A rock bio with a difference
THE SMITHS hit the top for just a few years, but the British band’s fan base remains strong
No one does heritage better than the British, and their curatorial bent extends to their rich pop music tradition. Never was that flair on better display than at the opening and closing ceremonies of last summer’s Olympics in London, where the flag was flown, literally and figuratively, by artists ranging from Paul McCartney to the Pet Shop Boys to the reunited Spice Girls. Much like pop itself, the effect varied from stirring to fatuous.
For many, though, one iconic name — a band as essential to the ’80s as the Beatles were to the ’60s, and whose legacy looks every bit as secure, if smaller in scale — was conspicuously unrepresented. But it’s likely their fans, accustomed as they are to nurturing their devotion against the tide of the canon-making industry, were simply nodding knowingly. They wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
That band gets its full due — some would add “and then some”— in Tony Fletcher’s A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of The Smiths (Crown Archetype, 698 pages, $35). Look at that page count again: it’s not a typo. A band whose lifespan as a recording entity spanned a grand total of less than four years, from late 1983 to summer 1987, is afforded the kind of scrutiny normally reserved for epoch-making politicians. The author, whose credits include books on Keith Moon and R.E.M., is no one’s idea of a prose stylist — workmanlike is probably the nicest word that could be applied — but as anyone who has slogged through more than a handful of rock biographies can attest, humility has its advantages. The customary (and madly irritating) devices of embedding lyrics and wink-wink insider references, and of campaigning tirelessly for the subject’s worthiness, are thankfully absent. Fletcher knows his readership is pre-converted and simply gets on with telling their story.
For Fletcher, that story stretches back much further than the band and indeed the lives of its four members, deep into the history of Manchester, their native city. A cradle of the Industrial Revolution and long a destination for immigrants driven out of Ireland, the city has a long tradition of radical politics and oppositional culture. Fletcher’s may well be the only rock biography to give Friedrich Engels significant space.
Much is made of the Smiths’ members being products of that Irish working class diaspora: shunted from their childhood homes by slum clearances, educated during the last gasp of a paternalist Victorian system rife with casual corporal punishment, they were galvanized by the Sex Pistols and their own city’s Joy Division/ Factory Records axis and found a home with Rough Trade, from whose staunchly indie bosom they effected their uncompromised rise to world prominence.
The songwriting tandem of singer/lyricist Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr was the core of the Smiths, and Fletcher, even without benefit of the former’s co-operation (he has talked to seemingly everyone else), captures the unlikely and ultimately fractious relationship well. Morrissey, especially, is an endlessly enigmatic figure, among other things the patron saint of lost causes and late bloomers. Derided by one Manchester scene-maker as the “village idiot,” he was still living with his mother at 23; New Year’s Eve 1982 found him holed up in his bedroom, dateless, reading Pride and Prejudice. Within a year, somehow, his band would be the toast of England.
That Jane Austen detail above is crucial. Discussion of a Smiths biography is at home in a books column as much as in the entertainment section because few bands, if any, have been so steeped in literature. A typical Morrissey interview in the music press of the day was peppered with names such as Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Smart, Germaine Greer, Oscar Wilde and Shelagh Delaney, whose A Taste Of Honey provided Morrissey with several songs’ worth of raw material, often cribbed wholesale. Their musical building blocks, too, seemed to emanate from a parallel world, a place where Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, Marianne Faithfull loomed as large as the Rolling Stones. The audacity of such a cosmology may be somewhat lost now, but at the time it was revolutionary, effecting a feminist- and gay-friendly embrace that encompassed concepts like vegetarianism and (gasp!) celibacy that were previously absent from the pop arena, and exposing the hegemonic post-punk orthodoxy of the era as merely a minor variant on the standard macho rock template. Add to that the simple fact the Smiths could rock as hard as anyone when the mood struck them (newcomers are directed toward the title track of their consensus greatest album, The Queen Is Dead), and you’ve got all the ingredients for a body of work that arrived like a suckerpunch and hasn’t aged a day since.
The tragedy of the Smiths’ career, of course, is that it ended so soon, done in largely by Morrissey’s inability to trust a manager, and his general passive-aggressive petulance. For exasperating selfsabotaging behaviour, his only rival is a figure from the opposite end of the rock spectrum, Axl Rose. The final hundred pages or so of Fletcher’s book unfold with a sad deflation leavened only by the knowledge that the band didn’t stick around long enough to mess up their legacy.
By ending with the band’s breakup (a sundering that the acrimony engendered by drummer Mike Joyce’s successful suing of Morrissey and Marr for unpaid royalties is likely to render permanent), Fletcher leaves untold a story at least as interesting: the Smiths’ long and ongoing afterlife. Those albums have never stopped selling, their appeal spreading to places as unlikely as Mexico’s biker culture, where Morrissey is regarded as a near demigod. Should Fletcher choose to take up that story, and to treat it with the scholarly passion he has already shown, we’ll be in for a multi-volume work on the scale of Winston Churchill’s The Second World War. If that’s the case, the line will start right here.