Twenty-four years ago I visited a Smiths disco at the Star & Garter pub in Manchester. I’m posting this report on the night to mark the sad death of Andy Martin who passed away on 29th March. He’d operated the Star & Garter since 1997. As Fergal Kinney wrote in a superb article about Andy and the Star & Garter in the Manchester Mill; “Today, small venues matter because the best ones carve out and insulate a space outside of the mainstream for community to flourish. This, at a time when capitalism has largely eroded community spaces — with the attendant crisis of epidemic loneliness — is a towering achievement”.
I wrote about the Smiths disco in one of the chapters in my book about DJs called Adventures on the Wheels of Steel. Here it is again; my report from way back in 2000…
Dave Cotrill is a DJ. Every few months he goes to a function room upstairs in a pub on the edge of Manchester city centre, down the wide streets behind Piccadilly station, under one of the iron bridges, well away from the bustle of the city's club and bar hot spots on Canal Street, Oldham Street and Oxford Road. He goes where there are few cars, no taxi ranks, no gangs of drinkers swaying down the pavement, to a pub on the corner of Fairfield Street called the Star & Garter. The main door is always locked, so he goes in the side entrance. When he walks in, there are four or five customers congregated round the bar downstairs, sipping pints. This is unregenerated Manchester, untouched by the digital, global, corporate world; there's no stripped pine, no chrome, no theme, no menu, no cloakroom, no Chardonnay, no champagne.
He goes upstairs to a room that's available for hire. It's 9.30pm. The decks have been set up on a trestle table on the stage. He clambers up on to the stage with his records. It's a one-man operation: he hires the room, does all the publicity and plays all the records. He has with him three boxes of records - not the swish metallic record boxes festooned with logos and airline stickers that the top-notch DJs would have someone carry for them, just plastic crates, which he carries himself. His crates are full of records by the Smiths, and the records the Smiths singer Morrissey has made during his subsequent solo career. Tonight, as usual, Dave will be hosting a Smiths/Morrissey night, a one-man disco dedicated to the man who infamously called on his listeners to Hang the DJ.
Dave also carries with him a slide projector and a bedsheet which he hangs at the back of the stage. He dusts down the in-house DJ equipment, turns on the power and checks the leads are plugged in. The Star & Garter's DJ equipment consists of two old-fashioned Citronic decks built into a crumbling black console with a mixer. The mixer has no crossfader, and the decks, needless to say, have no pitch control and no slipmats. There's a 20p piece glued on top of each stylus, weighing the needle down to prevent the records jumping. The set-up is state of the art 1978.
Dave has been running the Smiths/Morrissey disco since 1994. It takes place every few months. It's the only DJ job he's ever had; nobody has come down to one of his nights and headhunted him, snapped him up to do a festival or a gig somewhere else, although occasionally he has branched out and run a Smiths/Morrissey disco in London. The last one at the Liquid Lounge in King's Cross was OK, but not as good as the Manchester nights.
The Star & Garter doesn't have queues. When I get there I worry, not just because there's no queue, but because there are also no doormen, and at first, I'm not sure I've come on the right evening. At the bottom of the stairs there's a middle-aged lady in a purple anorak collecting the entrance money. It's £2 before 10.30pm. I pay and go upstairs. I can hear ‘I Started Something I Couldn't Finish’ as I walk through the door into the room, which is already half full. The hall holds maybe 200 people, with Dave, his records, and his slides on the stage to the left, chairs and tables to the right, and a bar in a room off to one side. There's no VIP bar (naturally; there are no VIPs). Somebody gives me a leaflet advertising the sale of a West Ham Boys Club T-shirt; apparently Morrissey wore a similar shirt on his last tour in Britain. I ask the T-shirt salesman if it's the same design as Morrissey's. "No, but as near as I could get it," he replies. There's a fruit machine, but it's been turned off.
Tonight, pints of Stella in a plastic pint pot are £1.30. I could probably buy a round for everyone in the room for the same price as drinks for four in some glitzy London bar. I don't, although half an hour later I get Jane a pint of cider. She's celebrating her 26th birthday.
Jane has been coming to the Smiths/Morrissey disco for five years. She's on Dave's mailing list, so she gets advance warning of when the events are going to take place (every couple of months, always on a Friday, and a special every year on the Friday that falls nearest to Morrissey's birthday). Dave has more than a hundred people on his mailing list, and most of them are in the room already.
I look for somewhere to sit. There's no room round any of the tables, but there's a bench running along the side wall next to the dance floor with a couple of spaces available. It turns out that this is where the true devotees sit. I'm next to Bill from Wigan. He's in his late 20s and he too is on Dave's mailing list. Something has gone wrong recently, though, and he hasn't been sent any information about tonight, but he ended up here anyway.
He was on a night out in Wigan with his mates, but they went looking for some decent music. They ended up in Warrington (why Warrington? "Don't ask," he says). Eventually Bill and his friends found themselves in Manchester, at the Thirsty Scholar. I didn't even know it was still open, I tell him. While they were there he picked up a flyer advertising tonight's Morrissey disco, so they came straight over.
