Rough Trade began life as a record store in 1977, soon becoming one of the UK’s most influential independent record labels. Independence was not a new thing in the record business – right back to the early Sun releases in the USA, rock music had relied upon selective independents to find and represent some of the most influential and interesting of bands. At the end of the Seventies, recording companies were beginning the drift towards conglomeration that meant perhaps half a dozen or so labels ran almost the entire business. The fact that The Sex Pistols had courted EMI and A&M so fiercely, illustrated the fact that the so-called independence of punk was in fact often merely an attempt to extricate as big an advance as possible from one of the majors. Punk’s self-help ethic, however, was instrumental in people like Geoff Travis forming Rough Trade, and the company consistently maintained extremely high aesthetic standards. The bands that joined the young label – and indeed went on be a part of its future – were almost without exception interesting and entertaining. Aztec Camera, Stiff Little Fingers, Cabaret Voltaire, Scritti Politti and The Fall were typical examples of bands moving from very small or self-run labels into the Rough Trade stable, where they could attract the attention of the media and develop a consistent fan base, and that the latter were on Rough Trade attracted Morrissey and Maher. As the music revolution that was MTV began to take a grip on the industry, it was harder and harder for bands that didn’t have the pop sheen and lip-gloss look to find a home that would give them a major profile: Rough Trade was ideal for The Smiths.
Johnny travelled to London and introduced himself to Travis with immense charm and unlimited enthusiasm for the featureless little cassette tape containing such a gem. “I remember Johnny glowing with pride, saying ‘This is it! Just listen to this,’” Travis recalled of their meeting in the Rough Trade canteen, when speaking to The Face. “I knew inside me that no-one had ever heard music like this before,” says Johnny. During the trip, Johnny kipped with Matt Johnson, and this was the period for The The when Johnson was writing Soul Mining. The whole trip was enlightening for Maher – a glimpse into Matt Johnson’s creative work cementing the friendship that was already well-established, and an inherent knowledge that the time had come for his own band too.
For Travis’ part, unlike many label bosses in a similar situation, the Rough Trade supremo gave the tape an unbiased listen. “I was helplessly won over,” he glowed afterwards. Deciding to release ‘Hand In Glove’ as a single, the label boss made one of the most important decisions on behalf of Rough Trade that he could have made. “I listened to it all weekend,” he told Q in 1994, “and absolutely loved it.” Travis called Johnny on the Monday, and – according to his account of 1994 – the band were in the Rough Trade offices on the Tuesday.
For Morrissey, the decision to take The Smiths on board was the label’s “best-ever deal.” Ultimately achieving the status as Rough Trade’s most successful band, future income from The Smiths allowed Travis to invest in more bands that would otherwise perhaps have been outside of the label’s grasp, such as Pere Ubu, Woodentops and Easterhouse. The label gained experience in charting successful singles bands and promoting major acts as well as minority ones, and enabled the company to expand into the US market with record stores and distribution deals. For The Smiths themselves, signing to Rough Trade was a blessing and, as would transpire later, a deep complication.
The blessing was that, from the very beginning, Johnny and Morrissey had wanted to control as much of their own business as possible. While rumours that the band would sign with Manchester’s Factory Records abounded, and other labels were reported to be interested, Rough Trade offered them the opportunity to retain a much larger share of their record deal than might otherwise have been possible, and left the success or failure of the band more than partially in the hands of the artists themselves. In short, although the advance paid to the band was considerable in Rough Trade’s own terms, it was significantly less than might have been gleaned from a deal with, for instance, EMI. Instead, the deal with Rough Trade would be a profit-sharing offer whereby the company and the band split the income from The Smiths fifty-fifty. If the band were hugely successful, their income would be considerably higher than if they were signed on a lower percentage/royalty deal. “We like Rough Trade as people,” Morrissey told Melody Maker in the autumn. “And they like us. That has to be the most important thing. And if people want to buy the records, Rough Trade will supply them.” Such implicit confidence in such a simple process was endearing. Both Johnny and Morrissey trusted that the route to immense success was inevitable. People would hear The Smiths. People would like The Smiths. People would buy their records. Nothing could be more simple for a duo who had etched out the steps to success from day one. “I want to be heard and I want to be seen by as many people as possible,” explained the singer. How he would be proven right, time after time.
The complication of the contract was that – while they waited until the early summer to formalise the deal – only Morrissey and Maher appeared as signatories on it, and this would come back to haunt them and many of the people around the band in the future. Although Rourke and Joyce were reportedly present at the signing, their names did not appear on The Smiths’ contract with Rough Trade, and so – contractually at least – they were not officially, technically ‘Smiths’. The situation was, much later, to cause Morrissey, Maher, Rourke and Joyce great problems and lead to one of the most acrimonious court cases in rock history, as well as to public vilification at the hands of the ever-considerate British tabloid press who had waited decades to dig their teeth into the band.
For now though, the deal enabled Johnny to take the band into the studio and start work on the much-discussed, much-anticipated debut album. There were gigs to play, now with the knowledge that the future of The Smiths was in part secured, and it was a heady and exciting time for Maher. Dave McCullough, writing for Sounds a month or so after the contract was sealed, wondered whether Rough Trade were in a position to really do justice to the inevitable potential that the band had. One of the first journalists to try and get to grips with what the band were really about, McCullough noted their confidence – “they KNOW the talent that The Smiths possess.” Morrissey, for his part was confident in the deal. “Obviously we wouldn’t say no to Warners, but Rough Trade can do it too,” he told the journalist. Johnny was keen to stress that one of the reasons that they had not signed to Factory was that they might forever be tagged a ‘Manchester band.’ “What we’re thinking of isn’t even in terms of national success. It’s more like worldwide!” Super-confident they may have seemed but, over the year to come, interviews with all the band members would demonstrate one thing – whether it be Johnny, Andy, or whoever, the thing that was important to all of them was The Smiths, and what The Smiths could achieve, almost as though they were the unwitting owners of a patent on a remarkable product that could not fail to succeed in a barren marketplace.
Smiths’ sound engineer Grant Showbiz confirms that the example of The Fall was key to The Smiths’ choosing to join Rough Trade. Grant himself got to know the band very soon after they joined the label, and was with them effectively the whole time, from their fifth gig to the end. “I did the sound for a hippy band called Here And Now,” recalls Grant. “We lived in a bus and we played free concerts, which at the end of the gig we would ask for a collection for food and petrol for the next gig.” Manchester was one of Here And Now’s biggest gigs, a valuable contribution to the hippy funding. “Andy and Johnny came to one of those gigs, and I guess probably saw me cavorting!” Self-described as “a fairly loud and shouty sort of person,” Showbiz’s careering back and forth was noticed by the pair of Smiths.
