Songs That Saved Your Life - The Art of The Smiths 1982-87 (revised edition) E-Book

Simon Goddard

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 530

Beschreibung

Reveals the stories behind every track (including unreleased out-takes), catalogues all the group's UK television, radio and concert appearances and features interviews with original band members, producers and associates. Formed in 1982, The Smiths' brief but brilliant career lasted just five years - but the music they left behind distinguished them as one of the greatest British guitar groups of all time. 'Songs That Saved Your Life - The Art of The Smiths 1982-87' reveals the stories behind every track (including unreleased out-takes), catalogues all the group's UK television, radio and concert appearances and features interviews with original band members, producers and associates.

Leseprobe

SONGS THAT SAVED YOUR LIFE

THE ART OF THE SMITHS 1982-87

SIMON GODDARD

TITANBOOKS

SONGS THAT SAVED YOUR LIFE

Print ISBN: 9781781162583

Ebook ISBN: 9781781162590

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark St.

London

SE1 0UP

First published by Titan February 2013

© Simon Goddard 2002, 2004, 2013

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Names, characters, places and incidents featured in this publication are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PROLOGUE: ‘IT’S A MISERABLE LIFE’

THE ART OF THE SMITHS 1982-87

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

EPILOGUE: ‘A LESS MISERABLE LIFE’

APPENDICES

I.    THE SMITHS ON RECORD

II.    THE SMITHS AND THEIR SONGS IN CONCERT

III.    THE SMITHS ON BBC RADIO

IV.    THE SMITHS ON UK TELEVISION

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

THANKS

SONG INDEX

FOREWORD

‘For the most part products are disposable, but just for that extra one song that changes your direction in life, the importance of popular music just cannot be stressed enough. Music is the most important thing in the world.’

MORRISSEY

You hold in your hand a book which, in skeletally crude form, was first published in 2002 under the title The Smiths — Songs That Saved Your Life. That apologetic prefix was its original publisher’s decision, not my own. The fact that it is now, as I’d always intended, a work about the art of The Smiths called simply Songs That Saved Your Life is as symbolic an indication I can offer that this is as close to the book I first wished it to be.

Returning to it a decade later, I was inevitably rattled by the sensation Nabokov expressed in reviewing an earlier novel and feeling ‘nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprenticeship of [my] youth’. Smiths fans and critics have said some incredibly kind things about Songs That Saved Your Life but, authors ever their own harshest judges, I saw only the flaws: many, textually, my own fault; others, visually, most definitely not. So between such self-flagellation, the ache of professional vanity and the madman’s twitch of perfectionism, I have done my best to sweep away the detritus, make clear what was once opaque and varnish that which needed recoating whilst resisting the temptation to strangle the sincere spirit of the original as I first presented it.

And ‘sincere’ is definitely the word. This book was written by an unapologetic Smiths apostle, first and foremost, who wanted to voice their passion for the group they’d loved since their teens; a group they felt had been long misunderstood, trivialised and ignored by the smelly pop-loathing, chin-stroking keepers of the so-called ‘pantheon’. I chose to do that not by telling the story of the band, in all its intrigue, mystery and skeleton-rattling secrecy, but the story of their songs in all their inarguable brilliance, magic and beauty. And just to drive that point home as hard as I could upon the cold deaf ears of artless philistines and joyless snobs I used the format of a critically sacrosanct book about The Beatles — a fact which annoyed at least one early reviewer. Mission accomplished.

Many years later, I would write another related book on the subject, Mozipedia — The Encyclopedia Of Morrissey And The Smiths, a task which forced me to again confront and describe the group’s repertoire anew. In doing so, being older and only a little wiser, I believe I expressed myself more poetically and with an eye twinkling ever brighter than the younger histrionic martyr trembling in the parenthesis of the original edition of Songs That Saved Your Life. But I digress. As nothing more nor less than an earnest little book about the greatest pop group that ever lived, it gives me great pleasure to resole my first footing in the hope of granting it a new, improved lease of life.

To be specific: the main song/studio chronology is now uninterrupted with the relevant live, radio and TV appearance details excised and compiled into respective appendices; fiddly footnotes have been dispensed with and integrated into the text where relevant; so too the previous pointless song-numbering system; and both the prologue and epilogue have been radically refashioned in keeping with my absolute belief that the discussion of any great work of art should never be dulled by the stale repetition of accepted historical cliché.

There is, I confess, a sliver of my psyche that could write a different version of this book every year for the rest of my life, forever finding something new (and possibly increasingly abstract) to say about The Smiths and their art. But caution reminds me of the great critic Ernest Newman and his life-consuming love of Richard Wagner. On his deathbed, aged 90, Newman asked to hear records of Wagner’s opera Parsifal. With his last breaths, he apparently croaked, ‘I must get well, you know — some new ideas about Parsifal have just occurred to me.’ Replace Parsifal with The Queen Is Dead and my own potential fate is all too terrifyingly obvious.

I started writing Songs That Saved Your Life as I approached the age of 30. I conclude this the day before I turn 40: as good a time as any to pack up my inkwell and shuffle out of Smithdom for pastures new. But wherever that is, a part of me shall always remain there. For The Smiths will always be the band of my life, and theirs the songs that saved it.

Simon Goddard

20 December 2011

PROLOGUE

‘It’s A Miserable Life’

A personal phantasmagoria of the beginning of The Smiths

‘When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’

OSCAR WILDE

How to start the story of The Smiths? With ‘Once upon a time’? With ‘In the beginning’? Or with

‘Knock, knock.’

‘Who’s There?’

‘Johnny.’

‘Johnny who?’

‘Johnny who’s about to change your life, my life and the history of pop music.’

This is the story of The Smiths as has been told and retold. A fairy tale. A holy gospel. And a knock, knock joke.

The year is 1982. The time, around one o’clock on an early summer’s afternoon. The place is Manchester. The door is that of 384 Kings Road in Stretford. The one doing the knocking is Johnny Marr. On the other side of the door is Steven Morrissey. The two have never properly met but in another few seconds the door will open and the two cells of The Smiths will irreversibly fuse as one and multiply to become the most beautiful organism in the history of popular music.

Think of it as the creationist myth of The Smiths as opposed to the evolutionary reality. That, in truth, The Smiths existed long before Johnny Marr knocked on Morrissey’s door, born as destitute emotions many years previous. In the late night echo of a typewriter clicking in a Stretford semi bedroom. In staring at sodium light through the condensation on a window pane as Iggy sings his blues. In the dread that consumes the spirit as it nears the school gates. In the distant slamming of doors and raised voices. In the skipping of a heartbeat to the crackle of ‘But, oh thank God, at last and finally!’ In the endless waiting for the postman. In the first blisters from a fretboard. In letters of rejection and playground ridicule. In winter nights forever sprinting home from the hooligan’s grasp. In second-hand paperbacks and postage stamps. In record racks and clothes rails. In grey skies and wet cobblestones. In all human existence exemplified by three minutes of sound on seven inches of plastic. In that long walk home in the rain once too often. These were the latent molecules of Smithdom already embedded in Morrissey and Marr, attracting some, repelling others, yet to find their perfect chemical balance until the two were united.

