How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005

by King, Richard

  ‘We did up our game tremendously,’ says Travis. ‘We employed the London sales team, and Roger Ames tried to steal the band and all the rest of it. There was something about that period, I don’t know where it came from – arrogance, confidence – that I thought we could take them all the way. You just don’t know what’s going to happen, you just think, “This is it.” You don’t worry about what you’re going to see when you go to the gig, you just can’t wait to get there.’

  Harper could see that the press were now starting to take a serious interest in the band and in particular in the copy-ready opinions and world-view of Morrissey, whose pronouncements on vegetarianism, celibacy or flowers were, after what felt like a lifetime’s rehearsal in his bedroom, reeling elegantly off his tongue. All of the singer’s eccentricities were now given a sense of legitimacy by the band’s breakthrough into the mainstream with only their second single.

  ‘It was very much made up on the hoof,’ says Harper. ‘There was nothing about steering the band the right way. Morrissey gave the press quotes, and it was controversy every time he opened his mouth, and, of course, they lapped it up. It was all done on a whim: “I’m not going to do it – oh, I am going to do it, but I’ll need a hearing aid or I’m not doing it.”’

  *

  ‘The nation recognised this creature,’ says Harper. ‘The euphoria was remarkable. Top of the Pops, in the charts – this was extraordinary. It was genuinely exciting and ground-breaking, but they did some extremely naff TV: kids’ shows, where they go round on a bus with children asking Morrissey questions. It was all wrong, dumb, it all got carried away. There were lots of really bad things, like Smash Hits.’

  Embracing the pop-star life and engaging with its customs, from trivial news bites to searching profiles in more serious media, had always been part of The Smiths’ master plan. Though scattershot, the result was that the band, in stark contrast to their contemporaries, had widespread across-the-board coverage.

  ‘If you think about New Order and Depeche Mode,’ says Harper, ‘Depeche Mode’s problem for a decade was, “No one takes us seriously, everyone thinks were a pop band” because Mute went straight to Smash Hits and it was Dave Gahan with his little hair, whereas New Order, similar band, wouldn’t do anything like that, not in a million bloody years. And they had a serious reputation, and it took heroin and dying and a long time for Depeche Mode to get taken seriously, whereas New Order did their self-harm in private.’

  The Top of the Pops appearance had a particular thrill for the band. As well as granting them the tea-time status of overnight national celebrity, which an appearance on the show in 1983 still guaranteed, it formed part of a triumphal homecoming. On the night of broadcast, The Smiths played the Haçienda for the third and final time to unprecedented scenes of adulation. Morrissey, a keen student of the programme, was well aware of the history of Top of the Pops and was delighted to be asked about the validity of The Smiths’ appearance. ‘Nothing spurs you on like anger,’ said Morrissey, ‘and we were angry about all the ugly people who control this business and all the ugly faces on Top of the Pops.’ Why all the ugliness? Morrissey’s own bid for TOTP immortality was just as colourful: waving a large bunch of gladioli in a manner that bordered on aggression, his oversized shirt undone, while strings and strings of pearls hung down round his neck. The Smiths’ arrival in the charts became a talking point. As soon as the band had taped their performance they were whisked on to a train back to Manchester where a waiting crowd would toast the band’s success with a barely contained hysteria.

  ‘We sound-checked at the Haçienda on the Wednesday night, left all the equipment on stage,’ says Moss, ‘went down to London, did Top of the Pops, and obviously the gig’s announced on Top of the Pops as well. It was already a sell-out gig. We went back up, got off the train in Manchester and we got cabs to the Haçienda and you couldn’t get on to Whitworth Street, there were so many bloody people outside the place.’

  Richard Boon accompanied the band on the trip up from London. ‘They did “This Charming Man” the first time on Top of the Pops. Back on the train, it was my birthday – big trip back up north for everybody, and they go on stage and Morrissey says something like, “It’s Richard’s birthday,” and they go straight into “Handsome Devil”.’