Talking to Bill is difficult, and not just because the bench is near the speakers. Morrissey fans know all the words to all the songs and throughout the evening, they sing them raucously. As we sit chatting on the bench, Bill will suddenly start singing, so about one out of every four things he says are lines from Smiths songs. I choose what to respond to as it's clear he doesn't expect a reply every time. Dave plays Girl Afraid. Bill gets up to dance, and I go and talk to Dave.
At home, Dave listens to Scott Walker, David Bowie, Prince, some old soul and French pop from the 60s like Françoise Hardy. He's very disciplined about what he plays at the discos, though. Probably a good 95% of the records he plays are songs sung by Morrissey, 3% are by other groups, and the remaining 2% are Smiths instrumentals. He has a clipboard on the table next to the decks on which he writes down the names of the songs. "I sometimes forget what I've played," he says, "and I never like to play anything twice in a night."
At the beginning he knew most of the audience, and they became friends and regulars, but he's been doing this for seven years and a lot of the original audience has drifted away. Now he doesn't know many of the crowd, although just as he tells me this a couple of lads come into the room and wave to him.
So how does he know what to play?
"There are certain things that I know are going to be popular."
Like anything with Morrissey singing on it?
"Yes."
There are a surprising number of younger people there. No toddlers, of course, but 18- and 19-year-olds, which strikes me as a bit odd considering that it was 1986 or 1987 when the Smiths were at their height. Somehow the Morrissey cult is still strong enough to renew itself with fresh-faced new disciples. According to Dave, it is the more recent converts who are the most devoted and eager. They're the ones totally consumed by Morrissey: "The younger ones are definitely the ones most likely to want to hear just Morrissey and the Smiths and the ones who have quiffs. The ones into them originally wouldn't have quiffs."
I ask Dave if these older Smiths fans are broadminded enough to want to hear some house or garage or something. "I don't know," he says, "I mean, I don't know what all those different dance things are called, but some of the older ones I speak to used to go to the Haçienda."
The Haçienda nightclub seems like a long time ago and a long way away. Here, at the Star & Garter, there are photocopied A4 posters stuck up with Sellotape on the blackwashed walls advertising punk nights. Also on the wall is an advert for next week's Manic Street Mania, a night of records by the Manic Street Preachers, also £2 before 10.30pm, but not organised by Dave. He tells me that other people have hired the Star & Garter for tribute nights. There was one night that featured records by James. There was also a Belle & Sebastian night and, predictably, some of Belle & Sebastian actually came to it.
Many of the gathering crowd at the Star & Garter are wearing genuine antique Smiths T-shirts, while others have come dressed in plain T-shirts, with scribbled tributes to Moz daubed in indelible black pen on them. The prevailing colours of the clothes are black and dark denim. Many of the girls are wearing skirts with flower prints, and some of them are dressed like Miss Havisham: Gothic, I suppose, wearing long black dresses, clumpy shoes, widow's weeds. They dance in groups, rather than couples, or singly. There's one couple dressed in Gap light khaki combat trousers and canvas trainers sitting at a table about 10 yards from me. They are possibly in the wrong club.
Dave plays ‘Golden Lights’ by Twinkle - a song that the Smiths once covered - but the dance floor clears. Jane comes over to sit next to me. She arrived here on her own. After about four or five Smiths songs, Dave plays something by James. "He never plays much else besides Morrissey and the Smiths, does he?" I say to Jane.
"No, not really, but he'll throw in the odd weird one."
Like James?
"Yeah, or the Fall."
What about Motown?
"No."
A bit of disco or some funk, say by the Fatback Band?
"No," she says, "you won't get any disco music here."
We change the subject. She admits to me that her job is about as inappropriate as you can get for a Morrissey fan: she work in a McDonald's. Tomorrow she has a day off. When she asked her boss, the man had said, "Why, is it another Smiths night?"
"Come back in two months," she says to me, "and it'll all be the same."
Dave then plays the acoustic Sandie Shaw version of ‘Jeane’ and five people get back on to the dance floor - a group of four girls and a boy, tall, with black floppy hair and Adidas trainers; he look like Alex James before he met Keith Allen. The girls are smiling and doing a skippy dance but he's just standing there on his own, gently rocking and touching and hugging himself. It's a bit creepy. I go to the bar to get Jane a drink.
I have to bring the drink back across the dance floor, which has filled now, to the strains of ‘How Soon Is Now?’ (sample lyric: "I go home and I cry and I want to die"). Everybody is singing along. Even the Gap couple are dancing, singing the words to each other; it turns out they're Smiths fans after all. Then Dave plays ‘Still Ill’, and suddenly Bill weaves his way across the dance floor to me. "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?" he asks me. "I don't know," I reply.
For the throng, dancing is a sideways swivel of the hips; their feet are everywhere and nowhere. Many of them twirl invisible gladioli above their heads. They dance with their hand on their hips, but primarily with their voices. When Dave plays ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’ the dance floor fills and the crowd roars the chorus. I nearly spill my pint on to Jane's lap.
Jane says that when the night started it used to be full of Morrissey lookalikes. Back then, she remembers, "All the boys looked like him and everyone brought flowers."
