Autobiography (14 page)

‘We’ve met before, y’know,’
he says,
‘I’m glad you don’t remember.’

Ooh
, but I do.

It had been in the foyer of the Ardwick Apollo, where Patti Smith had displayed her radiant stallions gradually lapping into seahorses nervousness. I stood in conversation with Philip Towman (another Wythenshawe musicologist), when Johnny first shoved his face in, and he said, ‘
You’ve got a funny voice.’
The comment contained an oblique confession, which said: you don’t talk as shockingly bad as I do. In fact, Johnny later confessed that prior to meeting me he had pronounced the word ‘guitar’ without the t, so Ardwick-mangled the parlance. I couldn’t imagine how this would be possible, or how he could be understood. I am shaken when I hear Johnny play guitar, because he is quite obviously gifted and almost unnaturally multi-talented. Since he shows an exact perspective on all things, I can’t help but wonder:
What is he doing here with me?
Formulating writing systems and mapping out how best to blend our dual natures – here, against the hiss of the paraffin lamp, and me wrapped in the sanctity of an enormous overcoat acquired in a Denver charity shop for $5. Why has Johnny not already sprayed his mark – elsewhere, with others less scarred and less complicated than I am? It seemed to me that Johnny had enough spark and determination to push his way in amongst Manchester’s headhunters – yet here he was, with someone whose natural bearing discouraged openness. Stranger still, we get on very well. It is a matter of finding yourself in possession of the one vital facet that the other lacks, but needs.

There are months to follow when Johnny and I – along with Angie (Johnny’s lifelong girlfriend) – concentrate deeply on the realization of the dream. For the first time in my life the future is more important than the past. Angie’s view in 1982 (and for the next five years, at least) held a bravely impartial and apolitical quality, and she would never be of the Girlfriend Syndrome who are famously destructive of the band that causes their love life momentary pause. Angie would always be intelligently supportive and ready to block gunfire; an honorable tack far superior to the commonplace and dreaded musician-girlfriend who would habitually cause infallible destruction and petty squabbles at Thatcherite levels. I suggest to Johnny that we call ourselves the Smiths, and he agrees. Neither of us can come up with anything else. It strikes me that the Smiths name lacks any settled association on face value, yet could also suit a presentation of virtually any style of music. It sounded like a timeless name, unlikely to date, and unlikely to glue itself to come-and-go movements: it could very well be Hancock Park of 1947, or Hulme of 1968; it could be primitive or developed – the Smithy poets of bygone Russia, or the servitude of the hard-working, and so on.

Johnny calls in bass player Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce after a few stop-start sessions with other musicians. Andy and Mike are also of Irish stock and are both overly capable of a tough and masterly sound. Mike calls his flashy drumkit ‘Elsie’, and is the most experienced of all four of us. Both Andy and Mike are very funny, and the four of us look right together. We rehearse assiduously, but each passing week sees either Andy or Mike deciding that they’d rather not be a part of it, and Johnny darts after one or the other brimming with a persuasion that never fails. A damned soul, I play no part in the persuasion since I have no experience of ever persuading anyone to do anything. It is Johnny who pulls Andy back, and it is Johnny who races after Mike, and surgical persistence always wins the day.

A major stroke of luck is the enormous rehearsal room in central Manchester which owner Joe Moss loyally offers to Johnny free of charge. It is this rehearsal space that makes us, and it is here that we are free to re-order the universe; no dabbling, no squabbling, no tinkering about. Mike has recently won a court action against some unfortunate, and he is flushed with cash, but it is understandably not for the Smiths’ pot and the burden of getting favors called in lands on Johnny’s shoulders. The Smiths’ sound rockets with meteoric progression; bomb-burst drumming, explosive chords, combative bass-lines, and over it all I am as free as a hawk to paint the canvas as I wish. It is a gift from Jesus.

I sing out to the youth of the slums, and
Hand in glove
and
Still ill
anchor four lives together – four lives unlikely to be anchored together for any other reason.

