Autobiography (33 page)

Rourke was not a fighter, and did his poor best, but everyone who had spoken in court had torn the evidence of Joyce to pieces. So how could the results ever be what they became? Nigel Davis had made so many mistakes – repeatedly referring to Joyce as ‘Johnny’ – but like twin pugs with matching flea collars, Rourke and Joyce were poor company even to each other, yet they allowed the savagely lashing Weeks to know us all much better than we knew ourselves.

Joyce Iscariot raced to the press caped in victory:
‘It’s not about money,’
he kept saying, which told everyone that it had purely and absolutely been about nothing but money. For someone who supposedly ran a case that was not about money, the self-unmade Joyce grabbed as much of it as his tenure on earth might allow, and none of it found its way to charities for the socially displaced.
‘I
just want what’s mine,’
said Joyce, reaching out for that which clearly wasn’t.

Finding nothing in the 1980s to assist the Joyce claim, Weeks instead delves back to the 1890s because, although Weeks is adamant that the partnership was a four-way equal split, he cannot produce anything throughout the history of the band to support this insistence. Joyce was thrown a lifeline, yet the worn-out husk of Joyce looked bewildered, as if he couldn’t quite believe his fortune, like a wobbly Lotto winner. Going easy on Joyce, Weeks tore into me with a thunder reserved for rapists and murderers. In the Smiths case, there had been no proof of intent to break the law, and therefore a charge of intending to break the law could not be made. But! Weeks! How do we rap these outspoken pop stars on the knuckles? How do we put them out of action? Here’s how. Or, at most, we can try. Without a knighthood to shut them up, the vocal pop artist must be nabbed, because otherwise their platform is their freedom. Allied to the peerage, judges keenly relish judicial law because they themselves have probably never been victimized by it, and their knowledge of how the police work in reality is zero. In what might be called the public gallery I had recognized only two faces in the courtroom. The biographer Johnny Rogan (whom Johnny had amusingly re-named Johnny Rodent) had climbed in amongst the small gathering. He wore dark glasses as the tools of his trade so that he could examine others intimately without them catching the dart of his eyes. As self-appointed Smiths historian, Rogan had gained attention as an Albert Grossman cannibal-disguised-as-Christ squealer – presenting every word as factual record and whose prize findings are incriminating evidence. Rejection motivates many biographies because the writers (being ennobling moral exemplars in themselves) gain public fascination due to their betrayal. Popular biography must demystify and destroy in order to have any practical value. I approach him and I speak gently, to which he seems taken aback – as if he half expected me to spring at his throat.

Angie Marr was also present, and as we walk into each other I touch her on the arm, and she looked at me with a shake of the head as if to say
‘and what a sorry ending it all is’.
I recall months of driving around in Angie’s sky-blue Beetle, with Angie at the wheel and Johnny in the passenger seat, wondering how we could persuade this drummer Joyce to have enough faith in us to join our band – never imagining he would launch us into such heavy waters by way of thanks. But whatever begins must end.

Finally, here in the mid-90s, Joyce had a new career. Having been rescued by the Smiths in 1983, he was again rescued in 1996 by the ensuing fame of the court case, beginning once more to be known, and beginning once more to profit by latching onto Morrissey and Marr. Yet the tatty particulars of the case caused a worried consternation, and press photographs scan a
what-HAVE-I-done
countenance across the money-hungry Joyce face. His wife may very well bask in victorious Third Party Orders for the rest of her life, calling instructions to her highwayman from beneath a blistering sunbed, but Joyce has lost his Smiths – now, today, tomorrow and always, and his own sentence begins on the day of his confusing victory, and it would run longer and harder than the sentence bestowed upon me by Weeks. I am as I always was. No future band came to the aid of Joyce, presumably in fear that he might do to them what he had done to the Smiths.

Collecting his enormous winnings, Joyce is a little boy of 45, a friendly heart only wanting what’s fair and due, and it is with Nigel Davis that Joyce systematically and dutifully stands, steeped in eternity, as money changes everything. But in the years to come, when Joyce shouts out for a Smiths reunion (and why would he want one if his experience the first time around had supposedly been so bad
?
), it will not be to either Nigel Davis or John Weeks that Joyce calls.

