Books about The Smiths have a somewhat acrimonious history. “I hope Johnny Rogan ends his days very soon in an M3 pile-up or a hotel fire,” fumed Morrissey on the publication of Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance in 1992. Morrissey’s disdain for the biographer’s contentious book didn’t seem to stop him quoting it from the dock in an English high court, where drummer Mike Joyce successfully sued him and guitarist Johnny Marr for £1 million of unpaid royalties in 1996.
Now, it’s time to hear Mike Joyce’s side of the greatest indie soap opera ever told. Morrissey published his Autobiography in 2013 under the Penguin Classics imprint and elevated his pretension to an even higher art form. He barely had a good word to say about anyone, apart from brief cameos from Dubliners Damien Dempsey and Sack singer Martin McCann. Johnny Marr followed in 2016 with Set the Boy Free: The Autobiography, which Rough Trade selected as their book of the year.
Joyce opts for nuanced narrative tactics when it comes to raking over these still-smouldering coals. While the court case itself is not explicitly addressed, there are plenty of tantalising revelations and astute observations as to how and why relations among the members of this amazing band, blessed with of the finest band chemistries in musical history, soured so spectacularly. Early on, he reveals the band essentially fractured into two separate camps between the lyricist and the musicians. Joyce enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the bassist, Andy Rourke, who died in New York in 2023 after a prolonged battle with pancreatic cancer, aged just 59.
The drummer cherishes every minute he spent with Rourke. “Every quirk, difference, peccadillo pushed to Monty Python levels of absurdity until tears were rolling down both of our faces,” he recalls. “The monotony of touring punctured by the hilarity caused by this daft, beautiful man.” Joyce also contends that Andy Rourke was a severely underrated musician. Despite Morrissey forging a remarkable songwriting partnership with Marr, none of the band really bonded with the singer, who courted a separate circle of friends, associates and acolytes. “For all of our shared ancestral heritage, it’s a miracle the band made it out of 1982, such were our apparent differences, the sense of total social dislocation from our singer and lyricist,” Joyce reflects.
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Of course, the band did make it out of 1982. What they created together over the next four years still sounds jaw-dropping. With a delightfully direct, easy to read, and warm style, Joyce testifies to the astonishing greatness of the best four-piece guitar band to ever hail from these islands and enthusiastically celebrates the band’s Irish heritage. Morrissey, Johnny Marr, and Mike Joyce all had Irish parents on both sides, while Rourke’s father was Irish and his mother Mary was English. It has been said that if their national identity were to be assessed by parentage, then The Smiths are more Irish than U2.
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Speaking of Irish Mancunians, after Oasis ended their 16-year-long live hiatus in Cardiff in July, the New Statesman’s senior political editor George Eaton trumpeted that the Gallaghers were the greatest Irish band of all time. Please allow me to correct this and declare that this title rightfully and deservedly belongs to The Smiths, alongside My Bloody Valentine, who are set to make their live comeback in the coming weeks. It is highly unlikely that The Smiths will get to have their own lucrative victory lap. Rourke is dead for a start, and Johnny Marr reportedly turned down “an eye-watering amount of money” to reform the band. Many fans are still deeply disappointed with Morrissey’s endorsement of a fringe far-right party called For Britain, who Nigel Farage claimed harbours “Nazis and racists”.
Mike Joyce’s The Drums is a terrific read and wonderful reconnection to a lost world. As Joyce brilliantly puts it, the ’80s were less connected by modern standards, but the shared passions people enjoyed – record shops, the weekly music press and John Peel – caught the ears, hearts and minds of millions. “When I look back, a pragmatic and content man in his sixties, I choose to focus on the amazing highs of being part of the band,” Joyce writes in his preface. “I want this book to be a love letter to that time and a love letter to The Smiths, capturing some of the stories and moments that defined that period of my life.”
Those same stories and moments produced a body of musical work that still defines a period of our lives, and continues to enrapture new generations of fans and enthusiasts in the whole beautiful and never-ending process.