  The Smiths hadn’t played their home town since their London debut at the Rock Garden, and the atmosphere inside the club was rabid with expectation and excitement. ‘Inside it was madness, on a 1,200 capacity place they paid us out on 2,400,’ says Moss. ‘There was probably even more than that; the last time we’d played Manchester there’d been an audience of thirty.’

  Joe Moss had been as good as his word: once the band had progressed from the fifth floor of his warehouse on to Top of the Pops in little over a year, he promptly quit as the band’s manager. In doing so he ended what was to be The Smiths’ longest period of stability; a revolving cast of managers would attempt to gain some control and order over the band’s affairs, which given the runaway start and near workaholic schedule they insisted on, to say nothing of their resolute sense of doing things their own way, would prove all but impossible.

  Amid everything was a realisation that from day one the foundations of the deal between The Smiths and Rough Trade were not the soundest. If Travis was confident in his ability to deliver on his promise in getting The Smiths into the charts, there were plenty of dissenting voices at Rough Trade who felt that the four-album deal had meant that the label were now hostage to whatever might become The Smiths’ fortune. While the absence of backslapping and glad-handing at the record company was one of the reasons The Smiths had signed to the label, it was equally direct in letting the band know of the pressures they would both be under. It was made very clear to the band that Rough Trade had gone out on a financial limb to lock the band into a long-term deal, and that the label was terrified at the prospect.

  ‘They only let us know that about five times a day,’ says Marr, ‘and not necessarily in a way to make us feel good or feel less pressure either. Geoff was dropping it in right from the off, and you could tell that they were sweating it a bit and that it was … a big financial first step for them.’

  The recording of The Smiths’ debut album was more difficult than Travis was expecting.

  The band had recorded sporadically, in between touring commitments for ‘This Charming Man’, and found it hard to settle in the studio. The initial sessions, produced by former Teardrop Explodes keyboard player Troy Tate, had been scrapped.

  For a band on a roll with a fast-growing canon of material fine-tuned by months of celebratory and incandescent performances, the results of the recording were oddly flat. After the first attempt with Tate, the band had chosen John Porter, who had engineered their Peel sessions. As a former keyboard player with Roxy Music, Porter clearly had the kind of pedigree the band approved of yet, for all his provenance, the band’s debut now sounds their most dated. The gated drum sound and keyboard lines in ‘Reel Around the Fountain’ have the feel of studio gloss. Elsewhere the separation between Marr’s overdubbed guitar lines smothers the elasticity of the interplay between the guitarist and the rhythm section of Joyce and Rourke. The album was an unsatisfactory compromise between the wit and drama of the lyrics in Morrisey’s delivery and the band’s sparkling proficiency, none of which prevented it from arriving in the album charts at no. 2.

  ‘Troy Tate, John Porter? Who was choosing these guys?’ says Harper. ‘This was coming from Geoff somehow, and the debut album did actually sound shit, and the band knew it. Everything felt unhappy; Hatful of Hollow sounds a lot better.’

  Hatful of Hollow, in collecting the band’s sessions and B-sides, captured the first rush of The Smiths at their zenith. Deliberately priced cheaply and housed in a gatefold sleeve, it was released in November 1984, just eight months after the debut. The gatefold opened on to a black-and-white picture of the group tuning up backstage in a PortaKabin at Glastonbury festival, then sponsored by CND. />
  ‘I can’t separate us playing Glastonbury from us being a Rough Trade band,’ says Marr. ‘Glastonbury was a million miles away from what it means now, but I’m so glad that we did it because, subconsciously, it was one of the last opportunities to get together in the community and be political.’

  Glastonbury festival before television coverage was more radical than it is now. Combining the remnants of Seventies alternative thinking – which had a larger constituency than the mainstream media realised – with the various Leftish strands with which Rough Trade was still associated, the event was a focus for free-spirited activism, hedonism and a celebration of anti-Thatcherite values, all of which was given added resonance in the summer of 1984 as coverage of the national miners’ strike started to dominate the news.‡

  Preceding The Smiths’ Glastonbury performance had been an appearance, ten days earlier, at the GLC Jobs for Change festival. Both performances suggest that The Smiths were a political band; to the group, the fact that The Smiths were on an independent label was enough to signify their position.