But history prefers the neatness of a fairy tale. So, for sake of dramatic opening, let us return to the doorstep of 384 Kings Road in the early summer of 1982. Like all classic fairy tales, this one needs to be simple. It may have been that Goldilocks broke into a home belonging to five bears. Perhaps Snow White preferred the company of 11 dwarfs. But neither truth nor surplus characters should get in the way of a good story. Look again at Marr, stood outside number 384. He isn’t alone. Beside him is another local guitar player, Steven Pomfret. It’s Pomfret who has brought Marr to this spot after he asked to be introduced to Morrissey. But Pomfret complicates our script, a bothersome rock’n’roll gooseberry cluttering the romance of what’s to follow. So let’s erase him. Let us wave Pomfret farewell to The Smiths’ cutting room floor. Snip.

Johnny Marr is now alone again outside 384 Kings Road. He is about to knock. The door is about to open. And it could be the case that the door is opened by Morrissey’s older sister, Jacqueline. This does our story no favours either. Too many characters, too many different voices. So let’s erase her as well. Another snip, and we’re left with just Johnny Marr, outside, and Morrissey, inside. All that separates them is a knock on a door. Marr raises a hand. We watch in slow motion as his knuckles clench, gliding towards the painted wood, a split second from impact...

The scene freezes. Just as it did for George Bailey gesturing the size of his dream suitcase in It’s A Wonderful Life. And we find that we, too, are watching such a film. A film about The Smiths which can only be called It’s A Miserable Life. And the same guardian angels that guided George Bailey — Joseph, the weary and wise, and second-class Clarence Oddbody, with ‘the IQ of a rabbit’ and ‘the faith of a child’ — are now manoeuvring the destinies of Morrissey and Johnny Marr. We do not see them. We hear only their voices.

CLARENCE: ‘What’d you stop it for?’

JOSEPH: ‘I want you to take a good look at that face.’

So let us take a good look at that face. That thin, eager face beaming out beneath a quiff balancing atop his forehead like a Brylcreem volute. As the angels discuss, this is 18 year-old Johnny Marr of Wythenshawe. Or John Martin Maher as he was born to Irish parents in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester on 31st October 1963. Before Wythenshawe, he spent his early childhood in Ardwick where he was given his first toy guitar aged two and a half, later sticking bottle tops on it so it looked like a proper electric version. He bought his first record at the age of eight: ‘Jeepster’ by T. Rex. He will remember this as a life-changing moment, the first of many: same as the day he bought Iggy & The Stooges’ Raw Power; and the day he bought Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers’ L.A.M.F; and the day he read a Melody Maker interview with ex-New York Dolls singer David Johansen called ‘The Last Doll Comes In From The Cold’. All of these he’ll call ‘massively important.’ (Many years later, Joseph adds, he will change his spelling from Maher to Marr, partly to avoid being mistaken for his namesake drummer in local punk heroes Buzzcocks.)

The frozen face of Johnny Marr is suddenly engulfed by mist, vanishing from sight as Joseph beckons Clarence deeper into time’s abyss. The haze gradually dissolves upon the music room of a Manchester secondary school. This is St Augustine’s Grammar in Wythenshawe. The year is 1976. Two teenage boys perch on desks opposite one another strumming guitars. The small dark haired kid Clarence immediately recognises as a younger Johnny Marr.

CLARENCE: ‘Who’s the other boy?’

JOSEPH: ‘Oh, you’re going to be seeing a lot more of him.’

This is Andrew Michael Rourke, also of Irish descent, born in Manchester on 17th January 1964. He is wearing a button badge of Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night album, the catalyst for his and Marr’s first conversation when Rourke was recently transferred from ‘the bad lads’ class’ in an effort to improve his behaviour. Rourke has been playing guitar since he was seven and has already taught Marr a few favourite tricks. But Marr is ‘dead keen’, a quick learner with the Midas touch who progresses to outplay Rourke within weeks. When they form their first band, The Paris Valentinos, Rourke magnanimously switches to bass guitar instead. He remains on bass for their next band, White Dice, who are invited to London to record a demo for F-Beat, a new label co-founded by Elvis Costello manager Jake Riviera.

CLARENCE: ‘Did they get a deal?’

JOSEPH: ‘No. They didn’t. White Dice broke up.’

CLARENCE: ‘Aw! That’s sad.’

JOSEPH: ‘That’s fate. Now, pay attention...’

As we see, Marr and Rourke next try their luck as part of a post-punk instrumental trio called Freak Party with drummer Simon Wolstencroft. They rehearse three nights a week at a studio in Ancoats called Decibel. In 1981 Decibel’s trainee engineer, Dale Hibbert, helps them record their only demo, the Marr original ‘Crak Therapy’. But Freak Party struggle to find a vocalist. The ever restless, ever hungry Marr decides to pull the plug. Rourke is saddened but not surprised.

JOSEPH: ‘And that is the last we see of Andy Rourke. For the time being.’

The celestial vapours dissolve again. It is now 1982 and Marr is idling behind the counter of an alternative clothes shop in central Manchester. The shop is called X Clothes. He is listening to a compilation tape of songs recorded at his hairdresser/DJ friend Andrew Berry’s house on Palatine Road: Marr’s regular city crash pad between his new digs in Bowdon as the attic lodger of local journalist and television producer Shelley Rohde. Marr is too lost in his spinning ferric symphony — the funky disco of J Walter Negro & The Loose Jointz, early hip hop pioneer Lovebug Starski and the scratchy guitars of LA’s The Gun Club and Edinburgh’s Josef K — to notice a spiky haired punk rummaging through the nearby rail of fluffy mohair jumpers.

CLARENCE: ‘The punk kid. Is he important?’

JOSEPH: ‘He will be.’

This is Michael Joyce, also born to Irish parents in Manchester on 1st June 1963. He learned to play drums tapping on the back of his mum’s settee listening to his favourite group, Buzzcocks. Joyce joined his first group, The Hoax, when he was 15. He is currently drummer with Victim, a Belfast punk band who’ve just relocated to Manchester after being offered a deal with a local label. Joyce deliberates over a couple of jumpers but saunters out of X Clothes empty handed without saying a word to Marr.

CLARENCE: ‘We’re just going to let him leave like that?’

