At a time when the biggest rock groups tend to move with all the speed and fluidity of supertankers, it's hard to contemplate an era when a single year in the life of a band could contain at least one long-playing work of genius, a handful of brilliant single and endless internal intrigue.

The Smiths were the last British group to move in the quickfire cycles established by forebears such as the Stones, The Beatles, et al. Their annus mirabilis began in May 1986, when they released Bigmouth Strikes Again, the stinging single that trailed their third album. By the late spring of 1987, they would have released four more singles, entered the arena bracket in the USA, signed to a major label — and finished work on the album that proved to be their last word. As Johnny Marr explains, the parallels with their '60s forebears weren't unconscious:

"I had a very, very strong intuition and feeling before we made The Queen Is Dead. And I felt a lot of pressure. I knew we had to deliver something that was great. I felt we were great, and we'd been called great, but I didnt want to get away with just coasting.

"The other thing is, I wanted us to be as good as my heroes. From day one, I wanted us to be as important. Right from the off with The Smiths, in my head we were our own Rolling Stones. On top of that, we were being talked about in legendary terms. So you'd look at bands like The Who and The Small Faces — that pantheon of British bands — and think, 'Well, are we going to do it or not? Now's the time — it's the third album.'"

He pauses, chews his gum for a moment, and then grins.

"So... I was shitting myself."

Through their four albums — excluding the filler-free compendiums Hatful Of Hollow, The World Won't Listen and Louder Than Bombs — The Smiths' standards never slipped. Their shows were similarly sky-scraping. And yet, in dressing rooms and tour buses and meeting rooms, The Smiths often appeared to careen from crisis to crisis. Most crucially, after the exit of first manager Joe Moss in 1983, The Smiths never found a satisfactory replacement. Candidates entered the frame, usually at times of impending crisis, but then found communication suddenly halted and their services no longer required. The result was that even the most mundane tasks often fell on the band themselves — and Johnny Marr in particular. There can be few guitarists and songwriters who have ever broken off from the creation of their masterpiece to discuss van hire; Marr, much to his bafflement, is one of them.

Factor in the group's ongoing gripes with the Rough Trade label, the fact that bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce were slowly waking up to the fact that they were downgraded aides rather than fully-accredited partners, Rourke's problems with heroin, and Morrissey's apparent reluctance to communicate with those around him, and it's clear that the group were recurrently in deep and hostile water. Then again, music as heart-stopping as The Queen Is Dead is rarely the product of people who are skilled at the art of the smooth ride.

"It was a very weird vibe around the band from the start, which we fed off," says Marr. "There were a lot of strange dynamics between the personalities. A couple of members of the band were very insecure, there were a couple of power trips going on... it was very intense, and it made for very intense music. Had it not been what it was, we wouldn't have sounded like we did."

Thirteen years after the split, The Smiths' wounds are some way from healing. The recurrent source of discord is the court case played out in 1997, in which Mike Joyce contested his 10 percent share of Smiths' monies and won, thus making him a millionaire but tearing up his relationship with Morrissey and Marr. Rourke, simply to avoid penury, had already accepted £84,000 by way of a pay-off; but Joyce's victory presumably sent his sense of injustice into the stratosphere.

Thus, Marr and Rourke, who once had a brotherly bond, have not spoken for years. Mike Joyce, still friendly with Rourke, is unable to speak to MOJO on account of fresh legal tussles with Morrissey. As for the latter, any talk of a reactivated bond with Marr is scotched by the guitarist. The singer is currently in sun-kissed isolation in LA, as distant from the other Smiths as he is from his beloved England.

The Queen Is Dead took shape throughout the autumn and winter of 1985. Work first took place at Drone, an inauspicious 16-track studio in Chorlton-cum-Hardy — chosen simply because it allowed the band to regroup as the compositional ink was still drying. There they managed to sculpt most of The Boy With The Thorn In His Side — released as a stand-alone single in September 1985.

Once the group arrived in a studio, the pace tended to be brisk. Confident of their virtuosity, Marr led the band at a rate of knots ("If you're good enough technically you don't need two weeks to rehearse the one song"). Morrissey, meanwhile, spurned full-band rehearsals; as a result, adding to the sense of occasion that tended to course around The Smiths' environment, the band first heard his lyrics as they boomed from the studio speakers.

"We'd record the whole rhythm section and most of the guitars, just having to guess what Morrissey would come up with," says Andy Rourke. "That was a really exciting part of the process; we'd all be there going, What's he going to sing now? Occasionally he might clue Johnny in to what it was going to be about — but that was it. With a lot of the songs, we'd end up rolling around on the floor with laughter. That was the case with Morrissey: you'd either laugh along, or you'd be almost crying along. They'd be either tragic or hilarious. Or both."

