ANDY ROURKE.

There are mixed feelings when figures who were an important part of your young adult life pass away. We lost Terry Hall late last year, but the passing of The Smiths’ bassist Andy Rourke (above left) at 59 from pancreatic cancer is no less significant. And, in a way, perhaps more so.

The obvious – and insensitive – thing to say is that there’ll never be a Smiths reunion now, something Andy always hoped for. Then again, there’d never have been a Smiths reunion anyway, because guitarist Johnny Marr and singer Steven Morrissey remain poles apart politically.

The nearest thing to a Smiths reunion was at Madison Square Gardens last September when, supporting The Killers, Marr invited his childhood friend Rourke on stage to play The Smiths’ euphoric anthem to suicide ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’, together with their miserablist, psychedelic classic, ‘How Soon is Now?’. It's perhaps sadly appropriate that Andy’s final on-stage performance was performing Smiths songs with the friend he’d known since he was 11 years-old.

I was at college between 1983 and 1986 which, roughly speaking, coincided with the lifespan of The Smiths. I remember an indie rock fanatic in our year called Pete Avery raving about a record called ‘Hand in Glove’. I never heard it at the time – if you missed it on the John Peel show and it wasn’t on Top of the Pops that was it – so the first Smiths song to make any impression on me was the follow up, ‘This Charming Man’, which got to number 25.

Morrissey’s homoerotic warbling was certainly something fresh, new and daring after the dour introspection of Echo and the Bunnymen, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division et al. But the music behind Mozzer’s vocals had an innocent, tuneful and playful bounce to it which, on reflection, I believe made Morrissey’s singular and often challenging lyrics acceptable to mainstream listeners. As part of the guitar, bass and drums three-piece line-up, Andy Rourke was integral to that musical persuasion.

For a someone trying to find his own identity in the chaotic early 1980s, The Smiths appealed as the best looking – Johnny’s quiff, the denim jackets and Levis, the loafers – and most culturally literate gang in town – Morrissey’s enthusiasm for everything from Oscar Wilde to Sandie Shaw. The Smiths were about intellectualism and embracing and celebrating the outsider, which was very appealing to an insecure, fairly bright twenty-something.

Which is all well and good, but the band would have been nothing without quality musicianship. Prior to The Smiths, Rourke and Marr had been in a funk band called Freak Party, and the bassist, perhaps unexpectedly, carried funk basslines over into The Smiths’ determinedly indie rock aesthetic (the equivalent at the time of Billy Bragg enthusiastically embracing Heavy Metal).

This gave the early singles ‘Heaven Know I’m Miserable Now’ and ‘William It Was Really Nothing’ their pop and sparkle, but it was on the Meat and Murder LP’s ‘Barbarism Begins at Home’ that Rourke’s reputation as a versatile bassist was resoundingly confirmed. The first time I saw The Smiths play this appraisal of domestic abuse was at the open air Jobs for a Change Festival in June 1984. The music flowed nimbly and infectiously, an extended, instrumental funk workout that I’m convinced went on for a quarter of an hour. Indie bands just didn’t do this sort of thing at the time, but Rourke steadfastly attended to his danceable bass runs and won us over. ‘Barbarism’ worked so well Johnny was even moved to do a little dance of his own.

At the other extreme, Rourke was happy to be the bedrock of aggressive walls of sound like ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, ‘The Queen is Dead’, ‘London’ and ‘Panic’, unassumingly showing how diverse his playing was.

In terms of pure nostalgia, I associate the reign of The Smiths with my college days, initial forays into London to see bands, meeting my first love and growing an extremely large quiff. The band split up in 1987, shortly after I’d started working, which had a curiously sad appropriateness about it. Playtime was over, but the quiff stayed (for a while).

Yet, today, The Smiths tower over British popular music and are one of the most revered bands this country has ever produced. Andy Rourke (together with my first love, alas) may have gone but – if you’ll forgive some obvious paraphrasing – their lights will never go out.

Pictures: Paul Slattery & Riaz Gomez.