2006 03 Q Classic Morrissey and The Story of Manchester - Part 7 - The Smiths

THE SMITHS IN MANCHESTER

Fronted by Morrissey, The Smiths were the most influential British band of the ’80s, creating witty, doleful music that reflected Manchester’s rain-soaked streets and the UK’s industrial and spiritual decline. 

isolation

In 1985 Nick Kent joined The Smiths on tour. He recalls a band at full throttle and a singer drifting into his own orbit.

APART FROM BEING the greatest group ever to rise out of Manchester and the only truly worthwhile thing to have come of age in the appalling ’80s, The Smiths were also the last entity I’ve ever been a giddy-headed unconditional fan of. Their music genuinely changed my life. Between 1982 and 1984 I’d stopped writing: nothing inspired me any more. Then someone in a squat played me the first Smiths album, and it was like waking up from a coma. After the long, uncertain and largely underwhelming years bridging punk with new wave, an English group had boldly arrived to pick up the creative gauntlet thrown by the great homegrown ’60s groups — Beatles, Stones, Kinks — and possibly take it even further. In short, they re-inspired me to put pen to paper. Their music had a unique aura and mystery about it that needed penetrating. In the winter of ’84, The Face green-lighted an in-depth Smiths feature and I soon found myself face-to-face with both Morrissey and Johnny Marr, who consented to do a rare interview together.

Right away, they were a textbook study in contrasts. Marr was a brainy lad, small and wiry, infectiously upbeat and radiantly unneurotic. He never stopped smoking self-rolled joints. Morrissey was tall, bony and sat in a dignified posture staring with penetrating eyes while demonstrating the general body language of a spinster aunt. He stuck to drinking tea. But when he spoke — mostly about The Smiths and his all-consuming love for what they were creating together - it was hard not to be held spellbound by his forceful eloquence and sense of utter self-possession. Marr mostly listened approvingly. It became obvious that they cared about each other deeply, that there was a powerful mutual respect bonding them.

Yet there was also the inescapable sense that they were such radically different personality types that, without the music, they’d probably never have sought out each other’s company in the first place. Certainly, a lot of Morrissey’s intensity and inwardness stemmed from all the humiliations he claimed to have suffered as a teenager. Large part of our interview were taken up with bitter recollections of his being misunderstood by local musicians, being rejected by various editors and being ridiculed by other Manc music-biz types. “Fame is a type of revenge,” he told me with relish. “You hate so many people. It sounds very juvenile now — like smashing someone’s windows. But then what else can you do?  [Fame]  is like a weapon, something to make them gnash their teeth.' Otherwise people will always have the finger on you. Always.”

BECAUSE OF MORRISSEY’S pervasive paranoias, The Smiths had become notoriously insular, trusting no one, and this in turn had a catastrophic effect on all the business issues! involving the group. Everyone who worked for The Smiths, I quickly noticed, was wary of Morrissey in much the same way that a court jester always has to be acutely tuned in to his king’s ever-changing moods. Still, for a short but memorable period of time, the group’s two principals welcomed me into their world of Smithdom as a genuine ally. In January of 1985, Johnny Marr invited me to watch him in a London studio mixing both Oscillate Wildly and the ill-fated single entitled Shakespeare’s Sister, which he’d written the music for after listening intently to some Johnny Cash albums. His original mix of the latter song captured its full impact but then the three other members elected to mix it again “more democratically”, and the released version ended up sounding cluttered and inconsequential.

The most magical moment in the studio for me with The Smiths occurred when I turned up the same month to find the four members just finishing the recording of a brand new track they’d begun just two hours earlier called Stretch Out & Wait. I remember sitting there with them listening to this over and over again. No one could quite believe how beautiful it sounded and how quickly and effortlessly it had been created. An elated but still somewhat nervous Morrissey took me aside at one point and earnestly quizzed me for half an hour for any insider scoops on his heroes, the New York Dolls, Marc Bolan, Jobriath and Klaus Nomi. And then he simply vanished from the premises. The rest of the group had evidently grown accustomed to his disappearing acts: they stayed on, smoking joints and laughing together without ever questioning their singer’s whereabouts.

