A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths

by Tony Fletcher

  After a seven-month absence, by far the longest since they had formed, the Smiths returned to the recording studio in August 1985. They initially decamped to Drone in Manchester, scene of those original EMI demos, to record at least one of the songs that had been worked up at soundcheck back on the English tour. By the time they were done with it, “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” sounded, to their ears, close to perfect. In positively contrarian Smiths fashion, they decided that this 8-track demo should become their next single. Only when they booked time to record its B-sides at RAK Studios in London did they transfer the 8-track to 24-track and “carried on doing some overdubs on it,” said Stephen Street, a process that served to give the single some professional polish while preserving the simplicity and enthusiasm of the initial performance.2

  This was key to the Smiths’ statement of intent. Things had gotten complicated of late on all fronts, but it had been especially evident in the density of the three singles since “William.” It was time to strip the music back, to rediscover the lightness of touch that had made that song, among others, so instantly appealing. It was therefore a compliment that the acoustic guitar arrangement at the heart of “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” should be likened to West African “highlife” music, even though that had not been Johnny Marr’s original intent. (He had been trying to emulate Nile Rodgers of Chic.) It was a delight to hear a marimba, even if it was essentially percussive. It was a relief to hear the bass more relaxed than in the past, yet playing an even more important role in the arrangement. And it was especially pleasing that Morrissey’s vocals should sound so delightfully yearning as they danced their way around a melody that managed to be simultaneously upbeat and yet melancholic. In all this, it was no coincidence that the single carried the credit “Produced by Morrissey/Marr” as opposed to “Produced by the Smiths.” The “Shakespeare’s Sister” session had seen all four members of the band at the mixing board, each with hands on the faders of their own given instrument, a time-honored recipe for failure. “After that session,” recalled Stephen Street, “Johnny said he wanted to have control.”

  The RAK session proved exceptionally productive. In addition to cleaning up “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” the Smiths recorded and mixed its B-sides: “Rubber Ring,” another song rehearsed during the spring tour soundchecks, and “Asleep,” a ballad that, for the first time, featured Morrissey and Marr alone. This same session then additionally produced the bulk of what would turn out to be the next Smiths single, “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” similarly worked up at the soundchecks in March. Initially inspired by the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash,” the final recording of “Bigmouth” proved considerably more restrained, dominated initially by multitracked acoustic guitars and audacious for the fact that it consisted of but a single verse followed by multiple choruses and a guitar interlude. Breaking with a self-imposed ban on outsiders, the Smiths invited Kirsty MacColl (she of Billy Bragg’s “A New England” crossover success and married to producer Steve Lillywhite) to sing backing vocals, and even employed a trumpet player on yet another new number, “Frankly, Mr Shankly,” which included four words that summed up Morrissey’s lyrical manifesto at the time: “fame, fame fatal fame.”

  The tendency of the rock star to sing about his chosen career in the spotlight as if a plight or a burden has always been an inherently dangerous one. John Lennon just about pulled it off in 1969 with “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” setting the way for Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople to do likewise with the self-referential songs “All the Way from Memphis” and “Ballad of Mott the Hoople” (and his book, Diary of a Rock ’n’ Roll Star). But it was an easy trait to overdo, as the Clash discovered when praise for the anti-corporate “Complete Control” turned into criticism for the self-mythologizing “Clash City Rockers.”

