So much to answer for.
It was May 1982 when a young Johnny Marr encountered the charismatic Mancunian oddball who became known to millions only by his surname. Their amazing songwriting partnership inspired a thousand indie bands and, 25 years on, they remain a potent force
Sean O'Hagan
Sunday May 6, 2007
The Observer
Twenty-five years ago this month, a bequiffed 18-year-old called Johnny Maher turned up unannounced at the door of 384 King's Road, a nondescript terraced house in Stretford, Manchester. 'It was a sunny day, about one o'clock,' he recalled years later. 'There was no advance phone call or anything. I just knocked and he opened the door.'
'He' was Steven Patrick Morrissey, then a 23-year-old misfit who inhabited the fringes of Manchester's fragmentary postpunk music scene. Morrissey had already tried his hand at being a writer, sending live rock reviews to Record Mirror, penning non-fiction books for a small publisher, Babylon Books, (a homage to James Dean, a tract on his favourite group, the New York Dolls) and even sending unsolicited scripts for episodes of Coronation Street to Granada Television. His fitful attempts at rock stardom had been even less successful, and had all but petered out following a few eccentric appearances as the lead singer for a little-known local group, the Nosebleeds. Back then, Morrissey's effortless oddness was such that Manchester scene-maker and head of Factory Records, Tony Wilson, would later remark: 'Anyone less likely to be a pop star from that scene was unimaginable.'
Prior to that fateful day in May 1982, Morrissey and Maher had met only once, their paths crossing fleetingly at a Patti Smith concert at Manchester's Apollo Theatre in 1978, where they had exchanged the briefest of courtesies.
Against all the odds, though, the mercurial Morrissey invited the nervous Maher up to his bedroom, where a pair of cardboard cutouts - one of James Dean, the other of Elvis Presley - stood sentinel like twin arbiters of their owner's pop dreams. There, the two music-obsessed strangers talked for hours about their shared influences, among them the New York Dolls, Patti Smith and Sixties girl groups.
'It was pretty phenomenal that we were so in sync because the influences that we had individually were so obscure,' Maher said later, long after he had changed his surname to Marr. 'It was like lightning fucking bolts to the two of us. This wasn't stuff we liked, this was stuff we lived for really.'
A few days later, Morrissey made the return journey to Marr's rented room in Bowdon, where, over a melody lifted from Patti Smith's 'Kimberly', they mapped out the contours of a song called 'The Hand that Rocks the Cradle', a complex lyric about childhood innocence and terror that would soon be set to a chiming, circular guitar line. Though they had yet to name themselves, and yet to find a rhythm section, 'The Hand that Rocks the Cradle' was the first real Smiths song, the inspired starting point of a creative partnership that would last a mere five years and yet alter the arc of British pop music in a way that could hardly have been foreseen by even the most blinkered champion of skinny white-boy indie guitar rock.
Between 1982 and 1987, the Smiths, now comprising Morrissey, Marr, Andy Rourke (bass) and Mike Joyce (drums), released a brace of brilliant singles, at least two classic rock albums, provoked several outbursts of outrage from Britain's self-appointed moral guardians and stirred scenes of fan hysteria on a scale not seen since the heyday of glam rock a decade previously. Perhaps more importantly, though, the Smiths almost single-handedly reclaimed and revitalised the ailing tradition of the guitar-driven, four-piece rock group.
To put the extent of their achievement into context, you need only remember that they arrived at a time in the early-to-mid Eighties when punk's rupture had long been papered over, when the new synthesised pop of Boy George and Wham! ruled the charts, and, more importantly, when sample-based dance music first began crossing into the mainstream and rock music seemed to be fighting a desperate rearguard action.