Showbiz’s second link to The Smiths came via Mark E Smith’s band. “I was working for The Fall at Rough Trade,” Grant remembers, “And Morrissey knew of The Fall, so I think from Morrissey’s end he knew my name and liked what The Fall were doing, in that they were slightly sort of angular and different to what was going on then.” So when Rough Trade found themselves with The Smiths on their hands, they also found they had someone who they felt could handle this odd bunch of lads from up north. Morrissey, Andy and Johnny all knew of Grant, and he soon became one of the most ‘inside’ of The Smiths’ insiders.
“The third thing,” Grant told me, as he looks back on how he came to know the band so well, “was that Geoff or Scott Piering at Rough Trade knew me and could see [that The Smiths were] a young band from Manchester. At that point they did seem a little bit like aliens from another planet.” Scott Piering was another member of the team to be on the inside from early in The Smiths’ story. Piering was Travis’ natural choice to promote The Smiths, with a history of working with some of the less mainstream acts that came his way. “Scott had been many things, but he was ‘indie man,’” recalls Showbiz. “He was a promo who was up against other plugging companies.” As a result, Piering often found himself working with ‘interesting bands’ in the early days of their career when – as Grant Showbiz puts it – “they couldn’t afford a ‘proper’ plugger.” But a ‘proper plugger’ Piering certainly was, as he proved over his time pushing The Smiths.
“My own feeling was that people like Scott and Geoff [Travis] realised that they could talk to me – and I made sense,” said Grant. “I wasn’t a lunatic, and I could get on with weird bands from Manchester,” he laughs. Showbiz, Piering and The Smiths were put together by Rough Trade, and it was a long and lasting relationship. Indeed, Showbiz continued to work with Johnny outside of the band, when the pair both worked with Billy Bragg much later. For now though, Showbiz’s input was first employed to clean up the live sound of the band. The sound that they produced was often rough-cut at best, recalls Grant. “I started on their fifth gig, and they had echo on Morrissey’s voice.” To illustrate, Grant does a fantastic impression of Morrissey’s voice with too much echo on it which does not transmit to print. But the point is made clearly enough – overloaded echo “wasn’t what you wanted with a band like The Smiths.”
As the team came together, one more major change took place which confirmed the identity of The Smiths proper. While Steven had long-abandoned his Christian name for the iconic-sounding moniker ‘Morrissey’, John Maher decided that it was time to distance himself from any potential confusion regarding his name and his background in the Manchester music scene. It is hard to see how anyone would have confused the rake-thin, stylish guitarist with newcomers The Smiths with the frenetic blaster behind the kit in the six-years-in-the-public-eye Buzzcocks, but while John Maher remained a member of the highest-profile Manchester punk band, Johnny decided to change his name to Marr. The song-writing partnership that was Morrissey and Marr was officially born.
‘Hand In Glove’ backed with a live recording of ‘Handsome Devil’ was released in May. The band had briefly considered releasing it on their own independent label – according to Morrissey very much at Johnny and Moss’s instigation. May also saw a series of gigs that pushed the band more firmly into the limelight.
Fewer debut singles have sounded better. Live, the song was an electrifying beast too: Johnny’s cyclical riffs carried the rhythmic attack as presciently as that of Joyce and Andy. Early in their career there was a unique lyricism in the playing, a melodic onslaught as well as a metronomic tempo. Behind Johnny, Rourke’s bass playing was equally incisive, his funk background not lost amongst the darker clouds of Morrissey’s lyric. “I tried to do a tune within a tune,” Andy explained retrospectively in Bass Player in March, 2006. “I wouldn’t be happy with a bass line unless you could hum it.” On top of this exquisite mix, Morrissey – in the band’s first two officially released songs – revealed himself as a unique lyricist and vocalist, as new and fresh as could be. His vocal both bland and tantalising, his lyric mundane and intriguing, the mix of desperation and urbane wit was irresistible.
‘Handsome Devil’ contained the same lyrical polarity. Not many bands aiming at the top of the singles charts would have dared blend a Velvets-like hint of sado-masochism with a cod-music hall lyric. Johnny’s aggressive intro recalled early-Sixties Joe Meek recordings, as well as the repeating-riff influence of Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn. All with a swagger that The Ants could never achieve however charming their own Prince tried to be. Like so many later Smiths singles, both tracks carried storming introductory bars, relentless and punishing passages that would grab the listeners lapels and drag them in. Part of the appeal of The Smiths sound was born of practical necessities. Morrissey’s vocal worked best in a lower key than the band were often happy playing in, and so both Andy and Johnny employed capos across much of the material on the band’s first album, raising their own pitch but lowering the key, setting the musical tone higher and the vocal range lower. So was born one integral part of The Smiths’ sound.
The moment was ripe for The Smiths, as pure as pure could be. “The debut affair of the year,” said i-D magazine of the single. For NME there was an “indestructible self-belief and irresistible intent,” while Irish mag Trouser Press noted two “punchy numbers of great promise.” The band themselves were aware of the record’s sensational feel. “It really was a landmark,” Morrissey was to tell Jamming the following year, while to another interviewer he described it as “searingly poetic… and yet jubilant at the same time.” “I felt my life was leading up to ‘Hand In Glove’,” agreed Joyce. “My life began.” For Johnny it was a dream come true, the fulfilment of a decade-long dream fuelled by practice after practice, rehearsal after dreary rehearsal in bands going nowhere. Recalling his own tactile love of the collectible seven-inch single, he proudly boasted “it was a fantastic piece of vinyl.” For Joe Moss, the reason why the band hit so hard and so fast was because of the absolute freshness of everything they did, the urgency and energy bounding through every bar.
On May 6, a meeting took place that was to shove the nascent Smiths into another gear in terms of reputation and profile. As Ken Garner recounts in The Peel Sessions, BBC producer John Walters was tipped off about the band’s gig at the University Of London Student’s Union by Rough Trade promoter Scott Piering. The Smiths were supporting – from well down the bill – The Sisters of Mercy, and Waters was impressed not only by the reputation that the band had brought down from the frozen north but also by their stage charisma. While Waters later claimed to have merely recognised the band as “a lead worth following”, it was definitely the enthusiasm of his colleague back at ‘the Beeb’ who picked up and carried Johnny Marr and his band to the nation. Waters was, of course, famed as the producer of John Peel’s radio show, and he offered the band their first Radio One session on the spot. The session – which took place less than two weeks later, on May 18 – was produced by BBC legend Roger Pusey and engineered by Nick Gomm, and immediately set a standard that – even to this day – both fans and band members feel was rarely bettered on tape. Tracks recorded were ‘What Difference Does It Make?’, ‘Miserable Lie’, ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ and ‘Handsome Devil.’ All four songs – and these versions of them – became firm favourites for many fans over and above the official album-released versions.
