Authors: Richard Carman
There were, of course, the conspiracy theories blaming everybody. Morrissey disapproved of Johnny’s ‘freelancing’, Morrissey wouldn’t tour, Johnny wanted to tour the world and live the life of the rock ’n’ roll superstar etc, all rumour, nothing proven. It was said that manager Ken Friedman had deliberately driven a wedge
between the two. Of course the truth was more simple than any of these… The Smiths had run their course. “It had nothing to do with how I feel about Morrissey, and how he feels about me,” Johnny told Dave Haslam. “We had a good time recording the last LP, and I was unhappy before that. And I was unhappy after that… If we had to go off on tour and try to promote the record with the bad atmosphere that was around, the situation would have got even more hideous.”
The band was over long before the split actually came, and once the decision was made there was no going back. As Ziggy had exhausted Bowie both personally and creatively, and as The Beatles had been left behind by the Yoko-influenced new creativity of John Lennon by 1969, so Johnny had tired of being ‘a Smith.’ He was suffocating. It was time for pastures new.
Rather than dwell on the split, it was probably more remarkable that The Smiths lasted as long as they did. The band was born of two very diverse talents and a remarkably concise vision. That that partnership produced work of such quality and lasted for five full years was a major achievement in itself. They came, they saw and they conquered, and regardless of who was to blame for the split, when the job was done they went their separate ways. Johnny was then, and remains to this day proud of what The Smiths achieved. The love of the seven-inch single that fired him so fiercely as a child was still with him as an adult, and he is proud to have released such gems that remain as treasured objects in the hearts and minds of record buyers even now.
That ought to be that, but years after the split Johnny was still troubled by its manner. He represented the break up as the biggest failure of his life, as he revealed to author Martin Roach
in
The Right To Imagination And Madness
: “We
should
have split when we did,” he reflected. “Simply because we had lost touch with basic emotional values which we all possessed.” He felt they were all “perverted by our egos,” which by then had turned the band into caricatures. “We were good people,” he says. “But we did the split wrong.”
In the wake of the split, Mike and Andy went on to work with Sinead O’Connor. Mike joined his early heroes Buzzcocks for a while, and worked with both Julian Cope and PiL. Both Rourke and Joyce worked with Pete Wylie, while Rourke joined ex-Happy Mondays drummer Gaz Whelan in a band called Delicious, later coming together in the band Aziz. Most significantly, the pair continued with Morrissey for a short while in his solo capacity, later playing a remarkable concert in Wolverhampton that also included Craig Gannon in Morrissey’s band. The gig was both valediction and the beginning of a new era, and – if you wore a Smiths t-shirt, the first 1700 punters to arrive got in for free.
* * *
Released in early September 1987,
Strangeways Here We Come
gave a clear impression of the creative crossroads that The Smiths had reached as they shuddered to a halt. It was a fitting finale. Lyrically the album mined familiar seams yet musically searched for something new, a two-headed snake. It was a heavy-duty piece of work. Johnny has always been extremely fond of the album, periodically claiming it as his favourite Smiths release of all. While he struggled to find a new direction for the band, the stripped down atmosphere still appeals to him today. For Andy, the album
did indeed point to a different future for the band had they stayed together, but Mike found it hard to listen to, even long after the band was done. “You don’t put that one on when you fancy some nice easy listening,” he observed dryly.
‘A Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours’ opens with Morrissey’s reverbed voice hauntingly ‘coming inside’ over jaunty piano chords. If Johnny was looking for pastures new musically for The Smiths, then he could have made no more radical statement of intent from his own point of view than to open the album with a track void of guitar. Instead, it is Johnny on vamping piano, clearly relishing the simplicity of the bouncing chords against Joyce’s military percussion.
‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’ was one of
Strangeways
’ best tracks, a glammed-up rocker that kicked off with a musical quote from Bolan’s ‘20th Century Boy’, big, expressive Keith Richards’ chords and a stomping drum track that wasn’t pretty but is a killer part of the song. The ‘horn section’ was another diversion for The Smiths, but on ‘Death Of A Disco Dancer’ there was a real treat, a rare instrumental outing for Morrissey, who had been playing the studio piano and who added his own solo contribution to the song. The descending B minor riff around which the song was based – like ‘Dear Prudence’ or ‘Tales Of Brave Ulysees’ – gradually fell into an open, grungy jam, some of the most visceral moments committed to tape by The Smiths. Whether Morrissey’s piano piece was rehearsed or not, he certainly played in key and included a number of jazz rolls that suggest there was a little more than mere happy accident. After the repeated descending chords, at the end Johnny plays a mini-Sergeant Pepper coda of rising chords to finish the song off.
This was definitely a new Smiths – no clipped, jangling siroccos of guitar, but mayhem, improvisation. If the songs to date had been surprising, ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ harked back to
The Queen Is Dead
, with Johnny’s half-beat acoustic guitar recalling ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’. This was one of Morrissey’s finest moments, at once absurd, hysterical, and deeply, deeply moving. If the attempt was to be as audacious as possible, then simply by the refrain of the title the song succeeded, but the clarity and honesty of Morrissey’s vocal is very moving. Set that against the cheeriness of Johnny’s guitar and Andy and Mike’s rhythm, and the song could not fail to bring a smile. With lyrics about a girl in a coma… The Smiths were at their devilish best and most contradictory.
‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’ was an instant classic: so much more sophisticated than the early records, this was a band at the height of their powers – Johnny’s trick of throwing cutlery at a heavily-reverbed guitar, the innocent-punk solo, and again Morrissey at his very best. ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ was one of Morrissey’s most dramatic – but not quite melodramatic – performances. The minor piano chords over the sound of chaotic crowd noises was reminiscent of ‘Meat Is Murder’, and it was two minutes before what might be called ‘the song’ proper came into the mix. The effect was of a movie soundtrack to an emotion about to break, and when Morrissey appeared, suddenly, it was stunning. Johnny’s arpeggios, the artificially concocted strings and mandolin… pure wonderful Smiths at their best.
‘Unhappy Birthday’ was an unusual song, a mixture of the jazz-inspired chords of ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ and the regular acoustic strumming of something like ‘Cemetry Gates’. At
once it can be the least satisfying track on the album, and at the same time perhaps the one most interesting to stop and listen to for the musical track alone, with Johnny’s echoing solo notes that slide the song in and out. While it contained elements of the same kind of juxtaposition that invigorates ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’, it lacked the suggested irony of that song, yet retained something else irresistible and eminently The Smiths. ‘Paint A Vulgar Picture’ was another difficult track – Marr’s music is dense and circuitous, hitting changes off the beat, and Morrissey’s melody shifting at every turn.
By ‘Death At One’s Elbow’ the transformation of The Smiths was complete. Only two years ago this track would have been a pure pastiche of Sun Records rock ’n’ roll. By
Strangeways
however, the trick didn’t work any more, and the song is probably the weakest point on the album. Compare this song to ‘Last Night I Dreamt…’ or ‘Death Of A Disco Dancer’ – it’s a joke that isn’t funny any more, and these two songs show where The Smiths were heading by the time their day was run. ‘Death At One’s Elbow’ was a redundant piece of work. And, as an album band, their day was running out fast. The gentle, entrancing ‘I Won’t Share You’ – plucked on a studio autoharp, Johnny pressing down the keys to damp the strings into pre-defined chords – was the last song on the last Smiths album proper. And of course, its lyrical content is loaded with irony and metaphor and could be a dozen different things to a dozen different people, but the key element was that this intriguing new album ended on a note of almost adolescent adoration… something that The Smiths had spent five years defining.
The critics reaction was mixed. For some observers it was a dismal album, the sound of a band in disarray. For others it was
better than
The Queen Is Dead. I-D
magazine described the album as “as good as
The Queen Is Dead
, but probably not better.”
NME
referenced Johnny’s “beatific melodies” as establishing The Smiths’ final greatness, and noted that – whoever Johnny and Morrissey chose to work with in the future – theirs was perhaps “a once-in-a-lifetime partnership.”