IN FEBRUARY - WITH Shakespeare’s Sister ready for release and both the Meat Is Murder and Hatful Of Hollow albums fresh in the record racks - The Smiths embarked on another British tour and invited me along on several dates. Compared with the Stones and Led Zeppelin tours I’d attended, it was most chaste and civilised, with camomile tea instead of Jack Daniel’s and polite backstage conversations in place of demonstrations of hedonistic meltdown. The Smiths still had obsessive groupies - but not the kind who specifically wanted to have sex with their heroes. Their most ardent fanatic was a strange Japanese girl who called herself Oscar and who followed the group whenever and wherever they performed live. Lately, both Morrissey and Marr had stopped wearing the frayed jeans and tacky beads that had been their early onstage apparel in favour of expensive designer suits that the affluent Oscar had personally bought for them.

This tour may well have been the high point of their career. As a live band, they were sensational. Each performance they gave on that tour was a celebration, unique unto itself. Most important of all, the creative chemistry between Morrissey and Marr was reaching its peak.The most exciting moments for me occurred during soundchecks in empty halls when Marr would play new riffs and melodies to Joyce and Rourke and the threesome would then begin sculpting together arrangements for forthcoming Smiths tracks. I heard the music for There Is A Light That Never Goes Out being formed before my very ears.

The future clearly belonged to The Smiths, but things started to fall apart around this time too. Managers were hired and abruptly fired before they could begin sorting through the labyrinthine complexities of the group’s contractual obligations. There was a lengthy communication breakdown with Rough Trade, their record label. And then Morrissey discovered that Andy Rourke - Marr’s best friend - was a heroin addict and duly coerced the rest of the group to sack the bassist. I was also deemed persona non grata. The piece I ended up writing for The Face contained quotes and insights courtesy of former colleagues of Morrissey’s from his struggling Mancunian outcast days, and he was not at all happy about seeing their candid reminiscences in cold print. Marr was also upset about a couple of details from his past that had seeped into the text. From then on, I watched the group’s progress mostly from the sidelines.

History now indicates that they released their masterpiece,The Queen Is Dead, in June 1986 and later that year set off on a triumphant tour of Britain with Andy Rourke back on bass and Craig Gannon as second guitarist. I wrote a superlative-strafed review of the record for Melody Maker and was briefly invited backstage on 26 October when the group played the London Palladium. Iggy Pop - a fan himself - was also present, much to Johnny Marr’s evident delight, but Morrissey never bothered to leave his personal dressing room and say hello to him. Just two months earlier, The Smiths had played New York and Mick Jagger had arrived backstage afterwards to offer his congratulations. Morrissey had bluntly refused to meet him as well.The more successful the human daffodil of angst-rock became, the more insular and untrusting it made him. Marr — continually caught between appeasing his singer and having to confront all the messy aspects of his group's business side — was starting to drink far too much. Straight after the Palladium show, he was involved in a serious car crash that could have cost him his life.

WE ALL KNOW what happened next. The Smiths — once again a four-piece and newly signed to EMI — recorded their final studio album for Rough Trade in early 1987. The sessions for Strangeways Here We Come were later remembered by all participants as being both productive and harmonious in terms of social interaction. Still, it’s hard to imagine Morrissey being entirely comfortable with Marr’s moonlighting session work for Talking Heads and Bryan Ferry. The final song on the album was — rather pointedly - entitled I Won’t Share You. Then Danny Kelly at the NME — having heard some gossip from a ‘friend’ of one of the band - ran a “Smiths To Split” news story in his journal, by which time everyone in the group had become so suspicious and mistrustful of each other that they let themselves break apart for good instead of directly confronting the issues involved in continuing.

Will they ever reunite? When hell freezes over, perhaps. Johnny Marr doesn’t seem to think so. And, as anyone who’s ever found themselves consigned to his voluminous list of pet hates will certainly tell you, Morrissey is not a person to whom the word ‘forgiveness’ is readily applicable. I can’t imagine him ever allowing Mike Joyce — or Andy Rourke — to darken his towers again after those nasty ’90s lawsuits that so publicly humiliated the singer. We may yet see Johnny Marr reunited with his former songwriting soulmate sometime in the uncertain future — but I can almost guarantee he’ll just be the special guest at a Morrissey-and-his-current-backing group live show.

