The story of The Smiths

Two Manchester boys

The story begins in Manchester with the children of Irish immigrants. Steven Patrick Morrissey was born on the twenty second of May 1959 in Old Trafford, to parents who had come over from Dublin a year earlier. He grew up in Hulme and then Stretford, a bookish loner who failed his eleven plus and hated his secondary modern school. As a small boy he was deeply shaken by the Moors murders, in which children from the Manchester area were killed. His librarian mother encouraged his reading, and he fell for Oscar Wilde, Coronation Street and Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey. By his early twenties he was writing letters to the music papers, and had published a short book about the New York Dolls, whose British fan club he had run.[1] [2]

Johnny Marr was born John Maher on the thirty first of October 1963, to Irish parents from County Kildare. In 1972 his family moved to a housing estate in Wythenshawe, and he taught himself guitar with records and a chord dictionary. He was a good enough footballer to have trials with Manchester City's youth team, but music won. At thirteen he formed his first band, the Paris Valentinos, with a schoolmate called Andy Rourke and with Kevin Williams, who later became the Coronation Street actor Kevin Kennedy. Their first gig was a street party for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in June 1977. At around fourteen he began spelling his name Marr, partly to avoid confusion with the Buzzcocks drummer John Maher.[1] [2]

Andy Rourke was born on the seventeenth of January 1964, with an Irish father and an English mother, which made him the only Smith whose background was not fully Irish. His mother left the family when he was eleven, and music became his escape. He met Marr at St Augustine's grammar school, where the two jammed through lunch breaks, and it was Marr who suggested he switch to bass. When they were fifteen, Marr moved into the Rourke house with Andy and his three brothers. They played in White Dice and then a funk band called Freak Party with the drummer Simon Wolstencroft. Mike Joyce, born on the first of June 1963 to Irish Catholic parents, fell for drumming after seeing Buzzcocks and played in the punk bands the Hoax and Victim.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Marr and Morrissey were first introduced at a Patti Smith concert at the Manchester Apollo in August 1978, when Marr was fourteen and Morrissey nineteen. In his memoir, Morrissey says Marr's first words to him were that he had a funny voice. Nothing came of it for almost four years. Morrissey sang at a one off show with the guitarist Billy Duffy in 1978, then drifted between jobs and the dole. By 1982 Freak Party had fizzled out for lack of a singer, and Marr was pointed toward Morrissey. He had seen a television documentary in which Jerry Leiber described knocking on Mike Stoller's door to start their partnership. So in May 1982, Marr and his friend Steve Pomfret turned up on Morrissey's doorstep in Stretford.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The most ordinary name

That first afternoon they talked records. Marr raved about Dusty Springfield, Morrissey played him Sandie Shaw, and Marr left with some of Morrissey's typed lyrics. The next day Morrissey phoned to say yes. Within days they were rehearsing in Marr's rented attic room in Bowdon, recording on his four track cassette machine. Early songs included The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Suffer Little Children, and a cover of the Cookies' girl group song I Want a Boy for My Birthday, which Marr loved for the quiet subversion of a man singing it. Morrissey chose the band's name. The Smiths, he said, was the most ordinary name there was, and it was time the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces.[1] [2]

Around the same time, Morrissey decided he would be known by his surname alone, and he later forbade people around him from calling him Steven. Pomfret left after a few rehearsals, and a bassist called Dale Hibbert, who worked at Decibel Studios in Manchester, came in. In August 1982 the band cut their first demo there at night, with Simon Wolstencroft sitting in on drums. Wolstencroft did not want to join, so they held auditions and Mike Joyce got the job. Joyce later admitted he had taken magic mushrooms before the audition, and only started hallucinating after he had played. Morrissey took the demo to Factory Records, but Tony Wilson was not interested.[1] [2] [3]

The Smiths played their first gig in October 1982 at the Ritz in Manchester, supporting Blue Rondo à la Turk at a student fashion night. They walked on to Klaus Nomi singing The Cold Song, and Morrissey's friend James Maker introduced them, then stayed on stage with maracas, red wine and improvised hand gestures. Joyce's snare drum broke, and the headliners would not lend him theirs. Soon afterwards Hibbert was out. Morrissey and Marr were unhappy with his playing, and some accounts say he was uneasy with the band's gay aesthetic, which Hibbert denies. Marr called his old friend Andy Rourke, and the classic line up was in place. In December they recorded a second demo, which EMI turned down.[1] [2] [3]

With Rourke on bass they played a tiny gay club called the Manhattan Sound, performing on the dancefloor because there was no stage, while Morrissey threw confetti over the crowd. On the fourth of February 1983 they played the Haçienda, where Morrissey told the audience that the thing to be in 1983 was handsome. Their new manager, Joe Moss, who ran the Crazy Face clothing business, gave them a rehearsal room above his premises on Portland Street. The rise was startling. Joyce remembers that at their first Haçienda show a single friend clapped, and eight months later St John Ambulance staff were carrying fainting fans out. By then, Rourke recalls, gladioli were arriving by the box.[1] [2] [3]

