Their presence might appear subtle, but The Smiths play an integral part in my novel, The Silver Skeleton.
I was rebelling at (and dropping out of) the lower sixth form at school in 1983 when Morrissey and Marr first left an indelible musical imprint on my mind.
I saw them live twice. Having been incredibly jealous when a friend scored a ticket to see The Smiths at Birmingham’s Tower Ballroom, I managed to catch them at the Birmingham Hippodrome on their next tour and again at the much lauded Wolverhamption Civic Hall gig a few years later.
The four main characters in The Silver Skeleton are named Stephen, John, Mike and Andy. As in Morrissey, Marr, Joyce and Rourke. The police officer who investigates the murder is named Craig (as in the fifth member Gannon). Two lesser characters, Paul Booth and Tim Carrack, get their names from Paul Carrack, who played keyboards on some Smiths recordings and Tim Booth, lead singer of the band James, who I saw support The Smiths
Chapter nine of The Silver Skeleton is set entirely at a Smiths gig, which I describe as the superb performance I saw at the Wolverhampton Civic Hall in 1986. In my novel, the gig takes place at the Birmingham Odeon, where The Smiths never actually played, but I needed the gig to happen in Birmingham, so claim artistic license! The song order is accurate and I build up the start to the gig with a description of Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights which remains the greatest-ever intro music.
The pivotal moment in The Silver Skeleton happens at that Smiths gig where an assault takes place during the encores and then the four main characters commit a murder as a form of revenge later that evening. Concert-goers these days perhaps don’t appreciate how violent gigs could be in the 80s. The term mosh pit wasn’t in use, as I recall, but the atmosphere in the area in front of the stage could be intimidating. At the Odeon, for example, in the days before electronic ticket scanners, people would help friends get down the front, others would sneak in through emergency exits and then the bar would empty at the sound of the opening number. There would be a cauldron of people, crushed into an area designed to hold about a third of the actual capacity.
The book’s romance, which is central to the plot, begins when two characters meet having both bought the new Smiths single Panic and the song that brings them together in the following chapter is How Soon Is Now.
I originally planned to name each chapter after a Smiths song, but realised that novels generally use chapter numbers rather than titles, so abandoned that idea. I pretty much listened exclusively to The Smiths while writing The Silver Skeleton to help take me back to the eighties and trigger memories for the chapters set in those years.
Michael Preston 