May also saw the band’s first interview with NME, a second London gig at The Electric Ballroom, and unfounded rumours that Mike Joyce might be replaced by Simon Woolstencroft on drums. It is difficult, throughout the story of The Smiths, to ignore the relentless parallels with The Beatles. But just as Ringo was – by snooty music heads in the Sixties – often dismissed as a tub thumper who, had he never met John, Paul and George, would be on the club circuit, so did Mike Joyce often get a very rough and unfair ride. In fact, Ringo’s drumming was revolutionary and to the discerning ear one of the best things about The Beatles. Likewise, without Mike Joyce’s punk input, The Smiths would have been a very different band, and assuredly not the one we all fell in love with.
Grant Showbiz recalls Joyce’s live input fondly. “A more technically proficient drummer might have really fiddled with [The Smiths’ sound], and taken it in a different direction,” says Grant. “Whereas Mike would just nail the beat and fly through it.” The sound of The Smiths in full flight is – whether you were in the audience or listening to live tapes – exhilarating. For Grant, the meat in this resolutely vegetarian band came from the drum kit, and he acknowledges the comparison with Ringo’s input in The Beatles: “It’s silly to say The Beatles thing – but there was an element of this guy just bashing the fuck out of the drums at the back.” It wasn’t just the ‘bashing the fuck out of it’ though. The beauty in the performance came via the incongruous meeting of Mike’s drumming with the rather more esoteric thing happening out front. To Grant, while Johnny’s instrumentalism and Morrissey’s lyric was “sometimes quite a pretty, fey thing,” the key to the blend came from Mike “nailing it, and making it dirty and hard.”
The band were most definitely on a roll. The John Peel session aired at the end of the month, and immediately there was a major response from Peel’s listeners. “You couldn’t buy pre-publicity like that” said newly appointed promotions man Scott Piering. The immediate demand for the band was such that the session was twice repeated on Peel’s programme within six months. The Smiths were becoming well known nationally, and back at home in Manchester the flames of their developing notoriety burned high across the city. “I was aware of them emerging, and the people in Manchester talking about them,” says CP Lee, then the notorious singer of Manchester’s wonderful and anarchic post-punks Albertos Y Los Trios Paranoias. “In fact, there were more people talking about Mr Moss – in that he was doing something.” Lee’s point, that it was Joe Moss having a band that was getting somewhere that was attracting much of the attention locally, demonstrates the surprise amongst much of the Manchester music community that The Smiths were now leading the game. “None of them were known, as musicians,” says CP. “The only real contender was Morrissey because he had sung with The Nosebleeds… and was known as a character around Manchester. But the rest of them were really unknown entities, so there was more talk about [Moss] managing them more than anything else.” CP Lee was a close friend of Richard Boon, then involved with Rough Trade distribution, and was regularly in the Rough Trade office himself. He remembers the buzz there too. “To me they were such an unknown quantity. They appeared like a little nova – a super-nova – bursting out of nowhere. It was very, very noticeable.”
Back in Manchester, the post-punk hierarchy was surprised by the rapid ascension of The Smiths. The inner circle of the tribe, or the ‘elderly members of the village’ as Lee describes the generation that had emerged from punk, hadn’t spotted this little outfit sneaking through the door. “You had a lot of people who had had a crack at it – Buzzcocks had made it, and I suppose you could say Mark E Smith made it,” says Lee, “but a lot of people like The Distractions and The Blue Orchids hadn’t. Suddenly here was this upstart team with no punk credentials. In a sense, anti-punk, you might say, who appeared from nowhere and [were] doing sell-out tours.” There was a certain amount of professional jealousy in Manchester about that, that led to a kind of dismissal of Morrissey and of The Smiths. It wasn’t that they were seen as a flash in the pan, but Lee believes that this is where the disparaging ‘Oh it’s all miserable… heaven knows it’s miserable…’ mockery of The Smiths started, to cut the band down to size in their home city. Twenty years on, it still surprises CP Lee that the band’s ascendance was so rapid. “It does amaze me,” he says. “When I listen to the stuff… where did they come from to play like that?” Where indeed!
Grant Showbiz also recalls how it was the live Smiths that really shook him, how their musicianship was spectacular right from the start. “I saw them on their fifth gig, and… in a funny sort of way they were more formed live [than in the studio].” Grant found ‘Hand In Glove’ difficult to get a handle on, to quite understand where they were coming from. “[It] always sounded like a rush to me, and then seeing them live – it was suddenly nailed.” As sound engineer on virtually every concert The Smiths played, it is natural that he should find their live shows the more exhilarating, but it was more than that. For Grant, the live band was the key to understanding the albums and the singles. Having seen the way the songs worked live one could, then – as Grant puts it – “file back into the record.”
Manchester got a chance to try and figure this conundrum out when the band lined up at The Hacienda in early July for their first gig there at the top of the bill. It was a major night for the band, but also for The Hacienda itself. Over the course of the summer, the band began the recording sessions with Troy Tate that were to evolve slowly into the first album. Ensconced in Wapping’s Elephant Studios, the sessions were intense and the work was focused and dedicated. “It was very exciting,” Johnny told Johnny Rogan for Record Collector in November 1992. “Troy was a really nice guy.”
The Smiths were riding high on the success of their debut single (number 25), had a clear agenda for their sound and for their image, and were honing a style and an ethos that would see out their career. Johnny was excited to be working on the album, and while he had reservations about the sound evolving on certain tracks, for a while he was happy to go along with the work. Introduced to the band by Rough Trade, Troy Tate had even produced his own single, ‘Love Is’, for the label; however, the sound of the album received mixed responses from the group themselves. According to Johnny’s 1992 interview with Rogan, Morrissey was more disappointed than himself, but the implication is that the dissatisfaction came from both the senior partners, while manager Joe Moss reportedly preferred the Tate sessions to the finally released product. Mike Joyce has also expressed a fondness for those recordings, telling Select magazine that he thought it had more atmosphere than the final version. What is clear is that Tate’s album captured a very different Smiths to the one finally released in the spring of the following year.
There’s certainly a different feel to the album in its ‘Wapping state.’ Various bootleg versions of the numerous takes that the band produced have circulated over the years. What is consistently obvious is that, as a studio band, The Smiths were more primitive than they would become with only a few more month’s recording experience. The sessions have a ‘demo’ feel about them, inevitably, as they were never completed as ready for release. Most notably, Marr’s guitar work is less developed. In terms of the writing process, some of the tracks were composed in full by Johnny, who would then present them to Morrissey for lyrics to be added, or Morrissey would present a set of lyrics to Johnny for the reverse process. By whichever method a particular song was composed, the band as a whole would often put down much of the music and then hand over to Morrissey, who would add his vocals as the last act on each track. That process was, according to Mike Joyce “one of the most fantastic things about working with The Smiths,” waiting with immense anticipation for Morrissey to finish the songs off. They were never disappointed. “He’d just spring this lyric on you,” remembered Mike.
Everyone surrounding the band was hyped up. This was clearly a band going somewhere fast. But what is interesting about the process was how much each individual member of the band fell in love with The Smiths themselves: without undue lack of modesty, Rourke, Joyce, Morrissey and Marr became the biggest fans The Smiths had, or would ever have. That desperate passion was one of the most significant elements in the band that was passed on to their expanding fan base.