It’ll be interesting to see what transpires when The Smiths are inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2008. Meanwhile, the magnificent Mancunian has a new album to promote called Ringmaster Of The Tormentors. “High Priest Of The Grudge Bearers” would perhaps have been more appropriate. ■

WE COULD BE HEROES

In 1986, The Smiths were poised to break America. But instead a gruelling coast-to-coast tour broke them. Johnny Black unfolds a cautionary tale of cocaine, egomania and poisonous sea-creatures.

A GLORIOUS ORANGE sun poured its warmth down on to the glittering waves that lapped the sands of Tampa Bay, Florida. It was a perfect day, except, that is, for the sound of an Englishman screaming in agony.

“I looked down and saw the blood pumping out of a puncture on the side of my heel,” remembers The Smiths’ bassist Andy Rourke. “It was pumping in time with my heartbeat.” And his heartbeat was accelerating.

Moments earlier, Rourke and the other Smiths had been revelling in a little time off during what had proved to be a morale-crushing first tour of America. Arriving in Tampa with Morrissey suffering laryngitis and everyone else whacked out from weeks of constant gigging and partying, they desperately needed a break. Tampa beach looked inviting.

They had raced across the sands and plunged into the cooling waters only to have their idyll shattered by Rourke’s agonised yells. “I thought I’d stood on a broken bottle, but then I felt this searing pain rushing up my leg, and then it was like I’d been kicked in the nuts really hard, and then it carried on up my body... all of this was within about 20 seconds.”

It was bad and it was about to get worse.

THE MOMENT THAT The Smiths hit America in late July 1986 was the same moment rock’n’roll hit The Smiths.“We’d never really been rock’n’roll,” recalls drummer Mike Joyce. “But on the plane over we were all swiggin’ from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, very rock’n’roll. Our attitude was just to get out there and blow them away.”

They’d toured the States before, almost exactly a year earlier. That tour had gone well but their jam-packed, euphoric gigs hadn’t translated into the record sales they’d been hoping for. This time, if all went well, The Smiths could finally conquer America.

When they boarded the plane out of Smiths-besotted Britain, their latest album, The Queen Is Dead, had recently stormed the chart, entering at Number 2. Now, though, they were on a collision course with the New World, where their previous album, Meat Is Murder, had floundered at Number 110 on the Billboard chart.

They were, however, not downhearted, and it wasn’t just the bottle of JD that was bucking up their spirits. “It was almost like a fresh start for us,” declares Rourke.“Everyone had renewed vigour because we had a new member in the band and, obviously, I’d just re-joined.”

Earlier in the year, Rourke had been fired from The Smiths because of heroin problems, but that disaster seemed to be behind him now and the band was back on an even keel. Better yet, former Bluebells and Aztec Camera guitarist Craig Gannon, who had been drafted in initially as a replacement bassist, had remained as a second guitarist with the intention of freeing up Johnny Marr. “Johnny had laid down so many guitar overdubs on the album that he was struggling to duplicate it on stage,” notes Rourke. “Having Craig there allowed Johnny to play more interesting stuff, and we sounded a lot tighter.”

Craig, however, was about to undergo his baptism of fire. His 21st birthday coincided with The Smiths’ arrival in North America, so, after the opening gig at Centennial Hall in London, Ontario, he was obliged to drink 21 brandies before staggering off to his room. Somewhere in the middle of the night he woke up to find that he’d emptied the contents of his stomach everywhere.

“The next morning it was like a crime scene,” remembers Rourke. “He’d done this projectile vomit everywhere, on the ceilings even.” Hotel staff found it so disgusting that they not only locked his room door but also stuck ‘Do not cross’ tape from jamb to jamb. “He wanted to go home,” says Rourke.“We had to talk him out of it.”

The Smiths touring party for this American incursion was, as Rourke recalls it, “pretty compact. We had a couple of roadies, a couple of guys on the lights, an out-front guy. Including the band there were probably only about 12 of us.”

