Such was the critical pandemonium surrounding the publication of Morrissey’s Autobiography in October 2013 that despite my vested interest as the author of two books on the man and his work—the hymn-by-hymn Smiths history Songs That Saved Your Life and the pick’n’mix biography Mozipedia—I abstained from my peers’ speed-reading hysteria.So, it seems, did Johnny Marr. “I didn’t [read Morrissey’s] to avoid everyone asking what I thought,” he recently told the press, who forgivably thought it only fair to inquire considering Marr was promoting his own equivalent. Touted as “the truth,” Marr’s recent memoir, Set The Boy Free, finds the guitarist “setting the record straight” after too many “so-called Smiths books” spreading “shit” and—be still my bamboozled heart—“lies.” Which sounded like a challenge not to turn a deaf ear twice to the gospel of a former Smith, but instead retreat to a dingy cell with oil lamp and wicker matting to devour both chronicles of Morrissey and Marr simultaneously. And, you know, atone for my sins.
The Smiths’ five-year existence occupies but a fraction of their respective lives, though in both cases, as the narrative fulcrum on which their working-class childhoods and solo fortunes pivot. Morrissey was 52 when he finished Autobiography, submitting the manuscript in its entirety before a bidding war ended in a reported £2 million advance and its Oxbridge-mocking advent as the first straight-to-Penguin Classic (a marketing masterstroke that was, naturally, his idea). Marr was 51 when he signed with Century, part of the same Penguin Random House group, writing his to contract and completed when he, too, was 52. Drastically different in style and substance, Autobiography and Set The Boy Free nevertheless offer similar wounded survivors’ tales. The Smiths were a band of damaged individuals making damaged music for other damaged individuals. Whether within or between the lines, these books bear the scars.
Marr’s version of events will be familiar to any scholar of the band, plotting key moments from his mythical first proposal on Morrissey’s Manchester doorstep to the group’s last stand in a Notting Hill fish restaurant. But candid insight is surprisingly thin. That his earliest Smiths tunes were the product of a brain sugar-rushing on lemonade and Cadbury’s Caramel is as fascinating, and deep, as Marr delves. There’s also his fond studio flashback to 1983’s “Hand In Glove,” with its flash of harmonica-parping studio spontaneity. “It sounded like it was from the mist of the north and somewhere in the past,” writes Marr in what sadly proves to be one of Set The Boy Free’s all too rare expressive blooms, not helped by an eye for detail that remains permanently half-shut.
Having interviewed Marr numerous times, knowing the Technicolor raconteur on tap makes his monochrome drone all the more bewildering. He describes creating the indelibly warped shiver of “How Soon Is Now?” but omits the mise-en-scene of red light bulbs and pot smoke stoking its muse. When a livid American label representative corners him backstage over the band’s contractual defection to EMI, Marr neglects to include the angry rep punching a hole in the wall, neutering all drama. Even his wedding to lifelong girlfriend Angie leaves best man Morrissey on the cutting room floor, similarly robbing the reader of the spooky coincidence that as the newlyweds climbed into a car after the service, the Rolling Stones’ “Angie” magically piped up on the radio. The handsome devil is in such details. Without them, Set The Boy Free is the drabbest of plain Janes. Typing as if awakening from general anesthetic, his last word on the Smiths’ third album is the following sentence: “The Queen Is Dead was good.” And for this revelatory record-straightening Johnny Marr was paid a six-figure sum.
The Sherlockian mind of Morrissey suffers no such fog when it comes to forensic minutiae. When label boss Geoff Travis congratulates him on Meat Is Murder reaching No. 1, he rewards Moz with a wretched bag of biscuits, “a two pounds and 75 pence sticker still affixed.” More selectively episodic than Marr’s Smiths-by-numbers, Autobiography is immeasurably more revealing. Half tragedy, half sitcom revolving around the bean sprout-munching minions of Rough Trade and his pantomime ridicule of Travis, the time finds Morrissey rolling his wicked sleeves up so far they become tourniquets around his shoulders. Plums of gossip to keep the jaw in steady swing are planted throughout: the lusty advances of press officer Gill Smith (“a hot-blooded goat in search of a rutting ram”), a failed coup attempt by manager Joe Moss to oust him, his haunted Kensington flat where an uninvited Sandie Shaw risks death crawling through the kitchen window, and his shock at accidentally discovering Marr working behind his back with Bryan Ferry. “As if jealously guarding a can of sardines, Billy Bunter and his playmates are rumbled,” he writes.
As he’s been proving since 1983 (and, as Autobiography painfully emphasises, long before that, to a world that wasn’t listening), Morrissey was born to write. Words are his hammer, punctuation his chisel, and the blank page his block of marble from which to transform a mundane journey from Manchester to London into existential sculpture. “No matter how high-speed the train, the frozen recollection in the window is the collapsed countenance of your own face staring back at you, unchanged, questioning, questioning, questioning like a second you—an inner you, representing the superiority of reason, reminding you that there is nowhere to run.” At such moments Autobiography reads, as you would hope, exactly like a Smiths song.
