The formation of The Smiths is now the stuff of legend. Joe Moss, with no ulterior motive other than to lend something to Maher that he knew would entertain him, lent Johnny a video that told the story of Lieber and Stoller, the two American writers who had joined forces to pen some of early rock ’n’ roll’s greatest hits, most notably for Elvis Presley. Apart from the incredible focus and determination that the pair showed, the fact that Jerry Lieber turned up on Mike Stoller’s door step, introduced himself and declared ‘Let’s write songs together’ struck Johnny as wonderfully romantic. Linked already via Billy Duffy, it was mutual friend Stephen Pomfret who suggested that Johnny meet his mate Steven Morrissey, taking him around – in May 1982 – to a house on King’s Road, Stretford, where the Morrissey family lived. The legend has it that there and then Johnny cited the American duo and indeed said “Let’s write songs together.” There’s a nice symmetry in the idea that while Johnny Rotten met Malcolm McClaren on the King’s Road, Chelsea, Johnny Marr met Morrissey on the King’s Road, Stretford. How north-west playwright Shelagh Delaney, one of Morrissey’s greatest influences, would have been proud. While the event has been talked up to mythical proportions since, it is clear that the pair hit it off immediately, and it was indeed a natural and immediate outcome that they should form a song-writing partnership. “I just laid this heavy jive on him,” Johnny was to say many years later. “Three hundred words a second.” Every name that Johnny threw at Morrissey was greeted with enthusiasm – the pair shared an incredible love of the same left-of-centre music, and from that moment on nothing would ever be the same for either of them again. The first thing that Morrissey said to Johnny was “do you want to put a record on?” Johnny later thought that this was perhaps Morrissey “testing out where I was coming from.” Johnny never missed the opportunity to put a record on: “That was out first point of contact,” he said. “I went over to this shoe box with 45s in it, and pulled out ‘Paper Boy’ by The Marvellettes.” Their first point of contact was Motown. “Right from the beginning,” said Marr, “we knew it was going to be brilliant.” An enterprise that would change the world was born.
The Morrisseys were another Irish family settled in Manchester. Four years older than Maher, the young Steven had spent his early years deep in artistic ferment. Naturally shy, Morrissey had pursued a novel career throughout his teens. A published author of fanzine-style booklets on the New York Dolls and James Dean by the time he met Johnny, Morrissey had submitted scripts to the producers of northern soap Coronation Street, and had seen his record reviews and letters published in several of the popular music papers. Steven was also an inveterate pen-pal, having a number of relationships with people via the written word in letters that flowed back and forth from his house in King’s Road. Most significantly, the pair shared a musical taste somewhat at odds with the times. While they both loved the garage-glam thrash of the New York Dolls and the impassioned, poetic cool of Patti Smith, they also shared a tendency towards Sixties US girl groups, T. Rex, Sparks, and the finer points of glam. The meeting happened almost as the legend would have it, but the musical joining of hands between Marr and Morrissey was a calculated move by which each party recognised that the other could be a conduit for the other’s frustrated talents.
Morrissey had more form in the Manchester music scene than Johnny. Present at the Sex Pistols’ famed Lesser Free Trade Hall gig, he had auditioned for a local band around the time that Maher had started the Paris Valentinos, and by 1977 was singing with The Tee Shirts, a band which boasted Billy Duffy amongst its members. Morrissey then went on to join Duffy in The Nosebleeds, playing support during spring 1978 to Slaughter & The Dogs and Howard Devoto’s Magazine. Steven was even referenced by NME’s Paul Morley, who reviewed a collection of Manchester bands in June, but despite the lyrical contribution to the band that their singer was now making, their split later in the year was inevitable. Morrissey dallied briefly as vocalist for Slaughter & The Dogs, with whom Duffy stayed when the band moved to London, and was seen at almost every significant gig in Manchester. Empassioned by music and creativity, Morrissey continued to write to the music press and to support Ludus, fronted by his friend Linder Sterling. By the time of his famed meeting with John Maher, Steven had quite a curriculum vitae on the fringes of the Manchester music scene. A committed writer, and a lyricist with a background in a band that had done far better than Johnny’s; although he played no musical instruments, Morrissey was a natural foil for the younger guitarist.