JOSEPH: ‘It’s not his time yet. That’s not why we’re here.’

A girl pops her head in the shop doorway. ‘He’s next door,’ she tells Marr. His reverie is broken, eyes widening as a gypsyish grin envelops his face. He yells something about a lunch break to the back of the shop and scarpers. Next door is another fashion outlet, Crazy Face. The walls, lined with vintage Rolling Stones photographs rescued from a Paris flea market, vibrate to the croak and twang of John Lee Hooker. It’s for such sights and sounds that Marr has fallen in love with Crazy Face. For weeks he’s been harassing the staff to meet its owner, seldom there as he spends the majority of his time in the shop’s main branch and wholesale warehouse across town on Portland Street. But today, as Marr has been told, he’s in. Marr is directed behind the counter and up a staircase where he sees a kindly man in his mid 30s staring back at him. He outstretches a hand. ‘Hi,’ he says, a glint in his eye. ‘I’m Johnny Marr. I’m a frustrated musician.’ The Crazy Face owner smiles back at him. Freeze frame on Joe Moss.

Moss becomes Marr’s mentor, best friend and father figure combined. Soon Marr and his girlfriend, Angie, are spending evenings round Moss’ home, smoking weed, listening to records and watching videos. Moss is transfixed by Marr’s talent as a guitarist, the way he translates Motown hits on six strings, picking the different vocal and background melodies simultaneously. All Marr talks about is forming a band. Finding a drummer and bassist won’t be a problem for him. It’s the frontman which bothers him. He needs to be as originally gifted a singer and lyricist as Marr is a composer and guitar player. He needs to be as serious about pop music as a life option. And he needs to look good.

One evening in the spring of 1982, Moss plays Marr a video of a recent documentary in ITV’s The South Bank Show series. The subject is rock’n’roll songwriting team Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, famed for the likes of Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and Ben E. King’s ‘Stand By Me’. Marr watches as Leiber describes how as a teenager obsessed with blues and jazz he was told about another boy, Stoller, who played the same type of music on piano. Leiber decided to find where Stoller lived, knock on his door unannounced and suggest they start writing songs together. This provokes a violent burst of electricity in Marr’s cerebral cortex from which his brain will never recover.

‘Find the guy,’ he thinks, ‘knock on his door. Tell him we’re going to write songs together. Find the guy. Knock on his door. Tell him we’re going to write songs together. Find the guy. Knock on his door. Tell him we’re going to write songs together. Find the guy...’

CLARENCE: ‘So how does he find the guy?’

JOSEPH: ‘He already has. He just doesn’t realise it. Come with me.’

We leave Marr catatonic with destiny on Moss’s sofa. A puff of smoke, the zing of a harp, and we’re four years earlier in Manchester’s Apollo Theatre. The date is 31st August 1978. Patti Smith is due on stage any second. In the crowd, the 14 year-old Marr is stood with his older Wythenshawe friends, 17 year-old guitarist Billy Duffy and Howard Bates, bass player in local punk band Slaughter And The Dogs. They are joined by another boy, a lanky 19 year-old from Stretford called Steven Morrissey. He and Marr say ‘hello’ but nothing more. Duffy has already been rehearsing in bands with Morrissey and tells the impressionable Marr what a great lyricist this Stretford stranger is. The name of Steven Morrissey will linger at the back of Marr’s head for the next three and a half years, occasionally bubbling to the surface whenever conversation turns to the New York Dolls; Marr loves the Dolls but seemingly not as much as Morrissey, the most famous Dolls apostle in Manchester who has written a book about them.

‘...knock on his door. Tell him we’re going to write songs together.’

And so we’re back in Moss’ living room in 1982. Johnny Marr remembers the name of Steven Morrissey. New York Dolls guru. Great lyricist. By all accounts, a bit of an oddball.

‘Steven Morrissey... Steven Morrissey... Steven Morrissey...’

He’s the one.

In the spring of 1982 Duffy is no longer around to introduce Marr to Morrissey. So he asks another Wythenshawe guitarist and Dolls fan, Steven Pomfret, who briefly rehearsed with Duffy and Morrissey years earlier. Pomfret, or ‘Pommy’ as Marr knows him, still remembers Morrissey’s address. Marr asks if he wouldn’t mind taking him there. Pommy agrees. And so, about one o’clock on an early summer’s afternoon, Marr and Pomfret arrive on the doorstep of 384 Kings Road in Stretford.

CLARENCE: ‘I thought we’d got rid of him?’

JOSEPH: ‘Sorry. My mistake.’

Pomfret is zapped from existence in the hurl of a lightning bolt.

Johnny Marr, alone, knocks on the door. The unhurried patter of feet down a staircase. The click of a latch. The creak of a hinge. The door swings open. A curious face peers out into the daylight, an untidy dark quiff sloping atop its owner’s head like a crumbling garret. Below is a forehead as if chiselled in granite, eyebrows like an intellectual infantry standing guard above the deadliest of blue lasers lying dormant in its shadows. Lips by Aubrey Beardsley, pallor by L.S. Lowry, and all of this anchored in a jutting jawbone wieldy enough to kill a thousand philistines, in words if not necessarily actions. There is no need for us to freeze frame such a visage: its enigmatic tapestry itself commands time take stock.

CLARENCE: ‘Now that’s a face!’

JOSEPH: ‘It’s quite something isn’t it?’

CLARENCE: ‘Is he sick?’

JOSEPH: ‘No, worse. Discouraged.’

Heaven and Earth, meet 21 year-old Steven Patrick Morrissey, born to Irish parents in Davyhulme, Manchester on 22nd May 1959; born to suffer; born to write; born to sing. At the age of six he bought his first record: ‘Come And Stay With Me’ by Marianne Faithfull. He had no idea what she was singing but still lost himself in its melodic chasm. Once cast adrift in black grooves and crackling speakers there was no hope for the boy. His mother threw him rubber rings in the voices of Timi Yuro and Sandie Shaw. He would dream of one day becoming Bobby Hatfield of The Righteous Brothers. He was, as he will later recall, the kind of child who bounded out of bed on a Saturday, leapfrogged down to the local record shop, stayed there inhaling the air for hours, smelling all the vinyl and caressing the sleeves before leaving about midday to return to his bed. ‘A completely successful day.’

Too briefly young, foolish and happy, his pop trance was shattered at the age of 11 by a television documentary on the workings of an abattoir; blood, agony, murder and the stark cruelty of human existence at its most indefensible. The boy never recovered. Music did its best to ease the infinite grief, from T. Rex (his first concert, aged 13), David Bowie and the band who ‘completely destroyed and changed my life’, the New York Dolls whose UK fan club he would organise with nothing more than blind love and an insatiable appetite for licking envelopes. As with the words of Wilde on his bookshelf and the face of James Dean squinting upon the bedroom wall, the Dolls became ballast to the destabilising sadness within; there were long days and longer teenage nights when even they weren’t enough. The scars of secondary school’s emotional sodomy, Catholic hypocrisy and the eventual break-up of his parents’ marriage sink too deep.

