Praise for

A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT

“Finally, the full story of the Smiths…

It belongs in any fan’s scholarly room.”
—Rob Sheffield, Bestselling author of Love is a Mix Tape

“An exhilarating read! I highly recommend it.”

—Matt Pinfield, Host of MTV2’s 120 Minutes and The Hivecast

“An intriguing portrait of an intriguing band that is as

rich in intellectual history as it is in rock trivia. Keith
Richards, eat your heart out.”
—Gary Marcus, bestselling author of Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning

“Written with love and filled with gem-like moments…

Fans will swoon; the inexplicable rest of you will learn
what the fuss was about.”
—Will Hermes, author of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire

Read more & pre-order the book here:

http://www.ijamming.net/

On sale 12/4/2012 Also available as an ebook

 T ON
Y F L E T C HER
CRO
WN A RCHE T YPE
NE
W Y
ORK

Flet_9780307715951_3p_01_r1.c.indd iii 9/20/12 8:41 AM

 Copyright © 2012 by Tony Fletcher

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Archetype,

an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark

of Random House, Inc.

Photo credits: insert one p. 1: © John Gilkes (www.johngilkesmapart

.co.uk); p.2: Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives,
Manchester City Council; p. 3: © Tony Fletcher; p. 4: © Rick Stonell; p. 5:
(top) © Paul Cox (www.paulcoxphotos.com), (bottom) © Paul Slattery;
p. 6: (top) © Paul Cox (www.paulcoxphotos.com), (bottom) © Paul
Slattery; p. 7: (top) © Paul Slattery, (bottom) © Barry Plummer; p. 8:
© Pat Bellis, reproduced by kind permission of Rough Trade.
insert two p. 1: © Stephen Wright (www.smithsphotos.com); p. 2:
© Steve Double (www.double-whammy.com); p. 3: (top) © Barry
Plummer, (bottom) © Pat Bellis, reproduced by kind permission of Rough
Trade; p. 4: (top left) © Getty Images, courtesy of the Estate of Keith
Morris (www.keithmorrisphoto.co.uk), (top right) © John Featherstone,
(bottom left) Courtesy of Stephen Street, (bottom right) © John Porter;
p. 5: (top left and right) © Stuart “Jammer” James, (bottom) © Lawrence
Watson. Courtesy of Retna, Ltd.; p. 6–7: © Ian Tilton (www.iantilton.net);
p. 8: © Tony Fletcher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data

Fletcher, Tony.
A light that never goes out : the enduring saga of the Smiths /
Tony Fletcher. — 1st ed. 1. Smiths (Musical group)
2. Rock musicians— En gland— Biography. I. Title.

ML421.S614F54 2012
782.42166092'2— dc23
[B] 2012024784

ISBN 978-0- 307-71595-1

eISBN 978-0- 307-71597-5

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Maria Elias

Jacket design by Raid71
Jacket photograph: © Stephen Wright/Redferns
Author photograph: Posie Strenz

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

Flet_9780307715951_3p_01_r3.f.indd iv 10/2/12 3:57 PM

 To everyone who survived the ’80s

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 CHAPTER

T W E LV E

It was an event I’d always looked forward to and uncon-

sciously been waiting for since my childhood. Time was
passing—I was 22— and Johnny was much younger, but it
seemed that I’d hung around for a very long time waiting for
this magical mystical event, which definitely occurred.

— Morrissey, Melody Maker, September 1987

I think I thought he was waiting for the world to come to

him. And it kind of did!