Almost immediately the pair set about writing songs together. The initial impetus was to be song-writers, and it only dawned on the duo gradually that what they were doing would require a band to realise the potential of their partnership. At the same time they recognised that their immediate friendship had a unique element to it. Within two days, said Johnny, he knew that “they had everything.” Morrissey presented Maher with a set of lyrics that had enough shape to enthuse the musician. “Morrissey was very, very demanding of me,” Johnny enthuses, still excited by the memory. “He was always looking for songs, and without him I wouldn’t have written as many songs in that fashion, with such speed.”
They began rehearsing with mutual friend Stephen Pomfret, who had been a member of the Tee Shirts with Morrissey. After Pomfret left and White Dice keyboardist Paul Whittal tried out, the duo joined up with drummer Simon Wolstencroft. They were so confident of ‘the product’ of their partnership that they booked Decibel Studios to record some demos. The studio’s engineer, Dale Hibbert, joined on bass and – in nascent form – The Smiths were born, a four-piece of guitar, bass, drums and vocals, with Morrissey and Maher as the primary creative force. “When [we] got together,” Maher told Sounds a year later, “it became immediately apparent that the songs we were writing needed bass and drums to make them work.” With a basic four-piece line-up, the new-found name suggested so many things too. In essence it was a reaction against the exotic, lengthier names popular with bands current at the time (Kid Creole & The Coconuts, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Haysi Fantayzee et al) – it sounded gritty, working class, antipop, and interesting-by-being-not-so. If they sounded ordinary, their music would be quite the opposite. “The name doesn’t mean anything,” Morrisey was to tell i-D magazine some months later in the band’s first published interview. “It’s very important not to be defined in any one category.”
When drummer Woolstencroft didn’t last, and neither did his replacement Gary Farrell, the pair auditioned local punk sticksman Mike Joyce. Another Irish Mancunian, Joyce had already served an apprenticeship of sorts with regular gigging bands The Hoax and Victim, and was vaguely familiar with Johnny as a customer of X Clothes, where he bought his mohair sweaters. With The Hoax, he had already appeared on both John Peel’s radio show and toured outside the UK, while Victim was a known band on the local Manchester circuit. Joyce joined them in a Manchester studio after receiving a demo, playing through a number of songs and getting to know the singer and guitarist quickly. “It just happened by mistake, really” Joyce told filmmaker David Nolan. “My other groups weren’t just complete thrash, but Johnny’s subtlety and texture when playing the guitar were different to other players I’d worked with up until that point.” When Joyce joined The Smiths, he did so as by far the most experienced member. Twenty years later he described the meeting for BBC Radio. “I’d known Johnny… and seen him around town working in X Clothes. Morrissey was just walking up and down the room with a very long grey coat on, and he said hardly anything.” A brief period of doubt about leaving Victim was soon abandoned. Mike Joyce was the next piece of the Smiths’ jigsaw puzzle to fall into place, and his arduous vigour as their drummer was an integral part of their appeal in the years to come.
An esoteric lyricist and singer of some eccentricity; an articulate writer/guitarist raised on glam riffs and acoustic folk, and a drummer besotted with Buzzcocks and the punk ideal. The Smiths were coming. “We were put together,” Marr said of The Smiths in Designer magazine. “We were a bunch of strangers for all intents and purposes – who then became incredible friends… We came together to make that music.” With hindsight, it is too easy to suggest – as some cynical observers may – that Morrissey saw a musician who could help make him rich and famous, and that Marr spotted a front man who could realise his own musical ambitions: the backroads of rock ’n’ roll are littered with such relationships that never got beyond idle plans. Nevertheless there was, with Joe Moss’s vital input, a calculated element to the new band’s structure. Johnny and Morrissey were laying plans right from the start. According to Marr, Morrissey’s plans for the group’s ‘aesthetic’ – its financial structure and the kind of record deal it would pursue – was in place long before a note had ever been put down on tape. Following their own instincts, this was going to be a band to die for. “Right from the beginning,” Marr told NME in 1989, “we knew it was going to be brilliant.”