The curtain of fog closes, opening again inside Manchester’s New Ritz. The date is 8th May 1978. In a fortnight, Morrissey will turn 19. Tonight he is stood on the Ritz stage as singer with ‘The Nose Bleeds’. This is his second, and last, performance with the band, bottom of the bill below Jilted John and headliners Magazine. Amidst the inattentive audience is a 21 year-old journalist called Paul Morley, hence to write Morrissey’s first review in the NME: ‘a minor local legend’ and ‘A Front Man With Charisma’, albeit misattributed to one ‘Steve Morrisson’.

Standing on stage to Morrissey’s left is guitarist Billy Duffy. He and Morrissey have been rehearsing under various names for the last year. It is Duffy who Morrissey entrusts to his first lyrics: ‘I Get Nervous’, ‘Peppermint Heaven’, ‘The Living Jukebox’ and ‘(I Think) I’m Ready For The Electric Chair’. When ‘The Nose Bleeds’ fizzle out, Duffy will try, unsuccessfully, to coax Morrissey to join him in the debris of Wythenshawe punks Slaughter And The Dogs. Duffy sticks with the Slaughter boys and moves to London. Morrissey returns to his bedroom in 384 Kings Road Stretford and closes the door.

Another billow of mist curls and disperses. The scene is now a graveyard, the sky as sombre and grey as the tombstones glistening with Manchester drizzle. Two distant trenchcoated figures wander into focus, a man and a woman. His is the unmistakable silhouette of Morrissey, now aged 20. Hers is a face just as intuitive, a glance just as penetrating. They could almost be twins. She is Linder Sterling.

CLARENCE: ‘Oh. Are they, erm, well...?’

JOSEPH: ‘Not exactly. But in some ways, much more than.’

Artist, collagist and singer with Ludus, Linder’s influence upon Morrissey is profound. He will copy her drawing style on letters to pen friends written on photocopies of her iconic iron-headed-nude collage for Buzzcocks’ 1977 single ‘Orgasm Addict’. Morrissey and Linder share books, fears, laughter, sorrow and, briefly, a room in Whalley Range. He listens to her sing, a shriek as fearless as the words skewered on her tongue: ‘girls in pink, boys in blue, sex intrudes, too many rules.’ She introduces him to her ex, Howard Devoto, whose band Magazine Morrissey supported that night at the Ritz two years ago. The spotlight is falling on those around him but Morrissey remains in its shadows. Linder looks in his eyes and sees a patience tried beyond all human endurance.

A blink of heavenly fog and we now see Morrissey aged 22 and perishing fast. Unemployed and unemployable, his existence hangs in the balance of dwindling hope, barbiturates and a box of seven inch singles including Rita Pavone, Billy Fury and The Marvelettes. The occasional local concert review for Record Mirror, a slim book on his beloved Dolls and another in the pipeline on James Dean are not solace enough. The decay of disappointment is irrevocable, the dream of fame now a fantasy of revenge on a world that for too long now has refused to listen.

Let us take a long, hard look at Steven Morrissey as he lies on his bed on a balmy early summer’s day in 1982. A hermitical frog begging for the kiss to transform him into a pop prince. The body breathes but inside the soul shrivels, gasping, dying. When all of a sudden he hears a knock on the door.

Does he answer? Dare he answer? It could be a Jehovah’s Witness. Or the gasman. Or, like the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, the rapping hand of fate itself. Der-der-der-DER!

Our angels decide for him.

Morrissey stares at the visitor nervously shuffling from foot to foot on his doorstep, pupils keen as a raptor as he takes note of the turned-up vintage Levis and that comical quiff. Johnny Marr smiles back and opens his mouth. What falls out is less a sentence than a thousand-mile-an-hour jumble of ‘hello’, ‘Billy Duffy’, ‘New York Dolls’, ‘guitar player’, ‘write songs’ and ‘this is how Leiber and Stoller met’. As Morrissey listens he can feel the load lifting from his coffin lid, Marr’s every breath kicking away a clod of earth to usher in the sunlight. He casts a brief suspicious glance to the skies, the chin nodding softly, the lips pursed as if to say ‘about bloody time’. He gestures for Marr to follow him inside. The door closes behind them.

CLARENCE: ‘And they live happily ever after?’

JOSEPH: ‘Well. Not entirely.’

CLARENCE: ‘Then, shouldn’t we stick around to help?’

JOSEPH: ‘No. We only had to get them this far.’

CLARENCE: ‘And Andy? And that punk kid?’

JOSEPH: ‘All taken care of. From here, we just leave them to it.’

A final heaven’s-eye glimpse of 384 Kings Road, Stretford, Manchester as it disappears from view.

CLARENCE: ‘Well. OK. I mean, I suppose you’re right. They already have everything they need to make the music of angels.’

Strike up the band!

JOSEPH: ‘Attaboy, Clarence!’

The credits have rolled. The house lights have risen. The curtains have drawn shut over the screen. We shuffle to our feet and stumble towards the exit. Outside night has fallen and the heavens have opened to create puddles in the dips of the paving stones.

We walk home. Alone, but singing in the rain.

THE ART OF THE SMITHS

1982-87

1982

‘Contrived by Johnny Marr, The Smiths evolved when Marr unearthed Morrissey and insisted upon a collaboration. The idea was to produce songs which were always instantaneous and listenable whilst also provoking deep thought; emeshing Morrissey’s words with Marr’s music in a sound which, above all, would stand apart without being inaccessible or esoteric.’

ROUGH TRADE PRESS RELEASE

‘When I came across Morrissey, in terms of influences it was pretty phenomenal that we were so in sync,’ says Johnny Marr of that first meeting at 384 Kings Road in the early summer of 1982. ‘Because the influences that we had individually were pretty obscure. So it was absolutely like fucking lightning bolts to the two of us. This wasn’t stuff we liked. This was stuff we lived for.’

Turning up on his doorstep unannounced, Marr’s irresistible sales patter bedazzled Morrissey enough to be invited upstairs to his bedroom. As they tentatively discussed their shared musical interests, Morrissey led Marr to his box of seven inch singles, asking him to choose one to play. Aware that he was probably being ‘tested’, Marr cautiously selected ‘Paper Boy’ by The Marvelettes, deliberately flipping it over to play the B-side, ‘You’re The One’. Confounding one another’s mutual intrigue, that one visit was enough for Morrissey to agree to Marr’s proposition that they begin working together as respective wordsmith and composer.

