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Available now at https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/the-fifth-smith-908

August 1987: The Dissolution of the Smiths

In August 1987, reports began appearing in the British music press that the Smiths had split. To many fans, the news seemed sudden. In reality, the group had been quietly coming apart for months.

The decisive events can be traced back to May.

Days before the group recorded “Work Is a Four-Letter Word” and “I Keep Mine Hidden” at Firehouse Studios in Streatham, Johnny Marr called a meeting at Geales, an upscale Notting Hill chippie. Exhausted by the band’s management problems and increasingly uneasy about its musical direction, he told Morrissey, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce that he needed a break.

“I felt like I was drowning,” Marr later recalled.¹

What made matters worse was that Marr also revealed that he intended to work with other artists, including Talking Heads and Bryan Ferry. Whatever Marr intended as a temporary hiatus, it is not difficult to understand why the others may have heard something more ominous.

According to Marr, the atmosphere immediately changed. Mike Joyce appeared to become the group’s spokesman and informed him that the Smiths intended to return to the studio almost immediately, despite having only just completed Strangeways, Here We Come.

Marr regarded the demand as almost surreal:

“It was like a weird test, and I was guilty of some kind of violation.”

Morrissey’s motivation may actually have been the opposite of what Marr perceived. With Johnny apparently slipping away, pressing ahead with another recording session may have been an attempt to keep him engaged and restore the band’s cohesion.

If so, it was a disastrous miscalculation.

At Firehouse, Joyce told Marr that they were recording Cilla Black’s “Work Is a Four-Letter Word.” Marr was already resentful of the new dynamic within the group and particularly disliked being instructed by Joyce:

“I didn’t want to do a cover of a Cilla Black song, and I didn’t want to be told I was doing one by Mike either. That was not going to be the new way.”

He reluctantly recorded it, later judging the result unworthy of the Smiths. More importantly, the session convinced him that something fundamental had changed.

“We had reached an impasse,” Marr wrote. “A chasm had opened up between us and there was no way to bridge it.”

He left immediately afterward for a holiday with Angie, relieved simply to be away. As the days passed without contact from the others, relief turned to anger and then to a more unsettling thought:

“The more days that went by without hearing anything, the more it pissed me off and the more I started to think that The Smiths might actually be over.”

Morrissey remembered the same period rather differently, emphasizing exhaustion rather than conflict:

“Johnny and I were both drained beyond belief… We do not telephone each other for two weeks, and then suddenly the press is rife with Smiths split stories…”²

The tragedy is that both versions may contain some truth. Marr wanted space. Morrissey and the others appear to have feared that space would become departure. Their effort to keep him close only made him feel trapped.

By August, what had begun as exhaustion, mistrust and a request for breathing room had hardened into something more permanent. The private dissolution of the Smiths was now becoming public knowledge.

¹ Johnny Marr, Set the Boy Free: The Autobiography (New York: Dey Street Books, 2017). All Johnny Marr quotations in this post are from this source.

² Morrissey, Autobiography (New York: Penguin Books, 2013).

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In my latest essay, I explore the darker question beneath the song’s irresistible groove: how does violence become normalized, and how much of what begins at home follows us into adulthood? Available now at https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/barbarism-begins-at-home-c5c

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https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/that-joke-isnt-funny-anymore-09d

https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/charles-hawtrey-morrisseys-quiet

Was Morrissey condemned for what he actually said and did, or for what critics assumed he meant?

My new essay examines the 1992 Madstock controversy, the role of the music press, and how a single performance came to define Morrissey's public image for decades.

Free to read. No paywall.

https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/madstock-1992-632

https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/rusholme-ruffians-163

https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/the-boy-with-the-thorn-in-his-side-249

• Why Johnny Marr deliberately abandoned his signature guitar sound to reinvent the Smiths at the very moment the band was nearing its end.
• How a nineteenth-century Irish revolutionary poem became one of Morrissey's most hopeful and deeply personal songs.
• The overlooked literary and historical references woven throughout the lyrics, from Lady Jane Wilde to the ghostly figure of "Troubled Joe."
• Why "A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours" serves as the perfect opening statement for Strangeways, Here We Come.
• How Morrissey transforms a nineteenth-century political rallying cry into a meditation on heartbreak, resilience, and emotional resurrection.

