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It's time the tale were told

The Smiths
The Smiths

Were The Smiths more Irish than U2? Are Morrissey and Marr stll in contact? How serious was Morrissey about sex and death? Tony Fletcher, author of There is a Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of The Smiths, answers these questions and more

2012 marks the 30th anniversary of the formation of The Smiths and the 25th anniversary of their split. Those five years yielded 70 songs, 17 singles and four albums that still have a deeply spiritual resonance for their millions of fans worldwide. Much has already been written about the band but Tony Fletcher, author of acclaimed books on The Clash, Echo and The Bunnymen, Keith Moon, and R.E.M., has written the definitive group biography, A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of The Smiths.

Alan Corr: The Smiths are already one of the most written about bands of all time. This book is 700 pages long and it is hugely detailed and exhaustive but what did you dig up that all the other books, including Johnny Rogan’s The Severed Alliance, didn’t?

Tony Fletcher: “I started my focus in Manchester, Johnny Rogan started his in Ireland, and I wanted to talk more about the Manchester Irish. I wanted to put the band in the context of their times. By the way, I’m really good friends with Johnny Rogan. I’m the same age as Johnny Marr and Andy and Mike and grew up in the same context in London and I wanted to put the Smiths in the context of mid-seventies, suburban city upbringing, and lower-middle class. I wanted to get punk rock in there, I wanted to get indie in there and I wanted to get America in there. I think that’s been ignored because the Smiths were really popular in America and nobody has really written about how that came about. Plus I think I have a lot more about the recording of the music and a very healthy overview of the band’s music and more detail about their breakup.”

Johnny Marr is very much the keeper of the Smiths flame and you talked extensively to him, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce for the book. However, of course, Morrissey refused to take part . . .

“The interviews I did with Johnny for the book were the longest interviews I did in my life and he said also in his life as well. We did a thirteen-hour day for one interview. Morrissey, of course, is the enigmatic one who will only give of himself what he wants to give of himself at any given moment. I sent Morrissey three letters requesting interviews and I was told they would be passed on but I did not get an official response from him. I hoped I would get some kind of note that said `thank you but no thank you’. I wasn’t surprised. You get a sense of certain personalities and how they work. It was important for me to be told that Morrissey had my correspondence because I didn’t want this book coming out and for him to say, ` hey I didn’t know anything about this’. I said in my last correspondence to him that if you decline to get involved please remember I was a massive Smiths fan, love the band, none of that will ever change, you’ve had a massive impact on my life, I’ve been a vegetarian since Meat is Murder came out. I wanted to get all of that across because I think these days Morrissey is very defensive about the press and tends to think that anyone who writes about him have a negative agenda and I that wasn’t the case with me.”

Did you approach his parents, Betty and Peter or his sister, Jacqueline, for interviews?

“No. The only time I ever spoke to the family was with my Keith Moon book. I think that you approach a grey area if you decide to go after family. You start to become a bit of a doorstep journalist. You have to have an understanding with your subject upfront that they are going to open some doors to you but keep others closed. With someone who is long deceased like Keith Moon I felt it was very fair to approach sisters, mother and ex-wives and girlfriends. Johnny Marr gave a lot of himself and opened up a lot of professional doors and for me to go round the back and start approaching family members would have backfired on me.”

I have to tackle the Irish Question: The Smiths are seen as a quintessentially English band but the Irish claim them as our own. After all, given that seven of their parents were Irish, they are more Irish than U2. But how much did The Smiths Irish heritage inform their music and lyrics?

“I think it comes through in very subtle but distinct ways and I think it’s evident in the group’s upbringing in Manchester which was definitively Manchester Irish Catholic. You’re talking about parents coming over after the Second World War and the experience of the group was Irish Catholic schools and being in a minority. The schools they were in were very, very strict and by today’s standards teachers would have been prosecuted for some of their behaviour. I think that’s what infiltrated their songs, a sense of being working class, of being recent immigrant and that feeling of you’re up against it and you’re an outsider. I’m not just talking about Morrissey’s lyrics; the music wasn’t made by people who felt comfortable on the inside. Much of the pop music of the eighties was by people who wanted in, they wanted in on Yuppie-ism, they wanted in on money, on fame, the glory. The Smiths were always looking in from the outside. The Smiths resonated with that generation and continues to. They speak for the outsiders and that’s where the Irishness seeps in. On Still Ill Morrissey sings `England is mine, it owes me a living' or `I never had a job because I never wanted one'. These are outsiders looking in. Johnny Marr’s ballads, the Irish influence was very much there. there all in the 6/8 waltz tempo. Something like Please, Please, Please, he says, was influenced by his holidays in Ireland when he was a kid.”

