Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  The front of our house was on a busy dual carriageway opposite Brookway High School, which was a big modern place from the 1960s that most of the local kids attended. I wanted to go to Brookway rather than St Augustine’s as it was outside my front door, but my mother was having none of it as it wasn’t a Catholic school and it had a reputation for devilment, which to me made it sound even better. Almost everyone I knew went to Brookway, so it was only a matter of time before I met the rest of Dave Clough’s friends, who were in a band called Four Way Street. The main man of the band was a talented guitarist and singer called Rob Allman. Rob was a middle-class kid with supportive parents who let their son and his friends rehearse in the hallway of their house. I was invited over to see them play. All the band were nice, but a little curious about the visitor sitting on the stairs while they rehearsed, especially as I had adopted the look of a mini Keith Richards and was smoking cigarettes, which I had become an expert at in recent months. The band ran through the rock songs of the day, like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘All Right Now’. I took it all in, and liked seeing how it all worked.

  My attention then turned to their other guitarist, called Billy, who knew he was cool and seemed to be taking it more seriously than the others. While all the young musicians who were around at the time were copying their heroes, Billy Duffy had a unique way of playing, whether by accident or design. I’d never seen anyone look that serious when they played. When the band finished, Billy and I got talking and he was the one out of all of them with whom I had an affinity.

  I started spending more time at Rob’s. His parents were kind, and the house became a creative haven for me and Billy and a few others who played guitar. I don’t know why I was accepted by the older guys, other than the fact that I could play quite well and had mastered ‘Rebel Rebel’ better than anyone else. Being around them was an education. They were clued up, acerbic and sarcastic, and soon I was able to play everything they could. It was unusual for a bunch of older kids to nurture someone so much younger. Maybe it was because I could take care of myself, or maybe they just liked having a little urchin hanging around.

  Rob Allman was brilliant and musically gifted, with an ego that made him an obvious frontman and a prodigious enthusiasm for alcohol. I would go over on a Saturday night and he’d have a bag containing six cans of toxic syrup called Carlsberg Special Brew, which made you so deranged you’d have been better off sniffing glue on a merry-go-round. I would hang in there after drinking two cans and try to get through a Neil Young song or ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ before dropping my guitar on the floor and running to throw up outside. Sometimes I didn’t make it.

  The atmosphere around Rob’s was more like a salon for musicians, and everyone had their own influences and specialist subjects: Billy’s favourite guitarists were Mick Ronson, and Paul Kossoff from Free; Rob was into Neil Young and Richard Thompson; and there were a lot of guitar players that we all liked, such as Nils Lofgren, Pete Townshend and Bill Nelson. I was very into Keith Richards and was a Rolling Stones fanatic, having discovered their 1960s Decca singles on the West Wythy jukebox. My first impression of Keith Richards was from seeing his image on the cover of the Through the Past, Darkly album at someone’s house. When I learned that the guitar on the records came from the same person in the photograph, and I then became aware of his reputation as an outlaw outsider, I was fascinated. He seemed totally heroic, and his role in coming up with riffs and driving his band was like a beacon to me. People forget just how freaky Keith Richards was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was a freaky dangerous guitar player, and he could write a riff better than anyone.

  The other big influence on me at this time was Rory Gallagher. I found his albums in record shops and I knew I would like him. Lots of bands at that time were remote and shrouded in Tolkienesque imagery or had a sound that was swamped with organs and all kinds of nonsense. Rory Gallagher was Irish and someone I could relate to. He had a beat-up guitar, played stripped-down lo-fi rock and was the walking definition of musical integrity. He seemed to live for playing the guitar, and to me he represented the idea that if you wanted you could live all of your life in a room with your guitar and an amp and that could be your world forever.

  We all read the music press and discussed everything that was going on, and then one day something was different. There had been a gig in town the night before by a new band from London called Sex Pistols, and some of the older guys had gone. I heard there had been a big fight with people throwing pint glasses and chairs, and it sounded a nightmare, but then I saw Billy and got another side to the story. He was raving about this band, who played loud short songs and were really young. He was saying, ‘They were really good, John … really good’ as an indisputable fact, and it was obvious that the Pistols had affected him. Then I heard about the opening band, called Buzzcocks, who were from Manchester and had a broken guitar, and within a single day I realised that something had changed. The first punk song I heard was ‘Boredom’ by Buzzcocks on a 7-inch EP called Spiral Scratch, which my friend’s older brother had bought. I picked up the record and looked at the cover, and turning it over the first name I saw was John Maher, who played the drums. I had to change the spelling of my surname. It had already been decided.

  In the meantime I was making progress with my own guitar playing and starting to develop a style that I liked and that I was even able to identify as being my own. I always switched between playing acoustic and electric – to me it meant that you were more complete; I thought I should be equally good on both. One time, I was sitting round at Rob’s, playing a riff, when Billy came in and said to me, ‘James Williamson?’ I hadn’t heard that name before and asked him what he meant. ‘That riff … it sounds like James Williamson,’ he said. I was a bit bothered by that, as what I was playing was something I was turning into a song, but I could see he genuinely thought it sounded like someone else and I wanted to know who this James Williamson was. ‘It sounds like something off Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges,’ Billy said, ‘you’ll love it.’ I made a mental note to check this record out. If there was someone out there who played this way, then I wanted to hear it.