"Morrissey would be there while the initial recording of the music was going on," Rourke continues, "and if he liked it, he'd sit there nodding and smiling. If he didn't, he'd leave the room and not come back. If he really didn't like something that me and Mike were doing, he'd drag Johnny out of the room and then Johnny would have to come in and talk to us. Was lack of communication an issue? Totally. It was a big guessing game: How To Keep Morrissey Happy."

After the Drone interlude, the group took off on a quintessentially Smithsian tour of Scotland, which included a date in the Shetland Islands ("The local vicar turned up," says Rourke. "I don't know what we were doing up there"), and then moved to RAK in London, wehere they recorded two of the album's linchpins — Bigmouth Strikes Again and There Is A Light That Never Goes Out — along with Asleep, the evocation of a suicide that finds Morrissey's grasp of sighing melancholia reaching almost unbearable peaks.

From there, they moved into the residential studio that hosted this period's key burst of activity: the six-week spell at Jacobs, near Farnham, Surrey, during which the lion's share of The Queen Is Dead made it to tape. It was the group's first taste of live-in artistry — The Smiths had been recorded at a handful of Manchester and London studios, Meat Is Murder at Amazon in Liverpool — and Marr in particular hurled himself into the experience. He was billeted to a cottage in the studio ground, to which, in the wee hours, he would retreat to plan the following day. He also added to the songs that they'd brought with them, writing the music to both Vicar In A Tutu and the funereal Never Had No-One Ever.

With the group was Stephen Street, who had begun his work with them as engineer on Meat Is Murder. His role was almost as demanding as Marr's, given that he had to straddle the wildly different schedules that divided the group. Morrissey, he recalls, would be up with the lark and keen to start work on vocal tracks by midday (Smiths insiders report that he was known to frequently climb the wooden hill before News At Ten). Marr, Rourke and Joyce had the slightly more nocturnal habits of accredited rock 'n' rollers. As with the archetypal English family, the evening meal was an accepted convening point: it was part of The Smiths' rule book, says Andy Rourke, that everyone dutifully turned up at the dinner table.

Thankfully, such quasi-domesticity had no bearing on the music. One song in particular bled with a scabrous intensity that was presumably absent at tea-time: the title track, inspired by Mar's desire to fuse two of the great rock archetypes, the MC5 and The Velvet Underground. The latter's V.U. — an assemblage of lost songs from the immediate post-Cale period — had appeared in February 1985. Marr was particularly transfixed by I Can't Stand It, the knock-kneed groover that opens the record; his desire was to alter the Velvets' blueprint by metaphorically taking it to Detroit. "I had The Queen Is Dead, the track, in my mind for a long time," he says. "I knew the song had the title, and I knew that was what the album was going to be called. To me, it was the MC5 playing I Can't Stand It. I'd always felt let down by the MC5. When I was younger, people were going 'Oh, the Dolls, the MC5, the Stooges' — but when I first heard the MC5, it felt a little too gung-ho, too kind of testosterone-mad for me. I wanted to deliver what I imagined the MC5 to be — energy, coolness."

One can hear the traces of Lou Reed in Marr's frantic rhythm guitar part: "It was done in this really little booth, in between the control room and the live room," he says now. "I wanted my amp to feed back. I put my head down, got on a vibe, played it, lost myself in it — and at the end I looked up. The band were going (applauds). I went, Was that alright? Shall I do another one? They went, 'Noooo!'"

Some of the music, however, was cruelly dropped on the cutting room floor. "There's about two more minutes of The Queen Is Dead," says Stephen Street. "On the album, it's about six minutes long, but we actually cut about an eight-minute track for that. I remember saying at the time, It's a bit long, and the band were like, 'No! We'll leave it!' But we did cut it. That version must still be out there somewhere."

As often happened, Morrissey premiered his lyrics to dropped jaws. And small wonder: in The Queen Is Dead, he uses England's post-imperial decline to inspire both revenge fantasies ("Her very lowness with her head in a sling — I'm truly sorry but it sounds like a wonderful thing"), and flights into pantomime that fuse republicanism with the eternal, Carry On-esque idea that beneath every aristocratic veneer lurks a repressed deviant ("I say Charles, don't you ever crave to appear on the front of the Daily Mail, dressed in your mother's bridal veil?").

When Cicely Courtneidge's reading of Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty was grafted to the song's intro, the abiding sense of a sprint through a darkened England was complete. "Amazing," says Johnny Marr, by way of roundabout agreement. "Amazing. My favourite Smiths song, lyrically."