The role of Joyce had always been so elementary that it never needed to be explained. With the face of a philosophical horse, Nigel Davis was the newly appointed Smiths patron. It was he who knew how things were and how things must be: Morrissey was inherently evil at all times, and Marr was given credit for untiring gibberish. Rourke and Joyce were the sensible of the four, and so fastidiously united that they lacked only matching nose-rings. Yet Joyce spoke in generalities so vague that he obviously could not convince even himself about his own powers of contribution. Surely Weeks knew that Joyce needed several attempts at his own Witness Statement – such was the certainty of his facts? As the limited mumble of words tumbled from mumbo jumbo Joyce, his theory of always being a 25 per cent partner had never actually been tested at any point in his Smiths career, and on this howling fact alone surely the law would somewhere, somehow, find in favor of Morrissey and Marr and not Joyce, if Weeks had felt open to such reasoning? Shouldn’t Joyce be punished for never taking his own business matters into his own hands? As an equal partner, why leave your tax issues to Johnny Marr?

However, Joyce was not the point and the outcome was the opposite of how things were and how things had always been. Throughout the trial I had been tested and tested every single minute – leaving me wondering if the end had already been drawn up. Each time any statement was made by others, Weeks seemed to dart his eyes towards me, in order to weigh the effect. Unable to get his way with his mother, Nigel Davis is alive in his courtroom, with the mouth of an excluded three-year-old, thrilled to be our executioner, and delighted at his own ability to recite interminable passages of law – done with a lap-dog smile, longing to be taken up and placed on the judge’s knee. On two occasions it is all so ridiculous that I laugh, and commandant Weeks catches this (since his obsessive glare never seems to leave me), and his return tells me that the commandant is annoyed, and if all of this sounds silly – that’s because it was.

Amid trumpets, the judgment of Weeks announces my funeral.
I, I, I, –
the droning climax.
I, I, I.
The deathly component is probably all the more enraged because I do not attend the handing down of judgment, yet there sat Marr, Rourke and Joyce in their web of sorrow and cheap suits, Joyce still no doubt drumming his mantra through his head:
I do not think or see or remember, I just assume.
One trial closes, but another far longer trial begins. The Smiths are underaged children, and here the comedy plays out. How can someone who is not creative pass judgment on someone who is?

The pride of the pipsqueakery, John Weeks begins his judgment by falling flat on his fat face: he brilliantly announces to the world how the Smiths formed in 1992 – his judicial accuracy not to be questioned!

‘In 1992 Mr Marr was playing guitar with the help and encouragement from an older man, Mr Joseph Moss.’

The year, of course, was 1982, but John Weeks is apparently unable to recall this most basic fact.

Weeks further insists that the January 1984
Top of the Pops
for
What difference d
oes it make?
was the Smiths’ first appearance on the show, which was hopelessly incorrect. Stranger still, the notion that
What difference does it make?
had been the first ever appearance on
Top of the Pops
by the Smiths had not even been suggested by anyone in the case! Based on these errors, by now it seemed that Weeks was in a perilous dreamland of his own making.

Weeks refers to a document drawn up by myself and Johnny in 1982 claiming copyright of our work recorded under the name of the Smiths, and holding the rights to extinguish involvement of additional group members. Weeks said this document had no value ‘because it was not shown to the other members of the band’ even though at the time there
were no other members of the band.
If there had been other members, and if those members had seen the document, Weeks did not say what difference this would have made.

Weeks describes me as being ‘more assertive’ than Johnny, which is a description that no one now or then would say is true, yet it is not contested by the one person who ought to have spoken up – Johnny himself.

Weeks claimed:
‘Morrissey liked to make decisions but lacked the courage or the will to communicate them to others.’

Since my entire personality covered almost every speck of the Smiths’ presentation and lifespan, how did Weeks consider all of this to have been conveyed – via a medium? If what Weeks had claimed was right, how could there ever have been the Smiths? What would the band even be
called
?

His next verdict is on page 2 of his judgment:

‘Morrissey first decided that he wanted to control the finances with Mr Marr.’