Morrissey’s songs became the ultimate series of letters to thousands of unknown pen-pals around the world. As a young child he had been a natural writer; from the age of six he was compiling his own magazines; as a teenager he was using the pop press as a means to communicate with the outside world, placing ads in the press seeking other New York Dolls fans, and maintaining relationships through writing. In Johnny, Morrissey found a vehicle for his writing that gave his words a context: Maher’s increasingly sophisticated music added weight to the structure of Morrissey’s words, and formalised their content. Before finding his co-writer, Morrissey was searching for a role. Johnny had already decided that the role of vocalist/frontman was not for him. But together they knew what they had to do. “The reason why Morrissey and I got together,” Maher told Sounds less than a year later, “was to write songs… we both felt the need to react against what we’d been hearing for the last [so many] years.”
The newly formed partnership was too passionate about music to allow the mundanity of the current scene to go unanswered. The key was their overwhelming optimism, the appeal of the nascent band to its first audience being the fact that they offered something to a congregation looking either for help or comradeship. While The Smiths over the years earned an undeserved reputation for glumness, Johnny’s guitar lines were resplendent in their optimism, as fresh as a walk at dawn on a cool spring morning. At the same time Morrissey’s lyrics leapt in an instant from the hysterically funny to the desperately heartfelt. Together, Johnny and Morrissey became the friend who one could always rely on, the shoulder to cry on or the cheesy mate to have a laugh with. With The Smiths, an audience found kindred spirits.
* * *
In 1982, one could be forgiven for thinking that punk had never happened. Although there were hits across the year for the likes of The Jam, XTC or Adam & The Ants, the biggest smashes of the year came from the likes of Bucks Fizz, Kool And The Gang, Nicole, Steve Miller and Survivor, with their ubiquitous movie smash ‘Eye Of The Tiger.’ It was an era of big hair rather than great music. For every Soft Cell there was a bunch of bands like Dollar, Bucks Fizz, Tight Fit or Bardo: either Eurovision wannabees or real Eurovision acts clinging to the charts by their fingertips. Seventies hangovers were still around, the protagonists rolling their jacket sleeves up to establish their Eighties credentials. Cliff Richard, Rod Stewart, Barry Manilow, Leo Sayer and David Essex were all still having major hits. Floppy-haired, floppy-thinking icons like Duran Duran, Haircut 100 and Wham!, alongside soft rock behemoths like Foreigner, outnumbered the genuinely entertaining acts like Madness ten to one. But The Smiths knew they had the key to an upheaval not seen since the Pistols. Johnny gushed on the subject of Morrissey, and Morrissey was equally proud of the guitarist. “Morrissey’s so confident,” said Johnny “that he doesn’t have to cloud his lyrics in metaphor.” Morrissey said that “Johnny can take the most basic, threadbare tune and you’ll just cry for hours and hours and swim in the tears.”
“One of the things about making records,” says Marr, “is that for it to work you have to be totally and utterly in love with it for those three minutes, and you have to be able to hear that love in the tracks.” While real love and true passion was missing from the pop world in 1982 and early 1983, Johnny and Morrissey knew how to love. “That might be a particular idiosyncrasy of mine,” says the guitarist.
Johnny’s compositional methods have been outlined piecemeal over the years. What is clear is that the song develops from feeling – what Marr has called “an uneasy feeling” that he tries to harness. When the muse is active, Johnny closes down other distracting elements. “I try not to party,” he says. “I keep myself really straight and sober, which is, I guess, the opposite of what people might expect. I get up early and stay up late, sleep as little as possible and harness that disconcerting uneasiness.” Marr likens the feeling to “knowing a storm is coming and [knowing] that something is going to happen.” While this method served Marr best in his post-Smiths days, often during the early and heady days of the band’s career the group component would overtake the individual creative element. “We were incredibly pragmatic in approach,” he says. “We’d do batches of three songs at a time. We’d sit down and say, ‘Let’s write a song.’” The discipline of Leiber and Stoller was paramount. “Morrissey would come round to my house and we’d do three songs just like that. Then he would go away and do the lyrics, and three days later he’d be in the studio recording it.” Morrissey and Maher were remarkably prolific, recording seventy songs in four years, and part of that urgency came from what Johnny calls Morrissey’s “emotional and physical necessity” to write. It made the process easy, “and in that way we propelled each other towards this endless supply of songs.”