Rough Trade and This Charming Man

In January 1983 Marr worked out the chords for Hand in Glove on an acoustic guitar at his parents' house. So he would not lose it, his girlfriend Angie drove him to Morrissey's while he kept strumming in the passenger seat. Morrissey wrote the words in about two hours. Joe Moss paid for a one day session at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, costing two hundred and fifty pounds. In the spring Marr and Rourke took the tape to Geoff Travis at Rough Trade in London, telling him it was not just another tape. Travis agreed to put it out. Hand in Glove was released in May 1983, reached number three on the indie chart, and missed the national top forty.[1] [2]

The single got them noticed where it mattered. John Walters, producer of John Peel's show on BBC Radio One, saw them in London and booked a session, recorded in May 1983. Peel said you could not immediately tell what records they had been listening to, which he found very rare. More sessions for Peel and for David Jensen followed through the year, and the music papers NME and Sounds came calling. Travis travelled to their Crazy Face rehearsal room to sign them to a proper deal. Only Morrissey and Marr put their names to the contract, and nobody discussed how the money would be divided. That silence would cost everyone dearly years later.[1] [2] [3]

Rough Trade paired them with Troy Tate, formerly of the Teardrop Explodes, to make an album at Elephant Studios in Wapping. It was a heatwave, and the band recorded fourteen songs in a sweltering basement where the instruments kept drifting out of tune. Travis had doubts and played the tapes to the producer John Porter, a former Roxy Music bassist, who called them out of tune and out of time. The Tate sessions were shelved. Porter rerecorded the album with them that autumn, in between tour dates, in London and at Pluto Studios near Manchester. Morrissey still told Porter and Travis that the result was not good enough, but it had cost six thousand pounds, and there was no going back.[1] [2] [3]

Meanwhile Marr wanted a hit. Jealous of labelmates Aztec Camera getting daytime radio play, he wrote This Charming Man in one night for a Peel session, along with Still Ill and Pretty Girls Make Graves. The single version, cut at Strawberry Studios, was played largely on Porter's 1954 Telecaster, with around fifteen layers of guitar and, at one point, knives dropped onto the strings. The song tells of a cyclist with a punctured tyre who accepts a lift from a charming stranger. It came out at the end of October 1983 and reached number twenty five. Then came Top of the Pops. Morrissey swung a bunch of gladioli, and a generation of teenagers, among them a young Noel Gallagher, had never seen anything like it.[1] [2]

Controversy arrived just as quickly. Garry Bushell of The Sun claimed that the B side Handsome Devil was about child abuse, which the band flatly denied. Morrissey said the song had nothing to do with children. In America, the band signed to Sire Records in late 1983, after its boss Seymour Stein agreed to buy Marr a new guitar, a gesture Marr had heard Stein once made for Brian Jones. Marr chose a cherry red 1960 Gibson ES three fifty five from a shop in Manhattan. On the second of January 1984, in a New York hotel room, he used it to write the music for Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now in about an hour, and wrote its B side Girl Afraid the same evening.[1] [2] [3]

1984: The debut and the backlash

The Smiths' debut album came out on the twentieth of February 1984. It reached number two, held off the top by Simple Minds, and spent thirty three weeks on the chart. The cover was a cropped still of Joe Dallesandro from the 1968 film Flesh. Reviews were mixed at first. Critics admired the words but many found the production thin, and the band themselves thought it sounded underpowered. Songs like Reel Around the Fountain, Still Ill and Pretty Girls Make Graves set out the Smiths' world: unrequited longing, sexual confusion, bleak jokes and Marr's chiming guitar, at a time when most chart bands were built on synthesizers. Some tabloids also claimed that two of its songs hinted at child abuse, which the band strongly denied.[1] [2]

The album closed with Suffer Little Children, about the Moors murders of the 1960s, naming three of the murdered children. In May it also appeared as the B side of Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, whose sleeve showed Viv Nicholson, the pools winner famous for spending her fortune. Tabloids claimed the song cashed in on the killings, and even suggested Nicholson had been chosen because she looked like Myra Hindley. Woolworths and Boots withdrew the single. A grandfather of one of the victims heard the song on a pub jukebox and was appalled. According to the band's history, after meeting Morrissey he accepted it was sincere, and Morrissey became friends with Ann West, the mother of Lesley Ann Downey.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now gave the Smiths their first top ten hit, reaching number ten. Its title played on a Sandie Shaw song, Heaven Knows I'm Missing Him Now. The session also brought in a young engineer at Island's Fallout Shelter studio, Stephen Street, who had just seen them on Top of the Pops and was thrilled to be working with them. Street went on to engineer Meat Is Murder and The Queen Is Dead, and produced Strangeways, Here We Come. In August came William, It Was Really Nothing, which reached number seventeen. When the band played it on Top of the Pops, Morrissey tore open his shirt to reveal the words Marry Me written across his chest.[1] [2] [3]

