Book description
They were, their fans believe, the best band in the world. Critics
and sales figures told a similar story: six albums between 1984 and
1988 made number one or number two in the UK charts. Twenty-five years
after their break-up, the band remain as adored and discussed as ever.
To this day, there is a collective understanding that The Smiths were
one of the greatest of all British rock groups.
The Smiths - Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce -
were four working-class youths who came together, by fate or chance,
in Manchester in the early 1980s. Their sound was both traditional and
radically different, a music that spoke to a generation, and defied
the dark socio-economic mood of the Thatcher years. By early 1984,
barely a year after their first headlining gig, they were the hottest
- certainly the hippest - name in modern music. In the years that
followed the group produced an extraordinary body of work: seventeen
classic singles, four studio albums, and some seventy songs composed
by the team of Morrissey and Marr. Yet for all their brilliance and
adoration - their famously energetic live shows routinely interrupted
by stage invasions - The Smiths were continually plagued by their
reticence to play the game, and by the time of 1987's Strangeways
Here We Come, they had split. The Smiths have never played
together again - their enormous contribution to pop culture forever
condensed into a prolific and prosperous halcyon period, their legacy
intact and untarnished.
Thirty years after their formation, twenty-five since they broke up,
The Smiths' firmament remains as bright as ever. It's time their tale
was told. Tony Fletcher's A Light That Never Goes Out is a
meticulous and evocative group biography - part celebration, part
paean - moving from Manchester in the nineteenth-century to the
present day to tell the complete story of The Smiths. Penned by
a contemporary and life-long fan, and the product of extensive
research, dozens of interviews, and unprecedented access, it will
serve to confirm The Smiths as one of the most important and
influential rock groups of all time.
Tony Fletcher is the bestselling author of five non-fiction books
and one novel. His biography of drummer Keith Moon, Dear Boy,
has been named in many Best Music Book lists, and his biography of R.
E.M., Remarks Remade, has been published in over half a dozen
countries. During the 1980s heyday of the Smiths his magazine
Jamming!, regularly featured the band as cover stars, and he
was a co-presenter of the television show The Tube, for which he
conducted Morrissey's first television interview. Fletcher saw the
Smiths in concert for the first time at the London Lyceum in 1983, and
for the last time at the Kilburn National, in 1986, on their final
tour.
A contributor over the years to a multitude of magazines,
newspapers, radio and television shows, primarily in the UK and USA,
Fletcher now lives with his wife and two sons on a mountaintop near
the village of Woodstock in New York State. There he runs, skis,
maintains his web site www. ijamming. net, and plays Hammond
B-3 and Rickenbacker in the Catskill 45s, a group that only performs
songs from 45 calendar years ago. They look forward to covering the
Smiths as of 2028.