— Johnny Marr, March 2011

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T he meeting at 384 Kings Road that May afternoon would turn

out, as we know now, to be one of the great initial encounters of
modern music. To quite some degree, both Morrissey and Marr recog-
nized as much immediately, as evidenced by the extent to which Steve
Pomfret’s presence in the room was barely even acknowledged. Mor-
rissey would prove more than capable of his familiar flippancy when it
came to describing the occasion—“I was just there, dying, and he res-
cued me,” he announced in an interview barely a year later, the fruits of
the partnership apparent by the fact that he was appearing live on Radio
1 at the time—but generally speaking he sought to fully acknowledge
the majesty, and indeed, the mystery, behind their seemingly unlikely
attraction and how quickly it manifested into a collaboration of excep-
tional creativity and loyalty.
“I had no doubt that Johnny was the moment,” Morrissey explained
to author-musician John Robb long after the event, “and I was grateful
that nothing had ever happened for me earlier on.” Certainly, Marr’s
carefully cultivated style that day had served its purpose in making a
positive first impression. “He looked a bit rockabilly, a bit wired and
very witty, but also hard and indifferent. It was the exact opposite of
the few rehearsals I’d had with Billy (Duffy) because with Johnny it was
instantly right and we were instantly ready.”
This represented a crucial understanding on Morrissey’s part. If he
had developed a reputation for underachievement on the musical front,
it was because past experience had taught him not to get in too deep
with the wrong partners. His gut instinct that day on Kings Road—that
Marr was perfect for him in a way that Marr’s neighbor and mentor
Duffy was not—had him promise to call Marr within twenty-four
hours. Being overly familiar with “people who said they were going

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to do things and never did,” Marr could not be entirely sure that the
call would come. But as it turned out, Morrissey’s primary gripe with
prospective partners was much the same as Marr’s: “So many people
seem to enjoy talking about things and so few people seem to enjoy
doing them,” as Morrissey put it upon release of the debut Smiths LP.
(“And that’s really been the history of the group, that we’ve got on with
things,” he elaborated.) These mutual frustrations turned out to be one
of many shared strengths, and when Morrissey duly made the call to
X-Clothes the following day, both of them knew that the partnership
was on.
A few days later, Morrissey came over to Bowdon to work on
songs. Stepping into Marr’s abode, he could not have been anything
but impressed. Morrissey, after all, had long dreamed of writing for
Coronation Street, of finding some way into the entertainment world
of Granada TV, and yet the teenage Marr was living inside that dream;
his landlady was the great Shelley Rohde, and her living room walls
were decorated with vast framed pictures of the Corrie stars. Upstairs,
Marr’s attic room offered, at least, a similar sense of obsession to that
of Morrissey’s bedroom back in Stretford: walls (and floors) of vinyl
to match Morrissey’s collection of books, guitars (and accompanying
recording paraphernalia) for his typewriter and pens. But the pair had
not met this second time to spin each other’s 45s as much as to write
them, to get to work and see if the initial spark of a few days earlier
could light a fire.
The prospective lyricist and singer had already supplied the com-
poser and guitarist with a cassette of himself singing a song entitled
“Don’t Blow Your Own Horn,” but despite having a few days to live
with it, Marr had not been able to come up with a viable chord sequence,
as evidenced by Morrissey’s disappointed reaction. The musical part-

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nership only took off when they moved on to work from a metaphori-
cal blank sheet of paper: two sets of Morrissey’s words unconstrained
by an existing melody. One of them was “The Hand That Rocks the
Cradle,” and Marr saw something in its phrasing that reminded him
of Patti Smith’s “Kimberly.” (Given Patti Smith’s iconic influence on
both Morrissey and Marr, and the fact that they had met so briefly at
one of her concerts four years earlier, the use of the “Kimberly” riff was
as much an act of homage and tribute as theft. The similarities in the
finished songs are minuscule.) The other was “Suffer Little Children”
and, in this case, not seeing a reference point from which he could simi-
larly crib a riff, Marr came up with an arpeggio chord sequence on
the spot. Morrissey expressed his enthusiasm in both cases, and the
pair set about completing the songs there and then. Within a couple
of hours, working in the same manner as the great 1960s songwriting
partnerships that they so admired and to which they both aspired, the
pair came up with the songs that would close out the two sides of their
debut album. As auspicious starts go, this was one for the record books.
While much can and has been made of the music Marr composed
that day, what was truly astonishing was that Morrissey turned up in
Bowdon carrying a pair of poems of such emotional and literary depth.
In comparison to his cut-and-paste biographies for Babylon, his hack
gig reviews for Record Mirror . . . well there simply was no compari-
son. Neither “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” nor “Suffer Little
Children” had any obvious reference points in the popular culture of
the time, not even on the post-punk independent scene where, for the
last three or four years, anything had been possible—including the rec-
itation of poetry to whatever meter (or lack thereof) took the author’s
fancy. Morrissey, to his credit, knew as much. “I was a bookworm,” he
admitted readily in 1985. “I was also an avid record collector and the