By the end of the summer, the sessions with Tate had been put on hold, with Tate taking a back-step into Smiths legend. The band were immersed in gigs that would further cement their live reputation around the UK, while their radio presence was improved even further. With gigs in the Midlands and London under their belts, the BBC decided to invite the band in for a second session, this time for The Kid Jensen Show in June. The session was broadcast in early July. Back in Manchester, the band returned to top the bill at The Hacienda. In August, a third BBC session was produced by the man who would, over the coming months, have a huge influence on The Smiths as a recording band, and on Johnny in particular.
John Porter, a former member of Roxy Music, produced the session at the legendary Maida Vale studio on August 12, taping versions of ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’, ‘Accept Yourself’, Pretty Girls Make Graves’ and ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ – tracks that he would become much more familiar with in the coming months. While the session would be broadcast on the Jensen show in early September, events of the late summer gave the band a vital but essentially unwelcome slice of tabloid publicity when The Sun newspaper began attacking Morrissey’s lyrics. The band were suddenly headline news, and while the focus was very much upon Morrissey, the misinformation and scandal caused by the controversy – based upon the lyrics of ‘Handsome Devil’ and the notion that the BBC had banned a Smiths song from its airwaves (it had actually decided not to broadcast the version of ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ for the next Jensen session) – gave the foursome a taste of things to come in terms of tabloid sensationalism.
In September, yet another session was recorded for Peel, featuring the first recording of ‘This Charming Man’. As the autumn progressed Johnny and the band had played in all corners of the UK, been interviewed or reviewed by the majority of the British music press and were back in the studio at work on the album. This time John Porter was in charge of the sessions, having agreed with Rough Trade to take over the production of the debut album. While the initial intention was that Porter would essentially just remix the album and knock it into shape, it became clear to all the parties concerned that a re-recording would be a preferable option. “Through a mutual friend,” Porter said in 1994, “Geoff asked me if I’d take a listen to the tapes.”
Johnny had been working on new material, and over September and October the band settled, with Porter now officially on the books, into Pluto Studios in Manchester. ‘This Charming Man’ was one of the first tracks to be recorded – slated to be the Smiths’ second single after Geoff Travis had heard it in session at Maida Vale. The music had been written by Marr on the same night as he penned ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ and ‘Still Ill’ – typifying his batch-writing of songs in groups of three to present to Morrissey – all born of the wandering Marr imagination on the train journey back to Manchester after recording a session for Radio 1. Fortunately for all of us, Johnny has always been able to keep his musical ideas in mind should they occur to him away from a recording or writing environment. According to Ken Garner’s book, In Session Tonight, it was a “happy, casual but serious decision” by Travis and the band that led to ‘This Charming Man’ being chosen as the single, and the Peel take was broadcast three times before the re-recorded version was released officially in the late autumn. Simon Goddard has noted the “near jazz-like complexity” of the chord progressions that define the song’s chorus, the Tamla feel to the verses, its “impossibly captivating” feel. The track is indeed one of finest moments in The Smiths’ canon. Famed for its fifteen tracks of guitar overdub, the main instrument used was not the supposed trademark Rickenbacker, but a thirty year-old Fender Telecaster, with several tracks of acoustic guitar mixed up for good measure. Constantly looking for ways to add both polish and the sense of impetuous creativity, Porter also included – at the end of the chorus – the sound of Johnny dropping knives onto the instrument – adding to the vibrant colours that the record invented.
The single was released on October 28, 1983, in both seven- and twelve- inch formats. Morrissey’s lyrics were inimitably complex – his perfect mixture of the mundane, arcane and emotionally compelling. While Johnny’s guitar work was stunning, the vocalist had also proved himself by now to be completely in control of his work both as a writer and a singer. Promoter Scott Piering realised there and then that the blistering debut of ’Hand In Glove’ was no fluke, and Travis too was hugely impressed with what his new signings had on board. Mike Joyce found himself immensely enthused by the experience of watching his own band develop so beautifully, so quickly. As he recalled, in Q magazine’s 1994 retrospective article, “we’d have the music finished, and Morrissey would come in and sing… It was just so moving… such an experience to hear your singer singing like that over a track that you have just done.”
Back in London’s Matrix Studios, the band continued with album sessions which hopped between there and Pluto in Manchester. At times Rourke and Joyce reportedly felt over-awed by Porter’s presence, his wealth of experience as a producer and bass player often making them uncomfortable, but for Johnny the experience was a learning curve of the highest order, and as Marr developed his studio-awareness, so the entire band benefited. John Porter taught the band more about the production process than anyone to date had, taking Johnny under his wing almost as though he were a younger brother needing guidance. He recognised a stunning talent in Johnny, and felt almost beholden to help develop it. “He showed me how to make a record,” Johnny told Record Collector in 1992, and while Marr has clearly admitted that the album did not have the finish and the completeness that it might, The Smiths nevertheless arrived as a recording band under Porter’s guidance. Indeed a large part of the album was played on Porter’s 1954 Fender Telecaster, as well as on a Les Paul and Rickenbacker 12-string. After the rest of the band went home, John and Johnny would often spend the entire night in the studio, layering guitar parts and piecing together the various pieces of the sonic jigsaw. By morning they would stagger from the studio exhausted, but with finished tapes to hand. It was a lesson in how to manage one’s time and concentration in the studio that would remain with Johnny throughout his career.
As the tracks came together, while working at Eden Studios in Chiswick, Porter decided to bring in one of his contacts to add a little extra colour to some of the songs. Paul Carrack knew John Porter through the mid-Seventies band Kokomo, and received the call from The Smiths’ producer out of the blue, as often happened to the increasingly in-demand ex-Ace and Squeeze player. “I used to do quite a bit of stuff in Chiswick when anyone needed any keyboards doing,” remembers Paul. Bands would be in urgent need of some piano or organ work, and Carrack would get the call. “John [Porter] said he was producing these guys, and that they had this real sort of cult following,” Carrack recalls. “And he said that it was a bit unusual.” Carrack remembers receiving a cassette from Porter, containing the Troy Tate tracks – “some sort of demos or tracks on cassette to get accustomed to,” as he describes them. Having listened over a few times, Carrack “just went up one evening and overdubbed,” appearing on three of the albums’ songs – ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’, ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ and ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’. “They’d recorded the tracks and just said ‘feel free,’” remembers Paul. “I just instinctively played what happened, and I doubt if it was more than one or two takes per song.” The band relaxed around the studio as Carrack added what he describes as “the icing – a little bit of colour.” Morrissey was, famously, impressed with Carrack’s trademark swirling Hammond organ sound on ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’, noting with typical dry wit that it sounded like ‘Reginald Dixon on acid,’ which Carrack took as “a huge compliment! I remember him just sort of huddled in the corner, quite shy,” says Paul.
