1987 09 10 Smiths The Listener

 

The Smiths: Cult of the miserable

Ken Garner profiles lonely hearts club band The Smiths, recently hit by the defection of their guitarist, and unravels the maudlin appeal of singer/lyricist Morrissey.

Every week in the personal columns of the music papers, dozens of young men draw freely on one group’s lyrics to describe themselves to prospective partners of mostly the opposite sex. 'I don’t have much in my life, but take it, it’s yours,’ proffers one. Another is '16, clumsy and shy’. Trying the patience of copyright holders, the most common plea is: ‘If you have five seconds to spare, I’ll tell you the story of my life.’

It will take only a little longer to tell the story of The Smiths, the group behind this outburst of national song. How guitarist and tunesmlth Johnny Marr recruited into his Manchester group an odd stay-at-home poet and vocalist, to be known only by his surname of Morrissey. How, with bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce, they went on to enjoy chart-topping success. And how, six weeks ago, five years on, Marr quit.

The group were poised for even greater things. Strangeways, Here We Come, their fourth and final studio album for the independent record company Rough Trade, to be released later this month, was to precede a long-term contract with EMI for the Morrissey-Marr combo. The Smiths say they will continue with a new guitarist. Yet Marr’s central role makes it inevitable that his departure is seen as ending the one true Smiths.

Morrissey, always a step ahead, has already written his own epitaph. ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’, a track from the forthcoming album, finds him addressing himself, as his own greatest fan, and concluding that although the EMI deal means leaving his roots behind, the better part of himself has the consolation that ‘they cannot touch you now’. A funny and subtle exploration of the pop-star condition, it gains an extra resonance following his collaborator’s departure. As if acknowledging the guest session work that has lured him away, Marr says farewell with a brief solo of consummate grace.

Their arrangements may have expanded, but their message has held fast. Their first, eponymous LP bristled with resentment at isolation. Meat Is Murder, the follow-up, presented a convincing equation between Morrissey’s rage at institutional and domestic violence towards children, and his vegetarianism and desire to drop his trousers to the Queen.

The latter ambition characterised last year’s The Queen Is Dead, an indictment of the nation’s humourlessness—which drew protest from Tory MPs, thereby perfectly proving the point. The LP also featured perhaps the definitive Smiths song, 'There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’, in which the most desperate need of the lonely is so contrived as to make the prospect of a fatal road accident amusing. An impressive roster of singles, B-sides and BBC sessions, already largely collected on three value-for-money compilations, complete and seal for ever the group’s years with Rough Trade.

Throughout, Marr’s driving, melodic style has been reminiscent of that other great northern group The Hollies. His jazzy links, possibly instigated to obscure the limitations of Morrissey’s voice, created the tension that was The Smiths’ unique charm. It is no coincidence that Marr’s sweetest playing underscored Morrissey’s most monotonal performance— the delightfully pathetic ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’. Morrissey is truly a vocalist. He hums, sighs, whistles, wails, yelps and yodels. A wrong note can be the right one. Fallibility is part of the package.

A clue to The Smiths’ success is provided by their record sleeves. The group does not appear. Instead, Morrissey chooses monochrome ‘cover stars’ like Shelagh Delaney, Pat Phoenix, Viv Nicholson and Yootlia Joyce, all of them icons of a pre-permissive society. It is as if sex ended in 1963. To his audience, many born between Lady Chatterley and the first Beatles LP, those years provide the only possible role models for today’s similarly grey times. The exuberance of the intervening 25 years appears an irrelevant aberration. In his sad, brief, provincial tales of undeveloped hearts, Morrissey is appropriating as his own a central strain in English middle-class culture that has gone astray. The Smiths’ achievement is in sticking it where it is rarely heard—in the Top Ten.

If not exactly a role model, Morrissey is nevertheless the thinking young man’s pop star. For a breed still brought up to believe that feeling is bad form, to be persuaded that it is perfectly natural to admit. to emotional excess or ineptitude, to profess celibacy, and to be camp or ludicrous, is quite a feat. True, Morrissey repeats his complaints over and over in each song. But, as those who place personal ads in the music papers know, the more you express an emotion, the more you may have to express.

Columnists seeking the New Man will comb the streets in vain. Like Morrissey, we go to bed early with a good book. And, like ours, his is a light that will not go out just yet.