Marr went home elated, if somewhat cautious. ‘My feeling, as I left him, was, “Well, yeah, OK. But I’ll wait to see if he calls me tomorrow.”’ The next day, Marr was back at work in X Clothes when he received the phone call from Morrissey he’d been hoping for. ‘And that was it,’ says Marr. ‘I thought “Right. OK. We’re on.”’

The crucial compatibility test came a few days later when Morrissey arrived for their first practice in Marr’s rented attic room in Bowdon. Proceedings got off to a clumsy start with Marr trying to make the best of a tune he hoped would fit some lyrics Morrissey had already given him, ‘Don’t Blow Your Own Horn’. ‘We were kind of half doing it,’ says Marr, ‘but neither of us liked it very much. It was quite a jaunty, strummy thing. It didn’t cut it and I don’t think Morrissey really liked it either. We lived with it for about a week then decided not to bother with it.’

Thankfully their next effort, ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’, was a far more auspicious omen of what was to come. ‘When I saw the words, I just thought it scanned over the metre, the tempo, of “Kimberly” by Patti Smith,’ says Marr. ‘Also it was terra firma, that was a real big touchstone for us. Remember we didn’t know each other then so it was really important to the two of us that it worked. So I played this chord progression for “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” and we decided that it sounded good. So good that we recorded it on my legendary TEAC three-track cassette recorder, which enabled me to put down two guitar tracks then a vocal on top. So after trying “Don’t Blow Your Own Horn”, that was the first song we actually wrote.’

Morrissey had prepared another sheet of lyrics,‘Suffer Little Children’. ‘I was sat on the floor with these words that he’d typed out,’ Marr recalls. ‘As I was looking at them I just started to play this chord progression, this figure I’d been fiddling around with for a couple of weeks. Straight away Morrissey said “Is that it? Keep going”. So as I was looking at the lyrics, I didn’t know how the vocal melody went, but I was getting a feeling from the words and just sticking with it. I thought it felt right.’ By the time the singer returned to Stretford, the first two Morrissey/Marr originals, both later immortalised on their debut album barely two years later, were done and dusted. ‘After that first meeting we really couldn’t get together often enough,’ says Marr. ‘It was a few times a week. We got a hell of a lot done in that first month.’

They were, Marr admits, in awe of one another’s potential. ‘He and I almost had this unspoken relationship where we were both able to be ourselves but we both knew how important we were to each other. What shouldn’t be forgotten is that we really, really liked each other. It wasn’t some business arrangement or relationship of convenience. There was intrigue and understanding because as different as we were, the thing that was paramount inside each of us was pop records and that absolute promise of escape. And he understood that without us ever having to talk about it.’

When not writing songs of their own, the pair strengthened their partnership, absorbing each other’s tastes. ‘We’d do each other tapes,’ says Marr, ‘as you do when you first meet a friend. I can remember when he gave me Marianne Faithfull’s “The Sha La La Song”. It was like, wow! That song really hit the jackpot for about two weeks. But we didn’t have to be absolutely magnetically joined by everything. If you live and work so closely together you just observe the things you don’t share like peeking over the garden fence. Eyebrows were often raised from both sides. So the stuff he liked that I didn’t, like Jobriath for example, I didn’t have any violent objection to it. I thought it was kind of intriguing, it just didn’t touch me.’

While the songs continued to flow (Marr names ‘These Things Take Time’, ‘Handsome Devil’, ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ and ‘Miserable Lie’ as ‘that first bunch’), the hunt for adequate musicians to bring them to life gathered speed. As local face and boy-about-town, it was left to Marr to find the suitable candidates.

‘I was inspired by Andrew Loog Oldham and his example,’ explains Marr. ‘I thought that was really noble, someone who was able to make things happen. In my head I thought I was running around the Brill Building. But that’s how I was. I wore hyperactivity as a badge of honour. With Morrissey, he didn’t actually need to physically get involved in that side. I was happy finding group members, places to rehearse, places to record, clothes, haircuts, managers and record companies. All he had to do was be brilliant and be with me, for us to be next to each other. That’s what it was about. However, he was by no means sat in his front room with the telly on. What connections he was able to draw on, he could. There was a guy in Stretford he’d known for a number of years who was a drummer. He got us all together one evening. This guy was really amiable and chatty but he just didn’t seem like a living breathing musician to me, just a nice guy with a drum kit, so obviously he wasn’t in. But whatever could be done we both did.’

Yet to find members for a fully working band, by the end of that summer they had an agreed name of Morrissey’s choosing: The Smiths. His stock answer in future interviews was that it was a celebration of ordinariness (‘It was the most ordinary name and I thought it was time the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces’) as well as a deliberate reaction against more flamboyantly named pop peers like Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. It may even have been a subconscious reference to Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the subject of ‘Suffer Little Children’. In 1966, the notorious child-killers were only caught through the testimony of Hindley’s sister Maureen, and her husband David Smith, frequently referred to in passing as ‘the Smiths’ in books such as Emlyn Williams’ Beyond Belief, Morrissey’s primary source for the song’s lyrics.

‘I seem to remember them saying it was to do with Patti Smith,’ recalls Dale Hibbert, the next musician to be drafted in by Marr as the band’s probationary bass player. ‘Because they were fans of hers, I seem to remember that it came from that. But it was discussed that the one thing they didn’t want was to be referred to as “Johnny Smith”, “Steven Smith” etc. They wanted to make it clear that was never going to happen.’

A sound engineer by day who’d previously fronted a succession of local bands, Hibbert was already acquainted with Marr, having recorded Freak Party’s demo at Decibel Studios barely a year earlier. After accepting Marr’s invitation to join The Smiths, Hibbert was taken to meet Morrissey — but not before Marr had imparted a word of warning. ‘The first thing Johnny said as I was going to meet him was, “Whatever you do, don’t call him Steve. He absolutely hates it. Always refer to him as Steven”. I thought that was a really odd thing to say, but I just went along with it.’

Morrissey had never been fond of the common colloquial abbreviations of his Christian name, already reprimanding those pen pals who took such liberties. (‘Please don’t call me “Steve”. It reminds me of the Bionic Man, to whom I bear little resemblance.’) By the time The Smiths signed to Rough Trade in the summer of 1983, he would forbid the use of his forename altogether. ‘There was a definite moment when it happened,’ smiles Marr. ‘A directive went out. A verbal directive, which went out by a “representative”. But it was fine, it made absolute sense. I wouldn’t really have addressed him as anything other than “Mozzer”. I’d already started to call him “Moz” because of the absurdity of it. It’s so ill suited.’