Did they?
"Yeah, I brought daffodils."
And then what happened?
"I grew up." She laughs.
I'm still amazed at how young the crowd is. I must be one of the few people in the room old enough to have seen the Smiths play. Jane never saw them, although she has seen Morrissey during his solo career. The last time she was a bit disappointed, not by him but by the crowd: "There were all these students there, who must have been into Morrissey for like a year or something."
I ask her what she thinks would happen if Morrissey walked in now.
"Well, we'd all jump on him."
A few minutes later I'm back bothering Dave as he tries to cue the next record up through his headphones. I ask him if Morrissey or any of the other members of the Smiths knows that the night exists?
"I don't know."
What would happen if Johnny Marr came in?
"I don't think people would leave him alone. I think they'd ask him questions."
What, like "Why did you split the Smiths up?"
"Er, no. I don't think they'd ask that."
Would you ask him to sign your records?
"I don't really bother with things like that."
As we talk, a few dancers come over to the stage and ask Dave to play certain tracks. It's all very polite. There's no one asking, "Have you got anything good?"; nobody is giving Dave any sort of a hard time. He's giving them what they want. Do any of the audience get aggressive when they ask for records?
"You can get one or two but that's usually because they're drunk, really."
Does he ever get any shady characters down here?
"Um, once or twice we have had some shady people in, but I don't think they were here selling drugs."
So, what happened; did these shady people start fighting?
"No, they just stood there and then they left. We never have fights. Sometimes it gets a bit rowdy and if somebody has had too much to drink, they might start acting daft and pushing people on the dancefloor, but nbobody would start fighting."
Does anyone ask to hear something a bit different?
"No, they never want anything else, although somebody asked me once for Dinosaur Jr. But they didn't get aggressive."
He waits for the record to finish so he can put another one on, and then he tells me about his proper job. He works for a company that helps find work for people in places like Salford and Bootle. His employers know that he moonlights as a DJ: "I have told them, yes, but I don't know what they think."
Does he think their image of a DJ is somebody living a very glamorous lifestyle?
"No, I don't think they think what I do is very glamorous."
Dave has played a few floor fillers but now he's playing one of the more miserable dirges from Morrissey's back catalogue, and the dancefloor has thinned out again. Dave is DJing in a totally different way to the way Seb Fontaine does it at Cream, or Steve Lawler does on the Space terrace on a sunny Sunday in Ibiza. If I were behind the decks, I'd be looking to build the atmosphere, peak it, hold it there, take it down again, bring it up, climax, encore. But Dave's set isn't like that at all; it seems like he's just throwing the records on one after another. There's no underlying thread, no sense of programming or progression. But this is a different world.
I ask him if he ever hangs out with other DJs."I don't know any other DJs," he tells me. So if Paul van Dyk walked in now Dave wouldn't recognise him? "No. Paul van Dyk? No, I've never heard of him."
Dave isn't on that loop - clubs, promo records. He's not interested in going to Cream, Fabric or Gatecrasher. He's happy doing his own night: "I used to go to indie clubs, but not any more. The last club I went to was the Venue because it was all bottles 50 pence but it smelled of sick and everybody was about 14."
The gaps between records are getting longer. He's like a jukebox, full of the audience's favourite tunes, with somebody pressing random buttons. But then why should he follow the disco rules? He's entirely matching the audience's expectation, after all. If he started some nifty cross-fading, he'd probably be booed off. He's not even standing up; he's sitting behind the decks, only getting to his feet to change the slides. Next up; a picture of Viv Nicholson.
Morrissey doesn't like dance music, does he?
"I don't really know. I don't believe anything he says in interviews because he always seems to contradict himself."
He's never said he likes dance music though, has he? He's still up for burning down the disco and hanging the DJ as far as we know.
"Yes, but I don't know if he means it literally."
Do you think he would burn down this disco?
"I've no idea." Dave is getting wise to me. "I don't know if his limousine would find the Star & Garter," he says.
Dave has been a fan of Morrissey since 1988, just after the Smiths split up. The first record he heard by Morrissey was Suedehead. Of course, 1988 was the year of acid house, an episode stubbornly resisted by Morrissey. "I could never begin to explain the utter loathing I feel for dance music," he said.
It's gone midnight now, and there won't be many more people coming to the Smiths/Morrissey disco. Those that are here will stay until 2am. I ask Dave if he pays his mother wages for taking entrance money: "Yeah, I do, but, I mean, she'd probably do it for free. I've never made much money, but then I'm never out of pocket."
Have you ever had a big night, loads of people in and it's been bonanza time?
"No."
I ask him to put me on the mailing list. I tell him I'll be back, and I did go back. The next time was Morrissey's birthday. Somewhere in Los Angeles, where he now lives, Morrissey was probably out with friends, but two hundred of his most dedicated followers were in an upstairs room at the Star & Garter. Unfortunately there was no screen on the birthday night because some faulty wiring on Dave's slide projector blew the fuse when he plugged it in. The Star & Garter was full, but there were no birthday balloons. No cake. No candles. No disco biscuits. Just the way they like it.
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