  ‘People assume that you’re standing up there going, “It’s shit being on the dole and this is wrong”,’ says Marr, ‘and just being slightly sanctimonious, but the political aspect of those times – and Rough Trade had it in spades – was so multifaceted because it was a given that you were political. It really was, “If you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem.” You were either mainstream or by definition you were anti the government.’

  A new dialogue around politics and culture had been created by the mid-Eighties that had been absent at Rough Trade’s conception. Rather than the application of the Marxist or feminist ideologies that had informed post-punk, a broader narrative driven by lifestyle was coalescing around new media like Channel 4 and style magazines like The Face, which had launched after Rough Trade’s inception. Both The Face and Channel 4, via its music programme, The Tube, profiled the band as early as ‘This Charming Man’. To many onlookers, the band included, these were shifts in the culture that Rough Trade had yet to come to terms with. The label still carried the whiff of collectivism and utopianism with which it had started, which in the light of the realpolitik of Thatcher’s second term seemed outdated.

  ‘Rough Trade established their model over a number of years, and let’s call it roots,’ says Marr. ‘You could also call it dogma in some cases and it worked in the market place that we were in. But aesthetically Rough Trade needed to shake some of that off, because that Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road scene was not of the times we were in, and the times were not Thatcher, the times were very much anti-Thatcher.’

  Despite the occasional caricatures of Morrissey as a dangerous eccentric in the tabloid press, the band’s commercial appeal and pop classicism meant that The Smiths’ views on vegetarianism, class and politics were increasingly understood and popular with their growing audience.

  ‘There’s this brilliant photograph of Johnny helping a guy up on stage to dance with them at Glastonbury and that was it,’ says Moss. ‘We had that vision of it being something that everyone could get into.’

  Whatever Travis’s headaches in financing the band’s and Rough Trade’s ambitions for The Smiths, in America the band would find their natural home with Seymour Stein and Sire. Stein’s background reached as far back as the girl-group song-writing teams that had so inspired Marr: as far as the guitarist was concerned there was no other competition in the running. ‘There was absolutely no other option for us because of the work he’d done around the Brill Building, and his connection with Andrew Oldham,’ he says, ‘and his friendship with Patti Smith and the Talking Heads and Ramones was once again just a given, but it was all that early Sixties Broadway culture that I was pumping him for, and still do to this day.’

  Stein’s first sighting of the band was when The Smiths played the ICA in 1983 just prior to the release of ‘This Charming Man’. ‘I was up in the balcony at the ICA’, says Moss, ‘stood with Seymour watching and he flipped, he absolutely flipped, ’cause the live thing just then was just phenomenal – it was a celebration. An aggravating thing about The Smiths is that people think it was miserable but it was a pure celebration.’

  Signalling the celebration was the now customary shower of flowers that gave the impression of a horticultural waterfall throughout the band’s set. Often spending their performance fee on flowers alone, Morrissey would dispatch bunches into the audience only to be met by the bouquets the crowd had brought along themselves, resulting in a giddy and heady atmosphere. ‘You couldn’t get much less football crowd than giving flowers out to the audience before the gig,’ says Moss. ‘At the start we figured we’re only gonna earn £50 tonight but we’re gonna have to spend all that on flowers … and that carried on through that first year. There was nothing short-term about any of the ideas.’

  Stein in the balcony, spellbound by what was happening, was directly involved in the floral carnival. ‘I got hit in the face with one of the gladioli,’ says Stein. ‘I had a phone call from Geoff Travis, all excited about them, and I had so much trust in his judgement that I just jumped on a plane and came over and, oh God, it was amazing and … Geoff was saying to me, “Morrissey,” and I said, “It’s not just Morrissey. You’re very lucky here, this band has two superstars in it,” – and usually I’m a song person, and they certainly had the songs but even I who cared more about songs than actually the instrumentation – you could see that Johnny was a very special guitarist.’

