By Federica Lemme
Now I know how Joan of Arc felt
As the flames rose to her roman nose
And her walkman started to melt
(Da Bigmouth Strikes Again, J.Marr, Morrissey, 1986)
1987. A tormented young man in Denver, Colorado, holds the local radio station hostage with a gun so that it will play only the music of the Smiths. And so they do, for four hours, inflicting Morrissey on the poor Christian population of Colorado, who until then had been unaware of his existence. A gesture at once romantic and desperate, revolutionary.
If music ever had the chance to change the world, or at least to give it some serious nightmares, it was the music of the Smiths. Morrissey was a nerd who fought a war of liberation with a pop single.
Post-punk was the last period in history in which restless young spirits believed that by listening deeply enough and long enough to a pop prophet dressed in magical sequin-covered trousers they would find the Answer. Steven Patrick Morrissey was the symbol of the other Eighties: while in sweaty bars teenagers danced to Madonna dreaming of San Pedro, kids with a thorn in their side, in their lonely suburban bedrooms, deluded themselves at night that someone might love them. Morrissey was their Joan of Arc, the patron saint of their private darkness, ready to shut the mouth of the entire world.
Unlike the Sex Pistols, who often bluff or take up antagonistic positions for their own gain, the Smiths truly hate anything imposed as normal. Their lyrics attack the education system, the family, marriage, adulthood, sex, the church, meat-eating, money, governments, the Queen, discos, hunger, social relationships, and the music business. They manage their own music production and image themselves.
To translate the poetics of sound into video they turn to the director Derek Jarman. English, an artist in the deepest sense of the term, a tireless experimenter, he represented, for the history of both cinema and art, one of the most significant peaks of visual expression of the twentieth century. The Queen is Dead is a short film shot on Super 8. It opens with a young boy spraying on the walls the Queen is dead and continues with images in very rapid succession. The frenetic editing, combined with the driving rhythm of the music and with fragments of extreme beauty, best represents the rejection of anything that society considers acceptable, but also the heart of Morrissey’s rebellion.
His is a sensual hatred, which offers no theatrical violence but delicate, poisonous words. Moz does not proclaim a political revolution but commits the supreme terrorist act: he rewrites the way of singing about sex and love. He does not extol nihilism, but romanticism, frankness. The Smiths’ lack of pretension, their simple name, their look, Johnny Marr’s poignant guitar arrangements, are not only a reaction to the pomposity of the Eighties, but also a way of underlining the sincerity of Morrissey’s words, of reminding us that the Smiths are not showbusiness.
No manager, no record label, no deals or professional imperatives. For Morrissey and Marr the Smiths are not a way of opening a door onto life, but a way of kicking down the door of life. No compromise. Steven and Johnny, from the top of their mountain, impose their own vision of reality on the world, with Andy and Mike acting at the right moment on bass and drums, hundreds of metres down the valley. It is a strange and fatal marriage. Morrissey knows it, ever since the triumph of the first single, Hand In Glove, he has already conceived the idea that Marr will leave the Smiths because of him. Johnny does not yet realise it, he is a lover trapped in the web of desire. Steven sings over his music as if his own existence depended on it. And it does. Morrissey, although older in years, is shy, and shyness can stop you from doing everything you would like to do in life.
If Johnny the seducer, the guitar virtuoso, had not knocked on Moz’s door in 1982 to ask him whether there was something he would like to try with him, the bomb that is The Smiths would probably never have exploded, and Steven would have remained a wretch shut up in his own sad little bedroom. But Morrissey is a dreamer and Marr a man of the world. And men of the world are necessary to dreamers in order to do what they want and must do: inflict their dreams on everyone. Marr’s decision to leave Morrissey and the Smiths stems from the feeling of being more a fantasy of Moz than of himself. Their meeting had been a bomb and had blown up all the rules of the music industry and beyond. But the arrogance of their adolescent love was not destined to last. The tide of time would smother it.
In 1987, while Marr and Morrissey turn their misunderstandings into a separation, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke watch helplessly as the relationship reaches its final act. A decision that devastates the fans and that is professionally a mistake because that year the world is at the band’s feet, but which nobody, not even Steven, can hold against his friend. The game is no longer fun.
In one of his latest statements Moz states in no uncertain terms that there can never be a Smiths reunion. Relations between him and Marr have been tense for years. Recently Morrissey wrote a public letter to his former friend urging him to stop using his name for clickbait and, in general, to stop mentioning him in interviews altogether, because it is 2022, not 1982. It reads: «Why don’t you talk about your career instead, about your incredible achievements as a solo artist? Can you please leave me out of it? The fact is that you don’t know me. You know nothing about my life, nor my intentions, my thoughts, my feelings. Yet you talk about me as if you were my psychiatrist, as if you had constant access to my instincts. It has been 35 years since we knew each other, many lives ago. When we met, you and I, we were not famous. We helped each other become what we are today. Why don’t you let things stay that way?».
Johnny remains today an incredibly original musician and composer who has earned a place in the pantheon of pop. Yet his greatest contribution to the history of music was to push Steven out into the open, bringing lightness into a world of depression, and to provide him with the tools with which he would impose his wonderfully distorted reality on the world. For Morrissey, meeting Marr had been a sign of fate; just as he had hoped, wished and prayed, chaste love and salvation had come to him through pop. His misanthropy and his frustration had been avenged. He could remain alone, protect those young people who kept his little picture stuck above their beds, like that of a saint. Now he was loved, even if not quite like anyone else.