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two of them didn’t seem to go together. But I always felt that they could,
because the way I wrote, when I wrote words, it wasn’t the traditional
pop nonsense. It was quite literary.”
Indeed. “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” was anything but tra-
ditional pop nonsense. It appeared, on the surface of its title, to express
the love of a parent for his or her infant child—an uncommon enough
subject for a young working-class lyricist, but one that turned out to be
merely the bait before the switch. Reference to “blood on the cleaver
tonight” intimated something much more sinister, leading toward a
gradual elaboration in the later verses: a veiled admittance by what
was now clearly a male protagonist, of some form of unstated abuse
on a male child, a child that may not even have been his own. And
yet, as taboo subject matter goes, it was instantly outdone by “Suffer
Little Children,” which dared detail that which was not discussable in
Manchester: the Moors Murders. “Fresh lilaced moorland fields can-
not hide the stolid stench of death,” Morrissey stated of the crimes and,
in accordance with this couplet, he made no attempt to sugar coat his
own lyrics. References were made to victims Lesley Ann [Downey],
John [Kilbride], and Edward [Evans] by name; and Morrissey quoted
Myra Hindley directly, and thereby Ian Brady by association, as saying
“Whatever he has done, I have done,” and used poetic license else-
where to lightly alter Hindley’s phrase. The fact that both the song title
“Suffer Little Children” and the lyrical couplet “Hindley wakes” were
chapter titles from Beyond Belief, Emlyn Williams’s dramatically en-
hanced account of the Moors Murders (Marr recalled seeing a poster
for the book on Morrissey’s wall the day that they met) or that indi-
vidual lines had similarities to specific expressions elsewhere in the
book really mattered very little. If only for having the courage to write
the line “Oh Manchester, so much to answer for,” a refrain that would
inspire greater soul-searching among Mancunians than any number

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 A L IGH T T H AT NE V ER G OE S OU T

of essays or editorials on the Moors Murders, Morrissey had already

proven himself a poet beyond contemporary—or at least conventional—
compare.
Both Morrissey and Marr have suggested that it was this second
meeting that properly launched their relationship. And each has re-
called that they laid out not so much a wish list that day as a game plan.
They talked about the band they would form and how they would dress
alike and stand close to each other in photographs, draped over each
other if need be, like the New York Dolls. They decided that their first
single would have a blue label, that it would be laid out like one of the
1960s hit-factory releases rather than in any of the styles of the present
day. They decided, too, that they would like to be on Rough Trade—an
understandable quest, especially given that the London label had re-
cently added the Fall, the Monochrome Set, and Aztec Camera to its
roster, but a distant one, given that Morrissey and Marr didn’t have a
single contact at the company. And in confirming that they would write
for other artists as well, per Leiber and Stoller and the ’60s hit factories
in general, they agreed immediately that Sandie Shaw would be their
first choice. Years later, long after the split, long after the court case,
and in an attempt to find some common ground and happy memories,
Marr and Morrissey would meet up once more and remind each other
that everything they laid out that evening they achieved.

