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{“It was frightening,” explains Mike Joyce, positioned in the luxurious room of the Stock Exchange hotel in Manchester. The drummer is reflecting on his favorite gig with the Smiths: the night in July 1986 when The Queen Is Dead tour visited Salford Maxwell Hall. “They weren’t taking ticket stubs off people coming in. So they were passing tickets back outside through the restroom window.” The show attained double capacity. “They had to clear out the bar downstairs because the sprung dancefloor was giving way. Euphoria! There were people crying their eyes out, strangers hugging each other – and that was before E!”

Honoring the Smiths’ Legacy

{Joyce, garrulously upbeat company, has just authored a warm, engaging memoir, The Drums, honoring the Smiths. It’s a “right place, right time” story of his recollections as the great indie band eliminated the boundaries of British guitar music, with Johnny Marr’s masterfully complex playing combining seamlessly with Morrissey’s words, producing powerful, heartfelt and clever vignettes that accurately portrayed everyday life.

A man answered the door and cursed at me

“I wanted the book to be about the splendor of it,” notes 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 proceeded to perform 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 debated perspectives. “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 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|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 “strongly Catholic” Irish immigrant family. “The divine apprehension 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 traumas: Joyce spent six months in hospital after being involved in a car accident 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 initial inspiration, John Maher’s drumming motivating him to buy a kit. Joyce became so fixated on the band, he once tracked down frontman Pete Shelley’s house. “Some guy opened the door,” he recalls, “and told me to go away.”

Joining the Smiths

In his teens, Joyce became part of 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 took mushrooms 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 musical director (“I’d never heard anyone play guitar like that”) and Morrissey, then still ordinary Steven from Stretford, an aloof presence. “He barely talked to me.”

Joyce says he found it hard to characterize Morrissey in the book. “I don’t want it to sound like I disliked Morrissey. He was absolutely brilliant. Very witty person, sharp wit. But it was such an unique dynamic. There was a distance. I accepted we were just very distinct individuals.”

I went to court because I wanted what was due to me – and what was right

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. “Distinctive. Nobody writes like that. The introduction of dark, attractive, repulsive, appealing elements. A brilliant voice. Stage performance fascinating, captivating, highly proficient. It’s a strong mixture.” Andy Rourke, a permanent ally who Joyce writes about fondly, 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 struggled 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 crazy performance 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 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 album earnings 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 income decrease, from 25% to 15%, because he didn’t do interviews or create artwork. He declined outright.

Does he mean to imply, in the book, that they were being deceptive? “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 joint owners, though that’s not how Joyce sees it. “I think it sounded like the Smiths because of the four of us.”

Rourke reached an agreement (under “a lot of duress”) but Joyce went to court 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 rightfully mine, and what was right.” Despite calling him “not academically inclined and financially naive”, Judge John Weeks ruled in Joyce’s favour after a grueling week-long trial, 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 continuing. Joyce says he regularly gets trolled by Morrissey fans on social media. “Hostile messages, insults, typical abuse.” He says he last properly spoke to Morrissey in 1992 when they ran into one another in Altrincham. Aside from infrequent sightings 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 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 individual sacrifice? “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.”

Cherished Memories

Joyce, now 62, chooses to take a optimistic perspective, 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 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 totally unlit so we couldn’t see him.” Then he’d start singing. “Incredible,” says Joyce. “When he did I Know It’s Over for the first time? Crying.”

The Smiths’s split was abrupt. 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 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 development to the saga. Morrissey announced his intention to sell his financial stakes 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