You know your luck too well

Johnny Marr is at your door.

The knocks are growing more insistent. Are you ever going to answer?

It has been five years since he sauntered up to your mother’s Stretford semi and released you from solitary confinement. You welcomed him into your box bedroom, allowed him to finger your sacred seven inch singles and shyly accepted his modest proposal to conquer the world of popular music. 

The song he placed on the turntable that afternoon was Smokey Robinson’s “You’re The One”, a late single by the Marvelettes.

Two sedans and the latest sports car
Plus a lot of money in the bank?

asked Wanda Richards, whispering through the crackles of 1966

My baby, just give me you
In a love affair made for two.

Hand in glove, the two of you have come a mighty long way. While your peers have been waylaid by the easy distractions of sex, drugs and money, you have remained devout in your dedication to the Pop Moment, as though working in a hit factory from a bygone age of showbusiness. Since May 1983 there have been thirteen perfect singles, each an urgent, desperate, bleakly funny peal of romanticism in an age of unremitting cynicism.

The albums have been immaculate - piercing the heart of the decade, with all its murderous desires. But the mainstream has shunned you, the world refused to listen. The singles have stalled resolutely at the doors of the top 10, knocked back from popular embrace by some obstinate bouncer of the zeitgeist. You were never destined for the number one heroics of the Beatles, Bolan or Bowie - not even the passing pop fancies of the Kinks or Sparks. But this exile has only preserved the keenness of your ardour, sharpened the blade of your wit. No other band inspires such devotion. With every passing day, you can feel your legend grow.

It has been four years of scandal, acclaim, revenge, adulation, and now, finally, the first taste of a certain kind of luxury. Far from the squalor of Whalley Range, you are ensconced in the gloomy splendour of Cadogan Square, Knightsbridge, in a flat opposite the home of Sir Christopher Lee, on a square where the shades of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas still flit on moonlit nights. A few days ago you welcomed an LWT film crew to interview you at your desk for a South Bank Show special that should be a final vindication, a coronation. Will it prove to be your epitaph?

BANG BANG BANG. Johnny is now screaming your name on your doorstep.

You have controlled so much. From the flowers on your rider (“a selection to the approximate retail value of £50, including gladioli, but no roses or other flowers with thorns”) to the precise typeface (Benguiat Bold) and shade (Pantone 130c) on the sleeve of your new album, Strangeways Here Come. You are finally, after years of legal turmoil, poised to leave Rough Trade and storm the EMI establishment on your own terms. You have laid the foundations for an imperial spree. But things are getting out of hand.

Johnny has invited one more interloper into the family. After Joe Moss, Geoff Travis, Ruth Polsky, Scott Piering and Matthew Sztumpf, the American Ken Friedmann is the latest occupant of the Smiths managerial hotseat and is swiftly proving himself a world class nuisance. He has already fired your faithful booking agent Mike Hinc and prompted the sudden resignation of press officer Pat Bellis. At Wool Hall, while the band are recording Strangeways, he is busy with plans for European tours and British festivals. Now he is insistent that the group must produce a video for “Sheila Take A Bow”. 

Outside a voice is screaming. A woman is crying.

Pop music should be such a simple covenant: impassioned singer, sacred song, beamed magically into the lonely heart of the waiting listener. That there must be a whole squalid bureaucracy of functionaries interfering in this very intimate consummation is an inconvenient necessity - but the pop video is surely a step too far. Ruinously expensive, laborious and tiresome, it is one more commercial distraction that seems entirely out of your control.

You miss the days when it was the two of you, driving, side by side through the night on an urgent pilgrimage to locate a copy of “Shoes” by Reparata from some godforsaken derelict second-hand record shop in Morecambe. These days Johnny seems so far away. His head is turned by every offer: Keith Richards, Bryan Ferry, Talking Heads. Everyone wants a piece of him.

He insists that the two of you need a break and some time to rethink everything. He has heard a change in the rhythms at the Hacienda, can feel the first seismic tremors of something new happening beneath the streets of Manchester. This Wythenshawe Perry Boy, who still changes his hairstyle three times a week, worries that the Smiths are very soon going to be looking as corny as the Beach Boys showing up at Monterey wearing their blue striped shirts.

Can you change? You took an oath on that first meeting and have just renewed your vows of eternal fealty on your latest single: “now, today, tomorrow and always”.  But in your heart you remain chained to the gates of the Salford Lads Club.

“Don’t do this!” shouts Johnny through your letterbox.

But he has finally had enough. A strange fear has gripped you. You are not ready for a video, a manager, EMI, the real world. You are going to return to your bed, phone up your mother, and then turn up the volume very loud and listen over and over again to a tape of Strangeways. You know your luck too well. You will probably never see him again.