So much for the wide sweep of British history. On the finished album, immediately after The Queen Is Dead came the camped-up dramatisation of an altogether more small-scale brouhaha: The Smiths' ongoing gripes with Rough Trade. Frankly Mr Shankly, though seemingly founded in the provincial archetype of escape to the bright lights, turned out to be a barely-veiled statement of Morrissey's desire to exit the label — with Geoff Travis at its centre. "I want to leave," sang Morrissey, "you will not miss me/ I want to go down in musical history." At its close came the sting: "Frankly Mr Shankly since you ask — you are a flatulent pain in the arse."

"We got that," says Andy Rourke. "When he [Morrissey] says, 'I didn't realise that you wrote such bloody awful poetry' — apparently Geoff had written him a poem. So I believe, anyway. I heard that he went mad about it."

Asked about his feelings, Geoff Travis pauses for thought. "Occasionally," he begins, "it gave me a bit of disquiet. I laughed as well — it was a mixture. I suppose it made me a little sad. If I hadn't known Morrissey as well as I did during that period, it might have really upset me. With Morrissey, everything happens on so many different levels; nothing is really that straightforward. It's just part of an interesting relationship." The answer, inevitably, suggests either a Zen-like ability to shrug off life's barbs, or the desire to take the conversation elsewhere.

"Whatever was happening," says Geoff Travis, "Morrissey would paint a picture to the contrary. That's the nature of the man. It's part of his sense of humour."

Nonetheless, Morrissey and Marr fielded phone calls from a handful of major labels — WEA, Virgin, EMI — during their time at Jacob's. They eventually elected to sign with the latter, whose origins were in keeping with Morrissey's sepia-tinted aesthetic, while word filtered thorugh to Geoff Travis that their exit was nigh. In response, Rough Trade abandoned assumed indie laissez faire and injuncted them — preventing new Smiths material from appearing on any other label. As a result, contrary to the group's frenetic modus operandi, The Queen Is Dead was held in limbo; completed well before Christmas 1985, but not released until June 1986.

"My big memory of The Queen Is Dead," says Johnny Marr, "is being behind the mixing desk at about half 12 in the morning. We had all this elation going on, a real high, and it was, How about his on the verse, and this on the chorus? There was also some shit going on about us being out of our Rough Trade contract.

"Morrissey had been talking to a lawyer about it. This guy was the biggest clichéd textbook, we didn't like him at all. He called me up. It was a closed session, not easy to get through to us — but he managed it. He said, 'I'm working on this, Johnny, but we may be looking at an injunction on this record.' I'm a quarter of the way into climbing this mountain, and I've got this wanker telling me Rough Trade are going to injunct the record. I was like, (Sarcastically) Great, fantastic.

"Then the phone went about three-quarters of an hour later, and it was this guy Jay from Rough Trade — who was a sweet guy — to tell me that Salford Van Hire had been on to Rough Trade, and because our roadie had brought the van back two days later than we'd paid for, they were going to sue as well, and we needed a lawyer's address. I was like, Jay — fuck off. And I went back to climbing the mountain. That was the one of the first times I took a picture in my mind, and thought, This is insane."

On one occasion at least, Marr's own behaviour only added to the craziness. With the album complete and festering at Jacob's — pending the settlement of the dispute, Rough Trade paying the studio fees, and the removal of the injunction — he decided to drive to Surrey, with his guitar tech Phil Powell and attempt to kidnap the tapes.

"In two feet of snow," laughs Marr. "We were round my house on a Friday night, and we got talking: We should own those tapes. We thought it'd be a great adventure to go and get our album back. We got in the car, and we got about as far as Knutsford and I thought, Wow — this is going to take a long time. it took us about five hours. I got in the studio when it was just getting light. I went in the kitchen door and started snooping around, and one of the owners up and was like, 'Hi Johnny'. I realised how stupid I was and said, I've come to pick up the album (Smiling) At half five in the morning. With no authority. He said, 'We haven't had any authorisation and we haven't been paid — I don't think we can do that."

Mid-way through Mojo's inter-view with Stephen Street, at the members-only den Soho House, Blur's Alex James appears. he glances admiringly at the copy of The Queen Is Dead lying on the table. He seems well aware of the respect any member of a British guitar group should pay to such an esteemed part of the Anglo-rock canon: "Tunes," he says, in the same tones some people use to talk about Chemical Brothers records.

Later, midway through another question Street thinks for a minute. "This was the time when Andy Rourke was supposed to been on heroin," he considers. "I do accept there must have been some problems — but Andy played fine on the record. I wasn't aware of it."