Over those years, Morrissey and Marr would frequently try and
define the chemistry that lay at the heart of their partnership while
simultaneously acknowledging that it was ultimately intangible. (Or,
as the Buzzcocks put it in one of their finest recordings, presumably
discussing love, “Why Can’t I Touch It?”) Morrissey tended to the

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more matter-of-fact approach. “We moved very very quickly,” he

once recounted, acknowledging that while “I thought of the name the
Smiths . . . it was Johnny’s venture. We both had an astonishingly solid
sense of direction, and we very rarely disagreed which was unusual be-
cause we were opposites—he was full of excitement for everything and
I was . . . not.”
Too much would be made over time of the pair as opposites—in
geniality, exuberance, hedonism, sexuality; in hours kept, clothes
worn, and books read. In fact, as already noted, they had a phenomenal
amount in common: Irish immigrant parents, working class roots, a
single female sibling (within close age range), a strong relationship with
mother and a distant one with father, the violent drudgery of the Man-
chester Catholic schools system, and forced slum clearance from the
inner city. Their musical tastes, too, while often defined by where they
diverged—Morrissey’s love for the Cilla Black of 1968 versus Marr’s
passion for the Rolling Stones of that year—were for the most part in
stark alignment. Each was as fanatical about the New York Dolls and
Patti Smith as they were turned on by T. Rex and Sparks. Each was de-
voted to the glamorous girl groups and solo female singers of the 1960s
and to the methodical workaday approach of the Brill era songwriters.
And each came to the other at a time when the rockabilly revival was in
full swing and each a part of it according to his specific style. “Johnny
had his more modern approach, which was all the Hard Times/ripped
jeans/La Rocka thing,” noted Andrew Berry. “And Morrissey had that
whole English thing after rock ’n’ roll hit but before the Beatles.” The
distance between Morrissey’s fascination with the saga of Billy Fury
and Marr’s obsession with the look of Stu Sutcliffe was therefore no
real distance at all—or, as Berry put it, “Johnny’s and Morrissey’s styles
merged. . . . (They) influenced each other so two ideas came into one.”
Morrissey, for sure, was the more literate of the pair, and Marr

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clearly the more musical, but, of course, that was merely the differ-
ence in their parts that added up to the sum of the Smiths; and the fact
that both instantly recognized the abilities of the other was surpassed
only by the fact that they tended not to interfere with or second-guess
each other’s contributions when writing and recording music together.
Rather, they set to work on making the partnership visible. Or, as Marr
told Sounds at the end of 1983, “The whole idea of two people getting
together with lots of common ground but with separate influences to
bring out something we believe to be the best we’ve ever heard is some-
thing we feel has been missing since the Sixties. It’s joyous the way we
work together and if that’s reminiscent of the Sixties that’s fine.”
Almost thirty years later, Marr was able to elaborate upon the “joy-
ous” nature of that collaboration. “One thing that was never in doubt
was my time and my dedication and the songs. But I met someone who
was equally dedicated.” In the early days, Morrissey appeared no less
driven to succeed than Marr; it was only after success hit in such a big
way that the singer would develop a reputation for cancellations and
disappearances. And so, said Marr, “It was a fantastic thing to happen.
If it was possible for me to be an even happier guy, it happened. Because
I’ve got the most perfect relationship with the girl of my dreams. And
then I met this guy I admire. And I’m able to share a side of me that he
innately understands. Which is separate to ‘let’s form a group.’ There’s
a thing inside him of what you can be. Without trying to sound too eso-
teric, it takes up half of your being. This desire to fulfill this . . . know-
ing about yourself as an artist. There’s an unusual aspect to both our
personalities that we both understand. It’s about having a knowing of
this vision of something that you can do and something that you can
be, which is really a big part of you. I’m not just talking about success:
it’s about being Johnny Marr, or being Morrissey.”
Morrissey himself would frequently elaborate upon this sense of

