‘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. “They had to evacuate the bar downstairs because the sprung dancefloor was collapsing. Delirium! There were people crying their eyes out, strangers hugging each other – and that was before E!”
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.
“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 Sinéad 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.”
Joyce was born in Manchester in 1963, into a “strongly Catholic” Irish immigrant family. “The fear of God was absolutely entrenched in our lives,” says the drummer, although he does still remember a “happy childhood full of love”. It was not without its traumas: Joyce spent six months in hospital after being hit by car outside his house, an undiagnosed ruptured spleen causing internal bleeding that nearly killed him. The seizures faded after a year.
Seeing Buzzcocks live was his ground zero, John Maher’s drumming inspiring him to buy a kit. Joyce became so obsessed with the band, he once tracked down frontman Pete Shelley’s house. “Some guy opened the door,” he recalls, “and told me to fuck off.”
In his teens, Joyce joined 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 took mushrooms but “not a call-an-ambulance amount”. He played well enough to get the job, before he started to hallucinate. Band dynamics were already in place: Marr as MD (“I’d never heard anyone play guitar like that”) and Morrissey, then still plain old 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 fucking great. Very funny bloke, cutting humour. But it was such an unusual relationship. There was a distance. I accepted we were just very different people.”
He’s more comfortable talking 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 jimmy-jams. You’d be like, ‘That’s amazing. What’s that?’” Then there were Morrissey’s lyrics. “Unique. Nobody writes like that. The introduction of gruesome, handsome, vile, charming elements. A brilliant voice. Stage performance interesting, intriguing, incredibly skilled. It’s a potent brew.” Andy Rourke, a friend for life 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.”
It all left Joyce feeling slightly intimidated. “I struggled because Andy and Johnny were miles ahead of me.” But he says he never felt unappreciated 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 heed when only Morrissey and Marr signed the contract as the band joined Rough Trade.
“I assumed 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 pay cut, 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 lawsuit 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 settled out of court (under “a lot of duress”) but Joyce proceeded to trial 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 “unintellectual and not financially sophisticated”, Judge John Weeks ruled in Joyce’s favour after a brutal seven-day hearing, awarding him £1m. Weeks famously stated he found Morrissey “devious, truculent and unreliable” and Marr “willing to embroider his evidence to a point where he became less credible”.
The case caused a schism that is still playing out. Joyce says he regularly gets trolled by Morrissey fans on social media. “I wish you were dead, how dare you, all that stuff.” He says he last properly spoke to Morrissey in 1992 when they bumped into 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 died of pancreatic cancer 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 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.”
Joyce, now 62, chooses to take a positive outlook, talking enthusiastically about his favourite 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 You Owe 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 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? Tears.”
The Smiths’s split was sudden. 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 bereaved. 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 business interests in the Smiths, inviting prospective buyers to send an email. “I’ve got no skin in the game,” 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 dissociated from those who wish me nothing but ill-will and destruction”. Does he wish that? “I don’t,” Joyce says. “I’ve been sat here talking candidly about how brilliant the man is. It’s very confusing.”
Despite everything that’s happened, Joyce couldn’t be prouder of his time as a Smith. “I was in the coolest, best British band that’s ever been. In my life, I definitely rolled a seven.”
• The Drums by Mike Joyce (Putman Publishing, £25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