It would be as daft to expect Marr to match Morrissey’s wordsmithery as it would to think Morrissey could lick Marr at dueling banjos. But the shock of Marr’s prose is that it’s everything his music isn’t: graceless, lacking rhythm, meandering, and clichéd. It needn’t have been had he not been so vainglorious to insist its undertaking without the guiding shoulder of a ghost. Looking at his hero Keith Richards, whose Life is the wild gypsy quintessence of Keef cackling and wheezing on every page, Marr might have realized that it took a skilled journalist in James Fox to trap it there. Alone, Marr cannot express in words what he expresses in chords as a sixth sense: the emotion, melancholy, and vulnerability of his true self. If the past 35 years have taught him anything, you’d think he’d have learned his best work usually involves a writing partner.
Obviously Morrissey needs no ghost, unless we count the phantom of Charles Dickens. “My life is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets,” begins Autobiography and immediately someone somewhere with a big nose who knows remembers Little Dorrit. “Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets.” Those who took umbrage at Morrissey’s Penguin Classic status might be appeased to know how often he genuflects to Dickens; repeatedly quoting Oliver Twist, his youth’s register of sadistic teachers from the same grotesque mould as Nicholas Nickleby’s Wackford Squeers, or his transparent parallels drawn between the 1996 trial over Smiths royalties (told with epic if exhausting retributory relish) and the legal travesty of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. (“Bleak House, indeed.”) If Morrissey’s life reads like a Victorian melodrama, it’s because his quill is never happier than when dipping in the gaslit inkwell of 1850. When the Smiths’ self-titled debut misses No. 1 because Rough Trade didn’t manufacture enough cassettes, it’s the histrionic 19th-century vapors that attack: “My life sinks.”
“The Smiths could only ever have lasted as long as we did because of the differences in my and Morrissey’s personalities,” writes Marr, alas too mealy-mouthed to spell out those differences beyond the fleeting passive-aggressive slip. When he dismisses Morrissey’s godhead Oscar Wilde, whose “talent was spoiled by his smug self-regard and pomposity,” the eyebrow needn’t arch very high before registering the inference. In touché, the Achilles heel of Marr’s fence-squatting “Mr. Nice Guy” is pinpointed with cutthroat clarity by Morrissey. Capitulating before the judge in 1996, the guitarist becomes “a child again, wanting anything at all except the disapproval of complete strangers.” Contrast this with the rascally young guitarist waving off an overweight Smiths fan in Denver with “ta’ra, fatty.” Morrissey clearly misses that mischievous Marr. And as uninspired and unnecessary as the fat joke is, so do the mirth-starved readers of Set The Boy Free.
A chapterless Joycean monolith, Autobiography is the more demanding volume, but whether mercilessly mocking the monarchy or swooning in praise of the poet A. E. Housman, Morrissey never treats his reader as less than an intelligent equal. Marr, preoccupied with stunted-adolescent notions of “cool,” seems to regard his as the village idiot. Upon forming the Smiths, he writes: “I wanted what I was doing to be modern, and I wanted my friends to like it and think what I was doing was cool.” Five years later, Marr returns home after recording in Paris with Talking Heads when a friend asks how it went. “‘Good, good,’ I replied. ‘Talking Heads are cool.’” Thereafter Marr’s post-Smiths adventures pan out like The Littlest Hobo, trotting from one “cool” established band to the next only to scamper on, apparently without acrimony, once his work is done. The moral of his story: “For a Mancunian-Irish kid with a guitar, it’s all been pretty good.” And with that the composer of the Smiths—sorrow’s own minstrel of “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want,” Ardwick’s Beethoven behind “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”—reduces his life to a winking emoji.
Towards the end of Autobiography—between an attempted kidnapping in Mexico and failed efforts to save dying pelicans—Morrissey makes it unambiguously clear he will never reform the Smiths when, first litigant drummer Mike Joyce, then Marr, knock for second helpings. “Johnny, too, tells me that he is ready for a re-formation.” But what Morrissey dismisses in a single bite, Marr makes a needless feast of as his book’s apostle-teasing Big Reveal. In late 2008 they meet in a pub outside Manchester, when “suddenly we were talking about the band reforming.” “It could be good,” Marr continues in typically frostbitten fashion, “and it would make a hell of a lot of people very happy.” Excluding, that is, the singer. Both men make defiant virtue of their post-Smiths successes, but it is Marr who reveals himself as infinitely needier of his old group’s oxygen to keep him in public view.
“Yes, time can heal,” writes Morrissey. “But it can also disfigure.” Reading the twin lives of its crash victims, he alone emerges as the sole recognizable voice of the Smiths. Autobiography makes you laugh like the first time you heard “Frankly, Mr Shankly” and cry like the first time you heard “Well I Wonder.” It is a work of art, Morrissey’s best in 20 years, all slipshod solo albums considered. Whereas Set The Boy Free is a work of opportunism, an excuse for Marr to return to the spotlight and protest that there’s more to his life than the Smiths, you know. But as his gutless book betrays, not much more.