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higher calling even as he avoided his partner’s more spiritual observa-

tions. “Though I always wanted to sing and I always wanted to make
records, it was never really for the reasons that I felt most people did
those kind of things,” he explained to MTV on the eve of playing the
Royal Albert Hall, less than three years after he and Marr first met. “I
had no aspiration for stardom for the sake of stardom, for the sake of
glamour, for the sake of money and elaborate clothing or lifestyle. It was
never that. It was always for reasons that were much more serious—but
not so serious I felt they were ungraspable for an audience.”
As such, both were adamant that they were driven by something
much deeper than “a relationship of convenience,” as Marr described
the occasionally perceived notion that theirs was but merely a profes-
sional alliance. “You can’t need each other that intensely every day, on
some convenient arrangement—it will not work. You can not need each
other like that. And provide for each other. And be there for each other,
if it’s just about ‘here’s a tune, here’s some words.’ I’m not like that. I
don’t care about career enough to do that. I really don’t.”
The fact was that the pair did need each other—and on a very deep,
emotional level. There developed, undoubtedly, something much more
than a friendship, but rather love between them such as can often be
found on the battlefield, occasionally on the sporting field, and which,
when evident in a rock group, too, inevitably fuels the flames of some-
thing erotic. Both Morrissey and Marr would occasionally invite such
speculation, inadvertently or otherwise. “I was so utterly impressed
and infatuated,” said the singer of their initial encounter very shortly
after the partnership dissolved, using a highly charged word, “that
even if he couldn’t play it wouldn’t have mattered because the seeds had
been sown and from those seeds anything could sprout. He appeared
at a time when I was deeper than the depths . . . he provided me with

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this massive energy boost. I could feel Johnny’s energy just seething
inside me.”
“From when we first met, we loved with each other,” said Johnny
Marr. “We didn’t fall in love with each other, because we respected that
we both enjoyed having our own space and our own lives and we knew
that was important. There was a very strong bond all the way through
until the last couple of weeks of the band. And it was very very impor-
tant. But we didn’t fall in love with each other.”
“There was a love and it was mutual and equal,” confirmed Mor-
rissey, “but it wasn’t physical or sexual.” From the singer’s perspective,
it would have been foolish to even dream of it being otherwise. The
day that he went over to write songs with Marr for the first time, he was
introduced to Angie Brown, who ferried him to the Altrincham train
station in her VW Beetle. It was not a deliberate test of the prospective
singer, not even a warning, but a mere confirmation of fact: “You didn’t
get Johnny without Angie,” as Marr put it. Fortunately, Morrissey and
Brown instantly warmed to each other, becoming close friends them-
selves, creating one of the many personality dynamics that would prove
integral to the Smiths’ ability to succeed as much—and to survive as
long—as they did. So while it was true that Morrissey and Marr would
spend considerable time traveling together and talking together, it was
likely that Brown would be in the driver’s seat much of the time—and
that Morrissey would often be the only other passenger.
Besides, for all of Morrissey’s reputation as a loner, we already know
that he was far from the suicidal figure he liked to paint himself as at the
point that Marr arrived in his life. “I think he was developing his own
aesthetic,” said Marr of Morrissey up until that moment. “And there’s a
lot to be said for cocooning oneself and doing research to make yourself
who you want to be, intellectually and existentially.” Ultimately, “I just

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went along with his explanation of it, really: just sitting in his room.
And I never saw any evidence that he was crushed by that activity.”
In fact, given Morrissey’s intellect and his wit—in short, his way
with words—Marr was not surprised to find that his new writing part-
ner kept select but quality company. “I didn’t see him as someone who
had zero friends,” said Marr, “and the friends I met of his at that time,”
citing James Maker, Richard Boon, and Linder, “I really liked, and I got
along with. I had a tremendous amount of respect for all these people.
His friends were cool. He never introduced me to anyone I didn’t like.”
In turn, Marr took to introducing Morrissey to his own friends.
Andrew Berry observed, as did so many at this point, before Morrissey
truly found his voice (in the Smiths) that “he was really quiet and pri-
vate, especially when you were in the same room with him.” But Berry
nonetheless sought to become Morrissey’s friend “because if Johnny
says he’s cool then he obviously is.” And in this, Berry and his friends
quickly grasped the great reality of the partnership: “Johnny was very
protective over him.”
“It’s something I’ll never regret, that relationship,” said Marr, “be-
cause one day you get old—and hopefully very old—and you say, ‘Wow,
I didn’t see that relationship coming.’ Because it brought out something
in me that maybe I didn’t know I had, which was a very kind of protec-
tive aspect. I just thought I was looking for a guy who was going to be
a great lead singer.”