But Rourke's problems were real enough. A heroin user since his late teens, he had slid into the ways of the addict. His drug use had caused a schism with Marr in the pre-Smiths days, when the pair parted and Marr began the quest for collaborators that would bring him to Morrissey's door. Since Marr and Rourke's reunion, the subject had formed a constant, uneasy subtext to the group's progress. Now, however, Rourke was clearly ailing.

Marr's first response was to take him on the road. The pair played a handful of dates on the Labour-endorsing Red Wedge tour of January 1986, performing a three-song set with Marr's friend Billy Bragg, who sang lead vocals on The Smiths' Back To The Old House, his own A Lover Sings and the Stones' The Last Time — on which Marr bashfully added backing vocals. The guitarist also appeared at the show's grand finale — an ensemble reading of Curtis Mayfield's Move On Up, during which he found himself in truly unlikely company: Jimi Somerville, Junior Giscombe, Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp.

The tour was cracked up to be an ego-free crusade, but Marr's remembrance is slightly different. "We didn't do any socialising. In Manchester I was asked by a tour manager, would I like to play at the end with The Style Council? I thought it was rude to say no, so I said, Yeah, sure, fine. Paul Weller stood there, glaring. The show went on, he was still giving me daggers. I don't fancy it now. In the end, I thought If I'm going to go on-stage on this guy's number, I better introduce myself — and he was pretty snotty with me.

"Then," he adds, "The Smiths did something which is one of my proudest memories. I said to Billy, on the sly, Is it all right if I bring The Smiths up to play at Newcastle? We got in the car that day, drove up there with no equipment — no guitars, no amps — didn't soundcheck, but let everyone know that we'd like to play. We went on in the middle of the set, with borrowed gear, and blew the roof off the sucker. We played Bigmouth, The Boy With The Thorn In His Side, maybe another [In fact, there were two other songs: Shakespeare's Sister and I Want The One I Can't Have].

"There was a shitty vibe around that tour. Everyone was on such an ego trip. It had little do with politics; they were all up their own arses. Everyone was quite rude to me, but I went back with my band and blew 'em away. I was looking around, thinking my band had turned up and showed 'em. I was so proud of my mates. The songs were new, too. That was the great buzz for me: playing Bigmouth, laying it on everybody. It was ace."

On February 8, 1986, The Smiths played Liverpool Royal Court, before sailing to Ireland for three dates in Dublin, Dundalk and Belfast. It was these shows that convinced Morrissey and Marr that Rourke's trials were now hampering The Smiths. "When I used to go on tour," says Rourke, "obviously I couldn't score, so I used to go to the doctor's and get loads of sleeping tablets, loads of Valiums, and drink too much — and usually that fucked me up. Everything was a bit slow motion."

He remains adamant, however, that the wayward turns the music took in Ireland were not his fault. "All right, I was a bit fucked up, but I also had the worst roadie in the world. Throughout the set, me and Johnny used two tunings: one in F sharp and one in E, 'cos of Morrissey's range. Out of four or five gigs, this guy got it right once. I'd say, Right — There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. Pass me the one in F sharp. He'd pass me the E bass, and I'd be a tone out. I'd try it, but it'd be like Les Dawson."

Marr, however, placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of his friend. "There comes a time when a line is crossed. I can understand him going, 'How petty,' but with other people in other situations, it wouldn't have even got to two, three, four years. They would have taken some moral stance, which we didn't and wouldn't have done. It got serious because we were being told by a couple of people around the band, 'You don't sound very good'. Andy was off the case — you couldn't communicate with him."

On the group's return to England, Rourke was fired, apparently by crushingly callous methods. "Morrissey left a little postcard on the windscreen of my car, like a parking ticket. It said, 'Andy — you have left The Smiths. Goodbye and good luck, Morrissey.'" ("Very Morrissey," says one Smiths associate when reminded of this incident. "You are the weakest Smith — goodbye.")

"After I'd stopped crying," Rourke continues, "I phoned Johnny and said, What's going on? He was like, 'Er... you'd better come round.' Johnny was really good — he helped me through it, he was very supportive — but he had to abide by the judge's decision. That was the low point of my life, really. As far as I knew, it was permanent."

"He left my house and went down the drive with his bass, and it was the saddest fucking day of my life," says Johnny Marr. "I was in tears. For him."

Despite Morrissey's note, Marr saw Rourke's dismissal as a temporary measure, an exercise in tough love that would force Rourke to clean up. "It was totally a temporary thing," he says now. "Andy was one of us. There was never any 'goodbye forever'; it was kind of 'get your shit together'. But our resolve on that lasted about a week. It just wasn't right."