Carrack remembers Johnny as being open and friendly throughout the sessions – as indeed were the whole band: “I don’t remember it being arduous… they were really nice.” Johnny in particular struck Paul as a little bit different to the usual punky guitarist with whom he often found himself working. “I thought Johnny was a nice guy – he talked about his parents, who were music lovers,” Carrack remembers, being impressed when Johnny engaged him in a conversation about the legendary country artist Jim Reeves. “We often used to find that, when you’re with the younger bands, they would be very ‘anti-’ anything like that. Going back twenty years, we were old farts then, and to be talking to this young guy about things like Jim Reeves… I thought, well – they must have something.”
This intriguing band made a big impression on this seasoned session player. “I do remember thinking it was unusual. It definitely had a very strange vibe about it – that sounds wrong – a very strong atmosphere.” More than twenty years later, with an astounding list of credits to his name that includes working with every major artist on the planet, and enjoying a burgeoning and ever-developing solo career, Paul is reminded of his few hours’ work with The Smiths on an almost daily basis. “I’ve got a bit of a CV, I suppose,” he laughs now. “And [after] two or three hours with them, it’s amazing how many people will jump on that and say, ‘You played with The Smiths!!’”
Legends were certainly being born in the autumn of 1983. Lennon and McCartney. Jagger and Richards. Leiber and Stoller. Bacharach and David. Morrissey and Marr had arrived.
A mighty night for Johnny, and indeed for the entire band, came on November 24, as The Smiths made their first historic appearance on Top Of The Pops, still [just] the UK’s premier pop show. While for many acts TOTP was a huge stepping stone to the big time, The Smiths were becoming successful despite the media interest in them rather than as a result of it. But every so often an act appears on Top Of The Pops that changes the world. Bowie’s appearance singing ‘Starman’ in July 1972 was one such instance. The Smiths’ first appearance was another. “I didn’t take [contemporary pop music] at all seriously until I saw Johnny Marr,” Noel Gallagher said of the show. “When The Smiths came on Top Of The Pops, that was it for me. I wanted to be Johnny Marr.” The Smiths records and sessions were being played on the radio because people wanted to hear them, rather than the other way round, but the band were understandably excited, as they took the stage following gender-bender extraordinaire Marilyn. Johnny was nervous, and so intent on not making a fool of himself that his tactic of self-preservation was to root his feet firmly to the floor and to stay put. Rocking while Morrissey’s flowers and a stage-full of balloons lent a festive exuberance to the proceedings, Johnny was very visible on Top Of The Pops, and it was not only Noel Gallagher who was watching – a generation of indie guitarists were inspired too.
Immediately after Top Of The Pops – on the same night – the band were met outside The Hacienda by Mike Pickering. Two thousand punters had managed to get in, while a thousand more thronged along Whitworth Street outside. To a fanatical audience the band played a fourteen-song set that concluded with a rousing ‘Hand In Glove’. What Johnny called “three years of A Hard Day’s Night,” had begun.
As Christmas approached, the band took off for their first visit to the USA, booked to make their first appearance at The Danceteria, New York’s leading dance club, on New Year’s Eve. It should have been the start of a significant assault on America’s eastern seaboard. While Morrissey had family in America and had visited them a number of times in his teenage years, for the rest of the band it was their first time on an aeroplane. To be heading out west to the Big Apple was as exciting as it got – “having our dreams come true,” as Johnny described it. In fact it was the start of a careering course for The Smiths and for Johnny in particular. While the band appeared to gather speed along some pre-determined racetrack to success, in fact it was more as though they were beginning to lose control of the steering. The Smiths suddenly – and not for the first time – found themselves without a manager on the very day that they left for New York. So close to the band’s departure that several members of the party were surprised not to find him at the airport, Joe Moss decided to hang up his managerial hat and let go his connection with the band he had been so instrumental in getting going.
Over the years there has been much speculation about why Joe made this decision. Sound man Grant Showbiz, speaking to Q magazine many years later, felt that Moss got out to avoid having to deal with the pressures of the increasing numbers of people who wanted a slice of the band. Showbiz personally believes that that the fact that he was not ‘music biz’ didn’t help him. Rough Trade, he believes, would have preferred their own management. They definitely “had a sniff that they’d got ‘the big one.’” If that was the case, it was perhaps understandable that the company putting in so much money into The Smiths – regardless of whether the sums were modest compared to a major label – would have preferred the man at the business helm to be someone they were more familiar with.
“What actually happened I don’t know,” says Grant – reinforcing the air of mystery that still surrounds the matter. “I’ve always imagined it was that way inclined. We went to America for the first time and Joe wasn’t with us.” Others have speculated that Morrissey and Moss did not see eye to eye, or that Johnny’s friendship with Joe got in the way of the creative relationship between the two writers. To whatever degree any of the above unproven rumour is true, it only influenced Joe’s actual decision to leave, which was actually for a completely different reason. Joe had earlier separated from his first wife, and had young children both from that relationship and his new partner, so family priorities were naturally high on his agenda. Moss himself was forty years old, and dealing with a bunch of teenagers in the fastest-moving, most destructive industry on the planet. Exciting it might have been to witness the birth of The Smiths, but the birth of a daughter took precedence. Joe Moss left the band because – whatever the pressures that were or were or not upon him – his family was more important to him than The Smiths.
One thing is sure: the band missed his guidance. “They were so lucky to have that year or so with Joe,” Grant remembers again. “That really defined what they did afterwards. It was all done ‘Joe-less’ after that.”
Landing in the USA without Moss, Johnny and the band were met in New York by a limousine organised by the woman who had booked them for The Danceteria, Ruth Polski. Polski specialised in coming over to the UK, identifying new and exciting bands, and being the first person in the USA to book them there. She had a good track record too –The Fall, New Order and – according to Grant Showbiz – Echo And The Bunnymen were amongst her conquests. Grant remembers Ruth as “a wonderful, wonderful woman.” Polski is remembered as an opportunist, “in the most delightful way,” says Grant. “Obviously we were very happy that an American promoter was all over us, and was being very lovely to us.”
Arriving in the States without a manager, Johnny and Morrissey did their best to keep their hands on the wheel. While they may not have had a manager – and the fact was not missed by Ms Polski – they had brought something with them; a virus. Within days Mike Joyce hit the deck with a major dose of chicken pox, and while publicist Scott Piering began to take on some of the managerial responsibilities it was – as it proved for much of the rest of the life of the band – Johnny and Morrissey who also tried to keep hold of the reins. The gig at the Danceteria went down very well, but because of Mike’s illness the remaining dates had to be cancelled. Disappointed in New York, Johnny and Morrissey’s response was to pen ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ in their hotel room, reflecting a low point for the band as a major opportunity to cement their profile in America was lost. Silver linings and all that…
* * *
Back in the UK in the early days of the New Year, Johnny settled into the upstairs rooms of Joe’s house, where he was still living, and Morrissey became the first Smith to move to a flat in London, in the elegant surroundings of Cadogan Square. While the pressures of taking care of the band continued to increase, issues in Johnny’s private life took a turn for the worse.
