Now, we have the answer to the long-standing question about one of the most beloved post-punk bands of the 1980s,The Smiths. It’s a question that fans continued to ask decades after their ignominious break-up in 1988: Will the Smiths reform?
The answer is definitively no, with news Friday of the death of Andy Rourke, the band’s original bass player, at age 59. With The Smiths, Rourke helped create some of the most important and influential modern rock music ever. The sad news of his passing came, appropriately, from his longtime friend and band mate, Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr.
It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Andy Rourke after a lengthy illness with pancreatic cancer.
Andy will be remembered as a kind and beautiful soul by those who knew him and as a supremely gifted musician by music fans.
We request privacy at this sad time pic.twitter.com/KNehQxXoFz— Johnny Marr (@Johnny_Marr) May 19, 2023
Marr wrote on the Twitters:
It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Andy Rourke after a lengthy illness with pancreatic cancer. Andy will be remembered as a kind and beautiful soul by those who knew him and as a supremely gifted musician by music fans. We request privacy at this sad time.
Rourke befriended Marr when he was 11 years old, with the two regularly jamming together in their teenage years before forming The Smiths with frontman Morrisey [sic] and drummer Mike Joyce in 1982.
The Manchester native was a key band member until their 1987 breakup, before the release of their fourth studio album “Strangeways, Here We Come.”
Rourke continued to work with Morrissey on his solo project and performed alongside artists Sinéad O’Connor, The Pretenders, Badly Drawn Boy, and guitarist Aziz Ibrahim, according to CNN.
There are several cool clips of Rourke and the Smiths in the in memoriam tweet thread below—along with a complete recording (30-minute video) of their third-ever live show in 1983! As the caption on that video shares, Rourke was just 19 years old at the time:
That footage was filmed at The Haçienda in Feb 1983. It was The Smiths’ third show and Andy had just turned 19. Watch the full 30-minute performance at https://t.co/hvXf2GkSfO
— Birmingham 81 (@Birmingham_81) May 19, 2023
Suede bassist Mat Osman, reacting to the news, wrote to his Twitter followers about Rourke’s massive influence on not only himself but a generation of musicians. The thread begins:
Warning: contains coarse language
Aw man. RIP Andy Rourke. A total one-off – a rare bassist whose sound you could recognise straight away. I remember so clearly playing that Barbarism break over and over, trying to learn the riff, and marvelling at this steely funk driving the track along. (pic – K Cummins) pic.twitter.com/c3iBdsstpC
— Mat Osman (@matosman) May 19, 2023
Aw man. RIP Andy Rourke. A total one-off – a rare bassist whose sound you could recognise straight away. I remember so clearly playing that Barbarism break over and over, trying to learn the riff, and marvelling at this steely funk driving the track along.
My DMs are 90% other bass players talking about doing exactly the same thing with Barbarism Begins At Home. Love the idea that the day after [the “Meat Is Murder” album] came out there were hundreds of us, headphones on, dropping the needle over and over, saying ‘f**king HELL, Andy’
Andy Rourke’s death is comparable to the loss almost a year ago (in June) of Andy “Fletch” Fletcher of Depeche Mode, another original member of an iconic post-punk band, who was gone too soon (at age 60).
Anyone who’s read my “Higher Culture” VIP pieces knows that the Smiths‘ music defined my teen years, though here was one piece in front of the paywall about them with a very subjective “top 5” list.
(see “Higher Culture” Aside: Top Five ’80s Tunes From the Smiths)
In his 2016 autobiography, “Set The Boy Free,” Johnny Marr wrote candidly about Rourke’s use of heroin, something he learned of while hanging out at Rourke’s place before the Smiths formed:
The first alarming sign was when, completely out of the blue, one of my friends said, “We’re getting some heroin tomorrow.”
“What?” I asked, and he continued to talk about scoring smack the next day. I was shocked to see that the others seemed totally OK with it, and then I realized the reason why: they were already smoking it. At that moment, I knew that I had to get out and move on […]
I was angry and disappointed with all of them, especially Andy, for keeping it from me.
A related drug habit—pills—forced the band to temporarily kick the bassist out of the group during a tour promoting the release of “The Queen Is Dead” (1986).
Marr wrote:
We played a few shows in Ireland, and because he didn’t want to be carrying drugs with him he’d gone to a doctor to get some medication to get through it. The pills were harder for him to deal with than the drugs, and they affected him badly.
But happily, after the band split in ’87, he and Andy reunited while Marr was a member of Modest Mouse. They even got a chance to play together again:
He was on good form, having put his demons behind him many years before….we spent the day catching up and reminiscing, and at the end we agreed to do it again and stay in touch.
A few weeks later I heard from Andy again. He was putting a big concert together [for a cancer charity] in Manchester, and he invited me to join the bill….New Order were also playing, and I agreed to appear and asked Andy to come onstage and do a song with me [and his band, The Healers].
The band plays some of Marr’s solo work, then a few Smiths “covers.” That led in to Johnny bringing Andy onstage to play on “How Soon Is Now?” Marr said “it was a good moment for us and a good moment for Smiths fans, and it put things behind us in the best way we knew how.”
In what must be a prized memory for Johnny now, they got to reprise the moment in 2022, at NYC’s Madison Square Garden. Watch:
All in all, it’s a sad day for us fans, and Andy’s family and friends, though he’s now hopefully at peace. Here are the Smiths in their heyday, on U.K.TV show “The Tube” (1984). Enjoy:
RIP, Andy.