Authors: Richard Carman
Billy Bragg was staying in America at the time, trying – as Grant puts it – “to hit a tour.” Billy would get on a tour and run with it until it finished, looking for another one to join immediately – simply putting himself about on American stages. He might hit a tour in New Orleans, and pick up another in Chicago. When The Smiths decided to ditch the transvestites, Billy was in the right place at the right time. As Grant Showbiz puts it, “the call went out… send over Billy.”
Billy’s twelve performances were the perfect warm-up for the band – solo electric folk from a man with a mission, whose monologues and political songs blended with yearning love songs and set the audience up nicely for the careering headliners. They also confirmed to Bragg that his work could carry an American audience as well as a British one. It was here that a long-term friendship was formed between Billy and Johnny.
“I didn’t know them,” explained Bragg to this author of the time leading up to the tour. “They were in Manchester and I was in London. I didn’t cross paths with them much except for GLC gigs and working with them in America. But I like to think I got on really well with Johnny when we were on tour.” Marr was equally taken with Bragg. “I used to like watching him from the side of the stage,” Johnny recalled in April 2006 for
Uncut
. “He would have most of them really cheering, a lot of them laughing, and some of them well-riled.” By the time The Smiths hit the stage, said Marr, the crowd was filled with exactly the right energy. “There was a palpable tension… so we could take it up a gear. It was a brilliant package.”
While Billy was later to record and release the Morrissey/Marr song ‘Jeane’ himself, he also included it in his set from time to time while touring with the band. “‘Jeane’ was a great song,” says Billy today. “When they weren’t playing it on the American tour, I would stick it in.” For his own website, Billy also wrote that working with The Smiths had influenced him a great deal. “I felt that they were my comrades,” he wrote, “in a struggle to bring the focus of song-writing away from production and videos, and back to good tunes and great lyrics.” For Bragg and Marr there was a long relationship ahead, and many great records to be made.
Over the summer, all matters ‘pop’ were focussed on Live Aid, the first rock festival since Woodstock to really engage the world’s imagination. The Smiths were not involved, as they had not been with the previous Yuletide’s Band Aid single. Morrissey was typically scathing on the subject of Live Aid and the yawning gap between the egotistical rock star and the needs of the average African child. Instead, The Smiths released their next single, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Any More’, which continued the band’s frustrating stumblings in the singles chart, reaching a lowly forty-nine. Johnny was disappointed with the result, particularly singling out Morrissey’s contribution as “brilliant.” For the time being, The Smiths continued to release ‘proper singles,’ in other words songs not simply taken from the current album, but too many times the records failed to deliver in terms of chart placings and sales, though the band were selling out dates in both the UK and the USA and would ultimately reach the number one album slot. Johnny has noted that perhaps the band – while so patently a singles-orientated group for much of their career – were too divorced from the needs of the radio playlisters. Great records to own, but
not necessarily great for radio play. It seems bizarre to say this in hindsight, but such great tracks as are detailed in The Smiths’ chart listings did not shift millions of singles.
During July, the band were booked onto the then high-profile
Wogan
TV chat show, a major bandstand for anyone from the latest celebrity chef to the saddest, ‘movie-star’ fitness video/salesman. An appearance on
Wogan
guaranteed an audience of millions, but while Johnny sat in the studio with Andy and Mike, waiting for Morrissey to arrive, there was no warning at all of the fact that the singer would not appear. The band never appeared on
Wogan
, and we’ll never know whether its comfortable, middle-class, knee-touching format was the wrong environment for the band or whether Morrissey and Marr would have charmed the grannies of the nation as they had charmed its youth. This was in many ways typical of a band lacking long-term management, and came on top of a history of changing live schedules and cancelled gigs. Rough Trade and the rest of the band were philosophical about the
Wogan
incident, but it cast a light upon a general air around The Smiths. While bands such as U2 enjoyed the support of one manager throughout their career, what might The Smiths have achieved had they had their own version of Paul McGuinness? But then they simply may never have been The Smiths that we all fell in love with, and might have become stadium-plodding complacents rather than the dangerous, fun and exciting band they always were.
