Andy Rourke and The Smiths: The four Manchester-Irish friends who took on the world

Andy Rourke, who has died at the age of 59 after a lengthy illness with pancreatic cancer, was an anomaly in The Smiths: he was the only member of the iconic indie band whose background was not 100 per cent Irish. As Morrissey revealed to The Irish Times in 1999, the band’s bassist had an Irish father and an English mother – or, to quote one of the singer’s later hits, Irish blood and an English heart.

Rourke was nonetheless steeped in the Manchester-Irish identity that was a defining quality of The Smiths. Darkly witty, their lyrics brimming with sexual hang-ups, and their music fuelled by mournful poetry, The Smiths truly were more Irish than the Irish themselves.

And though he was overshadowed by the group’s preening, iconoclastic frontman and by their boy-wizard guitarist, Johnny Marr, Rourke brought an essential alchemy to the quartet. His light, melodic bass wasn’t so much a counterpoint to Marr’s vivacious guitar as extra fuel poured on top. It was also crucial to the unique chemistry that powered The Smiths.

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All great pop groups are contradictions, but The Smiths took the idea to extremes. On one side were Morrissey’s hysterically mournful lyrics (“as I climb into an empty bed / oh, well / enough said”), on the other the twinkling melodies conjured by Marr, Rourke and the band’s drummer, Mike Joyce. It’s why songs such as This Charming Man carry such a punch, their bleak poetry offset by the effervescent music.

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The band were upfront about how their immigrant backgrounds had shaped them. “Mancunian-Irish is definitely a type,” Marr – born John Martin Maher – once told me. “It’s different from purely British. Your culture is around you constantly, whether it’s the accents, the music, the politics, the sensibility. I’ve never described myself as British or English. I’m either Mancunian or Mancunian Irish – that is a culture and a nationality that is a thing unto itself.”

In that 1999 interview, Morrissey also said: “It was always odd later on with The Smiths when I was described as being ‘extremely English’, because other people would tell me that I looked Irish, I sounded Irish and had other telltale signs ... It was only actually Andy Rourke’s mother who was an English parent – all the other parents were Irish. It’s an interesting story.”

Rourke would no doubt have agreed – so it was perhaps no coincidence that, years after the break-up of The Smiths, he started Dark, an electropop project, with Dolores O’Riordan, of The Cranberries. He was devastated when she died, five years ago, saying at the time, “I have truly enjoyed the years we spent together and feel privileged to call her a close friend.”

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The Smiths would never reunite: the rift between Morrissey and Marr was too wide to bridge. Now any slim chance of the group sharing a stage again is gone.

Rourke will be remembered as an able lieutenant to the two prominent personalities in the band. But he deserves to be seen as so much more. The Smiths were about Moz’s pomp and Marr’s mercurial guitar – but they were also the story of four friends from an Irish immigrant community taking on the world. In that regard, Rourke’s contribution to one of the greatest bands of the 1980s is impossible to overstate.