Books / Hidden meanings

Saga of The Smiths

Do The Smiths summon any instant songs from your memories? Does the mere mention of “Heavens Knows I’m Miserable Now” get you humming, or the memory of “How Soon Is Now” spark the feet to dancing?

Admission: I recall always liking this key British band of the mid-1980s, and treasuring a cassette tape I’ve kept of their best works, culled from an American Sire Records compilation of their heady British hits. But reading Tony Fletcher’s epic new biography of the influential band, A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga Of The Smiths, I had trouble keeping an internal soundtrack running to match the concise manner by which the Phoenicia-based writer dissects not only the gripping story of their rise and breakup, but also the innate specialness of both their music and music-making.

Founded, Lennon and McCartney style, on the meeting of two disparate post-teens in the northern English industrial city of Manchester, Fletcher’s account of what guitarist Johnny Marr and lyricist/singer Morrissey created builds from a series of side journeys into the music scene of post-punk Britain, the make-up of the Mancusian world that would later ignite as a result of The Smiths’ success, and character studies of the group’s two creative forces, as well as their rhythm section and various producers, engineers and managers. What emerges is fast-paced and insightful into the nature of the music industry during its last great hurrah.

It made me run for YouTube installments of their music immediately…and share Fletcher’s astonishment at the ways in which their very first recordings hit the charts as if the band had been together for years and not weeks when they hit. Pop-drenched yet lent an everlasting alternative bent from Morrissey’s enigmatic lyrics, the sound they produced was instantly recognizable, catchy, and yet playfully changing record to record.

That they did it all for a hit-filled run of almost four years — including some major but self-destructively self-absorbed tours — without aid of any management is remarkable. As well as the makings of some great vignettes, band member recollections, and fodder for keen exegesis of that odd grey area between pop artistry and music industry business.

“The reality of the situation in 1985 was that Morrissey, having never owned a checkbook before The Smiths (because he never had enough money to need one), was now generating vast sums of income as a very public icon — and yet he was a highly private individual of infamously poor social skills, who had chosen to buy a house for and then move back in with a fiercely protective mother who was vocal in her own assertion that the music industry was ‘full of sharks,’” Fletcher writes, about half way through this nearly 700-page work. “The reality, equally, was that Johnny Marr was only twenty-one, and despite the fact that he had the people skills his partner may have lacked, was only marginally more experienced in business, and living the life of a newly minted rock star at full throttle. He pushed the band to record new singles before new albums had even been released; he agreed to touring schedules that gave little time for recuperation in between.”

By the time they broke up out of exhaustion and inability to finalize decisions, some lamented the death of what many critics believed “could have been one of the biggest bands in the world” while others felt they’d achieved all they could, given who they were.

“Did they fail or did they stay true to what they believed in?” Fletcher quotes the British singer Billy Bragg. “I see that they did what they set out to do — which was to set the world on fire. What they didn’t set out to do was become the new Pink Floyd.”

To bring that sense of specialized success out, especially in such an epically detailed fashion, is another triumph for Fletcher, who started off life as a teen fanzine writer and would-be rock star at the same time The Smiths were starting out before going on to write the definitive biography of Keith Moon several years ago, along with an ever-increasing stream of great music history works.

Bravo!

Tony Fletcher will be reading from A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of The Smiths at 6 p.m. Saturday, December 8, at Oriole 9 Restaurant, 17 Tinker Street, Woodstock. Accompanying him with music from the Smiths will be Robert Burke Warren and Grasshopper from Mercury Rev.