Rolling
Stone
picked out some of Johnny’s “emotional highlights” from the album, observing that the band were right to pack up rather than continue without him, while among the negative reactions, for Suzan Cohen in
Star Hits
this was “not exactly the way I [want] to remember them.”
As the year came to an end, so The Smiths’ discography of original releases began to run out, as singles were released from
Strangeways
. In October ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish/Pretty Girls Make Graves’ reached a disappointing number twenty-three on the singles chart, while in December ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ coupled with the Elvis-inspired ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ just scraped into the singles chart at number thirty. For the ultimate singles band it was a disappointing climax to the year, cheered by Melvyn Bragg’s
South Bank Show
TV special on The Smiths, perhaps a more fitting farewell.
Johnny Rogan wrote an article for
Record Collector
magazine suggesting that the joining together of Morrissey and Marr was “a unity of opposites.” It has become easy to distinguish between the articulate, witty, controversial front-man Morrissey and his musician partner. Johnny the Keef-clone party boy with a penchant for disco seems entirely at odds with his more literary partner. In fact, Morrissey and Johnny are much more alike than the media myth and polarised images suggest. To a degree there was a deliberate distancing of their roles in the band. Grant Showbiz
worked with them almost constantly during the life of The Smiths. “In some respects they are much closer than people see them,” Grant confirmed to this author. He feels that they were easily and quickly characterised by the press, and as a result there was an easy role for each of them to fall into. Johnny too has indicated that it was the similarities, not the differences, that bonded the song-writing pair. “[When we met] he knew we were different in the way we expressed ourselves,” said Johnny recently. “But the most important thing to him was the most important thing to me spiritually. You can’t be that close with someone for that length of time… without having the ultimate connection.” Living up to the images that developed through interviews and under the public’s gaze, each seemed to fit the expected role as it made the band easier to ‘read.’ Showbiz sums the dichotomy up thus: “Morrissey’s like ‘I’ll be more elaborate and I’ll be more embroidered,’ and Johnny’s like ‘Well, I’ll be less elaborate [then], and less embroidered than you ever said I am.’”
Because Morrissey wrote the lyrics, it was his interest in literature, theatre and film that was profiled in the press, while Johnny’s most obvious asset is his practical, musical input. Oscar Wilde and Keith Richards. But it is vital not to forget that Johnny is a highly intelligent, literary-inclined man with an interest in esoteric literatures and cultures too. Over the years, his declared interest in Native American culture, the writings of Eastern mystics, his constant assimilation of cultural values and mores betrays a man as articulate in the languages of the higher arts as his partner. Similar misrepresentation have smudged the reality of dozens of bands over the years. Socialite Mick Jagger, cricket buff and friend of royalty, and Keith the heroin-addicted, Jack Daniels-quaffing survivor
ignores Keith Richards’ highly articulate and well-spoken actual self. The image of acerbic John the wit, and Macca the thumbs-up tunesmith, ignores the fact that while Lennon was sat at home watching
Meet The Wife
and putting on weight, it was McCartney who was trawling the London theatres for inspiration, compiling tape loops and listening to Stockhausen. Morrissey and Marr was a successful creative partnership of equals because they were in so many ways very much alike. Both men are softly-spoken, articulate and intelligent book lovers, fans of inspiring pop, each with a fabulous sense of humour and fun. It was only in the media that their characters were drawn so differently. Anyone making the mistake of seeing The Smiths as the product of literary Morrissey and artisan craftsman Marr, beware. Johnny Marr is, as Grant Showbiz puts it, “a sharp cookie!”
Johnny Marr retained great memories of The Smiths, and like all four band members, remained very much a fan of the band that he had created. Asked what his fondest memories were, Johnny remembered the recording sessions, the first exciting thrill of success, and the never-diminishing humour that the band always enjoyed. While his own memories of the group were clouded by his reasons for leaving, Johnny has never had anything other than great things to say about the band itself or its output. It’s touching to note again that – despite all – the four biggest fans of The Smiths have always remained Johnny Marr, Morrissey, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce. They were truly a wonderful thing.
From bedsit strummer, to world-ranked superstar, Johnny Marr was free of The Smiths, and ready to go out and engage the world on his own. The whole world seemed to want him.