Who would have thought it?

There is a long tradition of the pop intelligentsia getting involved with academe or publishing -- Pete Townshend’s work as an editor for Faber being the obvious example, Jah Wobble’s labours over Blake’s poetry rather less so. Sir Paul McCartney was the driving force behind the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. The Spectator’s own Alex James is the best bassist of his generation, and lived the pop life to the full, but he also has the cerebral firepower to hold his own in an academic common room or editorial meeting. So there ought to be nothing unsettling about the Smiths’ former guitarist, Johnny Marr, becoming a visiting professor of music at Salford University. One only has to hear, say, the opening chords of “How Soon is Now?” or “What Difference Does It Make?” to realise what a considerable intelligence lurked behind that particular guitar.

Yet it doesn’t seem right, not to this 39-year-old, anyway. The Marr-Morrissey duo was formidable because it turned adolescent grievance into pop music of the most ironic and thoughtful sort: the duo ransacked all the kitchen sink history of British misery, irony and satire to make quite extraordinary records that still sound fresh and fantastic. But one of the many fantastic things about The Smiths was their surly refusal to be co-opted or to join in: they were the band that stayed at home in their bedroom sulking, diffident and difficult rather than rebellious. They didn’t smash up hotel rooms; they moaned about them. They embodied -- deliberately and provocatively -- everything that people most hate about students, with floppy hair and irritating cardigans. So there is something vaguely improper about Marr going over to the other side, to become a don, turn up at the right time and teach undergraduates. That’s not what a Smith should do. He should be making records that stop the students from going to their lectures -- that’s his job. There’s a division of labour issue here. Twenty years ago, the Smiths would have written a terrific song about it.