by Morrissey
Johnny’s boy-about-town associations brought our first gigs, and Manchester’s weary intelligentsia edged out to form a visual line of those-in-the-know. Richard Boon had operated New Hormones Records on Newton Street, and had managed both Buzzcocks and Ludus, as well as the Beach Club. He would remain a constant throughout the Smiths’ journey and was always encouraging (even though his expressionist jargon often swamped logic in far too much existentialism – if only for the Park Drive hell of it). Writer Jon Savage was also there; a friend to me, of sorts, whose flat on Wilbraham Road I would visit on nights of mourning, fascinated by Jon’s Punk dissertations, his vintage Jag, and tales of his childhood in Kensington, where he had an entire floor of an Edwardian house to himself – such the indulgence of an only child by comfortable parents. Both Jon and Richard were always a magnificent whirlpool of words. Also present at the first few Smiths gigs was local newshound Anthony Wilson, to whom I had given a copy of the New York Dolls’ first album in 1975. ‘I’ve never heard of them,’ he said, so keenly lay his finger on the pulse. Having latched on to the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop for his television show So It Goes, Wilson now assumed the cognoscenti cloak and found himself blessed with the need to assess, judge and grade – like a war general plastered with rows of ribbons but who had never actually seen battle himself. At an early Smiths night Wilson offers an opinion that no one has asked for:
‘I’m not so sure about Johnny. Hand in glove is Rebel rebel. All this Byrds stuff has been done and done.’
The comment tests me in my new role as Johnny’s comrade, and I fail because I allow meat-fed Wilson to say his piece.
Reacting against everything, the Smiths are an instant touring unit, with Joe Moss as four-stripe commander leading us up and down the M1. We are swiftly reviewed in glowing terms by the national press, and a Smiths coterie forms in every British city like an army on the march. The exhilaration is bracing, since we are very much apart from any previous factions and actions, trailing no one, and very much our own campaign. We stood alone and we drove our own crusade, our touring fortified by front-of-house engineer Grant Showbiz, whose great wit and inherent decency strengthened the Smiths’ quest. Even when the walls caved in, Grant remained an eloquent positive. The groups from Punk’s overspill continued to rabble-rouse in large armies, but the Smiths drew a line under the past with a detachment that presented a confidential perspective, and one that would never snap. The vat of agitprop, melody and self-culture all mish-mashed into a strong autonomous weapon that seemed on the face of it to be academic, yet appealed to heavily scarred jostlers. Something other than safe and dreary success was happening. EMI Records jumped in first, and paid for three recordings (What difference does it make?, Handsome devil and Miserable lie), and then they just as quickly rejected the results. Our paltry finances were gathered to record Hand in glove under our own steam, which we planned to present to the venerable and wonky Rough Trade Records at their rinky-dink west London tower of power. I am certain that my vocal is not good enough, and I suffer my first professional wobble. Joe Moss finds the cash to allow me to re-record the vocals, and we are all saved. Johnny and I journey to London for an agreed appointment with Geoff Travis, who is the moral conscience of Rough Trade.
Whatever it was that Rough Trade were, they were not a hip label, and by their appearance, Rough Trade personnel in the early 1980s need never have feared sexual assault. Everything was a question of personal identity, and Rough Trade set out to assert autonomy whilst at the same time challenging the established order. They did this largely by pressing records that no one wanted to buy. They were postmodernism up the pole. The dominant culture sought to sell many and very quickly, whereas Rough Trade’s service was to new artistic forms and slightly forbidden subject matter. Although the existing Rough Trade catalogue was known to be anti-Everything, it was also anti-listenable, and it would take the Smiths to bring a level of success and glamor to Rough Trade that the label had never dared hope for, and suddenly the smell of money replaced the smell of overcooked rice in the Rough Trade cloisters. The Smiths would pull Rough Trade out of the water – and would continue to do so long after the group had ended. Significant future signings were of groups who mostly wanted to be on Rough Trade because the Smiths once had been, and not because of the hysterical intellectual spinster image that the label had considered so confrontational until Hand in glove shattered their afternoons of wok rotas, poetry workshops and Woman’s Hour. Lugubrious historian Geoff Travis looked bitterly upon the Smiths because, on the day that Johnny and I arrived for our scheduled meeting (clutching Hand in glove), Geoff waved us away and didn’t want to see us. It was only because Johnny chased after Geoff and pinned him to the swivel-chair in Geoff’s private hutch that Geoff very reluctantly listened to the music.
