One of pop’s longest, coldest wars flickered with heat again this month, as Morrissey fired off a series of messages on his personal blog.
First, he claimed that concert promoters AEG offered him and Johnny Marr “a lucrative offer” for a world tour, saying that he agreed to it but Marr ignored it. Then he claimed that Marr had blocked the release of a new Smiths best-of and reissue programme proposed by Warner Music, who had approached Morrissey and a sleeve designer “to assemble artwork for all four releases, all of which were rejected and halted out of hand by J Marr”. You can understand why Marr might have demurred, given the cover art featured the words Smiths Rule OK! in bright faux-painterly daubs above a photo of the band, and thus looked like a flyer for a soft play centre themed around 80s indie.
Then, most seriously, Morrissey claimed Marr had applied for total ownership of the Smiths’ name without consulting him, allowing Marr to potentially tour as the Smiths without Morrissey.
Marr has long been diplomatic in his relations with Morrissey, but on Monday his management responded with a statement. It said he had reached out to Morrissey in 2018 after discovering the band name was not trademarked, and had attempted to give him joint ownership. Morrissey’s “failure to respond led Marr to register the trademark himself,” it continued. “It was subsequently agreed with Morrissey’s lawyers that this trademark was held for the mutual benefit of Morrissey and Marr. As a gesture of goodwill, in January 2024, Marr signed an assignment of joint ownership to Morrissey. Execution of this document still requires Morrissey to sign.”
As for the proposed tour, wrote Marr: “I didn’t ignore the offer – I said no,” adding he also did not intend to tour alone as the Smiths.
Marr couldn’t be more emphatic – and yet fans will still hold out hope, given that the Smiths are a rock band, and no rock band ever feels truly over. Perhaps we should blame the Eagles, who infamously said hell would freeze over before they re-formed, later re-forming for the Hell Freezes Over tour. Ever since, there’s been the sense – a bit like a will-they-won’t-they sitcom romance, or a Marvel movie where a superhero is atomised only to return for a lucrative sequel – that any post-band squabbling is just prolonging the inevitable.
A certain measure of tension was what made the Smiths great. Inaccurately thought of as fey and/or moping, they were musically tough and dynamic, and coupled with Morrissey’s devastatingly funny and emotionally daring lyrics: such waspishness, keen feeling and intense energy was arguably not the stuff of long, serene careers. Though even relatively recently Marr has spoken of the admiring, even loving way he and Morrissey regarded each other during the Smiths: “When you have such an intense relationship, and you are impressed with each other and reliant on each other, and when it’s set to music and poetic, it’s like a deluxe version of a conversation,” he said in 2013.
The band split in 1987, amid a lack of management plus the usual excess and creative differences: Marr said he “didn’t form a group to perform Cilla Black songs”, as latterly proposed by Morrissey, though you rather feel the Cilla-free and astoundingly good final LP Strangeways, Here We Come suggests that there might have been more to it. Morrissey later said: “It was a fantastic journey. And then it ended. I didn’t feel we should have ended. I wanted to continue. [Marr] wanted to end it. And that was that.”
Those remarks came in 2006, after one of a number of big-money offers to re-form. In October the following year, Marr said: “Maybe we will in 10 or 15 years’ time when we all need to for whatever reasons, but right now Morrissey is doing his thing and I’m doing mine.” And the year after that, they met in a pub, as Marr later told the Guardian: “The conversation about re-forming came out of the blue. I didn’t go there with that in mind. But there had been quite a few rumours about it, so naturally we discussed it. ‘It could happen …’ ‘How d’you feel about it?’ ‘What if?’ And off we went … I think we were both as keen as each other.” But they went back to their more immediate musical projects, and the energy petered out.
Morrissey’s comments on Chinese people, immigration, religion and more, as well as his support in 2019 of the far-right political party For Britain, caused some listeners to turn away from his music, including that of the Smiths (though the band clearly remain relevant to young people, given they have considerably bigger streaming numbers than almost all of their 80s peers).
And yet Marr, though he was frequently asked about his former bandmate in interviews, wouldn’t be drawn into particularly pointed criticism. “It won’t come as any surprise when I say that I’m really close with everyone I’ve worked with – except for the obvious one,” he told Uncut in 2022. “And that isn’t that much of a surprise because we’re so different, me and Morrissey.” Morrissey wrote an open letter after that interview, asking Marr to stop mentioning him: “You know nothing of my life, my intentions, my thoughts, my feelings. Yet you talk as if you were my personal psychiatrist with consistent and uninterrupted access to my instincts.”
Morrissey-Marr still carries as much weight for some as Jagger-Richards or Lennon-McCartney, and those fans will hope that today’s worsening relations are all just a misunderstanding – did Morrissey properly receive the relevant legal docs? Might it be better to go down the pub again rather than trade statements online? Morrissey’s recent spree of posts expressing his hurt that Marr has repeatedly denied the possibility of further Smiths activity, and his own agreement to a tour with AEG, show he longs to perform this music again (though cynics will say he’s just trying to sell tour tickets while his latest album, Bonfire of Teenagers, languishes rejected by every UK major label, as he claimed recently).
You can’t help but think his posts may have taken inspiration from two other Mancunians setting aside their differences after sniping at each other for years. A certain amount of the thrill of the Oasis reunion announcement came from imagining those songs ringing out of a mighty stadium PA, but the excitement was heightened by the romance of Liam and Noel Gallagher’s renewed fraternal bond, and curiosity about how they buried the hatchet (just earlier this year Liam aired grievances against Noel at some length in these pages). The very fact that the Gallaghers had agreed to go on stage together – after so much bitterness – created the third act that fans had been willing them towards.
There’s the sense that if they can get back together, anyone can. Despite the very material differences between Morrissey and Marr, and the evidently worn patience of both parties in their respective clipped tones this month, rock’n’roll carries enough mythos to make fans keep the faith. Some would see Marr collaborating with Morrissey again as an ethical failing. But plenty more would love to see them reunite – confirming, as it would, that music is often bigger than any of the people who make it. And after all, wasn’t it these two that promised there is a light that never goes out?
