Johnny Marr (31 page)

I
f ever a band was born to have its bones bared on the web it was The Smiths. There are too many Smiths-orientated websites to even begin listing them all, good or bad, but a trawl through any search engine will throw up the best. The majority of the bands and artists here have official sites and active Facebook and Twitter pages.
www.thethe.com
updates resources on Matt Johnson regularly,
www.petshopboys.co.uk
likewise for Tennant and Lowe, while
www.kirstymaccoll.com
and
www.billybragg.co.uk
are invaluable for these artists. David Byrne and Paul Carrack can be found at
www.davidbyrne.com
and
www.paulcarrack.net
respectively.

Johnny himself is of course at
www.johnnymarr.com
and is active on Twitter at
@Johnny_Marr
. Another excellent resource is the unofficial site
www.johnnymarrplaysguitar.com
. Official sites,
Facebook pages and Twitter accounts can all be found for The Cribs, Modest Mouse, Neil Finn and most of the other artists referenced.

A
n Interview between Johnny Marr and Martin Roach for the latter’s book,
The Right To Imagination And Madness
, published by Independent Music Press in 1994.

“I was writing this book about my favourite twenty songwriters and contacted Johnny’s managment office. At the time, I had only two books to my name and was publishing this work on my own label. I didn’t worked for any magazines and, in many ways, offered Marr little or no benefit in return for the interview. Further, he hadn’t spoken to the press for several years. I was amazed and delighted when I got a phonecall to get myself to Manchester on a certain day and turn up at a central hotel. I waited anxiously and, bang on time, a blacked out BMW rolled up and Johnny Marr stepped out.

He walked straight up to me and introduced himself, not as ‘Johnny’ but as ‘Johnny Marr’. We sat in the bar area and drank tea,
while he spoke for four hours about his songs and the music that had affected him. He wouldn’t let me pay for anything and offered to check any information he’d given me if I had any queries. He was a gentleman and a scholar of music. Oh, and he looked compeltely rock and roll, exactly as you would want Johnny Marr to look: shades, cool clothes and a rock star’s barnet. I have never had the chance to thank him directly for his leap of faith in me – a totally unknown writer asking him about his songwriting – so, hearty respect and cheers, Johnny.

JM: I think it shaped it massively, as I think it does with everybody really. I came from a particularly musical family. I grew up on the outskirts of the city, near the Ardnick Apollo, not the Harlem Apollo [laughs] and loads of my relatives lived on the same street. Four families lived next door to each other, all Irish immigrants, all very young families and so there were parties every night. Being an Irish situation there were always accordions and harmonicas and other instruments around. My first memory of guitar playing was this uncle who had big sideburns and Chelsea boots, he was well cool, he had a guitar and did a little bit of playing, I thought he was really hip. Because it was a big family there were always christenings and weddings and there was always what seemed like this same band playing at these functions. In between their sets I would go and have a look at the guitars. I remember this red Stratocaster, I can recall the smell of the case and everything. My parents had Beatles records but they were more into the Irish stuff, kind of country music, which spilled over into The Everly Brothers
who were really popular in my household. No matter how much you believe otherwise, I think your upbringing indelibly affects your development, it gives you your musical personality and in some cases your entire musical vocabulary. Even when I started to rebel against that, when I was ten or eleven and I got into glam rock, it was still there. Even now, I hate country music, so the influence remains. Unwittingly or not, my family did shape my musical ideas and were very encouraging to my aspirations to play.

From what I have seen definitely, yes. It seems there are two ways you can go and neither include musical school. You can either come from the genetic thing like I did, or you can come from a completely non-musical situation. Take Bernard Sumner for example, he got into music from a completely different, almost political need, when he left school. He had no musical family at all. I don’t know anyone who’s had success from music school, that way always smacks for me of It Bites, too cerebral, too calculated, not very much soul. If you want it bad enough and connect with music on a spiritual level, tuition is completely irrelevant. Music is a purely spiritual connection.

From about ten.

That seems quite early.