With Gannon nursing an almighty hangover, this dirty dozen ploughed on to the next gig on the schedule, at Toronto’s Kingswood Music Theatre on 31 July. “The Canadian gigs were more or less warm-ups for the tour proper,” reflects Joyce. “We did those because we didn’t know what was going to be happening in Canada, reaction-wise... it was really a build-up for us to hit the States.”

Even at this stage, though, it was obvious that this was going to be a Smiths tour unlike any that had gone before. Soundman Grant Showbiz has told of how, by the start of August,“There was cocaine about, and limitless amounts of booze... you’re wondering how far you can go. I don’t think you become an alcoholic over six weeks, but yeah, you’re drinking every day, and you’re drinking to excess, and you’ve never done that.”

Exacerbating the effect of drink and drugs was the fact that Johnny Marr quickly found himself mired in managerial problems that were not strictly his responsibility. Shortly after the tour got underway, he learned that the dirty dozen’s per diem payments hadn’t been delivered. Rumblings of mutiny are never far away when road crew aren’t being paid, so Johnny felt obliged to phone the band’s American record company, Warner Brothers, and negotiate on behalf of the crew. As a result, though, he was now stranded in the no-man’s-land between admin and artist, likely to be shot down by either side. This awkward situation prevailed largely because ofThe Smiths’ chaotic relationships with anyone foolish enough to take on the baton of band manager. “None of our managers lasted very long,” confirms Rourke. “Morrissey either took a dislike to them or they quit.They’d tell us to do one thing but we’d want to do something else. We were pretty much unmanageable.”

They still hadn’t left the Land of the Maple Leaf when, on 3 August at Montreal University’s Centre Sportif, Morrissey was attacked onstage by members of the audience. Watching events unfold from the depths of the crowd was one Julie Lawler, who later described the unfolding drama. “He hits the stage floor hard and curls into himself as they fall upon him, making no effort to escape or fight back. His bodyguard eventually comes on stage and hauls them off, but Morrissey remains prone for a while, quietly gathering himself up. He slides back to the drum riser and climbs it slowly until he is standing. Then, pale but perfectly calm, he picks up the mic and resumes performing.”

Two days later, composure fully restored, they arrived in the dressing room of the Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts in Mansfield, Massachusetts to play the tour’s first gig on US soil. Here too, the tensions between the band and Warner Brothers were ramped up. “They put a load of pictures in the dressing room and we were expected to sign them for the record company staff,” recalls Joyce. “They didn’t bother to come to meet us, but they wanted their signed photographs.” On closer examination it was realised that the offending photographs were also two years old. “They hadn’t even bothered to get recent ones, so we tore them up and threw them in the bin, which didn’t exactly endear us to them.”

Next up was the tour’s first real proving ground, Pier 84 in New York City. “We got on the TV news in New York because they couldn’t understand us,” remembers Joyce. “I was watching TV and there was this presenter stood outside the Pier, and she’s saying,‘What is this phenomenon called The Smiths?’ Tears For Fears were out there at the same time. Songs FromThe Big Chair had sold millions, it was Number 2 in Billboard. We didn’t get anywhere near that, and yet we were playing much bigger venues than them.”

The media were mystified because the hordes that thronged to The Smiths’ shows were part of a new breed. Richard Nemeth, who was in the audience at Pier 84, explains, “There was an incredible adulation of The Smiths in the US at this time, but not on a huge scale. Most of the fans were like myself, college age and more of an ‘alternative music’ type. We all loved British bands and disliked musicians like Bruce Springsteen, who was huge at the time, and his type of fans.”

Nemeth remembers it as a cloudy, humid day with The Smiths received by an ecstatic audience. “There were classic Smiths scenes, young men and women rushing the stage to present Morrissey with flowers and hug him, only to be quickly escorted offstage by security.”

There was also an unexpected celebrity visitor backstage. “Halfway through the show,” reflects Joyce, “Johnny came over to me and flicked his head back to say, ‘Have you seen who’s behind me?’And there’s Mick Jagger having a little bop with Anita Pallenberg. They came and chatted to us as well, and it was like, ‘Will somebody please pinch me? When am I going to wake up?”’

