A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths by Tony Fletcher

Author:Tony Fletcher [Fletcher, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Published: 2012-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

The Smiths/Sandie Shaw collaboration made for ready media fodder, and the two acts continued to do the rounds of press, radio, and TV.4 Ideally, the professional relationship would have continued as well, and even more so with patented compositions; the great shame of the Morrissey-Marr writing partnership is that they never gave material to another artist without releasing it in their own name first. When Morrissey finally brought Amanda Malone into the studio, in April 1984, it was as if he was trying to repeat the Sandie Shaw formula: he had Malone sing “This Charming Man” and a new song that the Smiths had just recorded as a B-side, “Girl Afraid.” While both songs would have taken on new light sung from a female perspective, the recording, at the Power Plant, with Geoff Travis nominally in the producer’s chair, was something of a disaster. Amanda Malone had never been in a recording studio before; Sandie Shaw she was not. “Geoff Travis, as soon as I met him, had animosity towards me,” she recalled, and while Marr, Joyce, and Rourke were never anything but friendly toward her, they “were not into it” either.

All concerned recognized the possibility of reversing what was otherwise a fairy-tale story of increasly high chart success and critical acclaim; the fact that no less an icon than Paul Weller was engendering serious credibility issues for persisting with his own untutored female teenage protégée (Tracie) would have been very much on Travis’s mind. The single was duly shelved, and Morrissey, afraid as always of confrontation, neglected to tell Malone until she pushed him on the matter during a visit to Campden Hill Road—at which point he admitted that “Geoff Travis hates it.”

Malone, “stressed at the idea” that the single might actually be released, assured Morrissey that if anything, she was relieved to hear that it had been canned. She had been living in England for three months already, in a bedsit in Battersea, while awaiting her studio appointment, and she decided to stay on in London. Malone developed a close friendship with Morrissey away from the day-to-day rigmarole of the Smiths, a female companion similar in some regards to those he had back in Manchester. Morrissey’s sartorial sense of mischief had not been left in the north; on one occasion, he told Malone to dress up and meet him in Notting Hill for a formal lunch, at which, equally well attired, he walked them from his flat to the cafeteria at the British Home Stores on Kensington High Street—for a downmarket version of the afternoon teas he’d once enjoyed at Kendal Milne. That he was constantly interrupted by fans appeared not to be a problem—yet. “He was always charming and kind, no matter how many there were or how long they were there,” said Malone. “He really got that he was lucky to be in that position, he really enjoyed it—and enjoyed being loved. Not just in a conceited way, but that to these people in some way he meant something.

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