THERE IS little doubt that Steven Patrick Morrissey has spent much of the last 20 years blotting his creased copybook, expressing political views that are widely regarded as partisan and unsavoury, dangerously nationalistic even, but his remarkable decade, a golden 1980s, with his band the Smiths still has a pulsating resonance for a couple of generations of indie music fans.
In fact, there could be arguments that the Manchester group were the most interesting of all the post-Beatles outfits to emerge in the UK: a combination of post-punk disillusion, ragged bohemian chic and literate lyrics, often enigmatic and world-weary reflections on provincial life in England’s most dynamic rock city of the time.
And let us not forget that other essential catalyst in their unique songwriting formula – the ringing and jangling joy of Johnny Marr’s guitar shapes, rippling arpeggios and staccato chord changes wrapping themselves ivy-like around Morrissey’s meandering word pictures.
It was sadly a brief flowering, a temporary flaring: the group launched in 1982 and only lasted until 1987. But the body of material they sculpted in those five years earned them a large and committed following – the bedsit musings and and the shambling accompaniment captured the imagination of leftfield listeners and college campuses, the well-read and introspective, on both sides of the Atlantic and influenced several waves of British songwriters to follow, from the C86 crowd to shoegazers and Britpop.
I would occasionally spot Morrissey around his home city – I recall catching his distinct profile and his architectural quiff as he spoke to a few fans in the sun on the corner of Whitworth Street just outside the Palace Theatre at the height of the group’s acclaim – but I only saw the band on-stage once, in 1986.
That was at G-Mex, a cavernous reclaimed Victorian railway station, when, in an event called the Festival of the Tenth Summer, Manchester’s entrepreneurial magic-maker Tony Wilson brought together all of the great local bands of the 10 years since the fractious punk fracas commenced. Incredibly, the Smiths were joined on an all-day bill by a string of major acts, from New Order and the Fall to Buzzcocks and A Certain Ratio.
Dissolution would occur not long after and both lynchpins Morrissey and Marr would concoct successful if disparate solo careers: the singer as likely to court controversy over his views on sexuality, vegetarianism, nationalism or immigration as release a new album, the guitarist a new gunslinger for hire who would add his distinctive stylings to a string of hip operators – Electronica, the The, Modest Mouse and the Cribs.
So let’s consider some of the ways in which this composing duo have tipped their hats to the influence of the Beat Generation.
Morrissey drew on Kerouac in various ways. With the Smiths, he tapped into his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums with a pair of references: the song ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ quotes a phrase that Ray Smith – the author’s alter ego in the story – repeats. Further, ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ is another fragment from the same book which the lyricist adapts.
Much later, long after the group disbanded, an in-concert album entitled Live in Boston, a 1986 gig only made available on disc in 2017, was issued and one of the images commissioned for the record sleeve is that famed picture of Kerouac cocking his ear to a radio in a bid to hear the emerging sounds.
The singer’s other literary interests are widely stretched: they extend, for sure, to the Angry Young Men, a British movement featuring novelists and playwrights (even women!) from the late 1950s and sometimes elided with the Beats. The stories and movies which emerge from this community, particularly those linked to the working-class North and Midlands, become a particular touchstone for this Mancunian performer.
As for Marr, the guitarist reveal some of his own personal angles when he appeared in early July on a quirky BBC show on Radio Four called The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed, with Simon Armitage, the Britain’s present holder of this cultural title, inviting fellow artists to have an intimate tête-à-tête in his garden room, a production idea that actually preceded the onset of Covid.
Marr, formerly John Maher of Irish antecedents who decided to change the spelling for simplicity but also in part because the drummer of Buzzcocks shared his original name, was an easy-going and forthcoming subject for his poet host. The geographical and cultural history of the pair overlap and they have much in common.
Armitage assumed the Laureateship in 2019. Just as cities, states, even the nation of the US, have appointed poetic laureates, the UK has an ancient tradition of selecting a bard who then has a relationship with the crown and country. He – or she – is expected to write and respond to important moments in the land’s life: royal births, weddings and deaths, the pandemic and much more. Creatives frequently have to walk a difficult line between artistic freedom and respect for the implications of the appointment.
The present incumbent is a younger figure than most who represents a shifting take on this official role. Armitage is a lower-middle-class, Huddersfield and non-Oxbridge lad with a distinctly Yorkshire accent – a style he shares with his predecessor Ted Hughes (1984-98) – a contemporary voice – like Carol Ann Duffy (2009-19), a long-time associate of Mersey Beat Adrian Henri – and a keen interest in popular music – though previous holder Andrew Motion (1999-2009), too, was a keen adherent of the Book of Zimmerman.
Although from the other side of the Pennines hills, after university Armitage became a probation officer in tough areas of Greater Manchester and it seems that the Smiths were an ever present backdrop to his life and work during those days before he settled down to a full-time job as crafter of stanzas. Today, he is, in addition, Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.
Worth saying, too, that in recent years Armitage has formed his own poetry and music group, a band with a healthy mix of indie attitude and electronic modernity, the trio LYR, so to pitch him against his rock hero Marr, who has served as Visiting Professor in Popular Music at Salford University, was likely to produce more agreement and aggression. So it proved: an atmosphere of quiet equanimity, almost a mutual appreciation society convened.
Johnny had turned up with his constant social prop – a guitar – which he brought into play several times during the programme. Armitage said that he had a similar defence against the intrusions of the world. If he went into a pub, he would always take a book. It was his companion, his comfort, a ubiquitous object that gave him something to do when he was on his own. The poet asked the musician about his own reading tastes.
‘For me, at a time I was a teenager, I associated, I guess, the counterculture, with a certain kind of paperback culture, sci-fi was quite big. Soaking that stuff up, about 14, 15, it wasn’t just all about guitars and records,’ Marr explains.
‘There was another world that was illicit and alluring to me. It was a kind of universe of ideas, ideas you weren’t getting in school, weren’t getting from people around you at school. It was absolutely alternative and Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, all of that was my introduction to it.’
So, it wasn’t just Morrissey reading Kerouac or Greene or Woolf or Richard Allen. His younger collaborator-to-be had also found something mystical and marvellous in the poetry and prose of that Beat family. The Smiths might have chosen the most common or garden, the most ordinary of monikers, but these two principals brought to the table of those suburban bedrooms, where they originally met, a recipe of eclectic ingredients that would soon shape some of the most gripping songs of their era.
Pictured below: Simon Armitage and Johnny Marr