  Morrissey brilliantly distinguished himself from these icons by presenting himself as the subject matter of his songs, over the course of three singles and a couple of B-sides, without ever naming himself as such. He had started the dialogue with “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore,” a thinly disguised attack on the music press. “I was just so completely tired of all the same old journalistic questions and people trying, you know, this contest of wit, trying to drag me down and prove that I was a complete fake,” he told Melody Maker upon its release. In this context, the line “kick them when they fall down” was self-evident, but to someone who didn’t read the interviews, it could as easily have applied to school bullies. Morrissey’s public confessional continued with the new single, “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”: as he told Liverpudlian actress Margi Clarke on The Tube shortly after its release, “The thorn is the music industry and all these people who would just never believe anything I said, tried to get rid of me, wouldn’t play the records.” Knowing as much, the words “how can they see the love in our eyes and still they don’t believe us” clearly applied to the (misunderstood) Smiths—unless, as with “Hand in Glove” and its similar refrain “no, it’s not like any other love, this one’s different because it’s us,” the listener applied it to his or her own personal life, in which case it resonated no less powerfully. As for the following single, “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” there appeared less reason to question whether Morrissey was singing about himself, given the title and the reference to Joan of Arc’s “hearing aid,” Morrissey’s famous prop. The supposition became, in part, that Morrissey was comparing himself to the historic martyr—and that only he could get away with it. But again, that need not be the only point of reference.3 Who had not hurt the one they loved by saying something like (as per the words in “Bigmouth”) “You should be bludgeoned in your bed,” only to feel such remorse as to conclude “I have no right to take my place in the human race”?

  “Bigmouth Strikes Again” was saved from hubris by its humor: “I would call it a parody if that sounded less like self-celebration, which it definitely wasn’t,” said Morrissey himself two years later. “It was just a really funny song.” So too, up to a point, was “Frankly, Mr Shankly,” which, given Morrissey’s issues with his record company at the time of its writing and unveiling, was widely taken to be an attack on Geoff Travis. (The choice of pseudonym may have been a random rhyme. Then again, the name Shankly in the UK was widely associated with the manager of the incredibly successful 1970s Liverpool Football Club; a comparison to Travis as the public leader of the dominant Rough Trade label was inevitably invited.) Under the circumstances of their self-imposed battle with Rough Trade, lines like “I want to leave, you will not miss me, I want to go down in musical history” appear almost uncommonly direct, the closest Morrissey the singer had yet come to singing about Morrissey the singer. As for the final words, calling the Shankly character “a flatulent pain in the arse” appeared positively unpleasant on paper, but given its music-hall arrangement, it came across as something closer to comedy.

  Fortunately, Morrissey’s ego was not so evident in “Rubber Ring,” which, until its last verse, glorified not the saga of the singer but rather the power of his songs to, quite literally, save lives: the lyric “they were the only ones who ever stood by you” was very close to the words Morrissey had used in many an interview to describe other artists. Now that his own band’s words and music appeared capable of doing likewise for thousands of similarly troubled youth, Morrissey felt confident enough to project himself, in the final verse of “Rubber Ring,” into the “corner of your room,” to ask, “Can you hear me?” and then to request, “When you’re dancing and laughing and finally living, hear my voice in your head and think of me kindly.” The conclusion might well have been that the subject (the singer) had helped bring its object (the listener) through the fraught difficulties of adolescence into a happy adulthood. But a tape sample that was played over the song’s coda—“You are sleeping, you do not want to believe”—suggested something more sinister, and the track that it then segued into on the 12″ single, “Asleep,” furthered the notion of impending darkness.
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br />   Morrissey had discussed mortality already at length in interviews. And he had touched on it several times throughout Meat Is Murder, with the schoolboy of “The Headmaster Ritual” who wants to “give up life as a bad mistake,” the schoolgirl in “Rusholme Ruffians” who asks, “How quickly would I die if I jumped from the top of the parachutes?,” the female character in “What She Said” who is “hoping for an early death,” and the narrator in “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” who admits that their “only desire is to die.” He had then taken full aim at suicide on “Shakespeare’s Sister,” where “the rocks below, say, ‘Throw your white [or skinny] body down!’ ” He was to make two more references to premature death in songs that were written in the summer of 1985, even though they would not be heard by the general public until well into the following year.