Johnny has called the process “incredibly romantic.” This was not, of course, in the sense of amour, but romance with a capital ‘R.’ Heightened sensation, heightened perception, heightened emotional involvement typified the Romantic poets – Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth – and this was the ‘romance’ that the two writers experienced together. “The songwriting process, and the songs we produced, are sacred,” Johnny was to say after The Smiths’ split. “And still are to me now.” ‘Suffer Little Children’ and ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ were amongst the first, brilliant flowers of this new musical romance. Morrissey moved our hearts because his writing was so fine. Johnny moved our hearts with his passionate guitar. And they dragged us onto the dance floor too. Paraphrasing Joni Mitchell, a great song needs a little something for the heart, a bit for the mind, and something to get you on your feet. Between them, Johnny and Morrissey did that in spades.
“I have never related to the Jeff Becks of this world,” says Marr. “I have never seen the guitar as a solo instrument. When I started to write songs, I wanted my guitar to sound like a whole record.” Marr’s comments confirm his compositional premise: “I consequently developed almost a one-man-band style.” In relation to the oft-quoted comparison with the Phil Spector ‘Wall Of Sound’ – where Spector embellished tracks with multi-tracked drums, piano and strings – Johnny again relates his own attitude not to individual traits in the Spector sound, but to the entire package. For Johnny, as the guitar was an orchestra, so Spector was “the overall musician.” “Not purely sonically, but you could hear in his records that he was completely obsessed. There were no spaces – any harmonic suggestion was realised. It’s a kind of production thing.” Marr’s composition was a complete process from start to finish – individual songs conceived as a production exercise as much as a progression of chords or melodic structure. “If you’ve got four or five musicians playing then you will get loads of natural harmonics and spaces in there between the instruments. Spector was someone who would hear all these tiny suggestions and then fill every one in… [a] big, big, dense apocalyptic sound which I definitely connected with.” Johnny hears ‘the whole thing.’ “I’ll play a new song and hear piano and strings and then I try and play all that on my one guitar,” he told Martin Roach.
Maher’s playing style attracted attention early on. “Johnny would do interviews, and he wouldn’t cite the usual guitar heroes,” notes Alberto vocalist and academic CP Lee. “I specifically and distinctly remember him talking about the influence of English folk-rock. It’s now very apparent – because we know more about it – but [at the time] I detected the likes of Bert Jansch and Davey Graham. And it’s what made his sound unique – it’s definitely not American guitar-playing.” Billy Bragg spoke to me and also recalls talking to Johnny about his own guitar playing and the influences upon it. While most journalists summed up his style through analogies with The Byrds, Bragg was surprised that a British player should spring to Johnny’s mind first. “I said, ‘What were your influences in America?’” remembered Billy. “And he said, ‘Martin Carthy.’ If I would make reference points on people like Terry and Gay Woods, he would know them. It wasn’t beyond him, and he’s worked with Bert Jansch as well. [All that] is what he brought – that I thought was really great – to The Smiths.”
Early in the history of the band, Johnny was keen to emphasise that it was the band that was important, not individual members of it. This was not his vehicle, nor indeed Morrissey’s, but a group concept from start to finish. From that moment The Smiths were a unit. While he could not relate to self-indulgent guitar heroes, neither was he overly inspired by solo singer-songwriters. But The Smiths would represent the very best of pop music, whether it be Fifties, Sixties or Seventies. “We’re trying to bring back that precious element which is, I suppose, reminiscent of an earlier time,” he told Bill Black for Sounds. “Lots of common ground, but with separate influences to bring out something we believe to be the best we’ve ever heard.” This would be tempered – crucially – by Johnny’s own experiences. “I am a white musician,” he says, “born in the Sixties, in the provinces. And that is the way it sounds.” While Johnny would go on to earn respect, and an enviable reputation, for being able to walk into any studio in the world and ignite the work in hand, he never became a whingeing guitar soloist. “When that stuff is bad – it’s the worst,” he says.