In the office of the NME, where I worked in the mid-Eighties, the split between the dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists of the indie brigade and the unruly iconoclasts of the dance faction threatened to tear the paper apart. Back then, every editorial meeting was a battle ground, every choice of cover star a victory or a defeat. I remember assistant editor Danny Kelly, now a sports presenter, storming out of a meeting, incensed that the Fall had been overlooked in favour of the original ganster rapper Schooly D. Another meeting ended moments from an actual fist fight. I was on the side of the modernisers, fired up by the sheer energy and iconoclasm of hip hop, the sonic dissonance and radical politics of Public Enemy, the lyrical brilliance of Rakim, the inspired cut-and-paste techniques of every great rap single released on Def Jam and Sleeping Bag and all the myriad local labels that sprang up to disseminate this new music. Ironically, the flowering of hip hop reminded me of the eruption of punk: the same energy, the same DIY application, the same sense of possibility that anyone with imagination could cut a single. The parallels were lost on the indie brigade, though, and on the core readership of the NME, who were, and remain, essentially conservative: in thrall to the familiar - young men with guitars and adolescent neuroses. For the indie boys, the Smiths arrived at the very last minute and saved the day.
No other group carried such a weight of expectation - and tradition - as the Smiths. Had they not risen to the occasion, it is not overstating the case to say that the entire trajectory of recent British rock music as we now know it - that's the line from the Smiths to the Stone Roses to Oasis and on to the Libertines and today's indie darlings, Arctic Monkeys - would not have been traced.
It took me several years, and a long detox from the music press, to approach the Smiths with any degree of open-mindedness, having finally and reluctantly bowed to their brilliance with the release of the towering 'How Soon is Now', a song, interestingly, that sounds least like a typical Smiths song. I realised that Morrissey's singing voice, which improved enormously between the first and second albums, was an instrument that could be negotiated after all. Then there were the songs!
'If you look at the Smiths' greatest songs over that short five-year period, it's such an intense outburst of creativity that it sweeps all before it,' says the music writer and pop cultural historian, Jon Savage. 'Johnny had this incredibly instinctive melodic gift for a lead guitarist, and a style that was almost a signature from the moment you heard it. Morrissey was doing extraordinary things with lyric and metre, using words that didn't seem to scan on the line in any regular way, using implied rhymes, and often dealing with subject matter that didn't seem to belong in the pop tradition.'
Savage cites the Smiths' 1985 single, 'Shakespeare's Sister' as a case in point. 'I listened to it recently,' he continues, 'and was struck again by what a very odd song it is. It's essentially a suicide drama set to a demented rock'n'roll rhythm. I mean, how did that become a hit? It's not your regular pop song, is it?'
Though not blessed with great production, 'Shakespeare's Sister' is nevertheless emblematic of the Smiths' otherness, their singular ability to juxtapose the musically familiar and the lyrically surreal to create something unique. Musically the song evokes an older, more raw rock era, with echoes of both Bo Diddley and the early Rolling Stones in its galloping rhythm. Lyrically, though, it draws on an incredible variety of sources, none of which would have impinged on the consciousness of a less erudite, or indeed eccentric, songwriter.
The title comes from Virginia Woolf's essay, A Room of One's Own, one of the many feminist texts Morrissey embraced as a sexually confused, politically awakened adolescent. As Simon Goddard points out in his concise and consistently illuminating track-by-track study, The Smiths: Songs that Saved Your Life, 'Shakespeare's Sister' also pays lyrical homage to Elizabeth Smart's autobiographical novella of obsessive love, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. There are nods, too, to an obscure and melodramatic song about teen suicide called 'Don't Jump', recorded as a B-side by the British pop idol Billy Fury back in the early Sixties.
The merging of highbrow and lowbrow influences soon became a Morrissey signature of sorts. 'Reel Around the Fountain', for instance, references Molly Haskell's feminist-fuelled book of film criticism, From Reverence to Rape, while the quintessential Morrissey line, 'I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice', turns out to be lifted, word for word, from Shelagh Delaney's great kitchen sink drama, A Taste of Honey, perhaps the single most quoted source in the Smiths' canon. ('Hand in Glove', 'This Charming Man' and 'This Night Has Opened My Eyes', all borrow from Salford-born Delaney's seminal drama of northern working-class life.)
