve credits.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  1 The original citing of Rough Trade Distribution, which was not actually crossed out, was to be upheld legally in 1989 when the company went bankrupt, causing chaos over ownership of the Smiths’ catalog, which, it turned out, did not actually belong to the label.

  2 In “Childhood, Sexuality and the Smiths,” an essay that forms part of Why Pamper Life’s Complexities? Sheila Whiteley, a self-proclaimed Smiths fan, devotes several thousand words to analyzing these songs and reflecting on this incident and trying desperately to draw a positive conclusion, but still admits, “Clearly, there is no empirical evidence to help interpretation.”

  3 The first of these lines was a rewrite of one of anarcho-punk band Crass’s: “Do they owe us a living? Of course they fucking do.” The second was one of Morrissey’s favorite ripostes, and would form the centerpiece of a future Smiths single. Taken together, they were quite majestic. The “iron bridge” referred to in the song, like other lines, appears to come from Viv Nicholson’s Spend, Spend, Spend but was widely presumed by Smiths fans to reference the one that crossed the railway tracks from Kings Road to St. Mary’s.

  4 Oscar Wilde, in correspondence with his close friend André Gide, had referred to his prison warden as “quite a charming man,” though the influence on Morrissey may have been entirely subliminal.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1. In The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life Simon Goddard points out that the bootleg mixes of the Troy Tate album available online are considerably inferior to the final mixes, which this author has not heard.

  2 This certainly makes more sense than the story that has typically been reported—that Porter had been cold-called by Geoff Travis, barely a week before he met the band at the BBC session, with a view to remixing the Smiths album. Not only would this have stretched coincidence to its limits, but it would have negated the need for the Smiths to approach Porter in the BBC canteen and introduce themselves in order for him to switch sessions.

  3 Ever the optimist when it came to the Smiths, Morrissey assured listeners that it would be out in a month “because I think the time is right.”

  4 At some point Porter did get his wish. A “Single Remix”—of the London session—was ultimately issued after the band’s breakup. It sounds muddier than the original mix.

  5 While completing this chapter, the author heard the multitracks for “This Charming Man.” Marr’s multiple guitar parts represent, not surprisingly, a true tour de force, all the more astonishing for the guitar player’s youth; in addition to the various riffs and arpeggiated solos recorded onto different tracks, there are acoustic guitars and plenty of backward reverb that added (hidden) volumes to the overall mix. Morrissey’s vocals, draped in reverb though they may be, are equally impressive. Rourke’s bass part reveals yet greater melody and dexterity than was audibly apparent on the final mix, while the bleed of the otherwise finished song through the isolated drum tracks confirms that Joyce recorded his drums at the end of the session.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  1 Given Travis’s working relationship with Stein, it’s entirely possible that the deal was agreed and the paperwork generated throughout the summer, based on the buzz surrounding the Smiths, and then signed and sealed after Stein saw the group in the flesh.

  2 In Britain at the time, a little over 6 percent of all record sales went directly to the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society by law; these royalties were then fed through to the composers via their publishers.

  3 Marr was at pains to point out to the author that the money did not go exclusively into his own pocket. “The first thing I did when I got publishing, was bought Mike a kit, bought Andy his amp, and Angie a ring. And I got myself a Rickenbacker. Morrissey had done the deal too so he didn’t need me to buy him anything!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  1 This shift in priorities caused enormous turmoil within Rough Trade. Richard Scott recalled that Geoff Travis had told him upon signing the Smiths that he viewed Morrissey as “the next Boy George,” which Scott took as a commercial ambition rather than perhaps a cultural observation. “That locked everything into clear perspective,” said Scott. “That what I thought we’d been trying to achieve actually wasn’t the case at all. That he had a completely different agenda. That suddenly it had to do with money and chart success.” The degree to which this had opened up a schism in the company was evident the day that summer that I arrived at Rough Trade’s Blenheim Crescent offices to interview Geoff Travis for The Tube’s segment on the label only to find him in a screaming match with various of the label’s other major players. Travis was sufficiently put off balance that he initially insisted someone else be interviewed for the television show in his place; he eventually calmed down and sat for the interview, delivering precisely t
he sort of comments that were causing the internal fighting. “Rough Trade wants to be successful in the most mainstream possible sense,” he said on camera, adding, “I am very sick that we have lost groups who are as good as Scritti and Aztec to other majors.… But we always had a moral problem because I never felt I could sign a group to a six-album contract without knowing that I had the resources to compete in the marketplace properly.” His conclusion? A prescient one: “I think what’s really been proved is that in a majority of artists’ cases, they’ll always take the money.”

  2 In May 1983, just as the Smiths released “Hand in Glove,” Rough Trade had secured its first top 40 hit in the unlikely form of Robert Wyatt’s “Shipbuilding,” a song written by Elvis Costello about the previous year’s Falklands War, and released by Wyatt to coincide with the general election that returned the Thatcher government to power, largely on the back of the military victory in the Falklands.

  3 It was at the Venue, on September 15, that I first saw the Smiths in concert, thanks in part to the persistent urging of Scott Piering. It was immediately evident that something special was afoot, not least in the presence of a substantial following, many of whom were carrying flowers. I refer readers to Len Brown’s book Meetings with Morrissey for a truly evocative first-person account of that show, his own first exposure to the Smiths, and how it profoundly affected him.