  But nowhere did he address death by suicide quite so determinedly as on “Asleep,” arguably the most graceful, eloquent, and dignified song on the subject ever recorded by a popular rock band. Part of its success came down to its composers’ willingness to abandon the rock tradition and instead embrace a classical format: it was no coincidence that a song that opened with the words “Sing me to sleep” should be arranged as a nocturne, the name given for solo piano pieces associated with the night. The piano part in question was almost identical to that recorded back at Shelley Rohde’s house in 1982 and tacked on to the end of the original “Suffer Little Children” demo, Marr playing the purposefully haunting chords and melody with the quietly stated determination of a diligent student, over which a harsh wind from a BBC Sound Effects album accentuated the air of doom. Morrissey’s lyrics, once more to his credit, managed to avoid all mention of the word death, let alone any means of attaining it, but it was hard not to construe them as a suicide note all the same—not with lines like “Deep in the cell of my heart, I want to go” and “I don’t want to wake up on my own anymore.” It was a painful admission of a failure at living and loving from someone who could only conclude “there is a better world,” signing off by singing “bye-bye” as a music box morosely faded out the song to “Auld Lang Syne,” a tune associated not only with New Year’s celebrations but funerals and other farewells.

  A year later Morrissey volunteered the fact that six people “who were alarmingly dedicated to the Smiths” had taken their lives. (“Their friends and parents wrote to me after they’d died.”) And a few months after that NME, in a special news story about the growing number of youth suicides on both sides of the Atlantic, additionally reported “two recent instances of young people who wrote to [Morrissey] on a daily basis and afterwards killed themselves.” Understandably, Morrissey was then asked to explain himself. He remained customarily unapologetic—and yet appropriately sympathetic. “I don’t want to be a nurse,” he told Martin Aston about his role in the wake of this news. “I’d rather say, in essence, well, the despair you feel is true, and it’s common. Not enormously common, but common.” Further questioned as to whether, “in the case of two Smiths fans who killed themselves, who took your words very seriously,” he felt “a sense of achievement in touching them,” he had the courage to reply in the affirmative. “Yes, because quite largely people in such situations are untouchable by the human race, and nothing makes sense to them. So I think it is quite remarkable.” All the same, it was perhaps a shame that “Rubber Ring” should have preceded “Asleep” on vinyl, because the youthful Morrissey who had so frequently entertained suicidal thoughts had been saved by pop music, and perhaps now stood in the position of saving Smiths fans who gravitated to the band for the very reason that he wrote such personal, unique lyrics. As it stood on the 12″ single, however, the optimistic endorsement on “Rubber Ring” of those “songs that saved your life” was quickly followed (and countered) by the pessimistic request on “Asleep” to put an end to it.4

  Either way, the eight-minute piece of music signified a marvelous maturity in the work of the Smiths. The inclusion of found sound and odd samples, the use of the piano as lead instrument, and the absence of other familiar instruments all reflected an experimental edge far removed from public perception of the Smiths as a four-piece rock ’n’ roll group. The decision to then blend the two songs into each other as part of a joint narrative was something that the Beatles had only dared try in the latter stages of their storied career. Unfortunately, only those who bought the 12″ (on which “Rubber Ring” served as the bonus cut) heard it that way; when the tracks were subsequently included on compilations, they were separated by other songs, as if a bad influence on each other.

  Morrissey and Marr would look back on that summer of 1985 with particular fondness. The rigors of a major British and European tour behind them and the (perceived) problems with Rough Trade kept at the distance that separated Manchester from London, they found time to hang out with each other much as they had when the Smiths first started. They wrote a considerable amount of new material together, face to face at Marr’s place in Bowdon, and it would prove some of their most critically acclaimed and enduring. They also embarked, at Morrissey’s suggestion, on a mission for Marr, now that he had the money, to repurchase all the singles he had swapped or permanently loaned before becoming successful. At one point they drove from Manchester to Brighton and back just to acquire a copy of the 1973 single “Good Grief Christina” by Chicory Tip. It was a combination of rock star self-indulgence and pure fandom, fueled by an impenetrable friendship, and the hours spent together helped explain why each would continue to back the other for as long as they could see ahead.