Hibbert would join Morrissey and Marr for a handful of practices at the guitarist’s digs in Bowdon. ‘We both had semi-acoustic guitars,’ recalls Hibbert. ‘I had a Hofner and Johnny had a Gretsch, so we didn’t even need amplifiers. I used to have to pick Steven up from his mum’s house on Kings Road in Stretford and take him to band practices on my motorbike, with him clinging on to the back of me. So I got to know him quite well. He certainly didn’t appear shy or retiring. I was told he had a history of journalism and had a lot of contacts in the music business which is why they were gonna take a shortcut to getting signed.’

‘I Want A Boy For My Birthday’(Sylvester Bradford)

Recorded August 1982, Bowdon, Manchester

Home cassette recording

The earliest known surviving document in the recording history of The Smiths stems from those very first attic practices with Morrissey, Marr and Hibbert. It was for the latter’s benefit that the singer and guitarist taped a simple arrangement of ‘I Want A Boy For My Birthday’, a 1963 B-side by New York girl group The Cookies, on Marr’s TEAC machine so that Hibbert could learn the melody in preparation for The Smiths’ first demo session. The cover was Morrissey’s idea. ‘I’d never heard it before,’ says Marr, ‘but I thought “Great, this’ll really freak ’em out!” I was really happy to encourage it.’

A pleasing, lovelorn ballad pleading for the birthday gift of a male companion who’ll ‘hug me, kiss me, squeeze me day and night’, The Smiths’ interpretation bravely avoided all sense of ‘camp’. Though of murky quality — Morrissey’s vocal is at times almost inaudible beneath Marr’s chorus pedal electric wash — their reading of the song as captured on tape is both faithful in arrangement and earnest in sentiment. The decision to tackle ‘I Want A Boy For My Birthday’ was itself an overspill from Morrissey’s fixation with the New York Dolls who’d similarly interpreted The Shangri-Las’ ‘Give Him A Great Big Kiss’, famously pinching its opening line — ‘when I say I’m in love you’d best believe I’m in love, L-U-V!’ — on their own ‘Looking For A Kiss’. Morrissey’s objective, clearly, was to emulate the Dolls’ same transgender subversion in relocating the female adolescent kitsch of 60s transistor pop into an all-male 70s rock’n’roll environment. Marr was in total agreement. ‘I knew about Phil Spector through Patti Smith,’ he explains. ‘I knew about [Shangri-Las producer] Shadow Morton through The Dolls. That’s the context “I Want A Boy For My Birthday” was done in.’

Pushed for time, The Smiths never managed to record a studio version of the song for their demo as hoped though they would play ‘I Want A Boy For My Birthday’ twice in concert: at their live debut in October 1982 and again the following January. Hibbert kept possession of Morrissey and Marr’s home rehearsal cassette, releasing a sample clip on the internet in the late 90s prior to its sale to a private collector along with the master tapes of the group’s first demo.

‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’(Morrissey/Marr)

‘Suffer Little Children’(Morrissey/Marr)

Recorded August 1982, Decibel Studios, Manchester

Engineered by Dale Hibbert

First studio recording

In Hibbert, Morrissey and Marr finally had the means to access free studio time, even if The Smiths were still a ‘group’ in name rather than body when they made recorded their first demo at the end of the summer. ‘If there were any local bands that I liked then we used to do these overnight sessions’, says Hibbert of his job at Decibel. ‘I was left to lock up so I used to let these bands in. Nobody ever paid. I used to justify it by saying that I was learning a skill.’ Accordingly, Hibbert refutes the myth that his keys to the studio were the only reason Morrissey and Marr accepted him into their bosom to begin with. ‘I always maintained that it wasn’t because of free session time’, he stresses, ‘because as a friend of Johnny’s I would’ve given them that anyway whether I was in the band or not.’

Over an insomniac marathon seven hour session between 11.00 pm and 6.00 am the next morning, two tracks were recorded and mixed, aided by former Freak Party drummer Simon Wolstencroft who’d been coerced by Marr to help out at the eleventh hour. The chosen songs were the first two they’d written together. ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ featured a grumbling low Morrissey vocal, typical of the group’s formative recordings, while Marr soaked his sketchy, central riff in a shallow flange-pedal wash. Surprisingly, the surviving demo also reveals Marr’s shaky attempt at a backing vocal harmony. Though Hibbert played bass, come the next track, the Moors Murders elegy ‘Suffer Little Children’, he was banished to the control room, leaving Marr to overdub a crude bass part of his own.

At seven minutes plus, the Decibel ‘Suffer Little Children’ is a much longer prototype than that which was finally to appear on 1984’s The Smiths. Though Wolstencroft’s pattering rhythm was discernibly different from that later applied by Mike Joyce, Marr’s basic melody was intact, if less pithy. So too was Morrissey’s stirring baritone, utilising wraithlike reverb for added drama (the only lyrical difference being the surplus lament from Myra Hindley’s conscience, ‘oh, what have you done?’). The mock Hindley voiceover was also more explicit, cackling haughtily and audibly crying out the victims’ Christian names: ‘Lesley! Edward! John!’.

‘That was a girl, a friend of Steven’s,’ says Dale. ‘She just turned up towards the end and did this weird laughing.’

‘Never saw her before, never saw her afterwards,’ laughs Marr. ‘She was nice. Very kind of studenty. From what I remember she had an archetypal 60s vibe — a bob haircut and a duffle coat. Morrissey never being one to miss a sartorial angle!’ The mystery girl was one Annalisa Jablonska, whom Morrissey had previously named as being his ‘girlfriend’ in correspondence with Scottish pen pal Robert Mackie. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ he teased Mackie in a letter dated 4th December 1980. ‘Do you like girls? I have a girlfriend called Annalisa. We’re both bisexual. Real hip, huh? I hate sex.’

In preparation for ‘Suffer Little Children’, Marr brought in a cassette of a separate piano melody to tack on as an eerie epilogue. Grinding to a halt on a slovenly strummed minor chord, the song segues into this fittingly maudlin piano coda. Its grief-stricken tone would be amplified by the distant sound effects of children playing (a device they would repeat on ‘What Difference Does It Make?’) and a chiming music box.

‘I’d recorded that on this little piano in Shelley Rohde’s house,’ remembers Marr. ‘I stuck a microphone out of the window as there were children coming out of school. So I had this music box going, kids playing outside and me playing this piano part all at the same time. I can remember it clearly, a beautiful summer’s day, because when me and Morrissey met it was the start of summer so our relationship, our writing relationship, just bloomed all the way through that summer of ’82. I was living in the attic of this groovy bohemian house with an inherited record collection [from his friend, record shop owner Pete Hunt] and an amazing girlfriend [Angie, who he later married], having just met The Other Guy. So, y’know, no wonder I was happy. It was a fantastic time and that’s how I remember that whole first demo.’