The Smiths had a lot of waspish, gallows humour. In the book you dwell on Morrissey’s thoughts on chastity and suicide but how much did he mean what he said and how much was he tongue in cheek?

“He was much more humorous than people gave him credit for and I think the archetypal example of that is Heaven’s Knows I’m Miserable Now which so many people took as confirmation of Morrissey’s miserablism when in fact it was him laughing at himself. You think I’m miserable? Well, I’m going to put it into a song title! How’s that? There were also lyrics in that song that he absolutely meant – `two lovers entwined passed me by . . . ‘ I don’t think there is anybody who hasn’t experienced that emotion. The bigger question of his chastity and celibacy is a much more complex and contradictory one. I had people talk to me for the book who said that they did not believe Morrissey was celibate. Does it matter? I think it matters if you say you are but maybe it’s enough to put out there that celibacy is an option and that maybe you were celibate for a large period and that maybe teenagers don’t have to be obsessed with sex because there is a life beyond that.”


In his book Cider with Roadies, Stuart Maconie gives a very funny account of the first time he heard The Smiths (he was stuck in the boot of a friend’s car travelling over the moors above Manchester). What was the first time you heard the band and what was your reaction?

“I probably first heard them with Hand in Glove, I don’t remember it that clearly. I was running a magazine a the time in London and we were quite close with Rough Trade. I’d be going in and out of the Rough Trade store since about 1978 and Scott Piering, who was a Smiths manager for a while, had been plugging The Smiths quite heavily. But Hand in Glove did not do it for me and then I heard the Peel Sessions and then went to see them at the Lyceum in London in September ‘83 and I will tell you, like a lot of people, when I heard This Charming Man I thought ah! That’s what they’re talking about, that’s the band that’s so special. Hand in Glove did not sell a lot of records when it came out but all credit to Rough Trade they heard something and turned it from something quite dark and introspective into something very celebratory and The Smiths had a hit single with This Charming Man. An astonishingly great song.”

A key factor in that breakup was the recording of a video for Sheila Take a Bow in 1987 . . .

“The American record company were continually coming to The Smiths and saying we really need a video from you, we love you and you may not make them in Britain but we cannot sell records for you in America unless you make a video. They had a new manager who was American and he had it all squared away and they were going to spend money and make a video and they got this director in who was very well respected. She met with Morrissey and they set up on a soundstage in south London but, not the first time but maybe the last time, Morrissey didn’t show and the rest of the band did and it was a very embarrassing situation for the new manager. They went round to Morrissey’s place to get him to explain himself but he stayed behind a locked door and Johnny just said that’s it, that’s the end of the band. They did continue for three, four months longer but Johnny confirmed to me that was for him the final straw. It was just one no show too many. It just wasn’t going to get better.”

Business and managerial difficulties are two of the reasons the band broke up but what to you think was the main reason?

“I think it was personality differences. Everything that brought Morrissey and Marr together and made The Smiths so special also eventually was going to wrench them apart. It was a marriage of relative opposites that was only ever going to have a certain lifespan. I think Morrissey, god bless him, got more and more difficult with his no shows and business decisions, and I think it was that that drove Johnny away. A lot has been made out of that final song Golden Lights and the B-side Work is a Four Letter Word, that very, very last session, but I think they could have gotten through that. They could have laughed off the fact that they were covering Cilla Black but they couldn’t laugh off the fact that Morrissey and Marr were struggling relationship and business wise. I think Johnny wanted to make more and more varied music and Morrissey was more rooted in a certain worldview. All the issues that tore them apart were the things that made them so special for the five years they were together.”

Do you know if they’ve had much contact with each other in the 25 years since the split?

“When Morrissey and Marr broke up they stopped talking to each other and it’s a shame because they should have kept in contact. I think it was one of those situations when each one thought well he should call me. I know that both of them were hurt by the other not calling to make peace. Johnny’s pretty open about this. He says he’s not “not” in contact with Morrissey. He’s in occasional contact with him. They are most certainly in contact as business partners, they sort of have to be. They're in occasional contact but put it this way, I would not put money on a Smiths reunion.”

A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of The Smiths is published by William Heinemann

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