On Friday, May 21, 1982, toward the end of the same month, if
not even the very same week, that Johnny Marr and Morrissey met
for the first time, the Haçienda nightclub opened its doors on Whit-

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worth Street in Manchester, the billing shared by ESG, the thrillingly

contemporary all-girl New York electro/hip-hop trio, and Bernard
Manning, the aging, overweight, famously sexist, and decidedly un-
fashionable Manchester comedian. The club, also known early on by
its catalog number, FAC 51, was evidently trying at once to be both
hip and ironic, and it would bounce uncertainly between these cul-
tural extremes for several years to come. It did not help matters that
Ben Kelly’s industrial design turned out to be way ahead of its time,
and that the acoustics bounced painfully about the vast club whenever
it was less than half-full—which was most of the time—or that the city
only granted the liquor license on condition of it being a members-only
club. (Fortunately, members’ guests were allowed entry too, or else the
club would never have survived.)
History has suggested that the Smiths grew and operated in op-
position to this perceived Haçienda aesthetic, that their performances
at the club in 1983 represented an invasion of common sense and good
taste, of a return to good-old uplifting guitar music in the midst of a
Factory scene that had disappeared up its own sense of self-importance.
“The whole Haçienda thing,” Morrissey would reflect in the middle of
that year, before even the second of their three shows at the club, and
already using the past tense, “seemed terribly antiseptic.”
The reality was that both Morrissey and Marr spent considerable
time at the Haçienda when it opened. Indeed, it’s of interest to the story
of the Smiths’ own aesthetic that through the early part of the group’s
development, both before and after the lineup was cemented, the two
founding partners continued down their individual paths, accentuat-
ing in the process the marked differences between the two characters
even as their friendship blossomed.
For his part, Johnny Marr remained firmly immersed in style

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culture; when Andrew Berry and John Kennedy organized a bus trip
to the gay London nightclub Heaven (to see Animal Nightlife), in July
1982, he went along for the ride. And when Berry and Kennedy moved
on to open a weekend night called Berlin, in a King Street basement
club, Marr could be found there as well. So could Rob Gretton and
Mike Pickering; despite the fact that the Haçienda was already book-
ing the best of touring bands, it was struggling to pull people in for its
dance nights, perhaps because the kind of kids they were looking for
were over at Berlin instead. Berry was invited in for a meeting at the
Haçienda and offered a role as a DJ. He agreed—on condition he could
use the club as a hair salon during the day. He was duly given the use of
a dressing room, and his new salon, Swing, assigned the catalog num-
ber FAC 98, was soon cutting hair for New Order as well as Morrissey
and Marr and every visiting band that took advantage of the Haçienda’s
unlikely fashion opportunity. With Berry ensconced in the club six
days and several nights a week, Marr, as his best friend, became an
additional part of the Haçienda’s inner circle, and though he never
made a habit of spinning records there, he was frequently to be found
hanging in the booth. In fact, when The Face commissioned a report on
the Haçienda’s progress at the end of 1982, amid the references to its
“bleak” landscape and half-filled dance floor was a quote from “flat-top
Johnny Marr” defending the Saturday night music policy: “I schlepp
to funk.”1
Contrary to his own subsequent dismissal of the place, Steven
Morrissey could also be found hanging regularly at the Haçienda dur-
ing its early days. That’s where Cath Carroll and Liz Naylor first came
across him, wearing his customary heavy overcoat on a typically quiet
Saturday night shortly after the club opened; they had gotten into a
conversation with Linder there, and “Steven came with Linder,” said
Naylor. “He was Linder’s shadow.”