Tucked away on the twelve inch of William was How Soon Is Now. Marr wrote it in June 1984 at his flat in Earl's Court, a demo he called Swamp, built as far as possible on a single chord. At Jam Studios with John Porter, in a session the band remember as fuelled by cannabis and lit by red bulbs, they fed the guitar through several Fender amps with the tremolo set to different speeds, recording in bursts of about ten seconds. Morrissey arrived the next morning and sang it in two takes. Rough Trade thought it too unlike the band for a single, but late night radio made it one of the most requested songs of the year, and Sire's Seymour Stein called it the Stairway to Heaven of the eighties.[1]

In late 1983 Morrissey and Marr had written to their idol Sandie Shaw, the barefoot star of the sixties, telling her the Sandie Shaw legend could not be over yet. She recorded Hand in Glove with Marr, Rourke and Joyce backing her, and in April 1984 it gave her a top thirty hit, her first time back in the top forty in fifteen years. The year ended with Hatful of Hollow, released on the second of November. It gathered singles, B sides and radio session versions, and many fans preferred it to the debut, because the sessions caught the band's live urgency. It reached number seven and stayed on the album chart for forty six weeks.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Meat Is Murder

The second album, Meat Is Murder, came out on the eleventh of February 1985 and went straight to number one, knocking Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA off the top. It would be their only studio album to do so. Morrissey later wrote that Geoff Travis marked Rough Trade's first number one album by giving him a bag of biscuits with the price tag still on. The record was angrier and more political than the debut. The title track argued for vegetarianism, The Headmaster Ritual attacked the violent teachers of Manchester schools, and Barbarism Begins at Home set a lyric about beating children to a seven minute funk groove driven by Rourke's bass.[1] [2] [3]

Morrissey, a vegetarian since the age of eleven, forbade the others from being photographed eating meat. Marr gave up meat around then, joking that it was not a good idea to have a number one album called Meat Is Murder and be seen eating a bacon sandwich. Mike Joyce says he became a vegetarian the very day the title was discussed in the studio, and raised his children and grandchildren the same way. The cover used a Vietnam War photograph of an American marine, with the words on his helmet changed from Make War Not Love to Meat Is Murder. The marine, Michael Wynn, said in 2019 that nobody had asked his permission and that he was not happy about the change.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Morrissey turned interviews into a stage for provocation. He attacked the monarchy, Margaret Thatcher's government and Band Aid, joking that one could care about the people of Ethiopia without inflicting daily torture on the people of England. After the Brighton hotel bombing of October 1984, he said the only sorrow was that Thatcher had escaped unhurt. The Headmaster Ritual caused trouble at home too. The headmaster of his old school spoke to the tabloids, and the Manchester education authority threatened to ban the band from playing in the city. Joyce remembers Morrissey arguing that famine relief should not depend on pensioners buying charity singles, because it was the government's job.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Through 1985 the Smiths toured Britain and America at length. Early that year Morrissey and Marr had moved back from London to Greater Manchester, and Marr's new house in Bowdon became a songwriting workshop that Joyce compared to the Brill Building. In one marathon session in the late summer of 1985 they wrote Frankly, Mr. Shankly, I Know It's Over and There Is a Light That Never Goes Out. The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, a melody Marr had thought of on a tour bus, came out that September and reached number twenty three. It was the first single the band agreed to promote with a video, and in 2003 Morrissey named it his favourite Smiths song.[1] [2] [3]

The Queen Is Dead and a year of chaos

The Queen Is Dead was mostly recorded in the winter of 1985 at Jacobs Studios in Farnham, under the working title Margaret on the Guillotine. Morrissey and Marr produced it, with Stephen Street engineering. The title came from Hubert Selby's novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the phrase had first surfaced when Morrissey ad libbed it during a long live jam of Barbarism Begins at Home. Joyce and Street built the title track's pounding drum loop with a sampler, while Marr ran feedback through a wah wah pedal. The high backing voices on Bigmouth Strikes Again were Morrissey himself, sped up, and credited on the sleeve to Ann Coates, a pun on the Manchester district of Ancoats.[1] [2] [3]

The album was finished before Christmas 1985, then sat on the shelf for almost seven months while the band fought Rough Trade. They wanted to leave for a major label, and the label went to court to stop them taking the record elsewhere. Frankly, Mr. Shankly, about someone desperate to quit a job, was widely taken as a jab at Geoff Travis. The strain showed. Marr was drinking heavily and living on cocaine, and has said his weight fell to seven stone. When The Queen Is Dead finally appeared on the sixteenth of June 1986, it reached number two. Its cover was the French actor Alain Delon, and in 2013 NME named it the greatest album of all time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The darkest trouble was Andy Rourke's. He had used heroin since he was sixteen, and early in 1986 he was dismissed from the band. A famous story says he learned of it from a note left on his car windscreen, a story Morrissey has denied. Craig Gannon, a young Manchester guitarist who had played with Aztec Camera, was called in, and the session player Guy Pratt was also lined up. Within about two weeks Rourke was back. Gannon stayed on as a second guitarist, making the Smiths a five piece. Later that year a drug possession arrest nearly kept Rourke off the American tour, until his work visa came through just in time. He later said sudden money had led him to spend it on drugs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The five piece recorded Panic, a song urging listeners to burn down the disco and hang the DJ. It reached number eleven, though some critics read racist undertones into its attack on disco music, a charge the band strongly rejected. Ask followed, with Kirsty MacColl on backing vocals, reaching number fourteen in October. On the road the hysteria was extraordinary. Joyce's favourite gig was a July night at Salford's Maxwell Hall, where fans passed tickets back out through a toilet window, the hall filled to double capacity, and a bar had to be cleared because the dancefloor was collapsing. The North American tour was a triumph too, but drink and drugs wore the band down, and the last four dates were cancelled.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty third of October 1986, at the National Ballroom in Kilburn, a BBC recording caught the five piece at full power. It later became Rank, their only official live album. After the British tour ended, Gannon was simply not called back, and heard from a friend that he was no longer in the band. On the twelfth of December 1986 the Smiths played an anti apartheid benefit at Brixton Academy, usually counted as their last concert. That night they played Shoplifters of the World Unite, the only time they ever performed it at a gig. Meanwhile the band had signed to EMI for the future, a move some fans and critics saw as a betrayal of the independent scene.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Strangeways and the split