Grant Showbiz believes that on the one hand they could have been a huge band if they’d had long-term management, but agrees that, at the same time, what defined The Smiths as great was something that would have possibly been lost in the process. “Joe just stayed with them long enough to set up a way [that] things
were done,” he says today. That gave the band a blueprint from which to work after Moss left. “We were either doing it the way Joe used to do it, or we were doing it the way Joe didn’t do it – but there was
something
to react to. But when I think of how we stumbled through…!”
Looking at their near contemporaries, such as U2, Grant has mixed feelings that the band never quite got the album/tour/ merchandise mix right and missed commercial opportunities that could have made them immensely rich. “In some respects you would wish it upon them that they would have had that,” he says, “but at the same time it means that they [remained] unique.” Indeed, as testified to throughout Johnny’s career, what they wrote, played and sang came first, before anything, and that too was a defining feature of The Smiths’ career, whoever was at the helm. Put quite simply, the music was the most important thing. “I imagined,” says Grant, “that there would be some sort of corporate meetings going on. But it seemed like they were just hanging out with one another. [It was] the best way, these things always are… it just happened.” While The Smiths were rapidly becoming a wild horse that needed reining in before it disappeared over the horizon altogether, it seemed this arrangement at least kept them hungry and creative.
Rumours abounded that Rough Trade were about to ‘lose’ The Smiths. Apparently dissatisfied with the level of promotion they were receiving, and burying themselves in the studio for a few weeks the band laid low while Rough Trade countered the rumours. The group set about recording ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ at Manchester’s Drone Studios, where they had recorded their first, ill-fated demo for EMI. The song was polished
up at London’s RAK studios,
sans
producer, as the band took the production credit themselves.
Similarly, the sessions for the new album which began at RAK in mid-summer were also ‘produced by Morrissey and Marr’ and engineered by Stephen Street. The first track for the album committed to tape was ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, a behemoth of a track and one that consistently justifies Marr’s reputation as
the
best guitarist/one-of-the-best-producers of his generation. As the sessions progressed, it was clear that both Johnny and Morrissey were struggling, trying to work through studio sessions and record track after track while at the same time dealing with the minutae of the band’s growing business empire. Matthew Sztumph had moved out of the revolving door of The Smiths’ management and the business of being The Smiths was becoming increasingly intolerable for Johnny, as more and more of it fell once again on his and Morrissey’s shoulders. The continuing irony was that the camaraderie between the four members of the band was still good and Johnny’s relationship with Morrissey unharmed despite the pressure, but it seems obvious in retrospect that if The Smiths had retained a long-term manager they might have enjoyed more longevity.
Like a prodigious child, too bright for its own good, The Smiths were hard to handle. Back in the Sixties, the death of Brian Epstein left the Beatles’ ship rudderless and the band began to dissolve almost immediately. For The Smiths, it was almost as though Epstein had died on them before they even got going.
Out of the studio by the late summer, Marr
et al
headed off on a short tour of Scotland, while ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ was released at the same time. Musically it was one
of the band’s more exuberant recent single releases, Johnny’s bright acoustic strumming gently coloured by electric overdubs. Increasingly, as tour followed album, and singles that should have been top ten failed to make the top twenty, the Ultimate Singles Band-elect appeared to be turning into a traditional album/tour/ album outfit, against all the odds.
In September, Johnny made another appearance on a record away from his own band, on The Impossible Dreamers’ single ‘August Avenue’. While that record failed to set the world alight, more significantly ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ disappointed again. The top ten was unthreatened by the release, which made a lowly appearance at number twenty six. As well as the single, a number of new songs were premiered on the tour, songs that would be heard on the album to be released after Christmas, amongst them ‘Bigmouth’ and ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’. The reception from most of the Scottish audiences was fabulous. The band were again very much on form live, and continuity was maintained on the tour as Stuart James stayed in the role of tour manager. A gig at Glasgow’s Barrowlands was televised for Channel 4’s
The Tube
and dates at Aberdeen and Inverness were augmented by a trip way off the traditional rock ’n’ roll tour map when the band played in Lerwick, Shetland.
