‘Hand in Glove’: The Smiths song written about Morrissey and Johnny Marr’s friendship
What happened to The Smiths was a tragedy. A group of working-class Mancunian misfits became one of the most exciting bands of their generation by going completely against the grain, proudly making intelligent, defiantly vulnerable music. It is the kind of music that threads an impossible needle by unmistakably being the work of its creators, yet being profoundly relatable to anyone listening. Then everything fell apart.
I’m not even talking about the viscerally depressing horror show Morrissey has spent the last three decades playing out in public. This was a kitchen sink drama so poetically sad that a screenshot from it would probably make the cover of a Smiths single in a different life, and it started right from the dissolution of the band itself.
The band fell apart thanks to the standard rock band tropes. A brutal mix of creative differences and legal troubles that widened the chasm between Morrissey, guitarist Johnny Marr, bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce too far for anyone to negotiate. Over the decades they spent apart, that animosity remained so vitriolic that a reunion was never even rumoured, no matter how often the GDP of a small country was offered to them for a tour.
This will always sting when it happens to your favourite band and, for certain generations of indie fan, The Smiths are less a “favourite band” and more a set of teachings to build your life around. What makes it sting all the more was that The Smiths weren’t a band forced to the back pages of NME, looking like a bunch of talented chancers who felt like they could be pop stars. It was built around a friendship.
How were The Smiths built around a friendship?
That friendship was between Morrissey and Marr, and it began, fittingly enough, at a Patti Smith concert. The two first struck up a conversation at the Manchester Apollo but wouldn’t get to know each other properly until a few years later, in 1982. At the time, Marr was looking for a singer to front a new band, and a mutual friend had suggested Steven Morrissey, as the latter’s band, The Nosebleeds, had just fallen apart.
Famously, Marr went straight over to Morrissey’s house in Stretford, Manchester, guitar in hand, to see what all the fuss was about. The two hit it off immediately, not just musically but personally too. This meant the absolute world to Morrissey in particular. Marr was a popular man back then in the Manchester indie scene, but his singer, possessed of a shyness he would later describe as “criminally vulgar”, could count his friends on one hand.
That “us against the world” mentality would infuse their very first single. ‘Hand in Glove’ is one of the most beloved songs in the band’s back catalogue due to its depiction of the giddy thrill of finding someone who understands you after being alone for so long. In an interview with Star Hits, Morrissey picked “Though we may be hidden by rags, we have something they’ll never have” as his favourite Smiths lyric.
He said, “It’s how I felt when I couldn’t afford clothes and used to dress in rags, but I didn’t really feel mentally impoverished,” elaborating further, “I just wanted to use the theme of complete loneliness. It was important to me that there’d be something searingly poetic in it, in a lyrical sense, and yet jubilant at the same time.”
Typically, Marr was more to the point, saying that it had to be about each other “purely because we were the only people hanging out with each other at the time.” After such a promising start, they would never be the same without each other. One wonders what could have been.