Rourke's replacement was one Craig Gannon, a Mancunian guitarist to whom Marr had been alerted by Simon Wolstencroft, sometime Fall drummer and a colleague of Marr and Rourke in the pre-Smiths band Freak Party. He envisaged little difficulty in playing bass; having Marr at his home — but without rehearsing with the group — he was in. (MOJO contacted Gannon with a view to telling his tale in this feature — in keeping with his reputation for reticence, our calls were not returned.)

Then, compounding his run of misfortune, Andy Rourke got busted. "I used to drive all the way to Oldham 'cos I thought it was safer than Moss Side. I'd just arrived at this dealer's house, and then the door came crashing down and about 20 undercover police dived in. Apparently, they'd been surveying the place for six months. It was a massive drugs ring that started in Nigeria, and this dealer was at the bottom of the ladder. The day before, I'd tried to dye my hair blonde, and it had gone orange. I looked like Cilla Black. When they arrested me, they put me in the cells. I always remember the little slot opening and the police sniggering, 'Look at his hair!' It was about a week after Boy George had got busted. He stole the headlines, thankfully. But I was on News At Ten. (Smiling) Trevor McDonut.

"Heroin had been there, on and off, since I was 18. But I was getting a decent amount of money, which made it easier to keep scoring. At one point, I was spending a couple of hundred quid a day. How did I get straight? In the end I just grew up, basically."

Rourke's bust threw his enduring bond with Marr into sharp relief. "His girlfriend had been phoning during the night, which was very weird: 'Andy's not come back, I'm really nervous, this is really heavy.' We just twigged that something had gone on," says Marr. "He phoned me Saturday morning, and came over Saturday night. He was completely in shock."

Rourke was convinced that he would go to prison. As it turned out, when the police operation presented its scalps to a court in Mold, North Wales, he was the only defendant of 25 to avoid jail: he was given a two-year suspended sentence and fined £1,000. He was also re-admitted to The Smiths. "I think we all rallied around him bcause of the bust. He needed his mates. So he was back in. And we had the opportunity to expand our sound."

The group decided to retain Craig Gannon as a second guitarist. Marr says their decision was based on how cruel it would have been to dismiss him within weeks of his recruitment — proof that Morrissey's fondness for high-velocity hiring and firing was occasionally tempered by a more considerate approach. Thus The Smiths became five, and Gannon took his place on-stage, to Andy Rourke's left."

In May, The Smiths finally released Bigmouth Strikes Again, the charging single that Johnny Marr now sees as their Jumpin' Jack Flash. The similarities are not just aesthetic: as with the Stones, this was their hard-faced return aftera period of trauma. It was premiered on Whistle Test in a performance of stunning ferocity: Morrissey using his mike lead as a bullwhip, as the augmented group conjured up a hurricane.

The following month came the release of The Queen Is Dead, finally liberated after the successful renegotiation of the contract with Rough Trade. The man responsible was Matthew Sztumpf, also manager of Madness and hired for a second time after an abortive managerial stint in 1985. His story says much about The Smith's perilous control of their affairs — and, indeed, the eventual reasons for their split.

Geoff Travis's view of the group's instability to find a manager is remarkably cutting. "It was like a Carry On farce, really. One of the great tragedies of The Smiths is that they never had a good, coherent manager — aside from Joe Moss. Joe bailed out for personal reasons early on, and that was a terrible shame."

Sztumpf first appeared in the wake of the fall from grace of the late Scott Piering, who had taken on managerial tasks in addition to his work as the band's plugger, only to be ditched. Sztumpf's first task was to join the dots for an imminent American tour, for which only the shows had been booked — at 10 days' notice. Against the odds, he pulled it off. he flew back to the UK with the band from the last date in L.A. "Having returned home, having chatted with Morrissey on the plane and left him at Heathrow, that was the last I heard," he recalls, "until three weeks later, when I got a call from either the accountant or the lawyer saying that my services were no longer required. It was a little strange, obviously."

His remembrance of a 21-day period of post-tour quiet does not quite tally with the facts. Certainly, it's a matter of record that on July 19, 1985, Sztumpf had to contend with Morrissey's no-show for a Smiths appearance on the not-insignificant Wogan TV show. "He'd been in London for two days or so," says Sztumpf. "The guys [ie, Rourke, Joyce and Marr] drove down from Manchester — and in the meantime, he was going back north. I was at the studio: Where's Mozzer? Eventually, someone suggested calling his mother to see if he was at home, and sure enough he was. The rest of the band seemed to accept it and went home. I have said that that was the low-point of my career. It wasn't very pleasant."