The Smiths began 1987 with Shoplifters of the World Unite, a number twelve hit whose playful lyric about stealing, and nod to Karl Marx, upset the Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens. The compilation The World Won't Listen, its title a dig at radio for ignoring them, reached number two. Then came Sheila Take a Bow, an homage to the playwright Shelagh Delaney, which matched their best ever chart placing at number ten. Sandie Shaw came in to sing on it, but Morrissey was ill and absent that day. She later called it a horrid song, and her vocal was dropped. That April, a television appearance on The Tube, where they played Sheila Take a Bow, became their final live performance.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In March 1987 they went to the Wool Hall studio near Bath to make their final album for Rough Trade. Marr wanted to escape the jingly jangly label, and brought in keyboards, programmed strings, a synthesised saxophone and piano. Morrissey plays piano, loosely, on Death of a Disco Dancer, the only time he played an instrument on a Smiths record. The sessions were happy. While Morrissey went to bed early with his Sylvia Plath, the others worked through the studio's wine cellar and played Spinal Tap songs until dawn. All four members, and Street, later named Strangeways as their best album. Morrissey said they agreed on that in their sleep, but in different beds.[1] [2] [3]

Away from the studio, things were souring. For years Marr had acted as the band's unofficial manager, booking vans and negotiating deals, and he had pushed for a real manager, Ken Friedman. The others turned against Friedman, and Marr was pressed into firing him. When the band gathered at Brixton Academy to film a video for Sheila Take a Bow, Morrissey did not come. Marr, Friedman and the director went to his flat, but he would not open the door. Then, at their last session in May, Morrissey wanted to cover Cilla Black's Work Is a Four Letter Word as a B side. Marr hated it. He later said he did not form a group to perform Cilla Black songs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Soon afterwards Marr met the others at a fish and chip restaurant in west London. By most accounts he said he needed a break and had offers to work with Talking Heads and Bryan Ferry. Joyce later said he thought they were just going for chips. The others heard it as goodbye. That summer NME ran a story claiming the Smiths were about to split. Marr, who had gone to Los Angeles for sunshine, wrongly suspected Morrissey had planted it, and confirmed to NME that he was leaving. The rest of the band tried out the guitarist Ivor Perry, formerly of Easterhouse, but those sessions fell apart. Marr was twenty three years old.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

By the time Strangeways, Here We Come was released on the twenty eighth of September 1987, Rough Trade had confirmed the band was over. It reached number two in Britain and number fifty five in America, their best showing there. Girlfriend in a Coma had already reached number thirteen, with a video featuring Morrissey alone. The last single, Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, was billed as the last single and stalled at number thirty. Its long piano opening plays over crowd noise from the miners' strike, and both writers have called it their favourite. Another planned single, Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before, was dropped in Britain after the Hungerford massacre, because of a lyric about planning a mass murder.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After the Smiths, and the court case