Whether you've loved this song for decades or simply admired its haunting beauty, its story is far richer and more surprising than it first appears.

Read the full essay at https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/a-rush-and-a-push-and-the-land-is

https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/how-catholicism-shaped-four-decades-104

-No paywall. Read the full essay at https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/how-catholicism-shaped-four-decades

A compact disc version of 2008's limited-edition vinyl The Smiths Singles Box compilation was issued seventeen years ago today (22 June 2009). The twelve-disc collection presented each of the Smiths' UK singles in replica sleeves. Rather than reproducing the more limited contents of the original 7-inch releases, each disc generally follows the expanded configuration of its corresponding 12-inch vinyl single.

Although not intended as a comprehensive anthology of every Smiths recording, the collection traces the band's artistic development through its single releases, from "Hand in Glove" to "Bigmouth Strikes Again." Along the way are many of the group's finest non-album recordings, including "Jeane," "Wonderful Woman," "Girl Afraid," "Rubber Ring," "Asleep," and "Unloveable," documenting different stages of the band's brief but extraordinarily productive career.

The cover art of the compact disc edition of The Smiths Singles Box was faithful to the vinyl edition, featuring a photograph of American actor Joel Fabiani rakishly leaning against a Jaguar E-Type. Best known for portraying Stewart Sullivan in the British television series Department S (originally aired 1969 - 1970), Morrissey is not on record of ever citing either him or Department S other than a post published on Morrissey Central on 5 January 2024 where he included Fabiani among the public figures he had most treasured meeting, listing him at number twenty-six in his personal roll call of "Meetings most prized."

CD Version Track Listing

CD 1: "Hand in Glove"; "Handsome Devil" (Live)

CD 2: "This Charming Man" (Manchester); "This Charming Man" (London); "Accept Yourself"; "Wonderful Woman"; "Jeane"

CD 3: "This Charming Man" (New York Vocal); "This Charming Man" (New York Instrumental)

CD 4: "What Difference Does It Make?"; "Back to the Old House"; "These Things Take Time"

CD 5: "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now"; "Girl Afraid"; "Suffer Little Children"

CD 6: "William, It Was Really Nothing"; "How Soon Is Now?"; "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want"

CD 7: "How Soon Is Now?"; "Well I Wonder"; "Oscillate Wildly"

CD 8: "Shakespeare's Sister"; "What She Said"; "Stretch Out and Wait"

CD 9: "Barbarism Begins at Home"; "Shakespeare's Sister"; "Stretch Out and Wait"

CD 10: "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore"; "Nowhere Fast" (Live); "Stretch Out and Wait" (Live); "Shakespeare's Sister" (Live); "Meat Is Murder" (Live)

CD 11: "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side"; "Rubber Ring"; "Asleep"

CD 12: "Bigmouth Strikes Again"; "Money Changes Everything"; "Unloveable"

Although superseded by Complete (2011), the 2009 CD Singles Box remains a distinctive release in the Smiths' catalogue. By preserving the original artwork, sequencing, and expanded 12-inch configurations, it recreates the experience of collecting the band's singles during the 1980s, when each release was treated not merely as a vehicle for a hit song, but as a carefully curated collection of recordings that often proved as essential as the album tracks themselves.

https://morrisseyringleader.substack.com/p/sheila-take-a-bow-997

Co-written with Jesse Tobias, the song compresses Morrissey's longstanding opposition to bullfighting into a bright, deceptively buoyant two minutes, culminating in the deliciously subversive refrain, "We all want the bull to survive."

One of five digital singles issued from the album, "The Bullfighter Dies" was accompanied by one of Harvest Records' now-infamous spoken-word promotional videos, which Morrissey later dismissed as failing to capture the songs' true spirit. Watch the spoken-word music video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrQTxeLPMEg

The track also appeared on the B-side of the limited-edition, numbered 10-inch World Peace Is None of Your Business single issued in the United States by Harvest Records. The release was housed in a plain die-cut sleeve with a sticker affixed to its reverse side.

Shortly after the album's release, Morrissey's relationship with Harvest had collapsed, the label dropped him, and World Peace Is None of Your Business was removed from digital platforms.

Despite its troubled history, Morrissey has since ranked World Peace Is None of Your Business as the finest album of his career, including those he made with the Smiths.

An icon turns 40.