Yes, very early. I had always had guitars for as long as I could remember. I thought once that maybe my parents were pushing me into it, but I soon realised that I was obsessed. I loved the feel and shape of them, so I always had toy guitars around. Then when I got to ten or eleven I heard Marc Bolan for the first time, like a lot of people, through Top of the Pops. The first record I ever bought was ‘Jeepster’ but it wasn’t until ‘Metal Guru’ got to No.1 that I really made that connection for the first time. It was a feeling that I’ll never forget, a new sensation. I got on my bike and rode and rode, singing this song, it was a spiritual elevation, one of the best moments of my life. The next day me and my mate went out and stole loads of glitter, put it all over our faces and started emulating our favourite bands. From then on my formative years were totally and utterly dedicated to music. I was into football like everyone else, but while most kids my age were into conkers and bikes, I was at home miming to ‘Metal Guru’ and ‘Telegram Sam’.

No, not at all, because I still think what I was doing was more interesting than what other kids were doing.

Yes, it was. Undoubtedly. I’m very one-dimensional in that respect, music is everything. When I left school I had jobs and all that, but they were only a means to playing loads of records and tapes and getting paid for it. That was a natural apprenticeship for being in a band because Billy Duffy from The Cult worked around there.
He was my closest ally and a few years older than me, so he was kind of like my role model. Eventually he gave up everything to be involved in music and I kind of followed that.

Very little, very little. I moved from the city to the south of Manchester, which was vaguely middle class, and looked like Beverly Hills compared to the staunch, working class, tough city. My new place was only a little housing estate, and now it is really dilapidated, but at the time it felt like nirvana. I met guys who were only 13 or 14 but took themselves so seriously as musicians, they were already legends in their own minds. Billy Duffy was one of those people. In those circles, it was okay to regard yourself a a serious musician, even though they were so young. Without that I would still have been a musician but I don’t know whether I would have had the confidence to have done what I did. I used to walk around all the time with a guitar case, and there was actually a guitar in it, but there’s not much I could do with it outside the shops! But it was just to let everybody know that my whole identity was as a guitar player. I was very cocky. But in terms of writing I realised certain limitations, after being in a few of my mates’ bands. I knew that as a guitar player there are only so many times you can play someone else’s songs. Someone had to start writing.

As soon as as I could string a few chords together, I started putting them down on a cassette recorder. I was never really into being the
typical guitar hero, I was always naturally into songs rather than all that. About 13, maybe earlier, I suppose, perhaps 11 or 12. I picked it up very quickly, it was only the physical discomfort of hurting my fingers that I struggled with.

Incredibly early. Coming from a punk mentality, Bernard thinks the whole ‘born with a guitar in your mouth’ story is really corny.

Not really in that respect. The most important thing about that whole period is that since then I have been able to look back and say to myself ‘Yes, my musical intuition was always correct for me’. I was playing James Brown in 1980, stuff that later went on to influence the baggy scene, Fatback, Sly Stone.

It was very unfashionable! [laughs] There was nobody dancing to it either so I couldn’t learn much from that!! [laughs] But it has held me in good stead since The Smiths split because if I had believed all the stuff about me being a musical megalomaniac I would have crumbled.

With the dance music I became involved in after I left The Smiths, it felt completely natural, because I was into all that well before The Smiths came along. I was listening to Chic in 1977, I have always had that schizophrenic attitude to music. But I think most people my age do, they are very open. If you’d talked to Shaun Ryder a few years ago he’d have been listening to Funkadelic and Rubber Soul as well. I think it is only the post-punk generation that understands that, because we have been left with a 30 year legacy of stuff that you can just take ideas from. You don’t have to be in any mind set or cult to appreciate it. My sister was always into dance music and she introduced me to 12” singles, so the whole DJ phase was just a natural part of what I do.

I didn’t get much from punk because of my age - I was too young to get into most clubs, although I did get to see Iggy Pop. I liked the American punk acts because they seemed to be more directly influenced by the British invasion of America, Patti Smith, The Stooges, New York Dolls, particularly The Dolls who were themselves interested in the girl groups whom I had already discovered. You see, what happened was that after glam rock I furiously back tracked because there was nothing around for me. I didn’t really get off on the records in the charts, I didn’t like Manfred Mann’s Band. The only records I liked were dance tracks at The Fair, all black music really. I used to go to The Fair to look at girls and clothes and listen to this stuff. In terms of material I could relate to as a writer, I had to go
back even further which is when I got into Motown, and that led me onto Lieber & Stoller and Phil Spector and the Brill Building. Phil Spector was the second major influence on me behind Marc Bolan. That is why I got into American punk rather than British, because Patti Smith used to do Ronnettes numbers and the Dolls would do the girl group stuff.

