🔗 Share this article

{“It was terrifying,” shares Mike Joyce, sitting in the luxurious room of the Stock Exchange hotel in Manchester. The percussionist is talking about his cherished gig with the Smiths: the night in July 1986 when The Queen Is Dead tour played at Salford Maxwell Hall. “They didn’t collect ticket stubs off people coming in. So they were redistributing tickets through the toilet window.” The show reached double capacity. “They had to evacuate the bar downstairs because the elastic flooring was failing. Delirium! There were people weeping openly, strangers embracing one another – and that was pre-MDMA!”

A Celebration of the Smiths

{Joyce, enthusiastically lively company, has just completed a warm, engaging memoir, The Drums, celebrating the Smiths. It’s a “perfect timing and location” story of his experiences as the great indie band eliminated the boundaries of British guitar music, with Johnny Marr’s beautifully intricate playing merging immaculately with Morrissey’s words, producing moving, loving and humorous vignettes that accurately portrayed everyday life.

Someone opened the door and shouted obscenities

“I wanted the book to be about the majesty of it,” explains Joyce. “How it was amazing, fascinating, insane and bizarre. Not the negatives.” That’s why The Drums ends shortly 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 ongoing drama of Morrissey’s controversial worldview. “From what I’ve learned, he’s certainly got very contrary beliefs to mine,” Joyce says. “But that’s his opinion. He just seems very frustrated 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 hearing it from a very different perspective.”

Childhood and Inspirations

The drummer was born in Manchester in 1963, into a “deeply religious” Irish immigrant family. “The divine apprehension was absolutely ingrained in our lives,” says the drummer, although he does still remember a “joyful youth full of love”. It was not without its difficulties: Joyce spent six months in hospital after being hit by a car outside his house, an undiagnosed ruptured spleen causing internal hemorrhage that nearly killed him. The fits faded after a year.

Seeing Buzzcocks live was his starting point, John Maher’s drumming motivating him to buy a kit. Joyce became so enamored by the band, he once found frontman Pete Shelley’s house. “Some guy opened the door,” he remembers, “and told me to get lost.”

Joining the Smiths

In his teens, Joyce entered punk bands, first the Hoax and then Victim, before a friend who also knew Marr invited him to audition for the Smiths. Before he got there, he consumed psychedelics but “not enough to require medical help”. He demonstrated enough skill to get the job, before he started to see visions. 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 aloof presence. “He hardly spoke to me.”

Joyce says he found it difficult to describe Morrissey in the book. “I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t like Morrissey. He was incredibly talented. Very witty person, sharp wit. But it was such an unusual relationship. There was a separation. I accepted we were just very distinct individuals.”

I pursued legal action to receive my fair share – because it was just

He’s more happy to speak about his bandmates’ talents, in particular Marr’s constant output. “Every day, you’d go round the house and he’d play some riff relaxing with cannabis 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 dark, attractive, repulsive, appealing elements. A exceptional vocal talent. Stage performance interesting, intriguing, incredibly skilled. It’s a strong mixture.” Andy Rourke, a permanent ally who Joyce writes about affectionately, was last to join on bass. “I’d heard bass played like that, but I’ve never seen it played like that.”

Legal Battles and Band Dynamics

It all left Joyce feeling slightly daunted. “I had difficulties because Andy and Johnny were far superior of me.” But he says he never felt underestimated as the Smiths quickly gained popularity. In November 1983, the band played This Charming Man on Top of the Pops, the same night as a energetic concert at the Haçienda. But in 1984, Joyce was called into a meeting with the band’s accountant. He hadn’t paid too much notice when only Morrissey and Marr signed the contract as the band joined Rough Trade.

“I thought 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 rejected immediately.

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 performance and recording royalties – 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 resolved privately (under “a lot of duress”) but Joyce continued with the case in 1996. He says if he’d lost, he would have been bankrupted. “But I thought that if I didn’t, then nobody would ever know what happened. I just wanted what I thought was rightfully mine, and what was right.” Despite calling him “uneducated and financially inexperienced”, Judge John Weeks ruled in Joyce’s favour after a grueling week-long trial, awarding him £1m. Weeks famously stated he found Morrissey “sneaky, aggressive and untrustworthy” and Marr “willing to embroider his evidence to a point where he became less credible”.

Consequences and Thoughts

The case caused a division that is still playing out. Joyce says he regularly gets trolled by Morrissey fans on social media. “Death threats, angry comments, the usual.” 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 memorial service for Rourke, who succumbed to cancer in 2023 aged 59.

“It was good to see him. Because it wasn’t about legal battles 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 emotional toll? “Yeah,” he says hesitantly. “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.”

Treasured Experiences

Joyce, now 62, chooses to take a positive outlook, talking excitedly 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 emotional he started crying as he sat on his drum stool. “I’m getting goosebumps 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 totally unlit so we couldn’t see him.” Then he’d start singing. “Astonishing,” says Joyce. “When he did I Know It’s Over for the first time? Tears.”

The Smiths’s split was abrupt. Marr called them all to a fish and chip shop in Notting Hill, London, and told them he was leaving. Joyce was surprised – “I thought we were going for chips” – and writes about feeling devastated. 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 twist to the saga. Morrissey announced his intention to sell his financial stakes in the Smiths, inviting prospective buyers to send an email. “I’ve got no personal investment,” says Joyce, referring to any business interests. “But I thought it was a strange thing 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 harm and ruin”. Does he wish that? “I don’t,” Joyce says. “I’ve