While the general music scene was stagnant – unless you were in the hair-dressing or lace industries – there was some fun in the singles charts: Soft Cell, Culture Club, The Jam, Bow Wow Wow, ABC and XTC, Bananarama/Fun Boy Three, Adam Ant and the resplendent Associates all made serious inroads into the top twenty in 1982, along with an air of style or fun. However, a number of these were already five-years-old as acts, and pop was in perhaps its most vapid phase since the sterile months of the late Fifties and pre-Beatles Sixties. There was little heart, precious little soul, virtually no wit (Madness and Blondie aside) and equally little musicianship. The record-buying public didn’t know it, but it needed The Smiths more than it needed anything: while Steven and Johnny sat head-to-head and planned their future, any discerning rock critic might have come up with a formula for a band that could shake the early Eighties up again, like punk had done six or seven years earlier. The band to re-energise the charts and the hearts and minds of the people who listened to the music would be a singles-orientated band (like the Pistols) with a predominance of guitar-driven pop. They would have both wit and wisdom, controversy but with substance: music needed punk all over again, but newly minted for the new decade.
* * *
Morrissey and Maher knew they had what it took. Johnny’s increasing versatility and accomplishment as a guitarist set against Morrissey’s faith in his own concept of stardom and his proven, tried and tested ability as a writer convinced the pair that they were more than viable contenders. Put simply, they both knew what a great record should sound like, and they knew there weren’t many of them around. Johnny has spoken of early singles by Sparks and Roxy Music as influencing his feel for what was right – and ironically several of these involved future Smiths producer John Porter. For Maher, the perfect equation involved a great intro, a great outro, and “something interesting in between”. He cites Roxy’s ‘Love Is The Drug’ as a perfect example: the car engine starting, the cigarette lighting.
They were controversial contenders from the outset too. Set to become probably the most notorious of all The Smiths’ released songs, ‘Suffer Little Children’ was inspired in part by Emlyn Williams’ account of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, in his 1967 book Beyond Belief. One of the duo’s first compositions, it could not be further from the chart pap of Shaking Stevens’ ‘Oh Julie’ or Shakatak’s ‘Night Birds’. It was an astonishing accomplishment for such a new partnership, but at the same time encapsulated so much of what Smiths music would come to mean to people – stylish, melodic, mood-driven, lyrically intense and musically dense. And with a hint of the mournful. For everyone who grew up in the north-west of England in the mid-Sixties, the Moors Murders were a part of their childhood, a news story that eclipsed almost every other, a chilling reminder that, even in the day-glo Sixties, we weren’t as safe and secure in our luxury as we thought we were. Williams’ book contains the title of the song as one of its own chapters, and numerous references in the song – notably ‘find me, find me,’ the chilling call of the murdered children from their graves – are in direct reference to the best-selling book.
Another early product of the new partnership was ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle.’ According to Simon Goddard, the lyrics predated Johnny’s writing partnership with Morrissey by some time. Goddard quotes Richard Boon, who knew Morrissey through Linder Sterling, having heard a home demo of the lyric as far back as 1980. ‘Handsome Devil’ also dates from this initial writing period. Within weeks the Smiths canon was coming together. With alarming speed, by autumn the band was ready, rehearsed and planning their first live gig.
The Smiths’ first public appearance is another landmark legend in their story. They appeared as support to Blue Rondo A La Turk at a fashion show at Manchester’s Ritz, on October 4, 1982. The Ritz dance hall had a history going way back in the musical past of Manchester. Only yards away from The Hacienda, Morrissey had sung there already with The Nosebleeds. Blue Rondo A La Turk represented everything that Maher and Morrissey’s new band rallied against: an absurd name taken from a Dave Brubek jazz number, a ten-piece ensemble and a bubbly interpretation of the currently trendy demob style. The Smiths – Johnny, Morrissey, Mike and Dale Hibbert on bass – were determined to make a statement. With only three self-penned songs and a cover – albeit three songs soon to be established as classics – they added a temporary fifth member to their number. James Maker was a close friend of Morrissey, reportedly so like him in his manner that the pair were at the time almost inseparable. Maker is usually cited as the band’s dancer for the gig, and he supplemented Joyce’s rhythmic drumming with maracas and tambourine, a role that Morrissey himself would adopt on stage many times in the years to come. Maker’s role was largely to grab the attention of the three hundred or so punters. “I was there to drink red wine, make extraneous hand gestures and keep well within the tight, chalked circle that Morrissey had drawn for me,” Maker was to tell Simon Goddard. “My involvement was not part of any long-term plan.”