First of all, Marr’s relationship with Angie Brown had shuddered to (an albeit temporary) halt. Angie had not travelled to New York, and it was virtually the first time they had been apart during their already long relationship. The split lasted about two weeks. The effect on Johnny was dramatic. “That was the point when my heart went out to Johnny,” Grant Showbiz remembers. “[I thought]… if he’s lost Angie what’s he gonna do?”
Johnny’s other problem was Andy Rourke. Andy was developing a classic rock ’n’ roll habit, heroin, and in a gesture of support alongside Johnny’s friendship, Joe Moss offered Rourke his basement to live in while he tried to sort himself out. It was important both for him and his role within the band that Johnny and Joe were there to help. Several people close to The Smiths remained unaware of Rourke’s problems, and all around him felt that – especially with the anti-drug manifesto that the band had developed – his problems should remain (excusing the pun) under wraps.
* * *
While the juggernaut of publicity and notoriety continued to nudge them forward, the New Year of 1984 would prove to be the biggest yet for The Smiths. This was the year of Sade, the Nigerian-born sister of all things cool through the mid-Eighties. Britain sat back and chilled out to her ‘Your Love Is King’, wore sunglasses in the early hours of the morning, grooved to The Thompson Twins and waited for the Next Big Thing while Billy Ocean’s ‘Caribbean Queen’ gently rocked the elevators of the world. The singles charts were crying out for new blood – something iconoclastic, stylish, dashing and irresistible.
It was fitting then, that January saw the release of ‘What Difference Does It Make?’, backed with the gently finger-picked ‘Back To The Old House’, a song written with Angie in mind. The single did very well for the band, proving to be their second-highest chart placing when it stalled prematurely at number twelve. The band appeared on Top Of The Pops to promote it. The same show featured the first appearance on a UK stage by a young upstart singer and dancer from New York, who harboured a mighty talent and an even mightier ambition. The following night the twenty-five year old from Bay City, Michegan, appeared at The Hacienda. She earned fifty quid for her troubles, and – unable to gain access to her digs at Mike Pickering’s house – spent the cold January night on his front door step. By the same time next year, Madonna’s rise to the top of the pop ladder would be almost complete.
The Smiths were quite clearly in line to be ‘the next big thing,’ but they were pipped to the crown over the course of the year by a bunch of Scousers from down the M62. While Morrissey’s lyrics hinted at sexual uncertainty, and while Johnny, Andy and Mike were undoubtedly the best guitar and rhythm section going, it was Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s all-out sado-masochistic and highly produced pyrotechnics that actually stole the show.
While The Smiths’ production sound was fantastic – they were a dream waiting to come true in a hundred thousand bedsits – Frankie Goes To Hollywood had a sheen and gloss that made their material irresistible. While The Smiths were the next big singles band who were going to break internationally and be huge, in the course of the year the Frankies broke all records with their three number one hits ‘Relax’, ‘Two Tribes’ and ‘The Power Of Love’. Commercially at least, they did in twelve months what The Smiths failed to do in five years. The key was that The Smiths rallied against the increasing importance of the pop video in the age of MTV. Frankie Goes To Hollywood grasped the nettle of publicity firmly, and their videos were superb advertisements for their material. The first British act to hit the number one slot with their first three singles since Gerry and The Pacemakers, their success was secured with stunning promotion from Manchester journalist Paul Morley and, with ‘Two Tribes’, a video directed by Godley and Crème, formerly of 10cc. If Liverpool won three-nil against The Smiths, it was ironically with Manchester’s help.
Undeterred, Johnny and the band soldiered on, and 1984 was in many ways the year of The Smiths too. February saw the release of the eponymous debut, The Smiths. The band’s first album opens at stately pace. ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ is a graceful, haunting piece, introduced not by Marr’s guitar or Morrissey’s memorable croon, but with Mike Joyce’s metronomic snare and hi-hat. Lyrically, the song opens on a dialogue between writer, audience and band apparently already half-run. Although this was a brand new band with a brand new album, the listener is invited into a myth all ready to be unravelled. Johnny’s guitar plays courtly arpeggios around a cyclical central motif based upon traditional folk structures. While the lyric speaks of tale-telling, the folk tradition is extant in Johnny’s chord structure that mirrors the Scottish standard ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ You can easily sing the Scottish melody over Marr’s A, E, F-sharp minor, D routine, and Johnny imposes a melancholy into this traditionally rousing, major key format. Notably, Johnny adds a series of major seventh and sixth notes into the phrasing – accents which were to become a trademark of his playing. The central lyrical and thematic motif of the song measures the movement from major to minor perfectly. If the tone rather than the content recalled Joy Division, Marr has also linked the song’s development to James Taylor’s gentle acoustic sing-along ‘Handy Man’ – a far cry from the rented rooms in Whalley Range, the childhood victims of Ian Brady and the pretty girls making graves found elsewhere on the album.
‘Reel Around The Fountain’ is one of the greatest debut album openers in rock history. When the first complete rhyme of the song – ‘told/old’ – falls onto the first minor third it is a wonderful moment. The lyric’s theme of a childhood debased drops suddenly onto this most telling note, suggesting much about the music that was to come from Marr and The Smiths over the years to come. Paul Carrack’s gentle, enigmatic contribution underpins the guitar phrasing subtly and perfectly too. Traditional structures are enlivened by delicate touches of harmonic and melodic detail, as closely fused to the lyrical content as is possible. The Smiths’ sound was born.
The second track, ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’ runs at a nervy, bass-led punk pace, with Morrissey’s phrasing desperately trying to pull the pace of the song back, but instead – as the band hit the choruses – the track takes on a perfect beat as Johnny’s tumbling riffs quickly establish another trademark. ‘Miserable Lie’, despite its mournful opening, soon kicks into a savagery and energy that caught the flavour of the early live Smiths perfectly. On ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’, the song’s circuitous minor chord sequence is set firmly against Johnny’s jaunty, acoustic strumming on the half-notes and Rourke’s walking bass. The jangling electric picking is typical of what would become synonymous with Smiths’ music, the feel of the song would reappear later in songs such as ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’, but the dichotomy between the mournfulness of Morrissey’s vocal and the optimism of the electric guitar, between the jolly strumming and the minor key is perfect Smiths, the ability to maintain two or more concepts at one moment within the same song.
Similar phrasing is picked up early in the next track and reflected throughout the sinuous course of ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’, which Simon Goddard cleverly notes throws a nod to Patti Smith’s ‘Kimberly’. ‘Still Ill’ is one of Marr’s most effective riffs, ‘Paperback Writer’-like and as fresh as the day. One of the great things about Johnny’s work – especially on early songs like ‘Still Ill’ – is that, rather than simply defining an introduction, shatteringly good riffs run throughout, and define the entire song.