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Carroll and Naylor were classic feminist children of punk, their

desperately stifled teenage lives in the Manchester suburbs having been
completely redirected at inner-city gigs by the Fall, and by moving into
a council flat and surviving, as Carroll put it, “single mothers who were
drug addicts, and feral teenagers who would chase us.” With the support
of Tony Wilson and others, they had gotten involved with the prominent
local zine City Fun. They had also gotten involved with each other for
a while, and their tendency to dress up in capes or anything else that
caught their fancy (“It was so liberating just to be able to take off your
polyester blouse and put on whatever you wanted to wear and go to a
gig,” said Carroll) gained them almost as much notoriety on the scene
as their band, Glass Animals. But by 1982, they were known (as the
Crones, though good-naturedly so) for other reasons: in an act of willful
Stalinism against City Fun’s “hippie, dope-smoking” editors, according
to Naylor, they had “hijacked the magazine on the way to the printers.”
Their intent as City Fun’s new bosses was, said Carroll, to be “irrever-
ent” and “oppositional.” “We were just basically incredibly annoying.
And people were amazingly indulgent.” No one proved more so than
Richard Boon, who provided them with space at the New Hormones
office on Newton Street. In accepting it, they had come into occasional
contact with Linder, an obvious feminist icon, but were too intimidated
by her reputation to converse with her: “She was always in that fash-
ionable atmosphere you don’t ever think you’re going to penetrate,”
said Carroll. This made it all the more surprising when Boon said that
Linder wanted them to manage Ludus; only after they accepted did they
realize that “as a daring lesbian duo,” in Naylor’s words, they were being
“appointed managers as an art project.”
Following their introduction to Morrissey at the Haçienda, a
four-way friendship quickly developed, an extension of the one that
already existed between the two pairs of close friends. Typically, the

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relationship was conducted in person, by mail, and on foot. “Everyone

walked around Manchester at the time,” said Naylor. “You were poor,
you had to. Also, we didn’t have a phone. Steven would write us letters.
He would write letters, like, ‘We will meet at the gates of the cemetery,’
and that would be a jolly day out.”
Not that he always showed up for a proposed rendezvous. On one
such occasion when they felt they had been stood up, the Crones de-
cided to visit him on Kings Road to find out why. “We were sure that he
was in,” said Carroll, “but he just didn’t open the door. I wrote to him
to say, ‘Where were you?’ and he wrote back to say ‘I wasn’t there. Give
me proof that you were.’ ” It was that sort of relationship. “His trucu-
lence manifested itself [in that] if you sort of said the wrong thing, he
would not communicate,” said Naylor. “But communication was very
slow in those days, so it was hard to tell if he was sulking or the post
was late.”
The arrival of unemployment checks would result in some pro-
nounced attempt at upward mobility, “ending up in these wine bars
with hairdressers from Vidal Sassoon,” according to Naylor, an inter-
esting if unintentional statement, given that Johnny Marr’s best friend
was a hairdresser and his girlfriend a Vidal Sassoon model. They might
also celebrate the appearance of cash with tea at the historic Kendal
Milne department store on Deansgate, where Linder, recalled Carroll,
“would produce something ridiculous from her handbag, some absurd
sex toy, and she would put it on the table next to these tiny little choc-
olate cakes,” successfully frightening the aging blue-rinse brigade on
their genteel shopping trips.
It was, admitted Naylor, “pretentious crap.” But “they were preten-
tious times. We were all pretentious because we thought the world had
ended. The world we knew had ended, in terms of technology, and cit-
ies, and the way we lived. It was unknown, the future.”