This appalling statement seemed to me to reveal what I would argue in the Court of Appeal was the bias of John Weeks. Weeks had never been told that such a thing were true, and Weeks seemed to disregard the fact that Joe Moss had initially acted as quasi-manager in the early stages and had opened a company called Glad Hips, the finances of which Joe controlled. Yet, here, Weeks decides of his own fantastic volition:
‘Mr Morrissey decided that he wanted to control the finances with Mr Marr’
– of course, allowing Marr to ‘tag on’ and not to be circled as a decision-maker himself. It had been made plain to Weeks that neither Morrissey nor Marr could implement any business decisions without joint cooperation from one another, but already we see a judge dispensing verdicts that, to my mind, didn’t fit the evidence he had been provided with, as he rewrites the whole script.

On page 3 of the judgment Weeks supplies a further half dozen factual errors, as he introduces Rourke and Joyce as
‘the other two’
. If the concrete basis of this judgment is to establish proof of equal partnership, why would the judge introduce Rourke and Joyce as
‘the other two’
? Why are they ‘other’ – which means different, unrelated or additional?

‘Mr Morrissey decided that he wanted himself and Mr Marr to have a larger share of the group’s income than the other two,’
is the next verdict made by Judge Weeks, along with,
‘Mr Morrissey wanted a larger slice of the group’s recording and other income.’

This seemingly ignores the Morrissey–Marr partnership wherein no decision could be made by one without the other, and ignores the fact that a 40:40:10:10 split had remained in place for the following fourteen years – unprotested by Marr. Weeks did not explain what he meant by ‘other income’, and since he has the last judicial word, no one is allowed to ask him to be clear about whatever he is trying to say.

Weeks claimed that the 40:40:10:10 split made Marr unhappy:
‘and he considered leaving the group,’
yet Weeks does not explain that Marr, in fact, did
NOT
leave the group, and instead continued with the 40:40:10:10 split for the coming fourteen years. By this statement, Weeks is confident that a person’s actions are far less important than their thoughts. One might assume that whatever anyone
CONSIDERED
doing would be of no interest to a judge. All proof of conduct is in action. The vulgar picture being painted may be of blurred vision, but its result is to crack apart the Morrissey–Marr partnership in order to punish one and to pity the other. Johnny allowed this finagling to be announced by Weeks, even though he, like me, must have felt it was blatantly unfair and fallacious.

By page 4, John Weeks states that everyone in the band was ‘unhappy’ with Morrissey, but that ‘they continued playing together’. Of course, if everyone had been unhappy, they would not continue to play together. The reality suggests that they were not unhappy at all.

Weeks refers to an ‘initial meeting’ with a solicitor named Bowen, the word ‘initial’ suggesting that consequent meetings took place. Weeks knew very well that there had only ever been one meeting with Bowen.
‘Mr Morrissey did not take to Mr Bowen and he was not retained generally to act for the group.’
As Weeks knew, Mr Bowen was not retained
at all
– but the word ‘generally’ opens the notion that Mr Bowen might have been utilized for some matters, but not all. Weeks also knew that Bowen was equally disliked by both Morrissey and Marr, but Weeks does not include the name Marr, and Morrissey is hooked in as the bully.

Weeks points out that Bowen ‘wrote two letters’, but does not say on whose instructions, and he sidesteps the fact that both letters were unsolicited, and nor does Weeks mention how Bowen had misspelled my own name eight times – which is hardly something a solicitor would do if actively representing a client.
Lee
|
please|stand up and defend me.

But let the bigger picture build.
‘The second letter from Mr Bowen is written to Morrissey’s mother, who took a keen interest in her son’s career.’
Weeks does not mention that neither letter from Bowen received a reply, or that after the one and only meeting with Bowen, Morrissey and Marr neither spoke to, or even met, Bowen again, and no fees from Edmonds Bowen & Co were ever sought from Morrissey and Marr, yet Bowen is referred to as ‘the band’s solicitor’ by Davis during the trial and then by Weeks, even though there was clear evidence that Mr Bowen was someone met only briefly by Morrissey and Marr. If Bowen had been ‘the band’s solicitor’, as Weeks firmly planted, why had Bowen never once billed Morrissey or Marr – or ‘the band’ – for his work? Is any solicitor so blind with dedication that they work for free?