After the Scottish gigs, the band returned to London. Over the autumn Johnny was virtually a resident at Jacob’s Studios in London. Having been listening extensively to The Beatles’
White Album
during the previous tours, he knew from the outset that the next album, to be called
The Queen Is Dead
, had to have something of the same eclecticism, the same air of seriousness in the music, and capture the variety of a certain moment within a certain band. The
songs were getting better, and Marr knew that he had something significant on his hands. Johnny was rarely to be seen outside the studio, working harder on these tracks than on any other Smiths album. But the pressure was definitely on. And it showed. “We were under a lot of pressure to come up with something really strong,” Marr was to say. “And we knew it.”
The sessions were spread between RAK and Jacob’s. More and more Johnny found himself alone in there, still grafting the incredibly long hours that had become his working practice. While the music of
The Queen Is Dead
developed, an iconic image of the band was taken by photographer Steve Wright. The famous photos of The Smiths at the end of Coronation Street (not the actual street of the TV soap), outside Salford Lads Club, remain one of the band’s most-loved legacies. It was the ‘lads’ element rather than the famous street name that attracted Morrissey, who devised the shoot. While at once cementing the image of The Smiths as a bunch of ‘lads,’ a gang of four inextricably bonded together for all-time, there was also a heady sense of irony in the notion. While Morrissey later became something of a boxing aficionado, the entire concept of a ‘lads club’ – with its inherent intimations of sweaty nights at the table tennis table, and trips to the seaside in a rented charabanc – must surely have jarred with the singer’s sensibilities in the months of 1985 and 1986, though might have appealed to his fictionalised concept of life in a northern town. Just as Beatles fans from around the world flock to be photographed stepping over Abbey Road’s famed pedestrian crossing, so now Smiths fans from San Fransisco to Tokyo clamour to be shot outside The Lads’ Club.
If accident could contribute to the recorded versions of a
song, this concept was grabbed with relish. The intense, wailing feedback that declares the album’s opening was indeed a glorious accident that was retained, adding immense drama to the sense of anticipation that the record would have. Throughout the sessions Johnny dipped into the Detroit songbook of the MC5 and the mighty Stooges for influence. Studio trickery was at hand for the recording of the backing vocals of ‘Ann Coats’ who was in fact Morrissey, his voice run at double speed (Ancoats is a tough suburb of city centre Manchester). On ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ Johnny used a Fender Stratocaster for the first time on a recorded track, and while he avoided simple Hank Marvin twang, he instead introduced another mixture of African highlife and English folk. The recording sessions were the most exploratory and innovative for the band so far, and without the guiding hand of a producer or manager it was a remarkable achievement.
But Johnny was beginning to feel out of it. “I try to take care of myself and live in the real world,” Johnny said of the process of recording what he described as the best LP the band made. “But some of my best work has been produced when I wasn’t.” While the responsibility of production was shared with Morrissey, and the decisions of direction were always shared, the responsibility for the most time-consuming elements of the recording process – the musical tracks – fell largely on Johnny’s shoulders.
“[He] was never out of the studio,” Mike Joyce remembered. “He worked hardest on that album out of everything we did.” Working unbelievable hours, Johnny quite simply made himself ill, as he continued to deal with Rough Trade, to speak to or dodge the press, and help handle the financial affairs of the band. Grant
Showbiz still marvels at what he achieved. Johnny Marr, ‘guitar hero’, arch-producer and iconic musician, was at this juncture, just 22 years old.
1
986 was a pivotal year for The Smiths and for Johnny Marr. While all things around him seemed under increasing pressure he produced what many observers still rate as his finest work, not only the most likely contender for ‘best Smiths album’, but also a heavyweight in the stakes as one of the best rock or pop albums ever made. The year began with the band appearing as part of the Red Wedge tour at the invitation of its progenitor Billy Bragg, who had of course toured with them in the States. The band also played a gig in Liverpool alongside The Fall and New Order in support of a group of the city’s councillors who were head-to-head with the Thatcher government over their failing to establish legal rates for the city. While Rourke and Joyce had already appeared in a Smith-free role earlier in the Red Wedge tour, this was the first appearance of The Smiths
proper as part of the dates, their first direct alignment to a political party cause.