‘Well, it’s excellent and I’d like to release it immediately,’ said the man who, four minutes earlier, wouldn’t even say hello. From that moment on, once ‘the Smiths’ (actually just Johnny and I) were signed to Rough Trade, Geoff removed his Vivian Stanshall cape and made an impressive effort to erase the old-governess spirit of Rough Trade with a tearless goodbye to their fair-trade essence of hiring dwarfs on stilts to pack and shift; or of rolling along in tight circumstances that favored social awareness, musicians’ collectives, the communal vote, homemade bread and an unsexed all-hands-on-deck concept that had thread its way to some attention with Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding. In his wheelchair, Robert was the very picture of the Rough Trade pop star, with a hit song that had cloistered nuns the world over tapping their habits. Certainly, there could be no shame attached to wheelchairs, but there aren’t many in the Top 40. Ever after, Rough Trade became the Smiths label, and mostly – but not strictly – the label joined the Smiths’ world into the 1990s and beyond. Because of the Smiths, Rough Trade became known in Woolworths warehouses and Croydon kitchens, and the label’s tubercular image of the 1970s – hand-crafted on a spinning jenny by Geoff Travis – was scorched off the face of the earth. Once the Smiths had ended, Rough Trade became hopeful ever after of similar groups – and found them, without ever creating a group that was free of the Smiths mold. But the brutally drab initial imprint of Rough Trade died of chest complaints at the King’s Head pub in Islington – face down on a beer-stained copy of Spare Rib magazine, and never again would a band resembling the Raincoats be entertained by Rough Trade. The Smiths provided Geoff Travis with a surprise ending, and showed him the way to a more playful world where – for the very first time – the music papers suddenly saw Geoff Travis as the uncrowned king of musical taste, and Geoff thus joined the immortal worthies – amoral wealth here, a Brit Award there, reliant no more on fly-posting the sacred word at Compendium Books in Camden. Suddenly, post-Smiths, Rough Trade belonged to the world of publicity rather than poetry, and, without any sense of texture whatsoever, Geoff’s over-cautious admiration for Morrissey and Marr meant that his label would never die. He, of course, has no choice but to tell you otherwise. With owl-like wisdom, Geoff would dispense with the older custom-made RT retainers and replace them with workers who looked like Smiths followers. Because they were.
A born trick-cyclist, Geoff would even climb back into the 1990s ring with a new sense of sartorial style – a physical impossibility during his John Dowie days, when matching the sales of Virgin’s Kew Rhone was the ultimate strike. Rough Trade became an industry of shops and bags and hip-kid accessories – none of which featured the face of Robert Wyatt. Once knitting for the troops, Geoff suddenly looked like someone who had inherited a shipping fortune, and Rough Trade were magically up there with Melrose Avenue, James Dean and In Cold Blood. However, when ‘the Smiths’ signed to Rough Trade, the British music papers laughed at the misstep, or expressed sympathetic doubt that the move would not stifle the band. The vinegary spinster face of Rough Trade was no place for anyone seeking public attention, but it worked because the Smiths worked, and for the first time in his life Geoff was over-matched. Haunted, h
e could never praise the Smiths. When The South Bank Show pieced together a Smiths documentary, Geoff said to me, ‘I’m glad I wasn’t interviewed because I wouldn’t be able to think of anything good to say.’
‘Did they ask you to take part?’ I said.
‘Well ... no,’ he said, softly.
Geoff would instead maintain that the Smiths were just one of many who tumbled in and out of his office, even though, prior to the Smiths, what tangible experience had he of success? He still wore his old school jumper, as the very pleasant music of Peter Blegvad rang through the bunkers and lumber rooms of Rough Trade until the Smiths shook the bats out of the hayloft. It seemed that Geoff’s excitement was held back by his unwillingness to share public attention. He works and wins alone. But he must surely be aware that, without the Smiths, he would have found himself wandering from kaftan to kaftan; the Westway above slamming out the Who or the Clash, but not the recalcitrant Smiths – who saved his life and made it count in the long run.