The sound registered on these rehearsal nights above Crazy Face jeans shop left me with no doubt whatsoever that the Smiths worked on many levels, and let battle commence. Swiftly our set was assembled – each trial run of every song an excruciating torment of excitement; nothing ever failed, nothing ever stumbled.
The harsh intensity of every song gave immediate rise to an indescribable stimulation mixed with impatience. Here, at last, it all is. I had been far too ingrained with pessimism to ever allow myself the indulgence of illusion, but suddenly life was close to me, and as I belted out
Miserable l
ie
with the full of my body I no longer felt like an overgrown forget-me-not. The bedrock of sound from all three instruments was as commando-tough as could be imagined, and with it, I felt as strong as a lion.

Johnny’s boy-about-town associations brought our first gigs, and Manchester’s weary intelligentsia edged out to form a visual line of those-in-the-know. Richard Boon had operated New Hormones Records on Newton Street, and had managed both Buzzcocks and Ludus, as well as the Beach Club. He would remain a constant throughout the Smiths’ journey and was always encouraging (even though his expressionist jargon often swamped logic in far too much existentialism – if only for the Park Drive hell of it). Writer Jon Savage was also there; a friend to me, of sorts, whose flat on Wilbraham Road I would visit on nights of mourning, fascinated by Jon’s Punk dissertations, his vintage Jag, and tales of his childhood in Kensington,
where he had an entire floor of an Edwardian house to himself – such the indulgence of an only child by comfortable parents. Both Jon and Richard were always a magnificent whirlpool of words. Also present at the first few Smiths gigs was local newshound Anthony Wilson, to whom I had given a copy of the New York Dolls’ first album in 1975.
‘I’ve never heard of them,’
he said, so keenly lay his finger on the pulse. Having latched on to the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop for his television show
So It Goes
, Wilson now assumed the cognoscenti cloak and found himself blessed with the need to assess, judge and grade – like a war general plastered with rows of ribbons but who had never actually seen battle himself. At an early Smiths night Wilson offers an opinion that no one has asked for:

‘I’m not so sure about Johnny.
Hand in glove
is
Rebel rebel
. All this Byrds stuff has been done and done.’

The comment tests me in my new role as Johnny’s comrade, and I fail because I allow meat-fed Wilson to say his piece.

Reacting against everything, the Smiths are an instant touring unit, with Joe Moss as four-stripe commander leading us up and down the M1. We are swiftly reviewed in glowing terms by the national press, and a Smiths coterie forms in every British city like an army on the march. The exhilaration is bracing, since we are very much apart from any previous factions and actions, trailing no one, and very much our own campaign. We stood alone and we drove our own crusade, our touring fortified by front-of-house engineer Grant Showbiz, whose great wit and inherent decency strengthened the Smiths’ quest. Even when the walls caved in, Grant remained an eloquent positive. The groups from Punk’s overspill continued to rabble-rouse in large armies, but the Smiths drew a line under the past with a detachment that presented a confidential perspective, and one that would never snap. The vat of agitprop, melody and self-culture all mish-mashed into a strong autonomous weapon that seemed on the face of it to be academic, yet appealed to heavily scarred jostlers. Something other than safe and dreary success was happening. EMI Records jumped in first, and paid for three recordings (
What difference does it make?
,
Handsome d
evil
and
Miserable lie
), and then they just as quickly rejected the results. Our paltry finances were gathered to record
Hand in glove
under our own steam, which we planned to present to the venerable and wonky Rough Trade Records at their rinky-dink west London tower of power. I am certain that my vocal is not good enough, and I suffer my first professional wobble. Joe Moss finds the cash to allow me to re-record the vocals, and we are all saved. Johnny and I journey to London for an agreed appointment with Geoff Travis, who is the moral conscience of Rough Trade.