  There was never any shortage of issues to discuss, especially when the conversation came back around to the Smiths. Morrissey had been instinctively correct about so many things regarding the marketplace, the public, and his own role at the heart of it all, but when he had justified the Smiths’ decision to “bypass the whole video market” because “I think it’s something that’s going to die very quickly,” he had got it wrong. By mid-1985, it was evident that videos were as much a part of modern promotion as a picture sleeve, a poster, or an advertisement, and every bit as desirable. The question for most acts was less about turning down the opportunity than about making the most of it. So to the valid argument that videos in the early days of MTV distracted from the music, the response now needed to be in the form of an artistic statement that complemented said music. R.E.M. had finally understood as much: after initially turning their back on the format, and for very similar reasons as the Smiths, three members of the group had declared official disinterest and handed the reins over to the group’s artistic director, singer Michael Stipe, who had set about making short films that, even if they didn’t receive much play, satisfied demands for some form of video while maintaining the group’s visual integrity. The Smiths could have done something very similar, especially given Morrissey’s proven skills with the record sleeves, but having only just told Melody Maker, “We’ll never make a video as long as we live,” he had left himself no room for maneuver.

  Johnny Marr had willingly stood by his partner on this issue. “I thought all the videos that I was seeing were awful and I couldn’t imagine us doing one of those videos,” he said. At the same time, he admitted, “I didn’t have in mind an alternative.” He and Morrissey had effectively lost their argument with “How Soon Is Now?” when Sire had made a video regardless, and lost it again when it had clearly helped sales. Now came the news that the American label, invigorated by the success of the tour, wanted to release “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” domestically, this time with the appropriate artwork and with the intent of making some sort of success out of it. The Smiths had long complained that Sire did not release their UK non-album singles. Here was a chance for everyone to make good—but for that to truly happen, Sire needed some form of a promotional video.

  And so, under enormous pressure, the Smiths finally succumbed. They agreed to make a clip, but only if the crew came to them, while they were in the studio at RAK working on the new album, and brought
a case of wine along so the group could drown their compromise. Their refusal to meet the project even close to halfway (quite literally: “I will move three feet,” said Johnny Marr of his willingness to engage the camera) left open the opportunity to blame the other side if it didn’t turn out well.

  And it did not. “They still managed to make us look like twats,” said Johnny Marr. He was right: the video, such as it could be called one, was an embarrassment. Compared to the clip for “This Charming Man,” shot for and by The Tube two years earlier, it felt like a step back several years. Both videos had been made in a closed room, with the band playing direct to camera, but the earlier one had captured a look, a style, a feel, and a sense of purpose. The new one suggested a complete lack of creativity on the part of the director (Ken O’Neill) and band alike. (It also intimated a total lack of budget.) If there was a lesson to be learned, it was surely that the Smiths needed to step up and get creatively involved in the video process rather than leaving it to others. The lesson they took away was the opposite: that videos remained a waste of time and money. They were therefore thrilled when “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” charted just high enough for them to be invited to appear on Top of the Pops again, in person.5 Yet it was hard to say how much it helped them. “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” was a beautiful song and, one would have thought, a commercial one too; with its experimental B-sides, it formed by far their strongest statement since the “William”/“Please, Please, Please”/“How Soon Is Now?” trifecta. But it was only a modest hit.

  In 1983, Echo & the Bunnymen had undertaken an unusual tour of Britain that had seen them venture to village halls on the Scottish Isles of Skye and Lewis. For their Scottish tour of September 1985, the Smiths went one better: all the way to Lerwick, in the Shetland Islands, the northernmost point of the British Isles. For their support act, they brought along another group from Manchester, Easterhouse, whose guitarist Ivor Perry was Morrissey’s former Kings Road neighbor. Perry had moved out to a tower block in Hulme, a dad already at the age of twenty-one and, with his brother Andy, had formed the band originally called In Easterhouse, after an infamous Glasgow housing estate. The Perry brothers were working-class youths who read up on their politics and were interested in changing the world—through music if possible, but in the case of Andy Perry, who was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, by other means if necessary. After Perry, converted to the Smiths by “Hand in Glove,” had brought Morrissey a demo of the group, Easterhouse had been invited to open for the Smiths at Dingwalls in 1983, where they presumed to have played a passable show until “Morrissey leaped on waving flowers over his head, wearing a silver blouse unbuttoned, and metamorphosed into this superstar performer,” recalled Ivor Perry. “We were so outclassed as a group.”