Johnny and I signed to Rough Trade as ‘the Smiths’, witnessed by Andy and Mike, with Mike signing the document as a reliable witness. (Years later, in a distant courtroom, he will say that he did not have sight of such a document, and the most honorable judge will believe him – even though his signature is there on the contract for the world and the most honorable judge to see – should their eyes ever open.) £3,000 is handed over by the label, followed by a further £3,000 on July 29th 1983 – the lives of Morrissey and Marr fully purchased, our skinny white bodies lowered into the Rough Trade cauldron. From this windfall, I pay a lavish domestic telephone bill of £80, and the rest is put into a bank account named Smithdom that will fill our tank up and down and across the M1. Geoff shuttles the band to New York (in row 62, cattle class), where Seymour Stein awaits with a deal to sign the Smiths (ostensibly) to Sire Records. The deal, though, is not quite what it seems (are they ever?), and Seymour is in fact signing Rough Trade for licensing access to the Smiths. As thick as two short planks, Johnny and I sign – once again witnessed by Andy and Mike. We have no idea what we’re signing, in an act of legendary mental deficiency.
The champagne does not flow, and indeed there will never be one instance in the Smiths’ history with Rough Trade when Geoff would treat the band to a lavish none-too-cheap dinner or salutary clink of earthenware. Celebratory toasts never befell the Smiths, and it was a mark of our quaint drowsiness that we hardly noticed. Johnny and I continued to live on a strict diet of chocolate, crisps, chips and Coca-Cola, and with such an a la carte menu board we undertook lengthy tours. Both the Rough Trade contract and the Sire contract were signed by Johnny and I as the Smiths because the name and the project, with all of its ideas and concerns and worries, were ours alone, and no one else’s. Although Andy and Mike would soon ‘rally round the flag’, they hadn’t yet, and both still looked askance at this funny little Smithy gamble, with their eyes agape for better opportunities.
The release of Hand in glove told me, at least, that I existed. Every night for months the record is played on Radio One, either by David Jensen or John Peel, and I stand by the radio listening – a disfigured beast finally unchained from the ocean floor. The song rises out of the radio, and there is immediate support from music writers of integrity. The initial 6,000 pressing sells quickly, and the land is ours. The rush of success surged with certainty, and the press began stories of the Smiths turning down six-figure offers from CBS and Virgin, preferring instead Rough Trade – which was untrue. The only label that had offered the Smiths a deal was Rough Trade. Suddenly, Number One magazine lists Hand in glove at number 70 on their official Top 100, and our unrelenting self-financed touring attracts John Walters, who is producer and acting scout for the John Peel radio show. Our timetable then erupts with a series of radio sessions for both David Jensen and John Peel, and our reputation swells a hundredfold. It is a great feeling. John Peel, though, did not ever come to see the Smiths play live, and he did not attend any of the radio sessions. He is cited as instrumental in the Smiths’ success, but if not for the continual exuberance of John Walters, John Peel could never have encountered the Smiths. When I accidentally meet John Peel over the years (two times, and both in motorway service stations), he shyly has nothing to say on both occasions.
All of the new motion and commotion shakes the thought-patterns of Rough Trade Records, who are repeatedly reminded by the press that they are in possession of their first commercial venture – an unthinkable prospect for Rough Trade thus far. But how on earth could Rough Trade ever prosper – out there against brutally crass commercialism – unless the profiteer strangles the artistic elite? By the late summer of 1983 we are in Elephant Studios in Wapping recording our first LP. Wapping was still dankly post-war ruined dockland, and occupied exclusively by the east London poor. It is still the Wapping of To Sir, with Love (1967), and taxi drivers give a confused laugh once you state it as your destination. Apart from Peabody Trust flats, empty warehouses, rats that talk, and the left-behind doggerel of deep regret, there is nothing at all in Wapping. The elderly poor still shuffle about, out of time and quietly insane.