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Pretentiousness, then, was matched by intellectual curiosity. The

quartet would frequent the Equal Opportunities Library on Albert
Square and study books on gynecology and feminism. The issue of
sexual politics, certainly, was always central to the relationship. “As
women, we had a lot more freedom because you could pretty much do
whatever you wanted, because nothing much was expected of you,”
said Carroll. “Whereas for men, I think their role had been pretty well
defined. So I think it was probably a lot harder for [Steven Morrissey]
to find where he belonged. And there was also the possibility that he
was someone who could not fit in with anything. . . . He was someone
who could not cope with an everyday existence. That part of his angst
was absolutely genuine.”
Naylor, who wore her lesbianism as a badge of pride, believed that
“Steven was a lot more of an active gay man than he ever let on.” But
she accepted that “being gay in Manchester at that particular point was
not really an option.” She saw Morrissey in much the same way as she
saw herself and Carroll at the time: “confused, frightened, unsure, lost
between the modernist world and the postmodernist world we all in-
habit now [in the twenty-first century], where we play with irony and
identity. And at that point identity felt very serious.”
“There was a part of Steven that we never saw, a part of him that
had personal relationships with people,” confirmed Carroll. “He was
never really interested in talking about that with us. He would make
camp remarks or he would make remarks about things, but we never
really knew what was going on with him when it came to his personal
life. . . . I think we got the sense that behind that wall was some stuff
that wouldn’t be quite so easy to deal with.”
It was noticeable that until the success of the Smiths—in which
she would play an important promotional role— Carroll “never had
any doubt” that Morrissey’s path to success in life would be literary.

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Ironically, at City Fun, she and Naylor had cast aside some of his con-
tributions under the pen name Sheridan Whiteside (a character in The
Man Who Came to Dinner) because they almost always promoted the
New York Dolls, a band for whom the Crones had little time. Once they
befriended him, they were more supportive of his literary endeavors,
publishing a glowing retrospective of his on Sandie Shaw.
In the meantime, Naylor, Carroll, and Morrissey alike remained
unyielding in their support for Linder’s musical career. On paper,
things appeared to be going well for Ludus, who released three albums
in 1982 and recorded a John Peel session replete with the wonderfully
titled “Vagina Gratitude.” (The title of a compilation released that
year, Riding the Rag, a slang term for a woman’s period, was equally
inspired.) But New Hormones could not do much more for a band that
was determined to operate in the margins. In stepping up as Linder’s
unofficial PR person, Steven Morrissey acknowledged as much. “Being
the only sensible recipe for the culturally damaged,” he wrote in a press
release for New Hormones that summer, “Ludus are out to at least
stretch their patience with the world to the very elastic limit.”
Of that he was not exaggerating. On November 5, 1982, Ludus
headlined the Haçienda. Prior to the show, the Crones laid a red-
stained tampon on every table. Linder then took to the stage wearing
a dress made of meat, removing it for the last song to reveal a lengthy
dildo strapped around her waist.2 As the members of the audience
recoiled—even in the experimental world of post-punk England,
Linder’s act was extreme—Naylor and Carroll wandered among them,
distributing meat entrails wrapped in pornography.
The act infuriated the Haçienda’s owners—and that was largely its
intent. During its first six months, the club had been showing pornog-
raphy, “and they thought it was really cool,” recalled Linder. (It would
have to have been “soft” porn, given Britain’s draconian indecency

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laws of the time.) By reducing herself to an object of meat, said Linder,

“I took my revenge.” But with such a confrontational act of perfor-
mance art, she also brought herself to a crossroads. “I thought, ‘That’s
it. Where do you go from here?’ ” That Haçienda show turned out to
be her last in Manchester. She broke up Ludus the following year and
moved to Belgium, gradually abandoning music entirely for visual art.
Her feminist influence would live on in the rock world, not only in the
many women musicians who took up her fight over subsequent years,
but in Steven Patrick Morrissey—who, by the time of that last Ludus
concert, had already played his first gig with the Smiths.

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