Whatever it was that Rough Trade were, they were not a hip label, and by their appearance, Rough Trade personnel in the early 1980s need never have feared sexual assault. Everything was a question of personal identity, and Rough Trade set out to assert autonomy whilst at the same time challenging the established order. They did this largely by pressing records that no one wanted to buy. They were postmodernism up the pole. The dominant culture sought to sell many and very quickly, whereas Rough Trade’s service was to new artistic forms and slightly forbidden subject matter. Although the existing Rough Trade catalogue was known to be anti-Everything, it was also anti-listenable, and it would take the Smiths to bring a level of success and glamor to Rough Trade that the label had never dared hope for, and suddenly the smell of money replaced the smell of overcooked rice in the Rough Trade cloisters. The Smiths would pull Rough Trade out of the water – and would continue to do so long after the group had ended. Significant future signings were of groups who mostly wanted to be on Rough Trade because the Smiths once had been, and not because of the hysterical intellectual spinster image that the label had considered so confrontational until
Hand in glove
shattered their afternoons of wok rotas, poetry workshops and
Woman’s Hour
. Lugubrious historian Geoff Travis looked bitterly upon the Smiths because, on the day that Johnny and I arrived for our scheduled meeting (clutching
Hand in glove
), Geoff waved us away and didn’t want to see us. It was only because Johnny chased after Geoff and pinned him to the swivel-chair in Geoff’s private hutch that Geoff very reluctantly listened to the music.

‘Well, it’s excellent and I’d like to release it immediately,’
said the man who, four minutes earlier, wouldn’t even say hello. From that moment on, once ‘the Smiths’ (actually just Johnny and I) were signed to Rough Trade, Geoff removed his Vivian Stanshall cape and made an impressive effort to erase the old-governess spirit of Rough Trade with a tearless goodbye to their fair-trade essence of hiring dwarfs on stilts to pack and shift; or of rolling along in tight circumstances that favored social awareness, musicians’ collectives, the communal vote, homemade bread and an unsexed all-hands-on-deck concept that had thread its way to some attention with Robert Wyatt’s
Shipbuilding.
In his wheelchair, Robert was the very picture of the Rough Trade pop star, with a hit song that had cloistered nuns the world over tapping their habits. Certainly, there could be no shame attached to wheelchairs, but there aren’t many in the Top 40. Ever after, Rough Trade became the Smiths label, and mostly – but not strictly – the label joined the Smiths’ world into the 1990s and beyond. Because of the Smiths, Rough Trade became known in Woolworths warehouses and Croydon kitchens, and the label’s tubercular image of the 1970s – hand-crafted on a spinning jenny by Geoff Travis – was scorched off the face of the earth. Once the Smiths had ended, Rough Trade became hopeful ever after of similar groups – and found them, without ever creating a group that was free of the Smiths mold. But the brutally drab initial imprint of Rough Trade died of chest complaints at the King’s Head pub in Islington – face down on a beer-stained copy of
Spare Rib
magazine, and never again would a band resembling the Raincoats be entertained by Rough Trade. The Smiths provided Geoff Travis with a surprise ending, and showed him the way to a more playful world where – for the very first time – the music papers suddenly saw Geoff Travis as the uncrowned king of musical taste, and Geoff thus joined the immortal worthies – amoral wealth here, a Brit Award there, reliant no more on fly-posting the sacred word at Compendium Books in Camden. Suddenly, post-Smiths, Rough Trade belonged to the world of publicity rather than poetry, and, without any sense of texture whatsoever, Geoff’s over-cautious admiration for Morrissey and Marr meant that his label would never die. He, of course, has no choice but to tell you otherwise. With owl-like wisdom, Geoff would dispense with the older custom-made RT retainers and replace them with workers who looked like Smiths followers.
Because they were
.

A born trick-cyclist, Geoff would even climb back into the 1990s ring with a new sense of sartorial style – a physical impossibility during his John Dowie days, when matching the sales of Virgin’s
Kew Rhone
was the ultimate strike. Rough Trade became an industry of shops and bags and hip-kid accessories – none of which featured the face of Robert Wyatt. Once knitting for the troops, Geoff suddenly looked like someone who had inherited a shipping fortune, and Rough Trade were magically up there with Melrose Avenue, James Dean and
In Cold Blood.
However, when ‘the Smiths’ signed to Rough Trade, the British music papers laughed at the misstep, or expressed sympathetic doubt that the move would not stifle the band. The vinegary spinster face of Rough Trade was no place for anyone seeking public attention, but it worked because the Smiths worked, and for the first time in his life Geoff was over-matched. Haunted, he could never praise the Smiths. When
The South Bank Show
pieced together a Smiths documentary, Geoff said to me,
‘I’m glad I wasn’t interviewed because I wouldn’t be able to think of anything good to say.’