Red Wedge was pop music’s answer to another year of stifling Thatcherite brutality being administered to the British public like a dose of vile medicine that promised to heal the nation but only made the ailing populace sicker than ever. Johnny has only occasionally issued forth on matters political, but he was clearly no lover of The Iron Lady.
“We felt pretty fucked over by Thatcher’s government,” he was to say later. “And the environment was pretty crap.” Johnny highlighted the creative process as his means of coping with such anger and frustration. “We had to escape from that environment,” he said. “Morrissey turned it into poetry. I turned it into music.” Bragg’s rationale was to fuse the messages of the Labour Party with the passion and pulling power of pop, and to tour the nation waving the flag of truth and political veracity, increasing the visibility of Labour policy while partying hard from venue to venue. It was rock ’n’ roll with a conscience and working-class ethic that, in retrospect, was a worthy attempt to revitalise a Labour Party that took another ten years to finish the job from within.
Within The Smiths however, there were problems afoot, that would almost put an end to the original line-up. A handful of dates in Ireland confirmed that even while Andy was making the biggest effort of his life to clean up, whether on or off the drug the effect was the same: he simply wasn’t always able to contribute to The Smiths what had become his trademark fluency, beat and passion. It was decided that, for better or worse, Rourke could no longer remain a permanent member of The Smiths. The legend is that Morrissey, unable to confront the bassist face to face, left a
simple note under the windscreen wiper of Andy’s car, informing him of his having been thrown out. In February the band was to all intents and purposes a trio.
This perhaps paints a negative picture of Morrissey, but in truth his sympathies were apparently more with his band mate than against him. Both Marr and Morrissey appear to have felt that it was more in Andy’s own interests to
not
be in The Smiths than to continue to be. Johnny was to talk of Andy’s being ousted as “a necessity” amidst the turmoil of his having to act as substitute bassist, producer, manager. It was simply too much to deal with one’s best friend struggling as he was, within a band itself always teetering on the edge of chaos. Celebrity addiction was very much in the news, as Boy George’s own heroin issues made the front pages of the tabloids across the UK. To keep the attention off The Smiths, and to try and bring some sense of order to the band, a quick fix was needed.
Teenager Craig Gannon had a sound CV, having graced the line-ups of a number of bands all to some degree bearing the influence of The Smiths. He had played in Roddy Frame’s Aztec Camera, another beautifully electro-acoustic guitar-driven pop band, in The Colourfield with ex-Special Terry Hall, and with The Bluebells. “We just had a few rehearsals – me and Johnny mainly, learning the guitar parts,” said Craig. “Everybody made me feel really welcome – everybody was really nice to me and made me feel at home.”
While Craig joined the band with undoubted experience and a healthy pedigree, he was welcomed with a somewhat confusing message. Craig was told that Andy was out, and so Johnny would like him to step in on bass guitar, but should Rourke come back
then he would like him to stay on second guitar. Still only nineteen, when Andy did return Gannon found that Rourke and Joyce were his natural allies in the band, while Johnny and Morrissey were always more at a distance. Johnny in fact later admitted that he felt that he didn’t get to know Gannon as well as he might have. For Gannon though, eventually he and the band just found that “we didn’t like each other…” The key relationship within the band itself remained between Marr and Morrissey.
Over the course of the spring, The Smiths were once again recognised in the polls of the various music papers.
NME
voted them ‘Best Group’, with
Meat Is Murder
the ‘Best Album’. Johnny and Morrissey were voted ‘Best Song-writers’, Morrissey coming top in the poll for ‘Best Male Vocalist’, ‘Best Hair-do’ and ‘Best-dressed Man’.
Melody Maker
’s poll dumped The Smiths second to U2 in the categories for ‘Best Band’ and ‘Best Live Act’, and Robert Smith and The Cure’s
Head On The Door
took the ‘Best Album’ gong, with
Meat Is Murder
cantering in second. Johnny, however, was recognised as ‘Best Instrumentalist’.