As a first footing, Morrissey and Marr were very satisfied with the Decibel tape, especially the latter who played it on repeat to oblivious customers in X Clothes as often as he could. (‘I seem to remember it being on whenever I went in’ says Hibbert.) Unfortunately, their enthusiasm failed to rub off on Simon Wolstencroft who refused to commit himself to The Smiths full time. With a debut gig already pencilled in for the first week of October, the search for a permanent drummer accelerated.

The urgent vacancy would be filled through another of Marr’s friends, Pete Hope, who informed the guitarist about the ‘Buzzcocks freak’ he lived with already drumming in local punk band Victim. Mike Joyce, who as a regular in X Clothes already knew Marr as a face about town, was curious enough to attend an audition at The Smiths’ new rehearsal space, Spirit Studios on Tariff Street in the city centre. Before arriving, Joyce made the not altogether advisable decision to ingest some magic mushrooms. Though ‘tripping his head off’, his hallucinogenic feast did little to hamper his performance. Marr was impressed, as much by his nerve as his playing, and immediately offered Joyce a place in The Smiths. He readily accepted, quitting Victim in the same breath.

‘I remember saying to some of my friends at the time that they could be the next Psychedelic Furs’, laughs Joyce. ‘That’s as big as I could see it. But there was something instant about the music, Johnny’s tunes and Morrissey’s words, that wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. I thought “Yeah, I want to be a part of this.”’

The rhythm section superficially complete, Hibbert already felt the chill of an unspoken group separatism. ‘I used to socialise with Johnny so we’d talk about the group and where it was going,’ says Hibbert. ‘But even then there was always an air of isolation where anything important happened. For instance, they went to meet Tony Wilson at some point to discuss the possibility of signing to Factory. Neither me nor Mike were invited.’

In truth it was Morrissey alone who confronted Wilson about the possibility of Factory signing The Smiths. ‘Whatever contacts Morrissey could draw on, he did,’ explains Marr. ‘He physically brought the tape to Tony Wilson to play him. I can remember I was working in X Clothes that day when he rang me up and told me the news that Tony wasn’t into it.’ Neither Wilson nor New Order manager Rob Gretton were taken with the Decibel demo, though Marr contends that Factory’s legendary ‘failure’ to sign The Smiths has been exaggerated in hindsight; not least at the finale of the Factory biopic 24 Hour Party People, in which Wilson receives a visitation from God who chastises him that ‘you probably should have signed The Smiths’.

Whatever Morrissey’s motives for gauging Wilson’s response, Marr would always insist it was ‘absolutely crucial’ they didn’t sign to Factory in a conscious effort to break from the obvious traditions of Manchester’s past. ‘Even though we’d been to see Factory,’ explains Marr, ‘around that time myself and Morrissey had already discussed in private Rough Trade being a really good label. Because of The Monochrome Set, who started out on Rough Trade, and certainly The Fall.’

His exclusion from the Factory discussions aside, Hibbert’s trepidation increased as the band’s debut gig approached, particularly when he was subjected to an emergency makeover. ‘It sounds like I was a sheep,’ laughs Hibbert, ‘but basically it was like, “There’s a hairdresser here and this is how you’re gonna have your hair, and these are your clothes.” It was really bizarre. I had to get a flat top because they were into this 50s thing. At one point we all went down to this Army & Navy store where they’d got hold of these 50s bowling shirts with different names embroidered on the front. Initially, that’s what we were gonna wear. But there was never really a band feeling. It was always just those two. I was always under the impression that’s the way it was, right from the start. It wasn’t something that needed to be vocalised, it was just fairly obvious those were the conditions they were forming the band under. It’s about control. Two people can control an image a lot better than four.’

An even bigger shock was in store for Hibbert come the debut gig itself. The date was 4th October, 1982. The place: Manchester’s Ritz. The event: a student music/fashion show titled ‘An Evening of Pure Pleasure’. The headline act: Blue Rondo A La Turk (‘We knew we were gonna wipe the floor with them,’ Marr later remarked). And the support: The Smiths.

‘We actually played on the floor in front of the stage’, recalls Hibbert. ‘But there was this other guy that came out with us, wearing stilettos (sic) and a leather jacket.’ The combination of their guest's footwear and that night’s inclusion of The Cookies’ ‘I Want A Boy For My Birthday’ was enough for Hibbert to misinterpret Morrissey and Marr’s vision of The Smiths as being overtly ‘gay’. ‘They actually came out and said it,’ alleges Hibbert. ‘It was Steven’s idea. It wasn’t something that was mentioned and then dropped, it was something they wanted to follow through. I mean, that tape of “I Want A Boy” was intended to be on the first demo, so obviously a song like that would go hand in hand with that image. Steven said, “We’re going to be a gay band, but not in a Tom Robinson, effeminate kind of way but more in an underlying kind of macho type way.” It was a very strongly manufactured image that was being prepared.’

‘Well I’m guessing if I was Dale,’ Marr coolly responds, ‘and you’re stood on the stage with a guy in woman’s shoes, playing “I Want A Boy For My Birthday”, around a very effete little guitar player and an unfathomable singer, then he’s probably on the money isn’t he. But we didn’t sit down with Dale and say “Hey Dale — get with the programme!” We hardly knew him for a start. I think that’s a bit clumsy that whole area and we just weren’t and aren’t that clumsy. Us doing that Cookies song was absolutely echoing The New York Dolls, who everyone had forgotten about but Morrissey hadn’t and I hadn’t. We wanted to bring something to our audience that The Dolls and Patti Smith had brought to us. That was it.’

It fitted that the evening’s ‘gatecrasher’ was the London pen pal and dedicatee of Morrissey’s New York Dolls book, James Maker, whom the singer affectionately referred to as ‘Jimmy’ on account of his resemblance to James Dean. ‘I was living in London and travelled to Manchester to attend a couple of the early rehearsals,’ recalls Maker. ‘I’d heard the songs on cassette. I wasn’t there to rehearse. The idea of me going through dance steps whilst Morrissey sang “I Want A Boy For My Birthday” would have been just a little too Diana Ross & The Supremes. I was there to drink red wine, make extraneous hand gestures and keep well within the tight, chalked circle that Morrissey had drawn around me. There was no discussion on how I would fit into the stage show. My involvement was not part of any long-term plan.’