Little wonder, then, that the Smiths were manna from heaven for bedroom adolescents, for whom Morrissey was nothing less than a mirror - and a vindication - of their thwarted dreams and desires. His hybrid aesthetic - part high camp, part English eccentric, part pop-cultural pick and mix, part Mancunian drollery - extended to the Smiths' record sleeves as well. He alone choose the portraits that adorned the covers, canonising his personal icons for a generation of fans, many of whom discovered a whole world of literature, film and songs made in the postwar, pre-Beatles era that Morrisey seemed most fixated on. Those icons included actors, Alain Delon, Jean Marais, Rita Tushingham and Terence Stamp who, despite Morrissey once defining his idea of happiness as 'being Terence Stamp', famously demanded the withdrawal of his image from the sleeve of 'What Difference Does it Make?'
More revealing still, for a confessed celibate, was Morrissey's choice of gay icons such as Joe Dallesandro and Candy Darling, both from the Warhol 'family', the latter immortalised by Lou Reed on 'Walk on the Wild Side'. More irreverently, but just as knowingly, he selected various lesser-known English 'faces', including the ill-starred Sixties pools winner and author of Spend, Spend, Spend, Viv Nicholson, as well as two stalwarts of British television drama, Yootha Joyce (from Man About the House) and Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street).
For all the passing nods to Warhol, and despite Morrissey's undiminished love for the New York Dolls, the Smiths were a quintessentially English proposition, often unapologetically parochial in their obsessions. 'Manchester, so much to answer for,' sang Morrissey on 'Suffer Little Children', but Manchester made the Smiths, and they invoked it time and time again in song.
With Marr as his musical director, Morrisey elevated a certain kind of poetic provincialism - the provincialism of Philip Larkin or Alan Bennett - to a pop art form. In doing so, as the writer Will Self, a longtime Smiths fan, points out: 'Morrissey freed himself to be a national artist in a way that a London pop star could never be.'
Morrissey's wilfully maudlin lyricism and his definably northern singing voice, alongside his fondness for a certain kind of camp, self-deflating couplet - 'And, as I climb into an empty bed/ Oh well, enough said' - also spoke of a tradition that predated the pop lineage they were obviously a part of, a lineage that stretched back from the more melodic side of the Jam to early Bowie, and beyond that to the Beatles and the Kinks.
'There's a proscenium arch around the Smiths,' elabaorates Self, 'a music hall element that comes mainly from Morrissey's songs and attitude. You could imagine them in another not too distant time being introduced on The Good Old Days by a man in a dickie bow with a mallet. That's the tap root of many Smiths songs rather than, say, the great folk or blues tradition that a similar-sounding American rock group would be duty bound to draw on.'
The Smiths had a dark side, though, and that too was somehow quintessentially English. 'Morrissey sings of England, and something black, absurd and hateful at its heart,' mused Tony Parsons much later, referring specifically to the singer's more provocative, some would say nationalistic, solo songs. Listening again to the Smiths' first album, though, I am intrigued and appalled all over again by the subject matter of the chilling final track, 'Suffer Little Children'. This is Morrissey's ode to the child victims of the Moors Murderers, which Simon Goddard rightly describes as 'dreadful yet captivating'. It is hard to know what to make of the song save for the underlying sense that Morrissey is working something out for himself, and for his hometown, Manchester, in singing it. Whether or not you think it is suitable subject matter for a pop song at all depends on how seriously you take Morrissey as a songwriter, as an artist. Savage argues in his favour.
'It's an incredibly sensitive subject and one that I almost feel he was compelled to confront. I mean, it was such a stain on the city, it was as if the Sixties ended right then and there in Manchester. Morrissey grew up in the shadow cast by Brady and Hindley, and there's perhaps an unhealthy morbid fascination there, but there's also the sense of an artist wanting to get to grips with the dark side of his city. Whatever the impulse was, it was not shallow nor merely provocative.'
The writer Michael Bracewell, in his book England is Mine, homes in on Morrissey's fascination with the underbelly of a reimagined England familiar from the novels of Graham Greene, a not too distant, but fast-fading, urban Albion populated by underworld spivs, rent boys and juvenile delinquents, a land of 'jumped-up pantry boys' and tutu-wearing vicars. Morrissey, like Greene, is drawn again and again to the seedy and the sordid, the louche and the low-rent, seems spellbound by the sight of 'loafing oafs in all-night chemists'.