‘Hand In Glove’ and ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ sit together on the album as if the last ten years of pop music had been waiting for this moment alone – two pieces of such perfect pop, crafted and presented with a devastating confidence and bravado that belies the youthfulness of the band. Then ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’, with Johnny’s Burt Bacharach-like stabs and jazzy linking chords works perfectly to slow the album down before its big finish. ‘Suffer Little Children’ was dropped from the band’s live sets quite early in their career. The version immortalised as the closing track on The Smiths was one of the few songs on the album with which Marr was happy in retrospect, but outside the band the response to the song was phenomenal and routinely sensational. Rarely has a song snuck into the back end of a relatively unknown act’s debut album caused so much fuss: Morrissey was laughably virtually branded an associate of the Moors Murderers himself in the hysterical UK tabloids, as the crimes of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were raked over by newspapers happy to make headlines out of misrepresenting an artistic statement. For Smiths fans overseas, the track may have meant less, but for anyone growing up in the North West of England in the mid-Sixties, the story remained one of the most affecting of that decade.
While the press tried desperately to kick up a fuss, Morrissey retained a dignity in his own responses to the furore. To informed, intelligent listeners, the song was a desperately moving collection of images, literate and haunting, indeed infinitely less offensive than many of the books and articles already written on the subject. The entire piece is like a movie, plot unfolding, character developing, drama ensuing. Marr’s guitar modulates between A and D major seventh chords for much of the track – a fragile and graceful tone, the same structure as Erik Satie’s delicate piano piece Gymnopedie No 1. Johnny’s arpeggio’d chords recall a similar delicate and elegant tone. As Morrissey’s vocal becomes more and more haunting, Johnny’s sense of drama and mood drops quickly into a minor key as the voice of Brady’s accomplice takes the stage. The disarming laugh of Myra Hindley was provided by Morrissey’s friend Annalisa Jablonska.
The Smiths is like one of those grainy kitchen sink movies so beloved of Morrissey, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning on vinyl. Its tone is conversational, earthen, but its themes are elevated and troublesome. Musically it is articulate and sensitive but at the same time kick-arse rollicking good fun. It remains one of the best debut albums of all, and – if it wasn’t perfect – it was better than anything else around at the time by a long way.
The album’s cover ‘starred’ Warhol cohort Joe Dallesandro, and caused almost as much concern for some of the band members as it caused excitement with reviewers. Designed by Morrissey and Caryn Gough, the artwork set the standard for Smiths releases to come: a very careful selection of images that portrayed both the concept behind the band and some of the artistic influence and ethos behind the conception of the album itself. Here, of course, the cropping of the original still from Warhol’s movie Flesh masked some of the homo-eroticism of the image, but implied enough to encourage speculation regarding the band’s sexual stance.
Looking back on the album a couple of years later, Marr told Melody Maker that he was “not as madly keen on it” as he had been. He felt that the attack and ‘fire’ was missing from the record, and reflected the feeling of many of the fans that perhaps the later Hatful Of Hollow captured this early Smiths sound better. Morrissey was also said to be not entirely happy with the production, although he too recognised that it was better than anything else around. Although the album had now been recorded twice, with two different producers, bizarrely rumours circulated that there were moves afoot to re-do it again. Idealism was one thing however, and having reportedly cost Rough Trade £60,000 – a sizeable sum for an independent label – the chances of The Smiths’ debut album being re-recorded or re-mixed yet again were probably nil.
Johnny proudly called The Smiths music “rock from a housing estate”, and indeed they categorically made fundamental pop music. They spliced liberally from the music that influenced them, juiced it up with lashings of their own flavouring, and passed the unique result on to a new generation. The key trick was that they never allowed those influences to drown their own musical voice. In the same way, The Beatles had blended Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins influences with Motown and skiffle to come up with ‘Beatles’ music. CP Lee calls this process “pop lore” and likens it to the folk tradition of passing traditional songs and formats through the generations. The process applies equally to all pop formats, however, and not just traditional folk. “It just refers to popular formats or popular music, whether it’s folk music or pop music,” says Lee. “Or blues music. But you can see [how Marr] dips into and carries on a tradition, by amending it.” While those influences remain submerged within the musical phrasing, and the lyrical concerns, the music is nevertheless new. As much as Morrissey continued a tradition of Northern writers and performers from George Formby and Gracie Fields to Shelagh Delaney and Alan Bennett, so Johnny’s music had mixed up the glam of T. Rex with the finger-picking folk of Bert Jansch and Davey Graham, the raunch of the New York Dolls with the pristine production ethics of Sixties girl groups, yet the music of The Smiths was unassailably Smiths’ music, unique and new.
A tour to support the album took in Sheffield University, North Staffs Poly, Coventry and Loughborough, but came to a grinding halt when Morrissey developed throat problems. Gigs were cancelled in advance, but a series of TV and media appearances kept the Smiths flame alive. Speaking to NME, Johnny spoke of the differences between himself and Morrissey as personalities, and clearly flagged his happiness that Morrissey remained the spokesman for the band while he generally kept out of the public eye. A second appearance on Top Of The Pops promoted ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ – shown again later in the month as the single made its way up the charts. Then more TV, more radio, more magazines. With the tour back on track, the void left by the departed Joe Moss was finally filled after a fashion, albeit a somewhat confusing fashion.
Ruth Polski, late of the New York Danceteria gig, re-appeared on the scene in the UK claiming to be the band’s manager, and a disagreement with Scott Piering, who said he was in charge, ensued. “I don’t think she ever was ‘the manager’,” recalls Grant Showbiz “She was one of a number of people who may or may not have had a conversation at four in the morning, and woke up imagining she was the manager.” She wasn’t the first to do that – in the business as a whole – and, according to Grant “not the last.”
Ruth Polski returned to the USA, and was tragically killed in a car accident some time later. As far as The Smiths’ sound-man was concerned, she never caused any hassle. “She was just a kind of funloving creature,” he recalls. But issues of money and organisation continued to rear their ugly heads as the tour proceeded, while the pressures on Johnny and Morrissey increased. To whatever extent Polski and Scott Piering did argue, it was Piering who took the upper hand in the management issues at stake. Nobody really filled Joe Moss’s role like-for-like. “No-one ever said to me, ‘Joe’s gone – he’s looking after us,’ or ‘He’s gone – they’re looking after us,’” Grant told me. Rather, Piering was one of a whole group of people who, over time, contributed. “Everyone at that point – they were just going ‘Fucking hell – this band is going to be massive,” says Showbiz.
Grant Showbiz remembers the late Scott Piering fondly, and knows that his management of the band was always well-intentioned. “Close up he could see the disarray because he was travelling with us,” Grant notes today. “He thought ‘[These people have] had a go. Why don’t I step in and see what happens?’” What happened of course was that the Smiths continued to be too hot to handle. “It was great,” says Grant, “watching Scott trying to be a bit more corporate and a bit more organised.” But corporate and organised was not what The Smiths were about.