Morrissey moved fast. With Stephen Street as producer and co writer, and Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column on guitar, he made Viva Hate, released in March 1988. It went to number one, and its first single, Suedehead, reached number five, higher than any Smiths single had gone. Its closing song, Margaret on the Guillotine, imagined Thatcher's execution, and police searched his Manchester home. Rourke, Joyce and Gannon played on his 1989 singles, which Joyce later admitted felt like a kick in the eye for Marr. Rank, the Kilburn live album, reached number two in 1988. According to the biographers Johnny Rogan and David Bret, Morrissey first wanted to call it The Smiths in Heat.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Marr became the most sought after guitarist in Britain. He briefly joined the Pretenders, played on Talking Heads' final album, including the single Nothing But Flowers, and spent several years in Matt Johnson's band the The. With New Order's Bernard Sumner he formed Electronic, and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys joined them on their early records. After Rough Trade went bankrupt in 1989, the Smiths catalogue passed to Warner, which reissued it in 1992. This Charming Man returned to reach number eight, the band's highest chart placing ever, and There Is a Light That Never Goes Out was finally released as a single, five years after the split.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The money question finally exploded. Morrissey and Marr had each taken forty percent of the band's recording and performance royalties, leaving ten percent each to Rourke and Joyce. In March 1989 the drummer and bassist sued, arguing they were equal partners due a quarter each. Rourke, deep in debt from his addiction, quickly settled for eighty three thousand pounds and ten percent of future royalties. Craig Gannon also sued that year, over unpaid wages and his claim to have written the chords of Ask, and settled for forty four thousand pounds. Joyce fought on. His case reached the High Court in December 1996, where his barrister said the pair had treated the rhythm section as replaceable parts in a lawnmower.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After a seven day hearing, Judge John Weeks ruled for Joyce, awarding him around one million pounds in back royalties and a quarter share from then on. His character assessments stung. He found Morrissey devious, truculent and unreliable where his own interests were at stake, and Marr willing to embroider his evidence. Marr paid. Morrissey appealed and lost in 1998, and later said the case had cost him around one and a half million pounds in total. Marr has said Joyce had a right to sue, though he felt they had an agreement, and that he wished everyone had signed contracts from the start. Rourke, who gave evidence for Joyce, was declared bankrupt in 1999.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The reunion that never happened

Offers to reunite kept coming, and kept being refused. In March 2006 Morrissey said he had turned down five million dollars to play the Coachella festival, adding that money did not come into it. It was a fantastic journey, he said, and then it ended, because Marr wanted to end it. That same year he said he would rather eat his own testicles than reform the Smiths, which was saying something for a vegetarian. In 2007 reports said he had rejected seventy five million dollars for a fifty date world tour, but the offer was later described as a hoax. Joyce said he would happily play again, but knew a reunion was never going to happen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The closest they came was in 2008. Marr was remastering the Smiths catalogue, which put him back in touch with Morrissey and Rourke. That September he and Morrissey met in a pub in south Manchester, their first meeting in about ten years. Marr drank orange juice, Morrissey drank beer, and over several hours the talk turned to reforming. Marr has written that for four days it was a very real prospect, and that they would have needed someone new on drums. Then Marr went to Mexico on tour with the Cribs, and the messages simply stopped. He did not hear from Morrissey again until a brief email exchange in December 2010.[1] [2]

That 2010 exchange came about through politics. Prime Minister David Cameron kept saying he loved the Smiths, and had chosen This Charming Man on Desert Island Discs. Marr tweeted that he forbade Cameron to like them. Morrissey backed him publicly, citing Cameron's support for hunting, and the row even reached Prime Minister's Questions. When Marr was sent a photo of a student protester facing police in a Smiths T shirt, he emailed it to Morrissey, who replied within minutes. Marr felt he had created a moment of friendship, but wrote that the distrust remained. Marr had also rebuilt his friendship with Rourke, and in 2006 played How Soon Is Now with him at Rourke's Manchester versus Cancer benefit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Through the 2010s Morrissey's politics increasingly overshadowed the band. He praised Nigel Farage, and in 2018 he endorsed the far right party For Britain, later wearing its badge on American television. He has always rejected accusations of racism. Some record shops refused to stock his 2019 album, and Billy Bragg accused him of dragging the Smiths' legacy through the dirt. Marr joked that any reunion would feature Farage on guitar. In January 2018 a plan for Rourke, Joyce and Gannon to play Smiths songs with an orchestra, called Classically Smiths, collapsed within days of its announcement, when Rourke said he had never agreed to take part.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Losing Andy, and the legacy

Andy Rourke built a full life after the Smiths. He played with Sinéad O'Connor and the Pretenders, formed Freebass with his fellow Manchester bassists Peter Hook and Mani, and after moving to New York in 2009 started the band D.A.R.K. with the Cranberries singer Dolores O'Riordan. He married Francesca Mor in 2012. In September 2022 he joined Marr on stage at Madison Square Garden, which turned out to be his last performance. On the nineteenth of May 2023 he died of pancreatic cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, aged fifty nine. Marr, who announced the news, said he would be remembered as a kind and beautiful soul and a supremely gifted musician.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Morrissey wrote that Andy would never die as long as his music was heard, that nothing he played had been played by anyone else, and that he need not worry about being valued. Marr recalled watching him play the bassline of The Queen Is Dead and telling himself he would never forget the moment. The two families had spent the previous Christmas together, and Rourke looked over the layout of Marr's guitar book from his hospital bed. A year after his death, Joyce and Marr had their first proper conversation in decades at a memorial service for Andy. In November 2024 a mural of Rourke, crowdfunded by Joyce for a pancreatic cancer charity, was unveiled in Manchester's Northern Quarter.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In August 2024, days after Oasis announced their reunion, Morrissey said on his website that the promoter AEG had offered the pair a world tour as the Smiths in 2025, that he had said yes, and that Marr had ignored the offer. Marr had already answered a fan's reunion plea by posting a photo of Nigel Farage. His statement weeks later was blunt: he had not ignored the offer, he had said no. He also explained a row over the band's name. Finding the Smiths did not own the trademark, and after a third party tried to use it in 2018, he had registered it himself, and in January 2024 he signed an agreement to share it with Morrissey.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In November 2025 Mike Joyce published a memoir, The Drums, which stops at the 1987 split and focuses on what he calls the majesty of it all. He told the BBC that the Smiths cannot reform because Andy is gone, but that he would not mind if Morrissey and Marr played together without him. He says he is still abused online by some fans over the court case, but does not regret it. He still calls Morrissey a brilliant performer and a very funny man, and describes their relationship as unusual, with a distance he simply accepted. As of 2026, there has been no reunion of any kind.[1] [2] [3]