  Having signed the band, Stein secured for The Smiths a first American date, a one-off show at Danceteria in New York; it was The Smiths’ final performance of 1983, on the last night of the year. For a band that had played only its second concert in January, their rise and their work rate had been remarkable. The band had been booked into the club by Ruth Polsky, another industry maverick who would be sufficiently smitten by The Smiths to try, unsuccessfully, to manage the band. The support act was a PA performance from Danceteria’s hat-check girl and Stein’s newest American signing to Sire, Madonna. Stein, at the utmost peak of his uptown and downtown powers, was partying on an epic scale, holding the keys to the city high in his hand, especially after dark.

  ‘The very first night in America, I played a very woozy set, purely because of jetlag,’ says Marr, ‘no other reason, but then I remember standing in the long, dark corridor of an underground club at half three in the morning, with Seymour saying, “I’m going to show you what New York’s all about right now,” and he did, and I thought, this is one of the things I signed up for.’

  ‘It just all fell into place,’ says Stein. ‘New York was so magical. I was so crazy in myself I don’t even remember it all. I was out every – every – fucking night and it was just incredible.’

  Back in London, Travis and Rough Trade were coming to terms with the impact the whirlwind of The Smiths’ rise had had on the company. Unprecedented for many bands, let alone any that had been signed to Rough Trade, the scale and rapidity of The Smiths’ success was something Travis had previously dared not imagine. The band and the label would eventually define each other’s identity, but something was becoming apparent as pallet after pallet of Smiths releases got packed and dispatched from Rough Trade. None of the other releases on the label were achieving anywhere near the amount of sales as The Smiths’ output. As Moss had predicted, the band were now in such a considerable position of authority within the company, they virtually owned it. The top-heavy relationship between Rough Trade and The Smiths would become increasingly dangerous to both their futures.

  ‘It was the only place for us to go,’ say Moss, ‘and I think it worked out well overall, but small businesses are volatile. It’s not just Rough Trade, it’s the nature of it. Bands like The Go-Betweens and The Fall all got their noses badly put out of joint, because The Smiths were the only thing keeping the place going.’

  * ‘Hand in Glove’ features a harmonica intro, as does the Beatles’ debut single ‘Love Me Do’,
making The Smiths’ debut a perfect homage to Loog Oldham and Epstein.

  † According to Liz Naylor, such was Kay Carroll’s distinctive presence and approach to life that, in an act of post-punk will-to-power, Cath Carroll had taken her surname.

  ‡ Alongside Robert Wyatt’s ‘Shipbuilding’, one of Rough Trade’s most political releases was ‘The Enemy Within’, a 12-inch by Adrian Sherwood and Keith Le Blanc. The record took its name from Margaret Thatcher’s provocative (and contemptible) phrase for Britain’s mining communities and families. All proceeds of the release went to the striking miners’ fund.

  7 Thieves Like Us

  New Order, Thieves Like Us Fac 103 (Peter Saville/Factory)

  The Smiths were not alone in finding New York clubs a welcoming environment for British bands. New Order and Factory were taken to the city’s heart, a relationship that would be reciprocated by Factory opening their own version of a Manhattan club in central Manchester, a decision that would both define and help ruin the company.

  ‘An enormous injection of cash happened,’ says Peter Saville. ‘Record sales were significant, and there was nowhere for this money to go. There was no company, no staff, no salaries, there were no offices, there was nothing, out of which came the Haçienda which was a misguided moment of idealism.’

  Accompanying the steady and growing flow of money from Factory’s catalogue was an attendant accountancy black hole: running a company with an international million-pound turnover from a flat inevitably meant Factory’s paperwork was a mess. Though thriving on the sense of permanent chaos, Tony Wilson approached Rob Gretton’s wife, Lesley Gilbert, the first of many women who would manage Factory behind the scenes, to put the company’s affairs in some kind of order.