{“It was frightening,” recalls Mike Joyce, sitting in the luxurious room of the Stock Exchange hotel in Manchester. The drummer is talking about his favorite gig with the Smiths: the night in July 1986 when The Queen Is Dead tour played at Salford Maxwell Hall. “They failed to collect ticket stubs off people coming in. So they were redistributing tickets through the bog window.” The show ended up at double capacity. “They had to clear out the bar downstairs because the elastic flooring was collapsing. Frenzy! There were people sobbing uncontrollably, strangers hugging each other – and that was prior to ecstasy!”
A Celebration of the Smiths
{Joyce, cheerfully talkative company, has just written a warm, engaging memoir, The Drums, chronicling the Smiths. It’s a “ideal circumstances” story of his recollections as the great indie band tore down the boundaries of British guitar music, with Johnny Marr’s masterfully complex playing merging immaculately with Morrissey’s words, leading to moving, loving and humorous 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 grandeur of it,” explains Joyce. “How it was incredible, engaging, wild and unusual. Not the negatives.” That’s why The Drums concludes right after the 1987 split, before Joyce continued to collaborate with the likes of Sinéad O’Connor and Julian Cope, and before the Smiths’s famously complicated story of court cases, spats and the continuing saga of Morrissey’s divisive opinions. “From what I’ve understood, he’s certainly got very contrary beliefs to mine,” Joyce says. “But that’s his opinion. He just seems very upset 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|distinguish the music from the musician|divorce the work from the creator.’ 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.”
Early Life and Influences
He entered the world in Manchester in 1963, into a “deeply religious” Irish immigrant family. “The religious dread was absolutely entrenched in our lives,” says the drummer, although he does still remember a “pleasant early years full of love”. It was not without its challenges: Joyce spent six months in hospital after being struck by a vehicle outside his house, an undiagnosed ruptured spleen causing internal hemorrhage that nearly killed him. The seizures faded after a year.
Seeing Buzzcocks live was his initial inspiration, John Maher’s drumming inspiring him to buy a kit. Joyce became so fixated on the band, he once located frontman Pete Shelley’s house. “Some guy opened the door,” he remembers, “and told me to go away.”
Becoming Part of the Smiths
In his teens, Joyce entered punk bands, first the Hoax and then Victim, before a friend who also knew Marr asked him to try out for the Smiths. Before he got there, he ingested psilocybin but “not enough to require medical help”. He played well enough to get the job, before he started to experience altered perceptions. Band dynamics were already in place: Marr as leader (“I’d never heard anyone play guitar like that”) and Morrissey, then still ordinary Steven from Stretford, an distant figure. “He rarely communicated to me.”
Joyce says he found it challenging to portray Morrissey in the book. “I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t like Morrissey. He was fucking great. Very funny bloke, biting sarcasm. But it was such an unique dynamic. There was a distance. I accepted we were just very distinct individuals.”
I pursued legal action to receive my fair share – because it was just
He’s more at ease discussing about his bandmates’ talents, in particular Marr’s inexhaustible productivity. “Every day, you’d go round the house and he’d play some riff sat having a spliff in his sleepwear. You’d be like, ‘That’s amazing. What’s that?’” Then there were Morrissey’s lyrics. “One-of-a-kind. Nobody writes like that. The introduction of gruesome, handsome, vile, charming elements. A outstanding singing ability. Stage performance fascinating, captivating, highly proficient. It’s a potent brew.” Andy Rourke, a permanent ally who Joyce writes about lovingly, was last to join on bass. “I’d heard bass played like that, but I’ve never seen it played like that.”
Legal Struggles and Internal Issues
It all left Joyce feeling slightly daunted. “I faced challenges because Andy and Johnny were far superior of me.” But he says he never felt undervalued as the Smiths quickly caught fire. In November 1983, the band played This Charming Man on Top of the Pops, the same night as a wild show at the Haçienda. But in 1984, Joyce was called into a meeting with the band’s accountant. He hadn’t paid too much attention when only Morrissey and Marr signed the contract as the band joined Rough Trade.