The Smiths lasted barely five years, yet their influence runs right through British guitar music. Noel Gallagher, John Squire of the Stone Roses, Radiohead and Alex Turner have all acknowledged them, and Blur are said to have formed after watching the Smiths on The South Bank Show. In 2002 an NME poll named them the most influential artist of the previous fifty years, and in 2013 the magazine ranked The Queen Is Dead the greatest album ever. They were nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 and 2015. The songs still fill rooms without them, as Blossoms and Rick Astley showed with their Smiths cover shows from 2021 and a packed Glastonbury set in 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around The Smiths

Morrissey and Johnny Marr. One of the great songwriting partnerships of the eighties. Marr wrote all the music and Morrissey all the words and melodies. Marr says they were as close as two people can be without being lovers, and that they loved each other. By 1987 exhaustion, business chaos and musical differences had split them. They met again in a Manchester pub in 2008 and briefly planned a reunion, but contact faded, and by 2024 they were publicly contradicting each other over a tour offer and the band's name.[1] [2] [3]

Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke. Friends from the age of eleven at St Augustine's grammar school, they jammed through lunch breaks and played in band after band together. At fifteen Marr moved into the Rourke family home. After the Smiths they drifted apart, but rebuilt the friendship, playing How Soon Is Now together in 2006 and spending Christmas together in 2022. Rourke's last gig was with Marr at Madison Square Garden, and Marr announced his death in 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mike Joyce and Morrissey. Joyce says Morrissey hardly spoke to him at his audition, and describes a lasting distance between them, though he calls Morrissey a brilliant, very funny performer. Their bond broke over royalties. Joyce's High Court victory in 1996 led the judge to call Morrissey devious and truculent, and in his memoir Morrissey called Joyce a flea in search of a dog. Joyce has said he never read that book.[1] [2] [3]

Geoff Travis and The Smiths. The founder of Rough Trade released Hand in Glove after Marr and Rourke handed him a tape, and signed the band in their Manchester rehearsal room. Rough Trade scored its first number one album with Meat Is Murder. By 1985 relations had soured over money and the band's wish to leave, and Frankly, Mr. Shankly was widely heard as a jab at him. In his memoir Morrissey claimed the Smiths saved Travis.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Stephen Street and The Smiths. A young in house engineer at Island's studio, Street first worked with the band on Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now and became part of the inner circle, engineering Meat Is Murder and The Queen Is Dead and producing Strangeways. After the split he co wrote and produced Morrissey's Viva Hate. That partnership ended within a couple of years amid disputes over royalties.[1] [2] [3]

Johnny Marr and John Porter. The former Roxy Music bassist rescued the debut album after the Troy Tate sessions were shelved, and produced This Charming Man and How Soon Is Now. Marr said Porter nurtured him and the whole band. Morrissey was reportedly wary of their closeness, and in 1986 had Ask mixed elsewhere, by Steve Lillywhite, a mix Marr felt was less spirited.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Morrissey and Sandie Shaw. Morrissey worshipped the sixties star and named Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now after one of her songs. In late 1983 he and Marr wrote to her, and in 1984 she recorded Hand in Glove with the band behind her, returning to the top thirty. Her album Hello Angel took its name from a postcard he sent her. In December 1986 she recorded vocals for Sheila Take a Bow, but Morrissey was ill and absent, the take was dropped, and she later called it a horrid song.[1] [2] [3]

Morrissey and Ann West. Ann West was the mother of Lesley Ann Downey, a ten year old murdered by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and named in Suffer Little Children. When the song caused a tabloid storm in 1984, West came to believe it had been written sincerely and respectfully, and she and Morrissey became friends.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Johnny Marr and Angie Marr. They have been together since 1979, when they were fifteen, before the Smiths existed. Angie drove Marr to Morrissey's house while he strummed the chords of Hand in Glove, and was with the band at the Strangeways sessions. Marr has called her the constant through the split, and they have two children, including the musician Nile Marr.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Craig Gannon and The Smiths. Brought in as a stand in bassist in 1986, Gannon became the fifth Smith on rhythm guitar, playing on Panic, Ask and the Rank live album. After the October tour he was quietly dropped, and he later sued over wages and songwriting, settling for forty four thousand pounds. In 2018 he and Joyce tried to revive the music with an orchestra, but the plan collapsed.[1] [2] [3]