Now, though, the trek was fully underway as The Smiths headed deeper into America’s heartland via Washington DC, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, with Johnny Marr lapping up every precious second. “I was 21 or 22, living my dream, having just come offstage in Cleveland on a Sunday night with a bar full of Smiths fans, sat in a hotel room with a lot of money for a kid from where I come from, doing what I used to dream about at 11 or 12. I did what anyone where I come from does — I just partied. We weren’t Aerosmith, but we weren’t The Osmonds either.”

Frank Owen of Melody Maker caught the Cleveland show and neatly encapsulated something of the Morrissey appeal. “With his off-the-bum jeans and off-the-shoulder shirts, Morrissey is as gorgeously camp as ever,” wrote Owen,“assaulting the male myths of rock idolatry with his usual little-bit-of-delicate-sleaze-and-a-lot-of-tease routine - the missing link between Norman Wisdom and Joe Dallesandro. Morrissey doesn’t need to have sex in private because he does it all on stage.”

It was obviously enough to arouse the good folks of Cleveland to mount yet another stage invasion, as a result of which, remembers Morrissey, “We had to stop the show because people just piled on to the stage.”

Every day, mile after mile of highway strip rolled by as they charmed St Louis, Chicago and Milwaukee into submission. But thrilling and rewarding as the gigs were, the strain was taking its toll. Joyce observes that - apart from the ever-abstemious Morrissey — “We were certainly burning it at both ends. And in the middle.”

Photographer Andy Catlin, who attended several gigs, noticed that “Mike in particular started to get into drugs and stuff a lot. There seemed to be more of a separation between all the members of the band, not just Johnny and Morrissey. There was a very different pressure on Andy and Mike... the pressure of not having any control and getting out of it a lot in response to that.”

By the time they rolled into Santa Barbara for their first West Coast gig at the Arlington theatre on 22 August, the overworked Johnny Marr was coming apart at the seams. “I wasn’t really in any shape to be able to do it,” he admits. “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 on that tour, it was up to Angie [Marr’s wife] and Grant Showbiz to get us around. Angie was 20. She had a credit card and good sense, and she was on the case.” 

All that seemed to be keeping The Smiths going was the knowledge that, when they hit the stage, they would be rapturously received. At Berkeley’s famed Greek Theatre on 23 August, Joyce recalls how “all the college kids were just totally out there. A lot of kids that were there were the naughty boys and girls, into The Smiths because we were considered a bit rebellious.”

The showcase gigs in California were the two nights at the prestigious Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, where, according to NME’s Jane Garcia, the 12,000-strong crowds heard, “Twenty-four perfect pop sparklers, exquisitely executed... the man himself was at his most winsome, triggering a minor stage invasion by telling the restless crowd, ‘If you get stopped by a security guard, kiss him on the lips.’”

Even here, though, there was sharp contrast between what the public saw and what was happening behind closed doors. Once again, Johnny Marr found himself in the crosshairs because, with their Rough Trade recording contract about to expire, the band were being courted by several major labels. “The vice-president of Warner Brothers came backstage,” remembers Johnny,“and he was fuming.” The powerful exec’s wrath had been excited when he heard that The Smiths were about to sign to EMI without having the grace to advise him of their intentions. Marr, inevitably, was the one who wound up locked in the dressing room trying to defend his band’s actions.

“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.”

WORN DOWN THOUGH they were, the grind was far from over. Two nights later at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre in Orange County, Morrissey provoked a full-scale riot. “The security men were being very heavy-handed,” says Rourke,“so Morrissey said something like, ‘There’s 10 thousand of you and only 30 of them.’ So then the crowd started getting a bit lairy with the security guys, who then walked off, and there was a massive stage invasion and we had to run for our lives into the tour bus.”

From his spot behind the mixing desk, Grant Showbiz watched in horror. “All the kids were on angel dust and leaping eight foot up on to the stage. Bouncers were coming up to them, but they were lifting them up and pushing them out of the way because this stuff gives you superhuman strength.” Even cowering in the imagined safety of the tour bus aferwards, The Smiths were far from home free. “The security guards surrounded the bus and wouldn’t let us leave,” recalls Rourke.“I think they wanted a piece of our security guy, so he had to go out and talk our way out of it.”