Matters of band management came to a head when, with Andy re-instated and Gannon established in the line-up, Morrissey and Marr began a renegotiation of their contracts with Rough Trade and Sire, and reinstalled Matthew Sztumph in the role of manager. After the May release of ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ as the new single (backed with the instrumental ‘Money Changes Everything’) and a later appearance on Channel 4’s
The Tube
, the band hit the road, their first tour as a five-piece. As mentioned, Johnny’s increasing studio savvy meant that his guitar parts were getting harder and harder to reproduce on stage, and Gannon most certainly helped the band to progress live, allowing Johnny more space sonically.
Gigs in Glasgow, Newcastle and Manchester prepared them for a further onslaught on the North American market, determined as they were to break the US open. The tour that opened in Ontario, Canada in July came to a halt in mid-September when the band cancelled the few remaining gigs in the south-eastern states.
Much has been made over the years of the fact that Johnny Marr took to drinking in a big way during the American tour of 1986. Johnny Rogan recounted Johnny’s memories of the experience: “All I remember is really bad times, like laying on the end of a bed with Angie saying, ‘Someone’s got to do something about this.’” It was the pressure of the tour that put the strain on Johnny and saw his intake increase – rather than his drinking causing him a problem that affected the tour. Looking back on the period, Grant Showbiz thinks that Johnny’s consumption was high, but no higher than perhaps the average guy in his early twenties under the sort of immense pressure Marr was subject to. Young kids who leave home and suddenly find no-body behind the door when they crawl home from the pub do tend to overdo it, and Johnny’s drinking was more that of a young man under pressure than that of a potential alcoholic.
“Courvoisier did seem to suddenly arrive in our lives and make itself known to us,” says Showbiz. “But given the excesses that we
could
have got into… I mean, there
were
moments, and they were crazy moments. But it didn’t go
that
insane.”
“[I’ve] been around a fair amount of gnarled old rockers,” Showbiz says, adding to the picture of The Smiths carousing through the USA in the summer of 1986. “It wasn’t as if… it was never… you know, naked people on top of pianos, knocking over tables or accosting strangers and trying to beat up their girlfriends.”
Showbiz’s memories don’t include seeing Johnny losing the plot at any time. “None of that,” he says. “I can’t honestly remember Johnny being out of control.”
There were high jinks, of course. Grant recalls that members of the crew did occasionally spend a couple of hours behind bars to sober up, or were booted out of clubs for the same reason, but in general the tour was well-behaved. Compared to other bands, although they weren’t saints, The Smiths were well-behaved. “I’m used to getting singers, or whoever it is, out of the hotel room at eleven o’clock,” says Grant. “And they’re drunk. and it’s just a matter of trying to keep the level of alcohol in them sufficient so that they can perform, but not enough that they fall over. But Johnny was never like that.” Morrissey’s general habit of retiring early, and the fact that Johnny was accompanied by his wife were, again, key. “I think a lot of that again is down to the fact that Angie was there, and that Morrissey wasn’t that interested either. So that in some respects the two pivotal members of the band were never going to party hard.”
The Queen Is Dead
was released in May, reaching the tantalising peak of number two in the album charts. For its guitarist it was, and remains, “a fantastic piece of vinyl.” The title track bore all the hallmarks of Johnny at his most creative, the punishing schedule reflected in the murderous, strident chords and thunderous drumming from Joyce. As noted, the feedback howl that runs throughout the track, and the rigorous wah-wah of Marr’s guitar, recall The Stooges, or MC5, Johnny and Morrissey’s blueprint for proper rock ’n’ roll. Rourke’s bass lines are equally lapel-grabbing, the entire track a
tour de force
of the very highest quality. As the song was completed, Johnny was to say in retrospect, that he “came
out shaking.” For the opening track alone the album was worth its price, but of course virtually every song defined something vital and invigorating in The Smiths at their best.