Determined to make a mark, the band’s initial profile and styling could easily have been perceived as ‘gay’. Dale Hibbert remembered being specifically groomed for the public image. “I got carted off,” he told David Nolan, “given some clothes – ‘these are your clothes.’ Taken to a hairdressers – ‘this is your hair cut.’ And they said, ‘We are probably going to have an image as a gay band.’” This came as some surprise to Dale, who was very much married and a father. But the gay market was easily identified and, since Bowie’s Seventies gender-bending, represented a substantial market. With the new romantic penchant for make-up and effeminate garb, it had become increasingly easy for bands to promote themselves directly to the gay audience to get noticed, without actually being gay.
There were plenty of other bands around appealing to a gay audience or promoting a gay image. Culture Club and Soft Cell both had major hits over the course of the year 1982. The Smiths might have seemed a natural choice to take the next slice of the pink pound, with Morrissey’s beguiling ambiguity. But The Smiths were always too tough for that, too stylish even in this earliest incarnation, to be pigeon-holed so glibly. The Smiths had a sophistication that the above bands never achieved, their message too mixed, their dynamic too mature. Inevitably they did attract a substantial gay following, but their guitar, bass and drums drive encouraged badge-wearers from every supposed minority faction – students, gay libbers, vegetarians, animal rights activists and so on. What Hibbert’s comments do reveal is a sense that Johnny and Morrissey already had a clear notion that the band would – whatever it turned out to be – have an agenda, a profile of their own rather than following someone else’s fashion trend. The Smiths were going to be something.
The Ritz gig was a runaway success. Joe Moss, seeing the band for the first time before an audience, thought they were superb. In particular he thought the show was a ‘showcase’ for Johnny, highlighting both his songs and his ability on a live platform. If he had doubted The Smiths at all, he cast all those doubts aside. As he was to tell Q magazine more than a decade later, “there was only one place they were going.”
Throughout the rest of 1982 the band continued to progress, both in terms of writing and performance, as rehearsals were stepped up. It became apparent that family man Dale Hibbert didn’t quite fit. Johnny realised the natural bass player in his band should be Andy Rourke, with whom he had a natural synergy. Johnny invited Andy to join the band at a session booked at Drone Studios in Chorlton during December. One of Johnny’s contacts had convinced the mighty EMI that this was a band worth an audition, and with a small advance from the record company, Dale had booked the session with the intention of producing a professional demo. It was on this evening that Andy officially replaced Hibbert in The Smiths. The Smiths proper was born, and the permanent line-up of Marr, Morrissey, Rourke and Joyce recorded three tracks: ‘Miserable Lie’, ‘Handsome Devil’ and ‘What Difference Does It Make?’, all destined to make it into the Smiths recording canon proper. Reunited with Johnny in a band, Andy Rourke found the transition of joining The Smiths easy. “I had a good understanding of where Johnny was coming from,” he was to tell Bass Player magazine years later. “That was a luxury we had with The Smiths – everything just clicked.”
Simon Goddard has charted the progress of ‘Miserable Lie’ from this early demo through to the finished, officially released version on the band’s first album. What is clear is that both the songs and the band developed both lyrically and musically over the coming few months, with Johnny’s guitar sound being amongst the most notable developments. The funky undertone in the Drone version of ‘Miserable Lie’ betrays Johnny and Andy’s partnership in White Dice, while by the time later producers Troy Tate and John Porter had got hold of it, the layered guitar sound so symptomatic of The Smiths was fully evolved. Likewise, ‘Handsome Devil’ included a soon-to-be-discarded sax line and ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ featured backing vocals from Johnny, which were also dispensed with.
Visually, the band were compelling too, the antithesis of so many bands around at the time, and good-looking to boot. “It just so happens we’re handsome,” Johnny later told Sounds with endearing confidence less than a month after they signed their first contract with Rough Trade. “We didn’t rope in good-looking chaps on bass and drums. It just happened that way.” Great looking they were though. Morrissey’s increasing penchant for outsized blouses from Evans (a high street chain catering for over-sized ladies of a certain age), Johnny’s shades, Mike’s chisel-cut Irish good looks and Andy’s boy-next-door handsome features complemented one another perfectly.