Grateful for escaping with their limbs intact, they headed back inland for Phoenix, Arizona, and thence to Boulder, Colorado. By this point, reckons Rourke, Johnny Marr was in the middle of a fullblown nervous breakdown, and the guitarist himself acknowledges, “I was drunk onstage a couple of times - once in Denver [actually Boulder] , which was a weird gig. The atmosphere was so weird, I wondered how we were going to get through it. I felt we were sinking fast, which was a situation we weren’t used to.”

As they struck out into the wide open spaces of Texas, bound for the East Coast, Grant Showbiz was finding them increasingly hard to handle. “The amount of time it took to get Morrissey onstage was getting longer and longer. There was this great game he’d play of wanting to be asked 15 times if it had been 14 the night before. Johnny was like,‘Let’s rock!’ and Mozzer would be, ‘Well, somebody’s gotta ask me another seven times.’”

On 8 September, the night of a gig at McAlister Auditorium, New Orleans, they were joined in their hotel bar by a visiting journalist. “It was the beginning of the end, and me and Morrissey knew it,” remembers Marr. “The journalist said,‘It must be fantastic to get everything you’ve ever wanted,’ and I was so incredibly miserable that I said, ‘It’s a crushingly hollow feeling.’ When it goes wrong, it’s very weird...”

What Marr didn’t know was that the tour was about to come crashing to its knees.

THE SCHEDULE LISTED four more dates after Tampa - Miami, Atlanta, Nashville and, closing the circle, a return to New York - but with Morrissey now suffering laryngitis and the others stretched beyond their limits, none of them had any enthusiasm for continuing. They had achieved what they came to do but now every new gig was harder than the one before.“We’d put so much into it every night,” explains Joyce.“It wasn’t just like, ‘Oh, where are we now?’ It was more like, ‘Every gig is the most important gig we play’, which is a great way of looking at it, but it certainly takes the wind out of your sails after 30 nights.”

So when Andy Rourke ran out into the sparkling waters of Tampa Bay and then hobbled back on to the sand in agony, the final nail was driven into the coffin of the American tour. “I’d been stung by a stingray,” he recalls. “You’re supposed to shuffle slowly into the sea, but nobody had told me that. So I’d stood on it and its defence mechanism is to flick its tail up and a big long spiky tooth injects the poison.”

Still in his swimming trunks, he was driven to the nearest hospital, only to be confronted by the harsh realities of the American health system. Unaccustomed to carrying a credit card in his Speedos, he was turned away. “They escorted me out of the hospital and left me on the kerb for about 30 minutes while our tour manager went back to the hotel to get a credit card. By the time he got back I was weeping on the side of the pavement.” 

Then, before you could say, “That’ll do nicely, sir”, he was given a tetanus shot and the stingray-bite miracle cure - a bowl of hot soapy water. “As soon as I put my foot in the bowl, the pain just went. Why the hell couldn’t they just have told me that?” 

The remaining dates were cancelled and the band returned home, content that, despite the horrors they’d endured, it had all been worthwhile because America had succumbed and the record-store cash registers would soon be jingling.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that The Smiths would have been huge in America,” argued Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis some years later. “They felt angry that their singles weren’t hits and I agreed with them. For a long time they were neck and neck with R.E.M.”

Except, of course, that R.E.M. won that particular race. The Queen Is Dead convincingly out-performed Meat Is Murder, but with a Billboard chart high of Number 70, it remained by mainstream standards a commercial flop.

Johnny Marr, however, still maintains that none of this took him by surprise. “We were under no delusions about doing what Roxy Music hadn’t been able to do, and what T.Rex hadn’t been able to do,” he insists.“Me and Morrissey had conversations about that. We recognised that fact and we were quite happy about it. When we watched MTV, we knew we weren’t going to get on. Nor were we arsed.”

Marr’s unrepentant bravado, though admirable, can’t quite shake the feeling that the long trek through America drained something out of The Smiths that would never quite be replenished. The cracks and divisions that appeared in the band during their times of stress widened into yawning gulfs. Within four months they would play their last gig together, and a year later Morrissey was a solo artist. ■