Morrissey is one of pop music's few genuine visionaries, but that doesn't mean you should believe everything he says. Often he talks utter nonsense. Here, from an interview he gave in 2003, is an example:
When it comes to what we choose to wear, or choose not to wear, everything is a decision, even—and sometimes especially—not making a decision. And the care, instinctive or otherwise, which the Smiths clearly put into the way they looked was, and is, obvious.
“The Smiths were the worst-dressed group in the history of cloth. I can't imagine how that would inspire anybody.”
Evidently, this isn't true, either part of it. And why Morrissey should be so savage about himself and his three former colleagues isn't completely clear, though it's fairly easy to come up with theories. The simplest explanation—that he truly disdains how he, and they, used to look—seems the least likely. Perhaps, instead, as with many artists who burn so brightly at the beginning of their careers, his words should be seen as one more salvo in the perpetual battle to ensure that his present isn't eclipsed by his past. Or maybe, and this is surely at least partly true, it allowed him a new way to recirculate the copious bad blood that exists between various ex-Smiths. (For a tedious and one-sided account of the others' sins, see Morrissey's Autobiography.) Or perhaps he was just having a bad day.
But perhaps he was also, in his skewed and determinedly negative way, obliquely acknowledging something significant about the way the Smiths looked, and why they came to look as they did. For in some ways the very point of how the Smiths looked was to avoid drawing attention to it. They were the kind of pop musicians who needed to present themselves as though nothing so superficial and distracting as fashion could ever play any part in what they did, because they had higher goals and were playing for bigger stakes. It's all about the effort that you're not seen to be making.
What the Smiths achieved in a little over five years is incredible: Their catalog is crammed with astonishing songs (and very, very few duds) and while their records cleverly cherry-picked from the past, they were like no records that had ever been made before. The music was terrifically concise, but somehow simultaneously fierce and delicate, and Johnny Marr's guitar lines threw off melodies in every direction, as though he had so many at his fingertips that he could never run short. And as for those lyrics—thoughtful, poetic, brusque, funny, oblique, and heartfelt—each delivered with a kind of swooning, delirious over-committal…it was as though someone had just discovered a higher standard for what a pop song should be, and only the Smiths had been told. Theirs was a rare magic, and they clearly knew it.
But, even so, look at them, just standing there. You can see they also knew that, sometimes, a crucial part of trying your utmost is to make your way through the world seeming like you're really not trying at all.
To understand why the Smiths looked as they did, you need to consider the time and the place from which they emerged. For a band in early 1980s Britain to present themselves like this—utilitarian and everyday, in clothes almost anyone could wear—didn't constitute some default style option, as it might have in other eras. Rather, it was an active act of defiance. This was an era in which people who made music were not just expected to wear clothes, they were expected to have an image.
When the Smiths surfaced, two particular types of image were prevalent in the world around them. Commercial pop groups were expected to use what they wore as a flamboyant calling card, and this, the height of the New Romantic movement, was a golden age of such peacockery; the pop-star style icons of the day were Culture Club, the Human League, Duran Duran, Gary Numan, and Adam Ant. Indie groups, by contrast, generally dressed as though they would only ever be photographed in black and white, as though the principal purpose of clothes was to express a certain discipline and asceticism, to assert that their wearers were involved in something serious, and to signal contempt for anything suspiciously carefree. In the Smiths' hometown of Manchester, where pop culture still cowered under the commanding shadow of Joy Division and Factory Records, such conventions loomed particularly large. (Incidentally, early-'80s Britain was a moment when more typical rock-star attire, the kind that is traditionally accompanied by long hair, guitar solos, and faux-sexual strutting, was not even an option, not for any band that hoped to be taken seriously. Punk had killed all that—forever, it seemed at the time—and only its last feeble echoes survived in the form of a few largely ignored heavy-metal groups. Every cool British kid knew that pathetically retrograde throwbacks like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard would never amount to anything.)
The one thing hardly anyone was trying to do back then was to look normal. But for the Smiths—even though what they would aim to achieve, and succeed in achieving, would in so many ways be singular and extraordinary—normality was an essential part of their aesthetic. This started, of course, with their name. “The most surreal, overtly artistic names were being pinned to the most pathetically dull groups so we thought we'd latch ourselves onto the most simplistic name we could possibly think of and still produce inspiring music,” explained Morrissey at the time. “Simply by having a really straightforward name we were saying that you don't have to hide behind any veil of artistry to produce something worthwhile.”