Despite that, with The Queen Is Dead stuck in injuncted limbo he re-entered The Smiths' fold towards the end of the year. "You could say I was a glutton for punishment (laughs). But I loved the band. I thought, Maybe they've realised that they'd really like to work with me and we should do this properly. And I was intrigued by the situation wtih Rough Trade."

Sztumpf renegotiated the band's deal, scaling down their obligations to the label so that after the next album they could leave for EMI. "Morrissey seemed reasonably pleased — but not pleased enough to keep me on board," he says. "I was paid for the work I did during that period. I think it was the accountant who told me that time. I think they'd fired their lawyer (laughs). I wasn't that surprised; I was beginning to see a pattern to the way Morrissey worked."

Marr's role in this intrigue was less pronounced than that of his songwriting partner. He would agree to particular management candidates suggested by Morrissey, only to see them jettisoned. The result, inevitably, was further periods spent fielding phone calls about van hire, not to mention attempting to smooth over the fall-out. "[Morrissey] would take me to aside and say, 'We have to have this person as a manager,'" says Marr. "I would say, OK. You'd travel with them, go on the road, build up a relationship — and the next minute, that person's got to go. Then it'd be, He's going to be really upset, who's going to tell him? Oh right — there's a fucking surprise.

"But Morrissey had his reasons, you know. And maybe he was right. I'm not saying that he was wrong to employ them, or that he was wrong to get rid of them. They might not have been the right person. Joe Moss was always the right person for The Smiths, in every way. But in the end, one of the many things that started to be too much for me was that I had to do it [ie, fire them]. It landed on my toes. Matthew was an established manager. He wasn't just someone who loved the band and wanted to help out. It was a little bit more serious than that. Matthew was around for a while, but I could sense that this guy could never really show us what he could do, because he didn't feel it was like an official thing. There was a lot of insecurity going around. I don't like people feeling insecure around me. It makes me feel weird."

"I think if they didn't pamper Morrissey," says Andy Rourke, "then they wouldn't last very long. And if Johnny tended to get on with them more, Morrissey would almost get jealous and think, 'Right, I don't like them any more.' It was a bit strange. And frustrating. Me and Mike wanted to get our financial position sorted out, and that always seemed to be the bottom of the list. Just as we were getting there, the manager would get sacked and we'd be at the bottom again."

Rourke's claims of jealousy on Morrissey's part if any manager threatened to get close to Marr is borne out by the memories of most Smiths associates. Midway through my time with Johnny Marr, I remind him of that, with reference to Ken Friedman, the American manager who entered the frame during the recording of Strangeways, Here We Come. The conversation goes like this:

The theory is that Morrissey was jealous of Friedman's relationship with you.

"I believe so, yeah. It wasn't just managers though, was it?"

No, there were producers as well. It's pretty much accepted that that's why John Porter [producer of The Smiths and several singles, replaced by Stephen Street for the latter three albums] left the picture.

"And Troy Tate [employed for early Smiths sessions]. After it was pointed out to me, I started to twig it. And I wasn't going to have it."

So how did you go about addressing it?

"I left the band."

There were still 12 months left until Marr would exit The Smiths. In July, with The Queen Is Dead still warm, they released Panic — the clipped, glammed-up single that fused T.Rex's Metal Guru with a decrying of the banality of the '80s mainstream and the very British disquiet that pervaded the album's title track. According to legend, it was inspired by Morrissey and Marr hearing a surreal juxtaposition on Radio 1: news of the meltdown at Chernobyl being followed by Wham!'s I'm Your Man. Marr says the tale is rather embroidered — although exasperation with George and Andrew may well have informed the lyric. "I do remember being in the kitchen with Morrissey and Wham! coming on the radio and then just completely dissing it — and within the week we had that song."

The same month, the group layed their first British shows as a five-piece, at Glasgow Barrowlands, Newcastle Mayfair and — on consecutive nights — Manchester G-Mex's centre and nearby Salford University. The G-Mex appearance was part of the grandly-named Festival Of The Tenth Summer, organised to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Sex Pisols' performance at the Lesser Free Trade Hall; Marr remembers it as something of a fiasco. Salford, by contrast, was a joy, a chaotic celebration of The Smiths' ongoing link with the North that saw countless stage invasions. By the end, as 1,500 people moved as one to Hand In Glove and Marr climbed onto the drum riser, the window frames on the floor below the venue had all buckled. During the show, Morrissey reached for a Ramonesesque placard, emblazoned with the legend 'THE QUEEN IS DEAD', news of which had already reached the group's disciples. That night, it read 'TWO LIGHT ALES PLEASE'.