“I believed it was on behalf of all of us,” he says. “I was wrong.” Now he and Rourke were being told they couldn’t expect recording royalties in perpetuity after the band split. “I just said, ‘That doesn’t sound right.’ It was never mentioned again.” In 1985, he took a call from Rough Trade employee Martha Defoe, who on Morrissey’s behalf suggested Joyce take a salary reduction, from 25% to 15%, because he didn’t do interviews or create artwork. He refused point blank.
Does he mean to imply, in the book, that they were being underhand? “You can call it that. I mean, that’s why I went to court.” Both Joyce and Rourke began a legal action against Morrissey and Marr in 1989, claiming a 25% equal share of concert and album income – they had subsequently discovered they were paid 10%. Morrissey and Marr argued the band members were not equal partners, though that’s not how Joyce sees it. “I think it sounded like the Smiths because of the four of us.”
Rourke settled out of court (under “considerable stress”) but Joyce continued with the case in 1996. He says if he’d lost, he would have been ruined. “But I thought that if I didn’t, then nobody would ever know what happened. I just wanted what I thought was due to me, and what was right.” Despite calling him “uneducated and financially inexperienced”, Judge John Weeks ruled in Joyce’s favour after a intense seven-day case, awarding him £1m. Weeks famously stated he found Morrissey “underhanded, confrontational and inconsistent” and Marr “willing to embroider his evidence to a point where he became less credible”.
Legacy and Musings
The case caused a division that is still ongoing. Joyce says he regularly gets harassed by Morrissey fans on social media. “Hostile messages, insults, typical abuse.” He says he last properly spoke to Morrissey in 1992 when they encountered each other in Altrincham. Aside from occasional glances in the crowd at Manchester City matches, he had no contact with Marr until the remembrance ceremony for Rourke, who passed away from illness in 2023 aged 59.
“It was good to see him. Because it wasn’t about court cases or who did what. It was about Andy.” Is he still glad he went through with the case? “Yeah. I don’t regret it.” Even with the personal cost? “Yeah,” he says tentatively. “But I didn’t take Julian Cope to court and I haven’t spoken to him for 30 years. To not be in touch with people you’ve been in bands with isn’t that strange.”
Beloved Moments
Joyce, now 62, chooses to take a upbeat view, talking passionately about his favorite Smiths moments, from the studio playback of debut single Hand in Glove, which was the first time they’d heard themselves recorded as a band, to the time a rendition of I Don’t Owe You Anything made him so touched he started crying as he sat on his drum stool. “I’m getting chills talking about it now,” he says. From 1985, he adds, Morrissey would record his vocals without the rest of the band knowing what he was about to do. “He never had any light in the studio. It would always be pitch black so we couldn’t see him.” Then he’d start singing. “Mindblowing,” says Joyce. “When he did I Know It’s Over for the first time? Weeping.”
The Smiths’s split was unexpected. Marr summoned them all to a fish and chip shop in Notting Hill, London, and told them he was leaving. Joyce was blindsided – “I thought we were going for chips” – and writes about feeling grief-stricken. Having been a radio DJ in Manchester, Joyce has just come out of a 21-year touring retirement to drum for Pete Doherty. Yet Smiths reunion rumours haven’t stopped. Last year, AEG offered a reported $25m for the band to tour. Joyce learned of this via the press and doubts he’d have been asked to join. “I think I forfeited that with the court case.”
In September, there was another development to the saga. Morrissey announced his intention to sell his business interests in the Smiths, inviting potential purchasers to send an email. “I’ve got no direct involvement,” says Joyce, referring to any business interests. “But I thought it was a odd decision to do.” The drummer was mentioned directly: naming “Marr, Rourke, Joyce”, Morrissey said he “would now like to live detached from those who wish me nothing but negativity and damage”. Does he wish that? “I don’t,” Joyce says. “I’ve
