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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.
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Deep
wounds reopened: (from left) Johnny Marr, Morrissey, Mike Joyce
and Andy Rourke during their 1997 court dispute over the disbursement
of The Smiths' earnings.
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During
the three hours he spends allowing his reminiscences to be captured
on tape, Johnny Marr lets slip one particularly telling fact. On one
Friday afternoon at his Cheshire home in 1985, he wrote the music for
Cemetry Gates, I Know It's Over and Frankly Mr Shankly, and prepared
the requisite cassettes for Morrissey, ready for the lyrics. Talking
to Marr, one gets the impression that this was hardly a freak event;
both at home and in the studio, he and Morrissey were among the most
prolific songwriters the UK has ever produced.
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.
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The
odd couple: Steven Morrissey and Johnny Marr.
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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 Marr'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."
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The
Bill Shankly of indie rock: Rough Trade's Geoff Travis
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"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.
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Johnny
Marr and (right) Billy Bragg, on the "ego trip" Red
Wedge tour, January '86.
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"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."
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Liverpool
Royal Court, February '86: the show was the final straw in the
sacking of the drug-befuddled Andy Rourke.
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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."
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The
Smiths with new boy Craig Gannon, centre.
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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."
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The
five-piece Smiths debut Bigmouth Strikes Again: "Our Jumpin'
Jack Flash."
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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'.
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|
Morrissey
with hi-tech visuals on the Queen Is Dead tour.
|
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."
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|
"Hang
the DJ!" performing Panic on The Tube, July, '86.
|
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."
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|
And
then there were four: The Smiths, post Gannon, look forward to
more room on the bus.
|
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."
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|
Johnny
Marr, wife Angie, and keys for one doomed BMW.
|
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.
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|
Britannia
Hotel, Manchester, Jan '87: The Smiths' final formal photo session.
|
"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."
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Morrissey:
too big for The Smiths? Oldham Road, Manchester, January '87.
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