Meanwhile, the group were preparing for a 27-date American tour. It was assumed that Rourke's drug conviction would scupper his chances of a visa — so they drafted in the unlikely Guy Pratt, later to play with Pink Floyd. Rourke taught him his parts. "He had a ponytail," he laughs. "I remember Morrissey saying, 'Sorry, I'm not going on-stage with anyone with a ponytail.' So he had all his hair chopped off, bless him. Then my visa came through."

These rehearsals were also notable for an incident that neatly illustrated the divide between the ever-ascetic Morrissey and his accomplices. "Someone brought a load of acid along," says Rourke. "Morrissey had gone to bed, and we all had a load, playing football on the lawn under his window. We were going crazy 'til about six in the morning. We got up about 12 o'clock the next day, Where's Morrissey? 'Oh, he left at about six this morning — he's gone home.' He came back after a few days."

The North American tour began at the tail-end of July. The morning the band — accompanied by Marr's wife, Angie — flew out, their shift to EMI was ratified on paper. "I went over to Morrissey's flat before we went to the airport," says Marr, "and a contract from EMI arrived that had been sorted out by the lawyer. We were advised that everything was cool — 'Do it, sign it, it's going to be a wonderful relationship.' We signed it, and then on the way to the airport we went, Hang on a minute. The money we're getting for this contract, where's it going? Is it going to the lawyer? So we hastily signed a letter trying to divert the money to the band. That was posted at the airport."

The shows began on July 30 in Ontario, the date of Craig Gannon's 21st birthday. "He was like the little kid — a lot younger than the rest of us," says Andy Rourke. "That night, we bought him 21 brandies and made him down them in front of us. In the morning, apparently, the maid telephoned the tour manager — there was puke everywhere. There must have been a couple of bottles in him. He wanted to go home the next morning. We had to talk him out of it."

"They had to fumigate his room," says Johnny Marr. "They had that 'do not cross' tape outside. Poor old Craig. And we had our first ever incidence of hotel trashing when Craig joined the band. He trashed a room in LA. He was sober as well; he took a fire bucket and wrecked the light fittings. The partying thing was just something that was on my agenda: it was one of the things that I'd dreamed about doing as a kid. I'm glad we did it."

On one occasion, Rourke even recalls Morrissey involving himself in the tomfoolery. "I forget where it was," he says, "but he got drunk and pulled a cigarette off Johnny and started smoking. We were like, Oh my God! Look! Morrissey's smoking!"

By his own admission, Marr was drinking a bottle of Remy Martin a night, though he claims that the notion of either an alcohol-induced breakdown or recurrent drunken performances are way wide of the mark. Rourke's memory is slightly different: "There was one time when Angie called me to their room. He was in bits on the bed, feeling really ill, dead upset, and she was dead upset. I think he had a nervous breakdown, basically. I just remember not knowing what to do to help."

Marr, though dismissive of that tale, acknowledges that booze — along with the endless problems that came from the lack of a manager — impacted on his health. "The main thing is, I wasn't really in shape to be able to do it. I wasn't physically up to the job. I was a skinny bloke. And also, there were dramas going on all the time. Tour managers coming and going — and the pressure during the day... for a period of time on that tour, it was up to Angie and Grant Showbiz [Smiths soundman] to get us around. Angie was 20. She had a credit card and good sense, and she was on the case."

In the US, The Smiths were signed to Warners offshoot Sire. As the group crossed the Atlantic, word reached Sire of the EMI deal. A flare-up duly occurred. "We played the Universal Ampitheatre in LA," Marr recalls. "Quite a high pressure gig, but it went fine. The vice-president of Warner Brothers, who was quite a gentle character, came backstage, and he was fuming. It was like, 'He wants to talk to Johnny and Morrissey about their signing to EMI.' So guess who ends up locked in a dressing room, on his own, defending the band signing to EMI without telling him?

"And this guy was so furious, he punched the wall — put a dent in the plasterboard. He wasn't an intimidating guy, but he wanted to kill me. That scenario dragged on for two or three hours into the night — then we had to get on a plane the next morning and fly somewhere else. Meanwhile, my mates, Andy and Mike, are having a great old time. So I'm going to go out with them and have a few drinks. I can't deal with this."

