#a light that never goes out

Book #103 of 2018:

A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths by Tony Fletcher

I am probably not the ideal reader or reviewer for a book about The Smiths, a band with which I have little familiarity and no emotional attachment. (As a partial defense, they had already split up before I was even born.) But it seems to me as though author Tony Fletcher has gone too far in the opposite direction, fawning over the group’s supposed genius and delving deeply into the minutiae of its members’ lives. So although the writer provides an exhaustive amount of information about the studio editing process for the band’s greatest hits — complete with unexplained technical musicology phrases like “spaghetti rockabilly skiffle riff” — he’s ultimately unable to present a coherent or compelling narrative about their rise to the top of the charts.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a 700-page history of a musical act won’t appeal much to non-fans, but I was still expecting a more neutral explanation for why this particular group succeeded when and how they did. Or even, given the book’s title, a more lengthy discussion of their legacy and influence on the acts that followed and the fans who still love them. Instead, it’s mostly a lot of tedium about record deals and touring schedules, occasionally leavened by discussions of the clashing personalities behind the music.

Fletcher is best when exploring those personalities to track the causes behind the band’s eventual dissolution, yet this account comes too little and too late in the overall text to make up for the hundreds of stale pages beforehand. For a reader who hasn’t come at the book already enthused about its subject, I have to admit getting very little out of the experience.

★★☆☆☆