There is a light that never goes out

On a sunny Saturday morning, a stone’s throw from the Greater Manchester ring road, Leslie Holmes is up a stepladder, fixing linocuts of gladioli to a netball court wall. Nearby, racks hang with T-shirts bearing the same flower; tables are piled with tea towels, postcards and fanzines. Through an open door, a former weightlifting gym awaits visitors: since 2004, it has been the Smiths Room, a floor-to-ceiling shrine of fan art, handwritten messages, press cuttings and posters devoted to the band many say saved this building from demolition.

Throughout June, events have been held at Salford Lads Club, a shining survivor of Edwardian civic architecture, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Smiths’ landmark third album, The Queen Is Dead. The club occupies a special place in the band’s lore, appearing in a photograph on the album’s inner sleeve as well as in Derek Jarman’s accompanying film and the video for the 1987 single Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before, in which Morrissey leads bespectacled cyclists to the venue like a bequiffed Pied Piper.

Holmes, the club’s lively project manager, is a visual artist by trade, who began working here in 2002. After helping secure listed status for the building a year later, he noticed it becoming a place of pilgrimage for Smiths fans. He opened the Smiths Room in 2004, adding a polling booth where visitors can write or draw contributions, plus extra hinged display boards to create more space for them.

More than 100,000 people have visited over the past 22 years, Holmes says. Last year alone, they came from 73 countries. “It’s crazy, really. It’s like their church, their castle, their cathedral. Speaking to them, lots come from working-class communities which have lost some of the heritage that goes with that identity. Add to that the angst you feel as a teenager, and I think that’s where the power of the Smiths’ music comes from.” Holmes is not a Smiths fan himself. “Although I do like the references – Shelagh Delaney, Albert Finney, how they use quotes in their songs and refer to older stars in the artwork,” he says. “I’m more into classical music.”

As fans come in, I expect Morrissey clones. But there is only one man with a quiff: Arjen Vernkamp, visiting from the Netherlands with his wife, Korine. He calls Morrissey “one of a kind” but focuses on the band’s wider appeal. “I can feel what they felt, because I felt the same way when I was a small boy living in a small city.” Few visitors mention Morrissey’s many controversial statements in recent years. More speak about how the Smiths’ music reached outsiders, or how Marr’s guitar playing shimmered with glamour.

Salford Lads Club has found in the Smiths an unlikely financial lifeline as other landmarks of working-class life have disappeared across Britain. In 2015, photographer Stephen Wright allowed the club to use his famous Smiths photograph on a T-shirt, raising £78,000 and funding a youth exchange trip to Colorado, South Dakota and Wyoming. Two years later, a Morrissey T-shirt licensed by the band’s drummer, Mike Joyce, and supported by Christopher Eccleston and Maxine Peake raised a further £25,000, helping send club members to visit youth organisations and sports clubs in New York.

A recent Historic England grant funded urgent repairs to the building’s infrastructure, and the club reopened in May. Many visitors have a personal connection to the club itself. Geoff Darlington, who used the gym as a child, lived up the road until he was 11 and attended a nearby primary school, now separated from the club by a dual carriageway.

He is visibly moved by seeing the building. “Seeing it like this inside, so nicely done, really brings it back – how much there was for us to do.” Darlington also first saw the Smiths in early 1983 with his then-girlfriend, Jill, now his wife, after getting tickets through Mike Joyce’s sister, a colleague at an architectural ironmongers.

Jill adds that their 28-year-old daughter is “gutted” not to be there. “The Smiths spoke of youth and our angst when there were 3 million unemployed, so their music was reflective of our times, but its message just carries on,” she says.

The club’s significance also reaches into politics. Eighteen months ago, Andy Burnham chose it as the venue to launch his campaign for a third term as Greater Manchester mayor, a measure of its place in the region’s civic imagination.

On the day I was there, the guitar-and-violin duo Smiths on Strings performed versions of The Queen Is Dead’s more melancholy songs, and Salford poet Tony Walsh read a new poem, Class Photo, about the club and the band. Best known for This Is the Place, first read at a vigil for victims of the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, Walsh grew up in Salford and has been coming to the club for nearly two decades. “I want to get across what places like this really stand for, like the Smiths did – the hope they can carry,” he says.

At midday, Walsh stands behind a microphone on the front steps. He talks to a rapt crowd about how the Smiths brought together “masculine and feminine”, Vegas, New York and Berlin, and presented a glowing idea to Salfordians – the possibility that “your life” could also be “a gatefold sleeve”.

Illustration Oscar Ingham