‘
Did they ask you to take part?’
I said.

‘Well
...
no,’
he said, softly.

Geoff would instead maintain that the Smiths were just one of many who tumbled in and out of his office, even though, prior to the Smiths, what tangible experience had he of success? He still wore his old school jumper, as the very pleasant music of Peter Blegvad rang through the bunkers and lumber rooms of Rough Trade until the Smiths shook the bats out of the hayloft. It seemed that Geoff’s excitement was held back by his unwillingness to share public attention. He works and wins alone. But he must surely be aware that, without the Smiths, he would have found himself wandering from kaftan to kaftan; the Westway above slamming out the Who or the Clash, but not the recalcitrant Smiths – who saved his life and made it count in the long run.

Johnny and I signed to Rough Trade as ‘the Smiths’, witnessed by Andy and Mike, with Mike signing the document as a reliable witness. (Years later, in a distant courtroom, he will say that he did not have sight of such a document, and the
most
honorable judge will believe him – even though his signature is there on the contract for the world and the
most
honorable judge to see – should their eyes ever open.) £3,000 is handed over by the label, followed by a further £3,000 on July 29th 1983 – the lives of Morrissey and Marr fully purchased, our skinny white bodies lowered into the Rough Trade cauldron. From this windfall, I pay a lavish domestic telephone bill of £80, and the rest is put into a bank account named Smithdom that will fill our tank up and down and across the M1. Geoff shuttles the band to New York (in row 62, cattle class), where Seymour Stein awaits with a deal to sign the Smiths (ostensibly) to Sire Records. The deal, though, is not quite what it seems (are they ever?), and Seymour is in fact signing Rough Trade for licensing access to the Smiths. As thick as two short planks, Johnny and I sign – once again witnessed by Andy and Mike. We have no idea what we’re signing, in an act of legendary mental deficiency.

The champagne does not flow, and indeed there will never be one instance in the Smiths’ history with Rough Trade when Geoff would treat the band to a lavish none-too-cheap dinner or salutary clink of earthenware. Celebratory toasts never befell the Smiths, and it was a mark of our quaint drowsiness that we hardly noticed. Johnny and I continued to live on a strict diet of chocolate, crisps, chips and Coca-Cola, and with such an a la carte menu board we undertook lengthy tours. Both the Rough Trade contract and the Sire contract were signed by Johnny and I as the Smiths because the name and the project, with all of its ideas and concerns and worries, were ours alone, and no one else’s. Although Andy and Mike would soon ‘rally round the flag’, they hadn’t yet, and both still looked askance at this funny little Smithy gamble, with their eyes agape for better opportunities.

The release of
Hand in g
love
told me, at least, that I existed. Every night for months the record is played on Radio One, either by David Jensen or John Peel, and I stand by the radio listening – a disfigured beast finally unchained from the ocean floor. The song rises out of the radio, and there is immediate support from music writers of integrity.
The initial 6,000 pressing sells quickly, and the land is ours. The rush of success surged with certainty, and the press began stories of the Smiths turning down six-figure offers from CBS and Virgin, preferring instead Rough Trade – which was untrue. The only label that had offered the Smiths a deal was Rough Trade. Suddenly,
Number One
magazine lists
Hand in g
love
at number 70 on their official Top 100, and our unrelenting self-financed touring attracts John Walters, who is producer and acting scout for the John Peel radio show. Our timetable then erupts with a series of radio sessions for both David Jensen and John Peel, and our reputation swells a hundredfold. It is a great feeling. John Peel, though, did not ever come to see the Smiths play live, and he did not attend any of the radio sessions. He is cited as instrumental in the Smiths’ success, but if not for the continual exuberance of John Walters, John Peel could never have encountered the Smiths. When I accidentally meet John Peel over the years (two times, and both in motorway service stations), he shyly has nothing to say on both occasions.