EXTRACT FROM MEETINGS WITH MORRISSEY
By Len Brown
One autumn evening, in late September 1983, an ex-girlfriend, the Sounds writer Rose Rouse, tried to persuade me to go to the Venue near London’s Victoria. “A new Manchester band,” she told me, “strangely called The Smiths.” I’d already heard about them but, negative to a fault, I couldn’t really see a band named “The Smiths” getting very far. What were they thinking about? Most chart acts at the time had complex mysterious monikers like Depeche Mode, Blue Rondo A La Turk, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, even Kajagoogoo. But The Smiths?!? I even wondered if they were anything to do with the ubiquitous Robert Smith from The Cure, who’d also played with Siouxsie & The Banshees.
I’d remembered reading a Jim Shelley’s review in NME which had ticked all the right ‘Independent’ boxes but, cynically, I’d assumed it was just another Manchester writer enthusing about some of his post-punk mates. (Shelley received thanks on the sleeve of The Smiths’ debut.)
At first, I declined Rose’s invitation. It wasn’t just lack of money and enthusiasm, more the doom-laden word ‘Manchester’. I hadn’t articulated the notion but obviously I associated the city with my dead brother Don’s addiction to Joy Division and New Order, with the Hacienda, with the scary Granada Television images of Ian Curtis dancing madly and dead-eyed, to ‘Shadowplay’ or ‘Transmission’; with the closing door of the ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ video; with the deathly beautiful but darkly funereal pulse of Atmosphere.
Frankly, I wouldn’t have gone out that night if it hadn’t been for Rose and, equally important, The Go Betweens. Don had left me their Postcard singles and ‘Hammer The Hammer’ had been one of the best things on Rough Trade Records earlier that summer. I’d grown fond of the Australian band and had recently bought ‘Cattle & Cane’ and ‘Before Hollywood’. (There was something more than relevant about Grant McLennan’s ‘A Bad Debt Follows You’.)
My plan, on the bus to Victoria that night, was to catch The Go Betweens, cadge a few drinks from Rose, and briefly check out these Smiths. But, it did cross my mind as odd that the relatively well-known Go-Betweens, with their still-rising Indie-label pedigree, were now supporting a Northern band only beginning to make an impact. In truth, I knew next to nothing about The Smiths’ debut single, ‘Hand In Glove’, except that its cover flaunted a photograph of naked male buttocks. How very odd.
The Smiths, I soon learnt, had started out in Manchester a year earlier and had recently signed to Rough Trade Records. They’d just recorded a John Peel session and also appeared on the Kid Jenson Radio One show, but ‘Hand In Glove’ had failed to make any serious impact on the mainstream British charts. Reading the press, they didn’t sound like my sort of group at all although, intriguingly, Barney Hoskyns in NME described the single as “a pure redemption of all the suffering that’s ever been poured down love’s drain”.
That night, entering the Venue, everything felt different. There was a huge sense of anticipation and great expectation; the atmosphere was extraordinary. A diverse crowd too, not exclusively the purist New Romantic brigade from the Beat Route or Billys, or the gay scene regulars of Heaven and Hell. There were also lots of students, plus many younger teenagers in charity shop chic, wearing second hand American clothes from Flip or Lawrence Corner, mingling with Jo Boxer fashion victims and other renegade elements of the 1983 London music scene.
The Go Betweens were really entertaining – they always would be – performing those sweetly-crafted, slightly weird, Antipodean-skewed songs. When their set ended, I half-expected the atmosphere to change. Surely, the crowd would thin out as, like me, the majority probably expected The Smiths to struggle in the wake of their confident Rough Trade label mates.
I remember being at the bar with Rose, briefly being introduced to David Dorrell – then an NME journalist and early champion of The Smiths - as the mood began to change. Clusters of pale love-sick youths started to creep forward, and the initial anticipatory hush was followed by whistles and screams of first rapture, then applause, as four young Mancunians sloped, almost shyly, onto the flower-strewn stage.
It’s all about time and place, isn’t it? Rarely in your life will music alter or affect you in a dramatic way. Maybe it was like watching Elvis live in 1956, or The Beatles at the Cavern, or The Stones at the Crawdaddy. In a flash, mentally and visually, music becomes important; as if, as the cliche goes, what’s happened before is black and white in your memory and then, suddenly, it’s all colour; not the MTV-contrived, storyboarded version but the raw, in-the-flesh moment when the art form truly begins to make sense. Suddenly you see the point and believe what you’re hearing. As if it has some magical power to change you. For that moment onwards you feel you’re part of something different, something original. It gives you hope.