The band charged through all corners of the UK before coming to earth in London in mid-March. At the Hammersmith Palais, Sandie Shaw became the only other singer to front The Smiths besides Morrissey, previewing her own version of ‘Hand In Glove.’
Shaw’s version of the song was recorded at Matrix studios in London, in February 1984. The band included ‘Jeane’ and ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’ in the same sessions. Although the single only scraped into the Top Thirty on its spring release, Sandie was of course no stranger to the higher reaches of the UK charts. Over the course of the Sixties, she established herself as both the coolest woman in British pop and the first of the UK’s occasional winners of the Eurovision song contest, in an era when participation in that event was not seen to be quite as naff as it is today. Sandie’s high cheekbones and long, dark fringe made her as much a visual icon of the time as a musical one, and her trademark barefooted TV appearances guaranteed her column inches in the press too. Her chart debut, ‘(There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me’ was an iconic snapshot of 1964 power pop; her stylish follow-up ‘Girl Don’t Come’ was exactly the kind of melancholic-yet-breezy tune to appeal to both Morrissey and Marr. By 1984 Sandie was a long way away from being a chart regular, but while it may have been fifteen years since her last lowly chart placing, she was only thirty seven – hardly a pop star dragged from her pensionable years! She was the perfect partner for Morrissey and Marr.
By now, Johnny and the rest of the band had joined Morrissey living in London, with Marr a resident of Earl’s Court. Before recording with The Smiths, Shaw had been badgered over several months by Johnny and Morrissey, and it was a novel experience for Johnny, Andy and Mike to have a girl singer up front. Simon Goddard recounts the frequent visits to the local veggie restaurant enlivening what was an enjoyable set amidst the turmoil of the current tour. While the live schedule floundered on, the three instrumental Smiths backed Sandie on an entertaining Top Of The Pops appearance during which Johnny, Andy and Mike – in homage to Sandie’s Sixties predilection for shoelessness – performed barefoot while Sandie herself delivered Morrissey’s lyric whilst rolling, impassioned, across the studio floor. It was a memorable appearance for Smiths fans.
The tour had taken in various dates in Europe – several concerts were cancelled – and the tour manager had parted company with the band, increasing the sense of disarray around the entire operation. The role was taken over by Stuart James, before the release in April of ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ offered some respite and continued the band’s chart onslaught, reaching (unbelievably) their highest chart placing at Number 10. Written, as noted, immediately after the New York debacle, the track had been recorded with John Porter at Island Studios in London in February. While opinions of the song among band members have varied over the years, ‘Heaven Knows…’ remains one of the best loved songs in the Smiths’ catalogue, combining both Johnny’s sophisticated, articulate guitar and some of Morrissey’s funniest and most heart-wrenching lyrics, perhaps better than any other early single. Another two appearances on Top Of The Pops saw, in the latter of the two, Johnny wearing some rather splendid bling around his neck, while Morrissey paraded handsomely with a large branch hanging from his back pocket. Stylish and funny and miserable and cool were The Smiths in 1984.
TV shows and gigs in Europe were resumed for a few days, followed by a similar handful of dates in Ireland, before returning to the heady heights of Carlisle, Glasgow and Scotland. June saw the band play at Glastonbury. As a sideline for Smiths watchers, there was the release of one of Johnny’s first projects outside The Smiths, the Quando Quango single ‘Atom Rock.’ Quando Quango was an Anglo-Dutch electro dance set-up, formed in Rotterdam in 1980. By 1982 they had moved to Manchester, combining synths and saxophone to forge electro dance tracks way ahead of their time. Signed to Factory, Quando Quango included Mike Pickering alongside the bass of Barry Johnson, late of chart successes Sweet Sensation (and later of Aswad), A Certain Ratio’s Simon Topping, and an ever-changing list of contributors. They were produced by the extra-curricular Bernard Sumner of New Order, and it was via Quando Quango that Johnny first got to know Sumner, with whom, of course, he would come to be inextricably linked for a decade. The band had had significant success in the USA already – a market far more ready for their sound – with their single ‘Love Tempo.’ By the time Johnny was involved, playing guitar on both tracks from their 1984 single, his reputation as a Smith was established and the connection turned a few heads. The King Of The Indie Guitar liking dance music – that wasn’t on.
Johnny has spoken entertainingly of how he fell in love with dance music at the same time as he learned to be a red-hot guitar player. Back in the day, Johnny would hang out in his bedroom with his guitar-playing mates, “skinning up and being serious,” as he described it to Guitar Magazine. “My sister would be in the next bedroom listening to dance music,” Johnny continued. “Getting ready to go out with her friends. And they just sounded like they were having a better time… They’d say to me ‘What are you listening to this miserable crap for?’” At that point Johnny turned to Chic, The Fatback Band and War, and fell in love with dance music for life.
Johnny also joined in with future bedsit king and queen Everything But The Girl on their single ‘Native Land’, a pairing more likely to be approved of by Smiths fans. Rather than adding Smiths-style guitar crash to the record however, Johnny actually appeared on harmonica – a role that he would adopt on several collaborations over the years to come. Although he did not appear on the follow-up album Love Not Money, it was noted in several circles just how much influence The Smiths had on that collection of songs.
The appearance at Glastonbury was followed by a much-needed break. Grant Showbiz remembers the hectic schedule, and notes that – especially without Moss’s input – the band flew by the seat of their pants much of the time. At Jam Studios in London, The Smiths reconvened for the taping of their next single, ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, again with John Porter twiddling the knobs. ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’, ‘Nowhere Fast’ (held for the release of the next album) and ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ were composed one after the other very quickly in Johnny’s Earl’s Court apartment, the former a perfect example of a song almost spilling out of Marr despite himself. In the creative meltdown after finishing ‘William…’ came ‘How Soon Is Now?’, almost as an afterthought. “Because you are relaxed,” explained Johnny to Martin Roach, “you carry on noodling, and that way you write another good track immediately afterwards.” He described ‘Please Please Please…’ as a “Del Shannon song. After about a minute and a half of writing it,” Johnny recalls, “[it] had a Del Shannon feel, so I continued to write that with my mother in mind, because she listened to so much of [that music].”
Johnny was clearly on a creative roll in the spring and summer of 1984, and could have expected the success of ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ to have been followed by even higher chart placings. Despite the ongoing confusion surrounding the band’s affairs, the quality of his writing – and Morrissey’s – was undiminished. But ‘William…’ only reached number seventeen in the UK singles chart, a crushing disappointment to be followed by an extended period without a major chart hit. The single illustrates the increasing complexity of Johnny’s work with Porter, as guitars were overdubbed one after another. It is one of The Smiths’ most exuberant tracks, played at a breakneck speed that even Johnny himself later marvelled at. The capo on the fingerboard allowed Johnny to take the dazzling chord progressions out of the standard fingering and to really kick out. It is a wonderful record that should have been a top five hit.