‘Frankly Mr Shankly’, with Morrissey’s splendid lyrics and vocal delivery was written on acoustic guitar from start to finish at Johnny’s house, an early delight on the album and an all-time favourite for fans. The track shifts melodically through Johnny and Andy’s jaunty interplay on the bouncing half-note, the song presented simply with bass, acoustic guitar and drums. Simon Goddard relates how in initial takes of the song it was, unsuccessfully, augmented with trumpet that, according to Mike Joyce, was “quite ridiculous.” Instead, the emotional torch of the song is ignited by Johnny’s own electric guitar. While the vaudeville snigger of the song is irresistible, the target of the song’s ire was reputed to be (according to Simon Goddard) Rough Trade supremo Geoff Travis, who had presented a distinctly unimpressed Morrissey with one of his own poems. ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’ stands as one of the enduring reasons why people have loved The Smiths so much for so many years. The rush from ‘The Queen Is Dead’ into the stumbling music hall comedy of the track that follows it sums up so much about a band with a heart as big as an ox, a brain (to borrow from Douglas Adams) the size of a planet, and a belly-laugh sense of humour that few of their peers could counter. God bless Mr Shankly.
‘I Know It’s Over’ continued the emotional rollercoaster of the album, and was an immensely moving song for Johnny too. Morrissey’s lyrics hit the emotion of the track perfectly in synch with Johnny’s own feel. Rarely has such deep sorrow been so deftly expressed in pop. ‘Never Had No-one Ever’ continues the
sense of desolation and desperation, once again set up simply by Johnny’s simple chording.
‘Cemetry Gates’ came to Johnny on a train journey back from London. Repeatedly hailed as one of the country’s best new songwriters, he decided to specifically set himself a test. “I was on the train, thinking… ‘If you’re so great, first thing in the morning sit down and write A Great Song.’ I started with Cemetry Gates; B minor to G change in open G.” The breezy open-tuned strumming jigsawed perfectly into Morrissey’s equally warming lyric, filled with references to the movie
Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner
.
‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, like ‘The Queen Is Dead’ is one of the muscular armatures that roots the album. Flagged by Johnny as his own ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flask’, the irrepressible pace of the song and the Stones-like backing vocals can clearly be linked to that inspirational track. The song kicks off on unaccompanied, pacey acoustic guitar, soon hoofed into action by Rourke and Joyce’s rhythm section. On record the track was impressive, but live recordings demonstrate the power of the song in The Smiths’ live show, a fabulous piece of music.
‘Bigmouth’ was followed by ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’, one of Johnny’s most glorious riff-based songs combined with ecstatic non-verbal crooning from Morrissey, a natural choice for a single from the album. ‘Vicar In A Tutu’ trotted along, rockabilly style, to more of Morrissey’s Kenneth Williams-meets-
Private Eye
observation, ridiculing the church while painting a vulgar picture of clergymen in ballet garb.
While ‘Vicar In A Tutu’ is relatively lightweight amongst the album’s best songs, the track that followed it was sublime, perhaps
the most-loved of all the band’s anthems. The gorgeous, repeated closing refrain summed up The Smith’s legacy in eight simple words: ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’. This and ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’ were both written at Marr’s house on acoustic guitar, with Morrissey and Johnny working together on ideas that had been knocking around in Johnny’s head for some time. ‘There Is A Light…’ became an instant Smiths classic, one of the best-loved of all their songs. There was an instinctive ability in the duo to each complement the other’s ideas quickly and accurately. Whereas Lennon and McCartney had abandoned the face-to-face writing technique that spawned so many hits very early in their career, Marr and Morrissey were able, right to the end of The Smiths, to sit down together and come away with a perfectly crafted and finished song that would be polished and perfected in the studio. Johnny was moved when he heard the first playback of the finished piece. “I thought it was the best song I’d ever heard,” he said.
The album opened with a nod to The Stooges or the Stones. It ended on a note more out of
Carry On
than
Raw Power
. ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ is one of Morrissey’s most entertaining lyrics and one of Johnny’s most infectious riffs, knocked off one night while sat watching TV with friends. Constantly picking away at the fret board until the complex little gem was completed, the beautifully turned picking is one of Johnny’s most delightful pieces. Linked to Morrissey’s lyric (Morrissey told
NME
that “the fact that I’ve scuttled through twenty-six years of life without ever noticing that the contours of the body are different is an outrageous farce”) the song is a delight.