That’s how I felt when I saw The Smiths that night at The Venue. Still in their teens, Mike Joyce (The Drums) and Johnny Marr (The Guitars) looked born rock stars, with the right working-class faces and the right haircuts. Even Andy Rourke (The Bass) looked less primeval, more integral, than other bassists I’d witnessed.
Above all, the sound they made together was extraordinary and magnificent and unfashionably free from synthesisers. From the opening frenetic, inspiring burst of ‘Handsome Devil’, it became rapidly clear that here was something unique and passionate but also aggressive.
Every band needs a focal point. How often have you heard a strong, intelligent song on the radio and been driven by curiosity and optimism to see the artist live, only to be savagely disappointed when the creator in question churns their uncharismatic way through a ‘performance’ (see Dylan, Bob). All great live “acts” depend heavily on a showman, someone you can’t take your eyes off, someone blessed with charisma - whether it’s Jagger or Bono or Lennon or Van Morrison or Youssou N’Dour or Madonna or Hutchence or Prince or Ian Curtis or Rotten or Strummer or Docherty.
It’s not about simple beauty or straightforward sexuality. It’s perhaps more mystical and mysterious than that. There’s a magnetism that can’t be manufactured or stage-managed. Precious few have it. As a spectator, even when you attempt to survey the wider scene, like moths to flames, your addicted eyes are drawn back, irresistibly, towards one particular bright spark.
Morrissey was like that from the moment I saw him. Initially he seemed ridiculous; an early, exaggerated, cartoon version of the person he would become. I can’t remember whether it was the cliff of hair – I’d caught the weird and wonderful Split Endz in the late Seventies (as had Morrissey!) and, believe me, the Mancunian lead singer’s locks in ‘83 were definitely drifting into that madly hirsute beyond-rockabilly territory - or the desperately ill-fitting jeans, or the big girls blouse from Evans (purveyors of clothes for large women) that intrigued me first, or maybe just the strange unhealthily thin carriage of the man. (Jessica Berens in the American rock magazine Spin would describe his topiary-style features as “albescent, almost greenish… the hair could have been designed by an imaginative hedge trimmer.”)
What Morrissey was wearing might not sound outrageously significant, but at the time it was strangely radical in an utterly anti-fashion sense. We were still in the throes of rampant New Romanticism with all the trappings. Steve Strange, Boy George, Marilyn and Spandau Ballet were the peacock punks of London’s nightlife.
Pop music was a circus and everyone in the charts in 1983 looked comically ridiculous, from The Thompson Twins to Duran Duran; glamorously made-up and dressed to impress after the anarchic bondage and bandages of punk or the heavy overcoats sported by Joy Division’s young men (“the weight on their shoulders”). In this ridiculous context, an underfed scrawny bloke in baggy-bottomed jeans with a Billy Fury hairdo looked like a creature from another planet.
“Morrissey” – how oddly pretentious, why didn’t he want to be called Steven? - moved awkwardly, differently. In a way he wasn’t right, he wasn’t normal, and yet he looked so right up there onstage; an odd combination of self-consciousness and outrageous confidence yet without arrogance; like a showman in a straitjacket, screaming to get out… or back in.
Then there was the voice; so distinctively, proudly, un-mistakenly Northern; weather-beaten and world-weary, slightly lispish in delivery, a naturally soft tenor, prone to adventure towards the upper register and even climax in falsetto. Few white pop stars – only Sparks, Bowie and Billy Mackenzie of The Associates sprang to mind (those yodelling love children of Frank Ifield) - had carried this off before.
What he was saying, the words to these strangely structured songs, couldn’t be readily understood that night in the Venue and yet seemed instantly poignant and humorous and confessional. Without being utterly ridiculed, no one else involved in the confidence trick of pop music could or would have sung a high-pitched line about the “terrible mess I’ve made of my life”.
Or admitted he was jobless purely because “I’ve never wanted one”. Or shrilly piped “nobody ever looks at me twice”. This extraordinary lyrical, strangely sexual, musical poetry poured forth sounding freshly-invented even when obviously half-stolen: “you can pin and mount me…like a butterfly.”
The onstage chemistry was remarkable too. From the outset there was a clear, strong sense of partnership to the central Morrissey and Marr relationship but also a visual unity between all four members of The Smiths; perfectly in tune, musically, stylistically and artistically, and – in contrast with so many other acts I witnessed back in the early 1980s - this combination conveyed a real sense of original talent at work.
