"It was terrifying, says Mike Joyce, sitting in the palatial suite of the Stock Exchange hotel in Manchester. The drummer is talking about his favourite gig with the Smiths: the night in July 1986 when The Queen Is Dead tour hit Salford Maxwell Hall. They weren't taking ticket stubs off people coming in. So they were giving their tickets back out through the bog window. The show ended up at double capacity."
"Joyce, garrulously upbeat company, has just written a warm, engaging memoir, The Drums, celebrating the Smiths. It's a right place, right time story of his memories as the great indie band tore down the boundaries of British guitar music, with Johnny Marr's beautifully intricate playing merging immaculately with Morrissey's words, resulting in devastating, romantic and witty vignettes that perfectly captured everyday life."
"Some guy opened the door and told me to fuck off I wanted the book to be about the majesty of it, says Joyce. How it was wonderful and interesting and crazy and weird. Not the negatives. That's why The Drums stops just after the 1987 split, before Joyce went on to work with the likes of Sinead O'Connor and Julian Cope, and before the Smiths's infamously chequered legacy of court cases, spats and the ongoing drama of Morrissey's controversial worldview."
"From what I've gleaned, he's certainly got very different politics to mine, Joyce says. But that's his opinion. He just seems very angry about a lot of things. Of course I hear it people saying, I can't listen to the Smiths. I can't separate the art from the artist.' If that's how you feel, that's fine. Does that make sense to him? Not to me. But I'm listening to it from a very different perspective."
Mike Joyce recalls a July 1986 Salford Maxwell Hall show that exceeded capacity after ticketing chaos, forcing evacuation of a collapsing sprung dancefloor and producing intense audience emotion. He celebrates the Smiths' musical chemistry, with Johnny Marr's intricate guitar work merging with Morrissey's lyrics to produce romantic, witty vignettes about everyday life. He focuses on peak years, ending his account before the 1987 split and the subsequent legal disputes and controversies surrounding Morrissey's politics. Joyce grew up in Manchester in 1963 within a strongly Catholic Irish immigrant family, framing his perspective on the band's legacy.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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