  The next time I was in Virgin Records, I leafed through the S section for Stooges, looking for Raw Power. Wow! What the hell was that cover?! The picture was unbelievable, strong, a weird creature, totally unlike anything else I’d ever seen. I held it and something told me I needed it. I bought it for £3.30, and on the bus ride home I kept looking at the sleeve, trying to imagine what it would sound like. I got home, put the record on in my bedroom and heard ‘Search and Destroy’ for the first time. It blew my mind, and I wondered why the whole world hadn’t already told me about the track, then the next song started, ‘Gimme Danger’, and there it was … the acoustic guitar sounding like what I’d been playing. How could that be? This sounded to me like the greatest ever group, heavy, sexy, dirty, like the best older brothers someone like me could ever find, and James Williamson’s playing was perfection. I played the whole album over and over, and hearing it I knew I was on the right path and that everything I already felt was real. Iggy and the Stooges were going to a place I really wanted to be; Raw Power shone a light.

  Having my own band with the full line-up of me, Chris, Kevin and Bobby was exciting, and I couldn’t wait to get going. I plucked the name ‘Paris Valentinos’ from the air and it stuck.

  Now that punk had come along all the fashions had changed, and Claire pierced my ear for me by taking a sewing needle and stabbing it straight through my left earlobe without even bothering to put ice on it beforehand. The other requirement for being in a band was to dye your hair various colours, and we would steal bottles of hair dye from the supermarket and change our hair colour almost every week. After I got into Johnny Thunders and New York Dolls, I started cutting my hair myself and took to always wearing eye liner, which didn’t go down well with the teachers at St Augustine’s. I also insisted that they change the spelling of my name on the re
gister to Marr instead of Maher, but they refused, so I just put Marr on the front of my schoolbooks and refused to answer if a teacher called me Ma-her or Ma-yer when they took the register.

  Bobby had persuaded the Sacred Heart school to let Paris Valentinos use their hall to practise once a week, and we had the whole place to ourselves. What he didn’t tell us was that in return he had agreed to us playing hymns in the church next door for the congregation at the Sunday evening service. We duly complied and tried to look solemn as we strummed through the hymns, until a few weeks later the priest decided he was better off without us because we were often giggling uncontrollably and Kev was chatting up the girls in the choir.

  I still didn’t have an amp, so I would share Kevin’s Vox with him and we’d plug the microphone into the PA system that the school used for assembly. After all the wishing and fantasising, it was good to finally get down to the business of actually being in a band and learning how to do it, although it wasn’t all excitement: sometimes Bobby couldn’t get his dad to bring his drums, and I’d have to motivate the others to come and practise when there was a disco on somewhere nearby.

  The first gig we played was in the summer of 1977, at a street party for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. I’d been seeing a girl called Denise for a few weeks, and she told me that her dad wanted someone to play and asked me if the band could do it. When we got to her house there were a couple of tables set up on the street for a stage, with a few gangs of kids lingering around, eyeing up the drum kit. Chris spotted a crate of lager and promptly set about it, and Kevin produced a bottle of cider.

  When the appointed time came for us to make our debut, we staggered into the sunshine and on to the tables and kicked off with a wobbly rendition of Thin Lizzy’s ‘Don’t Believe a Word’, which luckily featured Kevin on lead vocals, as Chris, our singer, was stumbling around, out of it, on the pavement behind. We followed this with ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl’ before we had to stop and get off the stage to push the tables back together. All in all it wasn’t going so badly, and we introduced Chris as he made a few comedy attempts to get up on to the tables. Once he was up, he hung on to the mic stand and addressed the twenty people scattered around the road with a flamboyant ‘Good evening, people’ before launching into a confusing version of ‘Maggie May’. He then had to be carried off by the rest of us before reaching the end of the second verse. It was a good day. We went home feeling triumphant and drunk. I knew we were scrappy and I felt like a kid, but at least I was a kid in a band.

  The only thing I needed now was an amp of my own, and I heard that Billy Duffy had just got a new Fender amp after joining The Nosebleeds. I nagged him to sell me his old Falcon practice amp, and eventually he agreed to part with it for £15. When I got it home after carrying it the two miles from his house, I found that he’d put his pink shirt in the back which I’d been pestering him to give me for weeks.

  At home, my parents watched me coming and going, buzzing around, trying to get my band going and becoming even more independent. My dad and I left each other to do our own thing, and that’s how we got along. He’d get in from laying pipes, and I’d either go out, or stay in my room, listening to records and practising. I was starting to get fairly rebellious, but we managed to co-exist; it suited him and it suited me. My mum was a bit more involved in what I was doing, but she left me to get on with my life in my own way. I was fourteen and the oldest child, and she was taking care of Ian, who was just starting school, and she’d also gone back to work in a post office.