Maker balks at Hibbert’s allegation that he wore white stilettos: ‘They were black court shoes! I wouldn’t be seen — on a kidney machine — in white stilettos. And they were not props, I assure you. I was given a pair of maracas — an optional extra — and carte blanche. There were no instructions — I think it was generally accepted that I would improvise.’ Even at this, their debut gig, Morrissey had decided upon dramatic entrance music. As Klaus Nomi’s rendition of Henry Purcell’s ‘The Cold Song’ played through the venue’s sound system, Maker stepped up to the mic and announced the band in French: ‘J’ai l’honneur de vous introduire The Smiths. Je crois qu’ils vont faire BOUM ici — et je suis certain que leur musique vous sera fascinant!’ (‘In English it sounds awful,’ says Maker. ‘“I’m honoured to introduce you to The Smiths. I believe that they are going to make a huge impact — and I know that you’ll be enthralled by their music.” See? Awful!’)

‘It was great,’ says Marr. ‘When we walked out on stage that first time I really knew there’d be a lot of people who’d never heard anything like it before, or wouldn’t get us, especially with James Maker stood next to us. Because I was out all the time seeing whatever groups there were. So I knew we absolutely did not fit in.’

In the aftermath of the Ritz show, it became evident to Morrissey and Marr that Dale Hibbert was unsuited to life as a full-time Smith. His incongruity within the overall group aesthetic aside, Joyce also insists that Hibbert’s musicianship was lacking in substance. ‘Dale wasn’t a bass player, just a guy who owned a bass, and that was the problem.’ Marr chose his moment at a rehearsal session in Spirit Studios to hand Hibbert his marching orders. ‘I can remember it well,’ says Hibbert. ‘It was on the stairs as I was going out. Johnny said something like, “We need a parting of the waves”, and I thought they meant they wanted to rehearse somewhere else. So I said, “Yeah, alright. So where d’you wanna rehearse then?” Johnny went, “Er, no. I mean we don’t need you!” It fell to him to tell me because he was the one that introduced me to the band. But there was no way I would have made it with them. There was no way I’d have gone on tour and done all that stuff because I was married with kids. I just didn’t suit the image that was being prepared.’

Hibbert’s void would be amply filled before the year was out by the prodigal return of Andy Rourke. Nearly 12 months had elapsed since Marr quit Freak Party and purposely isolated himself from his former school friend. ‘We hadn’t seen each other for about a year,’ says Marr. ‘So I asked him round to mine and it was good to see him again. But he was a bit confused, I think, because he had to put up with me playing The Drifters whereas a year and a half before me and him were listening to David Bowie’s Low and A Certain Ratio!’

Their friendship rekindled, Rourke accepted Marr’s offer to replace Hibbert on their next demo session.

‘What Difference Does It Make?’(Morrissey/Marr)

‘Handsome Devil’(Morrissey/Marr)

‘Miserable Lie’(Morrissey/Marr)

Recorded December 1982, Drone Studios, Manchester

Second studio recording

Andy Rourke’s inauguration into The Smiths coincided with their next recording session at Drone Studios in Chorlton. Surprisingly, the recently dismissed Hibbert was also there, further confusing the history of his exit from the group. Joyce recalls Hibbert eyeing Rourke with confusion as he set up his bass and amp, unaware he’d been replaced until Marr took him aside for a friendly word. Hibbert contests otherwise, that he knew he knew he was no longer in The Smiths and was there purely as an engineer checking out another studio. ‘I already knew Andy,’ insists Hibbert, ‘because I’d recorded the demo of Freak Party and he was far, far superior to me as a bass player. I honestly didn’t mind.’

Intended as an audition tape for EMI, the Drone demo commenced with a primitive version of ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ containing an uncomfortably low vocal from Morrissey. Even more unusual were Marr’s backing harmony vocals during the final verse and the sound of the entire group applauding in unison over the ‘no more apologies’ refrain. Morrissey’s voice was just as audibly stretched during the second track, ‘Handsome Devil’. Stranger still was the added saxophone of guest Andy Gill, who mimicked Marr’s riff in abrupt alto blasts in a failed effort to fulfil his given brief of a ‘Stax-like R&B horn sound’.

Most peculiar of all was the third track; an epic seven minute blueprint of ‘Miserable Lie’. Though its slow introductory passage was intact, the remainder became an almost unrecognisable sub-funk workout dominated by Rourke’s unwarranted slap-bass improvisation and Marr’s erratic chops echoing Gang Of Four. Morrissey’s lyrics were just as woolly, dwelling upon the ‘criminal world’ refrain and swimming in reverb. Only after three and a half minutes did he switch into falsetto mode (trilling ‘what did I do to deserve this?’) while Joyce charged towards a chaotic fade-out finish of bombarding tom-tom rumbles pursued by Marr’s separated left-and-right channel fret screeches.

Though the end product was unsuccessful in its intended objective to impress EMI (ironic considering that they’d later sign The Smiths in 1986 — a year prior to their split), the three tracks completed proved an invaluable learning curve. Marr and Rourke soon overcame the obstacle of Morrissey’s flattened vocals, so painfully vivid on the Drone recordings, by employing guitar capos in order to play in a higher key better suited to his natural range. Most important of all, though, was Rourke’s successful induction, and with it the consolidation of a final line-up. With Morrissey (‘Voice’), Johnny Marr (‘Guitar’), Andy Rourke (‘The Bass Guitar’) and Mike Joyce (‘The Drums’), The Smiths were at last complete.

‘A Matter Of Opinion’(Morrissey/Marr)

Recorded December 1982, 70 Portland Street, Manchester

Informal rehearsal recording

The Smiths spent the rest of December honing their ever-expanding repertoire in the new permanent rehearsal home that Joe Moss, now the band’s official manager, had recently provided; the upstairs of his Portland Street Crazy Face Clothing Co warehouse where they spent their intensive incubation period over the winter months. By Christmas, four more songs were ready to add to their live set: ‘These Things Take Time’, ‘What Do You See In Him?’ (rewritten in the new year as ‘Wonderful Woman’), ‘Jeane’ and the rarest Smiths song of all, ‘A Matter Of Opinion’.

As the only original Morrissey/Marr composition after the recruitment of Andy Rourke never to be released or played in concert, ‘A Matter Of Opinion’ would avoid detection from biographers and fans for the best part of 20 years. Thankfully, one lone practice tape survives, captured on a domestic ghetto blaster that remained permanently to hand at Crazy Face and retained by Mike Joyce. Modelled in the same twanging R&B vein as other early Marr rockers ‘Handsome Devil’ and ‘What Difference Does It Make?’, just as ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ was a generous steal from Patti Smith’s ‘Kimberly’, so ‘A Matter Of Opinion’ owed its existence to Buffalo Springfield’s ‘Mr Soul’, written by Neil Young, driven by an identical riff. (That Marr borrowed from Young is mildly ironic since, as Young admitted, ‘Mr Soul’ was itself a deliberate steal from The Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’.)