These were songs so different from what had gone before, such a contrast to the spitfire anger of punk or the self-indulgent twaddle of New Romanticism (eg: “Se tourne pour se cacher, We fade to grey”). Sounding proudly “Independent” rather than manufactured and “Major” (at a time when the label a band signed with was regarded as a political and philosophical statement), The Smiths created uplifting guitar music that acted as the perfect backdrop to Morrissey’s realistic rather than pessimistic poetry.
Believe me. ‘This Charming Man’, performed live for the first time that night at the Venue, was breathtakingly brilliant, instantly addictive, a work of art you wanted to have and hold from that moment onwards. Johnny Marr - this young guitar hero, the George Best of Independent music, when such a craft was unfashionably vilified outside the big hair arena of Heavy Metal - stood and played with such mastery and confidence and sheer style that it was hard to believe it all chimed forth from him alone.
It was, and is, and ever more shall be, a marvellous two-minutes-forty-seconds wonder of a pop song, dripping with echoes of great guitar music from the past, yet fresh and new and awe-inspiring. Above the beauty of this complex music, Morrissey’s chorus was instantly unforgettable, theatrically camp, extremely funny and clever, particularly at the point in pop culture when clothes (in an almost quasi-Mod way) were supposed to be more important than life itself: “I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear…”.
True, I was young and impressionable then, and in desperate need of something to believe in, but among the congregation on the Venue floor, we all seemed to be aware we were witnessing the beginnings of something really special.
Apart from the sheer quality of the music live what remains in the memory is the warm sense that we were like minded spirits. There was no aggression, no spitting, just the occasional volley of gladioli or cut-price daffodils flying overhead.
Accepting The Smiths, we felt we were embracing a more tolerant and tolerable world, that we were being realistic about life and death, focusing on what’s vital but prepared to address head-on the problems we were all facing: fear of the future, a physical lack of confidence, the unrequited desire to be ourselves, to be unconditionally loved for who we really were.
Other songs pierced my ears and stuck in my heart. ‘Still Ill’, ‘What Difference Does It Make?’, the absurdly confident calling-card first single ‘Hand In Glove’ (“the sun shines out of our behinds”) and ‘Reel Around The Fountain’, with its echoes of Andy Warhol in its famous desire for “fifteen minutes with you”.
Not that this Morrissey character said much between songs. His shyness and awkwardness seemed to return whenever the music stopped, as if his self-confidence was struggling to play musical chairs. “Hello you gruesome devils,” he quipped, theatrically, after the opening songs then, during the inevitable encore, he urges: “You’ll have to do it eventually so do it now... accept yourself”.
Before the death he encouraged a shambolic second-hand student stage invasion, but even this was an affectionate pacifist affair, almost a love-in rather than a Sham 69 scrum. Security looked uncertain, embarrassed, emasculated even, because there were grown men onstage unashamedly hugging the lead singer. But the only danger Morrissey faced was of being smothered with flowers and kisses. What a way to die. I’d never seen anything like it.
Although as far removed as physically possible from the excruciating closing sequences on Seventies’ Top Of The Pops - when dolly bird punters in mini-skirts or hot pants danced along with ageing DJs in tank-tops – the chasm between performer and audience was beautifully bridged. Finally, Morrissey departs graciously with the words “stay handsome”.
It was a fantastic, memorable evening. The effortless brilliance of The Smiths had made the fine Go Betweens seem unexceptional, even run of the mill. I’d been moved by live performances before – T. Rex in 1974, Talking Heads in 1978, The Clash in 1979 - but there was a much stronger, warmer, lasting glow of connection between The Smiths and their growing band of fans.
Ian Curtis may well, in vain, have been “waiting for a guide” to take him by the hand. In Morrissey, that night in Victoria, it seemed we had found someone like us. Not so much a leader, but more a voice in the wilderness, for the uncertain, the outcasts, the equivocal, the misunderstood.
For all we cared, they could write us off as social inadequates, as the broken-hearted bed-sit brigade, or as un-ambitious underlings gently trying not to be crushed by the wheels of Thatcherism. If you didn’t want to sell your soul to capitalism or dedicate your life to the pursuit of money, or perhaps if you were struggling with love and self-love, then in Morrissey and his Smiths you were offered an alternative, bearable path through the political chaos and the musical mediocrity of the Eighties; a self-help group with great pop songs.
I thanked Rose Rouse with all my heart and took the long walk home alone, over Vauxhall Bridge towards Kennington, back to my rented room in Camberwell.
Copyright Len Brown, Omnibus Press, 2008