  One day my dad asked me if I fancied going out to do a week’s work with him in Liverpool. He was working on the road near Quarry Bank school, where John Lennon had gone, and aside from thinking that the pop culture connection might tempt me, he also thought it would be good for me to get out and do some proper work in the school holidays. I thought he was mad to even suggest it, but he was persistent and after a while I realised that the money would be useful, so I agreed. At five thirty on Monday morning he woke me up. It was still dark. I immediately wondered why the hell I was awake and getting into my dad’s van. After an hour’s drive I fell out of the van and on to the pavement, where my dad said to me, ‘See down there?’

  I looked down the road to where he was pointing. ‘Yeah?’ I said.

  ‘We’re going to dig all the way down there – all the way – and by Friday no one will know we’ve even been here.’

  I looked down the street to where he was pointing. It was a really long way. I dragged all the heavy equipment out of the van and I was already really muddy before I’d even started. I got my head down and got on with digging the road. A couple of my dad’s mates showed up each day and watched a lad with dyed hair and bracelets wrestling with a jackhammer while looking like a mini New York Doll. Every day I’d get in the trench and lay the gas pipes, and every day, driving back in the van, I’d fall asleep with my head up against the window. It was knackering. At the end of the week the road was back to normal and my dad handed me £125. That was pretty good – it was certainly more money than I’d ever owned. It was hard-earned, and my dad did it every day – that really impressed me.

  After a few years of St Augustine’s I was starting to learn how the school worked and how to work it. Like every guitar player through the ages, I was good at art and good at English, and could do well enough in most things if only I found them worthy of interest. I wanted very much to like history classes, but in those days everything you were taught in a Catholic school had a Catholic agenda, and so history was mainly indoctrination in martyrs and saints. My parents would get the same comments about me from the teachers: ‘He’s intelligent and is letting himself down’ and ‘He won’t apply himself to the work.’ A couple of the more right-on teachers tried a more positive approach, telling me that I could be a leader, which was well-meaning but I didn’t really know why they said it.

  My head was so full of songs and bands that nothing my teachers or parents said could make me think my future was going to be anything other than music. I would put a record on in my room before I left the house for school in the morning while Ian was downstairs getting ready. ‘Cracked Actor’ off Aladdin Sane was a favourite. I’d turn it up really loud and Claire would be in the bathroom, shouting, ‘John! John! Turn it down! Turn it down, will yer! I’m trying to do my hair.’ Why ‘Cracked Actor’ hindered her styling process so much I don’t know, but she took her hair very seriously.

  I would turn records up as loud as they would go and play them over and over while staring at the label going around. It could have appeared crazy to my family, but they were used to it and understood it. I’d continue to stand and listen in my blazer, holding my school bag, and then I’d have to run out of the front door and across the road to jump on to the bus. I’d find somewhere upstairs near the back, lean my head against the window and keep the song in my head until the bus got to school. It was a useful technique that helped me get through the day – it was like I was wearing invisible headphones.

  Most of the boys at my school were all right. One of the most enduring things from school was learning to recognise the different personalities that crop up. Some were loudmouths and some were quiet types. There were one or two kids who were genuinely funny and a few who were irritating. Those who were most irritating were the ones who made a craft of it. I always wondered what mentality you had to have to be like that, and I suspected those who craved constant attention were not entirely OK with themselves.

  I didn’t have a problem making friends, but there wasn’t anyone that I felt I had very much in common with. Then, one day, I was standing around at break time when a boy walked up to me, looked at the Neil Young badge I was wearing and said, ‘“Tonight’s the Night”’, or more accurately he sang it in the same voice that Neil Young did, which was impressive and also hilarious. He was called Andy Rourke, and was in different classes from me and was the only other kid in my year who didn’t have a regulation haircut. We stru
ck up a conversation about records and discovered that we both played guitar. That information was enough for us to take the conversation further, and Andy invited me round to his house the following day. He said that his mum would pick me up.

  I was waiting outside our house with my guitar when a large white car pulled up. Andy’s mother got out – she looked a bit like a Mancunian Elizabeth Taylor – and the electric car boot magically opened. I put my guitar in the boot, climbed in the back seat and said hello to Andy. I’d never been in an executive company car before, and I immediately saw that Andy’s background was somewhat different from mine. We drove to his house, a nice semi-detached in the suburb of Ashton-on-Mersey, and went straight up to his bedroom to play guitar.

  One of the first things I noticed was a huge mural of a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album cover that his mother had painted on the wall. I was impressed that he knew the album, and even more impressed that he had a mother who had painted an album cover on his wall. Andy shared his room with one of his three brothers, Phil, who also played guitar, and he offered to let me try out the Eko acoustic that was leaning against the wall. I took the guitar and played ‘Ballrooms of Mars’ by T.Rex. I knocked a couple of riffs around and then Andy played Neil Young’s ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’. His playing was assured and accomplished, and it was obvious that he was a natural musician. We passed the guitar backwards and forwards and in those moments Andy and I made a connection that would take us through times and places we couldn’t even imagine. We started hanging around in school a bit, smoking cigarettes at break times and talking about bands and songs, then he’d go to his classes and I’d go to mine.

  Town