The way they looked dovetailed with this. In their very first published interview of any length, in February 1983, only nine months after Johnny Marr went round to Morrissey's house (well, in truth, his mother's) to suggest they form a group, and before the release of their first single, “Hand in Glove,” they were already clear that an image was something they were refusing to adopt. Asked “How important are clothes to you?” Morrissey replied: “They don't have the relevance they once had, like in the '60s you could look at someone and assess their personality. That's not the case anymore. Clothes are no longer the window of the soul.”
“People take clothes too seriously,” echoed Marr. “If we said, ‘Right, we're going to have that image’ there are bound to be people who don't like it. We're just gonna be honest about it and then if people don't like us it's because we're the Smiths and not because of what we wear.”
“Style has nothing to do with clothes,” Morrissey asserted. “You can't become stylish; either you are or you aren't.”
At their best, the Smiths would look like an all-for-one-and-one-for-all gang, but a loose kind of gang, united not by a uniform but a common sense of purpose. In an early fanzine interview Morrissey elaborated on all this, further emphasizing the lack of artifice at their heart. The Smiths were, he explained, the kind of group who appeared how they appeared because that's how they were, and that was that: “We dress the way we do, we act the way we do, and we play music the way we do.”
Of course that's never true. Especially in pop music, but also in any of our own lives: “I just threw on what was next to my bed…. These are the only clothes I have…” and so on and so on—all these sentences we say that may be superficially honest but which are also always deceitful in what they feign to omit. When it comes to what we choose to wear, or choose not to wear, everything is a decision, even—and sometimes especially—not making a decision. And the care, instinctive or otherwise, which the Smiths clearly put into the way they looked was, and is, obvious.
Also, when you look at what the Smiths actually did and how they actually looked, it often wasn't quite as straightforward as their words might lead you to believe. For one thing, if the unstated fashion script for the Smiths was to wear functional and classic casualwear of the present and past as though it had accidentally landed on their bodies, it was a script that Morrissey in particular often veered away from, in ways that were fascinating and memorable but much more in keeping with a preening pop star than an image-shunning naturalist. For instance, early on there were the beads he favored hanging low round his neck and the oversize shirts. “I've recently discovered a women's chain called Evans Outsize which has wonderful shirts,” he declared in one interview; he also detailed a fruitless five-hour hunt for a decent shirt.
And it wasn't just Morrissey. Johnny Marr was no fashion innocent—before music started paying he used to work in Manchester clothes shops. “It was never a job as such,” he later explained, “because my job was to make tapes and bring in other young people who were, quote, ‘hip,’ and that's all I did.… I'd actually just stand there trying to look cool.” But Marr would also travel down to London to buy up new stock, and even describing his first meeting with Morrissey to biographers over a quarter of a century after the event, he could detail exactly what he wore on the day, including Wild One biker boots, vintage Levi's “rolled up exactly the right height,” and a “proper old American flying men's cap.” He also had a tinted quiff, his look styled on the early Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe. (Morrissey likewise remembered being suitably impressed: “He looked a bit rockabilly, a bit wired and very witty, but also hard and indifferent.”)
As for believing in the four of them as a gang—the demeanor that they adopted in almost every Smiths photo session, whether by grinning and throwing arms round each other, or sullenly lining up as though staring down a common foe—even on that level we are now cursed with knowing too much. It's now clear that, as far as Morrissey and Marr were concerned, the Smiths were fundamentally their group, just the two of them, and that Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke were only a cut above hired hands who were only ever supposed to receive 10 percent each of the group's income. Years later Joyce would successfully challenge this unequal distribution in court, but there seems little doubt that, however well it was hidden, the Morrissey and Marr you see in these photos considered the Smiths to be made up of two uneven pairs.
And yet…and yet, for the rest of us, all that barely matters. All pop music is a kind of lie: What matters is how potent and persuasive are the tunes and dreams and truths that are smuggled inside that lie. And the Smiths were supreme smugglers. At the time, Morrissey was frequently derided as a moaner and a misery-lover, but only by people who weren't really listening or didn't want to listen. Yes, these were often songs of great dissatisfaction and frustration, but they were also inspirational songs that forever bubbled over with a sense of the search for the magical and the worthwhile, however elusive those might be. Inside the Smiths' grand pop-music lie, they smuggled something that—in all its pain and beauty, dark humor, dread and wonder—their audience then, and their enduring audience since, could recognize as magnificently, distressingly, enthrallingly true. And so as you heard the Smiths—and as you saw them standing there, too—the only sane thing to do was to believe them.