Johnny Marr and Noel Gallagher. Gallagher said This Charming Man on Top of the Pops changed his life. Marr later helped the young Oasis songwriter, lending him the Rickenbacker seen on the sleeve of Supersonic and giving him a 1960 Les Paul. When Gallagher broke its neck fending off a stage invader, Marr gave him another. They later recorded together.[1] [2] [3]

Morrissey and Viv Nicholson. The football pools winner who spent a fortune became a Smiths cover star on Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now and Barbarism Begins at Home, and Morrissey borrowed a line from her autobiography for Still Ill. They met in Blackpool on the Meat Is Murder tour. The friendship soured in 1987 when Nicholson, a Jehovah's Witness, objected to her photo being used for The Headmaster Ritual because of its swearing.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about The Smiths

• Mike Joyce took magic mushrooms before his Smiths audition, and only began hallucinating after he had already won the job. Joyce said he took a modest dose before trying out. He played well enough to be hired, then the hallucinations started. He admits Morrissey barely spoke to him that day.[1] [2]
• The Smiths entered the Guinness Book of Records in January 1984 for holding the top three places on the UK indie chart. Hand in Glove, This Charming Man and What Difference Does It Make? sat at one, two and three on the independent chart at the same time, earning the band a listing in the Guinness Book of Records.[1]
• The jangly guitar on This Charming Man is mostly a borrowed 1954 Telecaster, not Marr's famous Rickenbacker. Marr said people assumed it was a Rickenbacker, but it was producer John Porter's 1954 Telecaster, with about fifteen guitar tracks, acoustic layers, a backwards guitar and knives dropped on the strings.[1] [2]
• Marr lent his Rickenbacker to Noel Gallagher, and it appears on the cover of Oasis's debut single Supersonic. The 1982 Jetglo Rickenbacker 330 that Marr used on early Smiths records was loaned to Gallagher during the Definitely Maybe sessions and turned up in the photo on the Supersonic sleeve.[1] [2]
• Marr jokes that giving Noel Gallagher a second vintage Les Paul, after Noel broke the first, is why he quit drinking. Gallagher broke the neck of Marr's 1960 Les Paul, once owned by Pete Townshend, while dealing with a stage invader. Marr then gave him a black Les Paul too, and says he must have been very hungover when he agreed.[1] [2]
• The mystery backing singer Ann Coates on two Smiths songs is actually Morrissey, sped up. On Bigmouth Strikes Again and The Queen Is Dead, Morrissey's voice was run through a harmoniser to sound higher. The credit Ann Coates is a pun on Ancoats, a district of Manchester. Kirsty MacColl's original backing vocal was dropped.[1] [2]
• The strings on There Is a Light That Never Goes Out are credited to the Hated Salford Ensemble. They were Marr on a synthesizer. With no budget for a string section and a reluctance to let outsiders into the studio, Marr played the string parts on an E-mu Emulator. Morrissey was sceptical at first but agreed.[1]
• Morrissey originally suggested leaving There Is a Light That Never Goes Out off The Queen Is Dead. In his memoir Morrissey admits he did not like the song at first and proposed dropping it. He calls the suggestion an everlasting humiliation, and says it is often a relief to be wrong.[1]
• Turn There Is a Light That Never Goes Out up loud and, Marr says, you can hear him shout That was amazing at the very end. Marr described the recording as magical and said that if you listen at very high volume you can hear his reaction captured at the close of the track.[1]
• The opening line of How Soon Is Now was adapted from George Eliot's novel Middlemarch. Morrissey's line about being the son and heir of nothing in particular echoes a sentence in Middlemarch about the heir of a manufacturer. The song's title came from Marjorie Rosen's book Popcorn Venus.[1]
• The eerie whistle in The X-Files theme was inspired by the guitar riff of How Soon Is Now. Composer Mark Snow's whistle effect for the X-Files theme was inspired by the song's riff. A cover by Love Spit Love later became the theme tune of the TV series Charmed for eight seasons.[1]
• How Soon Is Now was so hard to reproduce that the Smiths rarely played it live. The band considered it a major problem in concert. A version was recorded for the live album Rank but not used. Morrissey only made it a regular part of his solo shows from 2004.[1]
• When Rough Trade first heard Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want, they asked where the rest of the song was. The waltz lasts under two minutes. Morrissey called it a brief punch in the face and refused to lengthen it. He later said hiding it away on a B side was sinful.[1]
• An instrumental cover of a Smiths B side plays in the art gallery scene of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The Dream Academy's version of Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want soundtracks the Art Institute of Chicago scene. Morrissey later joked that it reached number eighty one, which is nearly a hit.[1]
• Salford Lads Club was furious about appearing inside The Queen Is Dead, and its solicitors wrote to complain. The committee feared people would link the club to lyrics like stealing lead from a church roof in Vicar in a Tutu. It later embraced the fans, and the photo entered the National Portrait Gallery in 2008.[1]
• Morrissey gave twenty thousand pounds to help restore Salford Lads Club, and wanted it kept secret. When the club launched a one million pound appeal, Morrissey donated but hoped to stay anonymous. He was persuaded to go public because the publicity would help the campaign.[1]