The haircuts were an important part of the look, cut by Johnny’s friend and DJ Andrew Berry. Early fan Joanne Carroll remembers the scene around the Manchester clubs with fondness, and remembers that where she used to get her barnet cut was all part of the sense of belonging to the happening Manchester scene. “Getting my hair cut at the bottom of the Hacienda, which at that time was a hairdressers,” is one of Joanne’s fondest memories. The atmosphere, and relationship between punters and pros was warm and friendly. “We knew [Andrew Berry] really well. I remember Johnny Marr being [in the hairdresser’s chair] frequently too.” On the day that Johnny and Angela got engaged, the little bunch of like-minded fans and friends from the hairdressers got together. While Joanne and her friends knew of The Smiths, it was Johnny that they got to know the best. “The day he got engaged we went out and bought a card for them,” remembers Joanne. Not that the other Smiths were unfriendly, but it was Johnny who seemed to have the warmest relationships around the circuit in the early days.
Grant Showbiz was startled by the Smiths’ haircuts too. Because they all went to Andrew for their ‘styling’, says Grant, “[that] meant they all had the same sort of haircut and it was unlike any haircut you’d seen.” At the same time, their dress sense was unusual too. As well as having been shorn by the same hairdresser, Grant remembers that “they all dressed the same too. They had these beads round their neck, they had these weird clothes you had never seen before… beamed down from planet Manchester.”
As a pure pop group, like The Beatles, The Smiths had something for everyone: if you didn’t fancy Paul, you could always go for George. CP Lee noted the band’s sartorial elegance early in their career. “Morrissey and Johnny Marr are both incredibly stylish men, but with their own absolute agenda,” says Lee. “It’s not quite James Dean… the leather jackets and jeans and stuff. When they first started out – the quiffs – I think Johnny was Britpop before Britpop.” As Morrissey quickly became the band’s front man in terms of interviews, so his charming features established his own appeal. Drawing his own personal style from the cool waters of James Dean and Oscar Wilde, Morrissey looked like no other pop star before or since. The hearing aid and the flowers were to come soon enough to complete the look. Too many interviewers and reviewers over the years have speculated about Morrissey’s sexuality, but in an age of effeminate, dolled-up pop stars, Morrissey was actually visually very masculine. His confident jaw would be held thrust out at the audience, his bushy eyebrows gloriously unplucked. At the same time Morrissey’s visual accoutrements – the hearing aid, the flowers, the collars tucked inside his shirt – undermined that apparent masculine confidence, and made him irresistible, intriguing.
Alongside him, Johnny was the epitome of a new kind of retro cool – the blackest shades, the coolest haircut, a red Rickenbacker slung around his neck like a weapon, and his slender frame as rock ’n’ roll hip as Keith or Brian Jones ever were. For Morrissey, being ‘handsome’ was absolutely crucial to The Smiths, and he playfully demanded “a handsome audience” to go with the band’s own aesthetic. For Johnny “it just [finished] the package off nicely!”
1982 ended with everything in place for an assault on the music-listening public. 1983 would see the band established as perhaps the most important band in the UK. For a short while, Johnny moved into digs, and had a significant local figure as his landlady. Shelley Rohde was a journalist and TV presenter on Granada TV, Manchester’s local independent station. She was also a well-respected author, the biographer of LS Lowry, her book being the standard work of reference on the Salford painter’s life. As a result, Johnny even found his way on to a couple of Granada TV debate shows. While his stay chez Rohde was not long – he moved out in early 1983 – Rohde was another of Johnny’s contacts who brought him closer to the centre of the Manchester scene. Even at this early point in his career, Johnny was connecting with some influential local people. Amongst the friends and acquaintances he had made over the last couple of years, several were talented enough to make it independently as successful musicians – Matt Johnson and Billy Duffy being amongst the most notable. Even at the age of eleven, he had found in Andy Rourke not only a lifelong friend but a man with the talent and the tenacity to survive being a Smith, and in Morrissey he had instinctively linked up with one of the era’s biggest talents. Even former band members such as Kevin Williams were destined to stardom, despite their musical torches not burning for long. Johnny was attracted to talent – he instinctively knew which people were right for him to be around. There is no suggestion of any Machiavellian manoeuvring, but it is clear that Johnny’s ambitions were fired by the quality of the people amongst whom he found himself.
