Fri 19 May 2023 13:57 BST
The Smiths’ creation myth is well known: Inspired by a South Bank Show documentary about the Leiber and Stoller songwriting partnership, Johnny Marr shows up unannounced at Morrissey’s doorstep, gets the singer’s approval after being invited to choose a record to play and Choice of the Marvelettes B-side, 1966’s Paper Boy, returns the next day as the two immediately write The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Suffer Little Children, their extraordinary meditation on the Moors’ murders : immediate evidence of the partnership and the band It came about and would, as Marr later put it, “do things differently”.
It’s a story that confirms Marr’s 2016 autobiography Set the Boy Free. But the book also hints at another origin of the Smiths: a few years earlier, he first met a troubled classmate named Andy Rourke and was then assigned by his school to keep an eye on him. Rourke came from a much wealthier background than Marr and had been left to his own devices by his divorced parents and developed a drug addiction that spread to heroin. The two became friends and musical partners, performing together in youth bands. The Smiths initially tried to do without Rourke, but failed: After one gig, Marr fired bassist Dale Hibbert and recruited his friend despite concerns about his drug use.
It was a decision that would trouble the Smiths at the height of their careers — Rourke was briefly fired in 1986 after being arrested for heroin possession — but it was the right decision nonetheless. It’s easy to think of the Smiths as a two-man show: Morrissey and Marr wrote the songs; What’s more, both were artists so talented and original that their characters could hardly be overshadowed. Indeed, it is a train of thought that Morrissey in particular has pursued vigorously in recent decades, belittling the contributions of the Smiths’ rhythm section and acting as if, to use the catchy words of a lawyer, they was tasked with deputizing for drummer Mike Joyce “as readily” were interchangeable as the parts on a lawn mower”.
“Sophistication”… (LR) Andy Rourke, Mike Joyce (drums), Morrissey and Johnny Marr at The Tube. Photo: Pete Cronin/Redferns
But it’s not true. Rourke was as gifted a bassist as Marr was a guitarist: when legendary session bassist Guy Pratt was called to rehearsals after the drug bust, he assumed no one would notice Rourke’s absence (“Let’s be honest,” he later wrote, “like “A lot of people would bother with that?”), but marveled at the “sophistication” of what was expected of him. In Pratt’s retelling, the general sigh of relief when it becomes clear that Rourke’s arrest won’t stop him from traveling across the US is almost palpable.
Listen closely to the Smiths’ records and the evidence is there. Rourke developed a complex but fluid playing style to “overcompensate” for the fact that the band only had one guitarist, he said. On 1984’s “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” or “The Headmaster Ritual” the following year, his bass and Marr’s guitar play around each other with amazing skill. On “This Charming Man,” on the other hand, Rourke works perfectly with one of the most famous guitar riffs in alternative rock history, driving the song forward. If you’re romantically inclined, you might think that Marr and Rourke’s shared tone is a testament to their longstanding personal closeness. On the title track of The Queen Is Dead, Rourke’s playing is even more propulsive: despite its complexity, the bass seems to tap into the song’s wild fury.
He also provided ample evidence of the breadth of musical influences that went into the Smiths’ sound, which was easy to overlook given the limited musical worldview their frontman represented in interviews. Morrissey might have thought reggae was “abominable,” but Rourke clearly didn’t share that view: Listen to his bass part on the B-side, 1986’s “Rubber Ring.” Morrissey “detested” modern soul – “that discriminated nonsense” – but on “Barbarism Begins at Home,” regularly considered the finest example of Rourke’s playing in the Smiths’ oeuvre, he plays a wriggling, funky slap bass that would not have sounded out of him place in the world of “discovered nonsense”. “I don’t think Morrissey thought that was cool,” he later admitted.
Still, Rourke and Joyce continued to play with Morrissey after the Smiths split. Rourke even temporarily replaced Marr as his co-writer on a handful of tracks, of which Girl Least Likely To is probably the best, and there’s another example of his ability to funk behind Morrissey’s on the 1990 single “November Spawned a Monster.” insert voice. Until the argument about the distribution of money in their former band got the upper hand.
Johnny Marr: “When I play Smiths songs, I get a huge rush of excitement”
Given his skills, it seemed odd that Rourke didn’t become a top-notch session player. Appearing on the Pretenders’ 1994 album Last of the Independents, Rebel Rock Me successfully reworked the rockabilly-influenced playing style he had on the Smiths’ Nowhere Fast and Rusholme Ruffians, as well as Killing Joke and Badly Drawn Boy”. But he seemed more focused on forming new bands: Freebass with Mani from the Stone Roses and Peter Hook from New Order; Dark with Dolores O’Riordan from the Cranberries; Moondog One with Joyce and Bonehead from Oasis.
None of them would ever eclipse the Smiths, but then again, the Smiths’ influence and impact was so great that it was hard to imagine what would happen later: Marr has played with countless artists since the band’s demise, but remains the guitarist for the band the Smiths some 40 years later; Morrissey could stubbornly claim that the music he is making is vastly superior to the Smiths’ production, but to no avail. Obviously, with another frontman or guitarist, they wouldn’t have had the same impact and impact — and hadn’t it been the Smiths. But the Smiths wouldn’t have been the Smiths without Andy Rourke either.
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