Morrissey claims Johnny Marr ‘ignored’ Smiths reunion offer

Fans have hoped for decades that the pair would reunite and rumours of any potential thawing in their relationship over the years have been met with excited speculation.

However, the pair have had a difficult relationship since the guitarist left a few weeks before the release of The Smiths’ final album in 1987, citing Morrissey’s lack of flexibility.

The singer was understood to be equally frustrated and annoyed that Marr was playing with other groups.

That rift has become a chasm in recent years, with their reported political leanings adding to the animosity.

Marr wrote about his sporadic meetings with Morrissey since The Smiths split in his 2016 autobiography and claimed there had been a “real prospect” of a reunion in 2008, but the singer had rebuffed the idea.

In the same year, he told Sky News he believed Morrissey’s views aligned with the then-UKIP leader’s on Brexit, before posting in 2019 that their similarity would see any Smiths reunion feature “Nigel Farage on guitar”.

In 2022, a year after castigating The Simpsons for using him as the basis for a character who had become a meat-eating, overweight xenophobe, Morrissey published an open letter to Marr, calling on him to stop using the singer’s name as “clickbait” and stop blaming him for everything from a tsunami to “the dribble on your grandma’s chin”.