The new year 1983 started with Joe Moss officially installed as The Smith’s manager. Joe’s friendship with Maher was firmly established, and was to be as long lasting as any within the band itself. Not only did Joe become manager to The Smiths, but at the same time he became Johnny’s landlord. Johnny moved out of Shelley Rohde’s house early in the New Year and into digs at Joe’s house in Marple, a sedate suburb of Stockport on the fringes of the Peak District, only a few miles east of Manchester itself. By the end of the year, Johnny had moved back out of Marple and into another house owned by Joe in Heaton Moor, again closer to Stockport than to Manchester city centre. Johnny wrote the music for many of the early Smiths songs here, and his home became a focal point for band members and friends to congregate until Johnny moved to London on a more permanent basis.
Moss was the band’s manager, although a lot of the issues relating to the band continued to be decided upon by Morrissey and Johnny. Financially, Morrissey took the wheel. “His motto was ‘What we make we put in our pockets and pay everybody else from our pocket,’” is how Johnny described Morrissey’s attitude from day one, speaking to Record Collector. This was never going to be a band led by a frontman with no involvement behind the scenes. In charge of more immediate matters, Joe’s first actions were practical, securing the band rehearsal space above his Portland Street premises, where the band could really hone their live skills and develop musically around Morrissey’s vocals. In early January, the band played their second official gig, this time with the Marr/Morrisey/Joyce/Rourke line-up that would remain largely settled through the rest of their career. James Maker graced the stage a second and last time, and with an audience of a few hundred packed into Manchester’s Manhattan Sound, the band expanded upon their original four-song set. In February, i-D magazine was the first to run a feature on the group, interestingly featuring Dale Hibbert as the bassist, indicating that the interview was conducted before the turn of the year. The band talked of how, in the wake of Joy Division, Manchester bands ran the risk of being patronised by the media, but at the same time admitted that the Manchester scene had helped them develop quickly.
“Bands need to be more positive, and stop limiting themselves” said Johnny. “If people don’t like us [it’ll be] because we’re The Smiths, and not because of what we wear.” Before Morrissey began to proclaim on ‘big’ subjects such as vegetarianism, The Smiths were very anti-image in their projection. Their concerns were voiced in this very first interview; that bands should be open and positive, and shouldn’t limit their work according to received patterns of predetermined behaviour, that fashion had nothing to do with music but that music was the ‘major influence on life.’ Interestingly, on the subject of their sound as a band, Maher noted that too many bands were trying to innovate, and that in the wake of the work of Brian Eno and David Byrne (whose hugely influential My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was released in 1981) people should give up trying to be original and should get back to the basics of simply making great music.
As media interest in the band began to ferment, so their live schedule began to pick up speed. Their first Hacienda gig took place in early February, the stage strewn with flowers in an attempt to – as Morrissey was later to explain – re-introduce ‘human gestures’ into stage performance. By now the band had a full set, and most of the songs that were to grace their first album were integrated into the show. Later in the month, at Manchester’s Rafters they supported ex-Television and Voidoid legend Richard Hell, a major event for the band so influenced by both Richard himself and fellow New Yorker Patti Smith. In March, Joe Moss provided the couple of hundred quid needed for the band to enter Stockport’s Strawberry Studios, a famed enterprise owned by 10cc, to record their first single. ‘Hand In Glove’ was the result of the session, the lyrics to the song recently penned by Morrissey to a track provided by Johnny. Marr was to explain that he came up with the riff on “a crappy old guitar.” “We [Angie and he] were visiting my parents… Then I got the idea for the riff, but because I had moved out there was nothing to record it on.” Angie borrowed her parents’ VW Beetle, “and drove this live riff over to Morrissey’s house,” says Johnny. “On the way, she said ‘Make it sound more like Iggy.’ And bang! ‘Hand In Glove’!” Although three versions of the song were recorded over the coming months (not including the later version with Sandy Shaw on vocals) it was actually a remix of this recording that made its way onto the band’s first album.
Fired up, the foursome travelled down to London later in March to play their first gig in the capital, accompanied by a coterie of friends and fans from the north-west, who supported the band at The Rock Garden in Covent Garden. Within days, Johnny took control of the band’s future, travelling back to London to present a cassette of ‘Hand In Glove’ into the hands of the man who would secure their future. The Smiths were getting nearer