Writing in 1936, Greene observed that 'seediness has a very deep appeal: it seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost'. For better or worse, no other songwriter has captured that sense of a lost England, Arcadian yet besmirched, quite like Morrrisey.
Now, ironically, the Smiths also represent something lost in British pop culture, their premature and messy break-up - the result of Morrissey's self-defeating control freakery as much as anything - has left a hole in the pop landscape that has not been filled by the altogether more obvious noise of the Britpop brigade or the rock-by-rote thrust of the current wave of traditional British guitar bands. You could even argue that, for all their skill and fire, their otherness and eccentricity, the Smiths did turn the pop clock back, ushered in the formal conservatism that was to follow.
'Who would have thought,' as Will Self puts it, 'that over 20 years after the Smiths' demise we would be listening to so much music that, in the main, is simply an atrophied form of the Smith's rock classicism?'
In fairness the Smiths cannot be blamed for the sins of their imitators. But, what, exactly, is their legacy? The songs, of course, and the craft that carries them. The merging of lyric and melody that seems to have come about so effortlessly time and time again. The sense of possibility that their best songs contain, the possibility that a 'simple' pop song could be as potent and as intimate, as literate and as allusive, as any other kind of great writing. You can hear that same sense of possibility in the lyrics of Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, another writer who deals in the poetry of the parochial, who paints from a quintessentially English - indeed definably northern - palette. You can hear traces, too, in the half-arsed songs that the Libertines left behind, though it is more a striving after something Smithsonian than a finished elucidation of it. Luke Pritchard, of Brighton band the Kooks, hears echoes of the band everywhere: 'Now that their music has had 20 years to marinate, their influence is more obvious than ever. Everyone from the Kaiser Chiefs to the Killers owes them a huge debt'.
'Morrissey was speaking directly to me,' Brandon Lee, the Killers' lead singer, said recently of the first time he heard the Smiths' 'Panic' on the radio in the early Nineties. That same epiphany he describes occurred across Britain and beyond in the early Eighties, when Morrissey became the bedroom bard to beat them all, the quintessential lonely adolescent turned pop star.
In the greatest Smiths songs, you can hear how the great Mancunian misfit, the self-dramatised 'boy with the thorn in his side', fixated on James Dean and the New York Dolls, turned all his acutely perceived limitations into the most potent delineation of outsiderdom and perversity yet articulated by a British pop singer.
Now Morrissey resides on the west coast of America; a more unlikely home for 'a jumped-up pantry boy' it would be hard to imagine. Exiled in Los Angeles, his wilfully adolescent self-absortion has become a tired trope throughout an erratic solo career: narcissim in the young is forgiveable; in the old it is simply ugly.
Johnny Marr, too, has been only fitfully successful on his own, though his current collaboration with Modest Mouse took him into the American charts - a success that must surely have caused his former partner some chagrin. You cannot help feeling, however, that, in the manner of Lennon and McCartney, or Strummer and Jones, each needed the other to shine most brightly. Now the moment is long past, the legacy assured, and this Johnny-come-lately fan can certainly live happily without a Smiths reunion. You wonder, though, whether, self-exiled in his mansion in California, the least likely pop star imaginable ever counts his blessings that a shy teenager called Johnny Maher plucked up the courage to knock on the door of his terraced house in Stretford 25 years ago. He really should. And so, heaven knows, should we.
Charming men: star appreciations
Bono: '"Girlfriend in a Coma" - when I heard it I nearly crashed my car and ended up in a coma. He has that gift. That is not the work of a miserable man.'
Chrissie Hynde: 'The amount of times people have said it was "Meat is Murder" that converted them is astonishing.'
Noel Gallagher: 'Whatever you put down in a lyric to define your love or hate, [Morrissey]'ll do it one better.'
JK Rowling: 'I think the Smiths were the only group whose falling apart really affected me personally. Very sad.'
Billy Bragg: 'He sang all those old Smiths songs and made me feel 17 again. It was pretty amazing as I was 26 at the time.'
Observer critic Miranda Sawyer: 'If you notice, it's really all blokes. Men are in love with him... not women.'
Gordon Agar
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