An overstuffed confectioner’s shop stands alone on a flattened street awaiting the council chop, and the part-eaten retainer behind the counter looks relieved to finally be on his way out of the new depersonalized world. I walk to the shop every day to buy things that I don’t need, because I want the owner to still feel relied upon, rain or shine. Production is in the hands of Troy Tate, who comes from Yorkshire and who has been appointed producer by Rough Trade. Mysteriously, we don’t object because we all quite like Troy, but his presence indicates a lack of concentration on our part, because we don’t actually know him, and this unfortunately reveals itself in the rash rumble coming from the speakers. It is not Troy’s fault, but recording does not go well, and we all feel that we must have another shot at it in view of the goggle-eyed interest from the weekly music papers. Geoff agrees that the LP must be right and must be improved upon from the Troy sessions. We do not, in fact, know anyone at all who could or should produce the Smiths’ first album. We cannot produce it ourselves because we – and especially I – have minimal studio experience. I actually have no idea what anything does or where anything goes. I am as useless as someone who has been left only as a head following a horrific road accident. John Porter had played for Roxy Music on their second (and magnificent) album, For Your Pleasure, and John had also produced one of our radio sessions for David Jensen, and Johnny thought him a logical choice to produce the album. I agreed.
John was very gentle and understanding, and our radio session had been a good indication of how things could be. We rearranged ourselves and we began again. I look back on the album that became The Smiths and I see nothing at all that had anything to do with me. Although the songs were very strong, the recording of those songs – in my view – failed everyone. The Smiths sound had already developed with a bullish fortification that doesn’t remotely suggest itself on The Smiths album. Live, Mike’s drumming had an incredible thunderbolt quality, and Andy’s bass had a pealing swagger – neither sound vaguely evident on The Smiths album. In fact, the album sounds exactly how the Smiths were not: pasty and thin. As genial as John Porter was, both Joe Moss and I could see that John didn’t quite know what to do with the Smiths sound.
The yearning thirst of Reel around the fountain was dropped in pitch, and John brought in his friend Paul Carrick to add frisky piano. The result is more caper than lamentation. Our live firebrand Miserable lie is choked to death and boxed in, when it had always up to this point detonated as a step-by-step incline crowned by a yowling falsetto – all of this lost in John’s production, which pulls the song back to a plod and makes the falsetto sound breathless and futile. I don’t owe you anything is sanitized into a squashy and spongy Spandau Ballet cuddle-up, and John’s remix of our glorious Hand in glove finally proves that he does not vaguely understand the rival gang spirit of the original recorded track. The mass
of constraints that are evident in the final mix are really and ultimately the fault of the band themselves – for failing to press STOP. The album ought to have been a dangerous blow from the buckle-end of a belt, but instead it is a peck on the cheek – correctly reviewed by the press who accurately assess all of the Smiths’ qualities without any claims of debut-album perfection. It is generally accepted that the songs are very strong, but unresolved on The Smiths. It enters the UK chart at a staggering number 2, held off by the Thompson Twins.
Richard Boon, now on the Rough Trade payroll, whispers to me: ‘You know, it would’ve came in at number 1 but we couldn’t manufacture the cassettes in time.’
My life sinks. It is a noisy bell to a quizzy mind, and one that sounds and sounds for five years to come, and it tells me that Rough Trade cannot quite produce enough testosterone in matters of big business, and they will hold the Smiths back. Nonetheless, in the market-driven viciousness of triple-platinum Queen and Phil Collins mega-ness, The Smiths is right there, insubordinates of an accidental moment in days when there is no sign anywhere of independent artists or a disconnected view. The chilblained mainstream would not comment on the arrival of the Smiths, and then (as now) there would be no Radio One airplay irrespective of how high the records climbed. Highest entry? Radio One had no interest except the ploy of avoidance.
It is forgotten now, but the Smiths’ success was held firmly at bay by the music industry, who instead exercised their if-we-ignore-them-they’ll-go-away Punk banishment. We are tellingly billed in the Sun for our first appearance on Top of the Pops as Dismiss, and This charming man garnishes triumphant reviews and begins a twelve-week chart dance. But something is wrong. The single leaps up and then glides down, then rockets then dives, and it becomes evident that Rough Trade cannot keep pace with the demand for stock, for suddenly they have a single that people want to buy, and they are caught cat-napping by the radiator. This charming man spends its entire life hedging and hovering outside of the Top 20, Rough Trade unable to supply sufficient quantities when the Top 10 called out with arms wide open.