• Terence Stamp at first refused to let the Smiths use his photo, so Morrissey recreated the pose himself holding a glass of milk. The What Difference Does It Make? sleeve used a still of Stamp from The Collector. Some pressings instead showed Morrissey imitating it, milk replacing the original chloroform pad, until Stamp changed his mind.[1] [2]
• Morrissey refused to make a video for What Difference Does It Make?, saying he wanted to herald the death of the music video. Speaking on The Tube in 1984, he predicted the video market would die very quickly. The band did not accept a proper promotional video until The Boy with the Thorn in His Side in 1985.[1] [2]
• The only Smiths sleeve ever to show the band was an American single cover that Morrissey called abhorrent. Sire's 1984 US release of How Soon Is Now used a backstage band photo from Glastonbury. It is the only time a band portrait appeared on a Smiths release cover, and Morrissey said it was tearful to see.[1] [2]
• The Headmaster Ritual contains the only lyric change Marr ever suggested to Morrissey, and it was ignored. Marr proposed changing bruises bigger than dinner plates to bruises big as dinner plates. Morrissey considered it for a day, said he was impressed, and then changed nothing.[1]
• Marr says The Headmaster Ritual took about three years to write, longer than any other song he wrote. He wrote it in an open tuning, and described its opening chord as what Joni Mitchell would have played if she had been an MC5 fan.[1]
• The first live Barbarism Begins at Home, in Dublin in December 1983, lasted about seventeen minutes. Joyce recalled Morrissey had been drinking red wine and kept returning to the yodelling middle section, while the exhausted rhythm section waited in vain for Marr to end it.[1]
• At the Royal Albert Hall in 1985, Pete Burns of Dead or Alive sang Barbarism Begins at Home as a duet with Morrissey. The song became a live jam in which Morrissey sometimes ad libbed. One of those ad libs, the queen is dead, later became the title of their third album.[1]
• Morrissey once persuaded a Scottish TV show to screen slaughterhouse footage during the dinner hour. Around Meat Is Murder he promoted vegetarianism relentlessly in shows and interviews, and on one occasion got slaughterhouse images broadcast at teatime.[1]
• The instrumental B side Money Changes Everything became Bryan Ferry's 1987 hit The Right Stuff. Marr reused the music from the Bigmouth Strikes Again B side for Ferry, who added new lyrics. The twelve inch of Bigmouth also carried Oscar Wilde's line talent borrows, genius steals in its run out groove.[1]
• Tesco nearly sued Smash Hits over a Shoplifters of the World Unite graphic. The magazine printed the lyrics beside a Tesco carrier bag. A Conservative MP also condemned the single as an ode to thievery, and Morrissey agreed on The Tube to call the lyric metaphorical.[1]
• Viv Nicholson's friendship with Morrissey ended over a swear word in The Headmaster Ritual. In 1987 the band wanted her picture for a reissue of the song. As a Jehovah's Witness, she objected to the word bastards in the lyric, and their friendship soured.[1]
• Morrissey wore a fake hearing aid on television in support of a deaf fan who was ashamed of wearing one. He wore it when the Smiths appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test, and it became part of his early look along with NHS style glasses and gladioli.[1]
• As a teenager Morrissey sent storylines to Coronation Street. Every one was rejected. He was a devoted fan of the Manchester soap and submitted proposed scripts to Granada Television, all turned down. Pat Phoenix, who played Elsie Tanner, later appeared on a Smiths sleeve.[1] [2]
• Linda McCartney was asked to play piano on Frankly, Mr. Shankly, and said no. The song was meant to capture the feel of Sandie Shaw's Puppet on a String. A take with a trumpeter was scrapped, and a tape fault forced a full rerecording with John Porter.[1]
• Andy Rourke played cello on several Smiths recordings. Besides bass, Rourke played cello on tracks including Shakespeare's Sister, Rubber Ring and Oscillate Wildly, and on the shelved Troy Tate version of Pretty Girls Make Graves.[1]
• The Hatful of Hollow run out groove reads The Impotence of Ernest, a pun on Oscar Wilde. The side one etching plays on The Importance of Being Earnest. Side two carries a message referring to Marr's younger brother Ian.[1]
• Morrissey's long Autobiography spends only about seventy five pages on the Smiths. Published as a Penguin Classic in 2013, it gives dozens more pages to the Joyce court case, and calls the judge the pride of the pipsqueakery.[1] [2]
• Morrissey says Tony Wilson dismissed Marr's playing at the early gigs, saying all this Byrds stuff had been done. In his memoir Morrissey also claims John Peel never saw the Smiths live, and gives the credit for championing Hand in Glove to Peel's producer, John Walters.[1]
• Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before was never a UK single because of the Hungerford massacre. The BBC declined to play it after the 1987 shootings, because of a lyric about planning a mass murder. It was released as a single in America, Australia and Germany instead.[1]
• Joyce says Morrissey recorded his vocals in total darkness, so the band could not see him. From 1985, Joyce recalls, Morrissey sang without the others knowing what he would do. When he first sang I Know It's Over, Joyce says, the drummer was in tears.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.