The overall musician. Not purely sonically, but you could hear in his records that he was completely obsessed. There were no spaces in his music, any harmonic suggestion was realised. It’s kind of a production thing. If you’ve got four or five musicians playing then you will get loads of natural harmonics and spaces in there between the instruments. Well, Phil Spector was someone who would hear all these tiny suggestions and then fill every one in. This big, big, dense apocalyptic sound which I definitely connected with.

Well, as I say, I have never related to the Jeff Beck’s of this world, so it was completely natural - I have never seen the guitar as a solo instrument. When I started to write songs I wanted my one guitar to sound like a whole record, so I consequently developed almost a one-man-band style. I don’t fit very well with another guitarist, other than Matt Johnson, whose work I can embellish and feel very comfortable with. In terms of my own songs I like to be able to hear the whole thing - I’ll play a new song and hear piano and strings and then I try and play all that on my one guitar.

Um. [Thinks long]. Neil Young I suppose. His stuff is very fashionable again now, but his electric guitar playing is similar. I hear echoes of that in The Smiths. Or possibly Keith Richards and Brian Jones combined, ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown’ and all that.

The rhythm and melody really. Even if I play what can technically be called a solo, I regard it as a break. I believe music should be approached as composition, not as a free-form jam, everything has to be structured for a reason. I could always relate to Phil Spector far more than anyone else as a guitar player. For me you’ve got Jimi Hendrix and the rest is crap. As a musician, if you are going to be some kind of virtuoso, unless you can do it with the same spirit and depth of soul as Hendrix, you should forget it. I am a white English musician, born in the sixties in the Provinces, and that is the way it sounds. Too many people fall into the trap of the whole ethos and mythic identity of the guitar hero, which is largely a complete anachronism, the fastest gun and all that crap.

I’m not into jazz that much but what you said undoubtedly applies to bad jazz - however, the greats like Coltrane, and Miles Davies are the furthest I have been down that road. I don’t dislike jazz because
of indulgence, I just dislike indulgence of any kind. For example, there’s a lot of indulgence in post-punk stuff, in fact some indie music has the worst kinds of indulgence. When that stuff is bad, it’s the worst.

Yes. There’s a pattern whereby I start to get a feeling, an uneasy feeling for a day or two and I try to harness that. I try not to party, I keep myself really straight and sober, which I guess is the opposite of what people might expect. I get up early and stay up late, sleep as little as possible and harness that disconcerting uneasiness. I feel a little bit uncensored and feel almost like a storm is coming and I know that something is going to happen.

Well, no, The Smiths was a completely and utterly different situation. We spent so much time together and we were incredibly pragmatic in approach. We were really into singles and we’d do batches of three songs at a time. We would sit down and say ‘Let’s write a song’. For my part it was the discipline of Lieber & Stoller which was at the core of The Smiths. It was like ‘this is what we do, we write songs and we can write thousands’. We recorded seventy songs in four and a half years. Morrissey would come round to my house and we’d do three songs just like that, then he would go away and do the lyrics and three days later he’d be in the studio recording it. When you have a partner who is so prolific and has
that physical and emotional necessity to write, it makes things very easy for you, and in that way we propelled each other towards this endless supply of songs. I don’t want that to sound too clinical and demystify the process though, because as well as being pragmatic it was incredibly romantic. The songwriting process and the songs we produced were sacred, and still are to me now. One of the things about making records is that for it to work you have to be totally and utterly in love with it for those three minutes and you have to be able to hear that love in the tracks. That might be a particular idiosyncrasy of mine, because I guess some of my more distinctive songs have that romantic melodic content. When Kirsty MacColl asked me to write for her she said ‘I want one of those songs that make you feel happy and sad at the same time’. That is very much where I am at, I feel like that, it can almost be upsetting when I make records, that mixture of melancholia and vibrancy. I don’t like to hear bone-head records, I look for poignancy. Those are the feelings that I harbour for a couple of days when I get that uneasy feeling.