Perhaps inevitably, the American tour ended with four dates still to go and The Smiths returning home. A month later they toured the UK. By the close of that trek, Craig Gannon's life as a Smith was over. "We weren't really going anywhere with him," says Marr. "He wasn't going to add anything to the next lot of recording, that became obvious. There was no need for him to be there. I sat down and wrote the songs with Morrissey: we had our system of working. He played on Panic and Ask — and I think that's maybe when we knew it wasn't going to work out, because he didn't do anything that I couldn't do myself."

The Smiths' year ended with the kind of grisly incident that a decent clairvoyant could perhaps have seen coming. After a drunken night out with Mike Joyce and his girlfriend, Marr crashed his BMW. The incident, if the wreckage was anything to go by, could easily have been fatal. "The pictures of the car... it was a write-off," says Andy Rourke. "He very nearly broke his neck."

Despite such trauma, the music largely maintained its air of excellence. Cracks, however, were appearing. Ask, released in October, was backed by a reading of Twinkle's Golden Lights — the first occasion that Marr had to adjust himself to the release of below-par Smiths material. "I wasn't used to the band I'd started doing stuff that I didn't enjoy," he says. "That was the first time that had happened, really. I'm not really that in love with Ask — including what I do on it, although I really like the words. Towards the tail end, there were a few tracks that I wasn't 1,000 per cent passionate about, and it had never been like that before."

Tellingly, Andy Rourke didn't contribute to Golden Lights. He found the arrangement a little hard to fathom, and his determination to get to grips with it was hampered by a simple lack of enthusiasm. Instead, John Porter played the bass, while Morrissey and the late Kirsty MacColl crooned what many still see as the group's lowest moments.

Soon enough, that debacle was revealed as a freakish aberration. For many, in fact, most of the material that emerged in the wake of Ask represented The Smiths' apex: Shoplifters Of The World Unite and its two b-sides, London and Half A Person; Sheila Take A Bow, coupled with Is It Really So Strange?, and Sweet and Tender Hooligan; You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby, a new track that crept onto The World Won't Listen; the lion's share of Strangeways, Here We Come... all, in terms of their simple quality, were of a piece with The Queen Is Dead. Indeed, the notion that the recording of Strangeways was some Let It Be-esque knot of bad vibes and pregnant pauses is rejected by Marr, Rourke and Stephen Street.

All that apart, something was missing. "I've got lots of photos and loads of video footage of us making that album," says Johnny Marr. "You can see us talking and having a laugh. But towards the end of the band, when we weren't doing music, we weren't able to be comfortable with each other any more. I was unhappy, and I didn't want to just harbour all this unhappiness and sulk and run away. But I was into making that record. And I love almost every track on that album."

Nonetheless, for reasons that have been repeatedly pulled apart and pored over, Johnny Marr left The Smiths. "I think when something's over, events have a way of conspiring to make you realise that it's over," he says now. "As cryptic as that sounds, it's true. Things would happen and I'd be like, Am I going to have to deal with this for the rest of my life? And it was a very, very emotional band. It's in the music. The relationship between me and Morrissey was very emotional. It wasn't volatile in that we would row or anything like that, but it was so intense that if rocked slightly it would be a big deal.

"Was the lack of a manager important? Massively, I think. I was nursemaiding people when I needed nursemaiding myself. And I couldn't see where we were going to go in the near future musically without repeating ourselves and not being as good.

"I was a pretty happy kid, a happy teenager before the band, and that was when I had nothing. People don't believe this — they think that at the time I had this agenda that I was going to join The Pretenders and be in Bryan Ferry's band — but I'm not an idiot. When you make a decision that serious, you have to look at the bottom line. 'Can you face the worst?' That was basically going back on the dole. When I've said that in the past, people have said, 'You're Johnny Marr, of course you weren't going to go back on the dole.' I had to really, really look at the decision I was making — how it affected me, my friends, my wife, my band. Was I prepared to walk away from the fame, the attention and get no end of shit for it? But I was like, Being back with my folks, being back at home if I have to be, being skint — it's better than this. I've never, ever regretted it."

It's close to 15 years since The Queen Is Dead; five years more, in fact, than the decade Nick Kent once breathlessly claimed it would take for The Smiths to achieve the same kudos as The Beatles. He was banking on more music, of course; and besides, only a fool would deny that the Fabs sit in their own fenced-off celestial space.

It's the enclosure immediatly below them that occasionally opens its doors — and, listening back to Johnny Marr, one gets the impression that he knows The Smiths may soon be posthumously granted membership.

"The thing about The Smiths is this," he says. "We were considered a great singles band, but we were also a really good albums band. Now that a load of time has passed and you can look at that, there weren't many British bands, apart from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, who were great singles bands and great albums bands as well. But we were both. All the time."