Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  I WOULD GO to the record shops and bookshops in Manchester city centre every Saturday without fail. Most of the bookshops were shabby affairs, with a shifty-looking proprietor who would eye you suspiciously like you were after a sleazy paperback or he wanted you out if you didn’t. I’d inspect the second-hand paperbacks by J. G. Ballard and William Burroughs with titles like The Drowned World, The Wind from Nowhere, The Naked Lunch and Junky, and wonder what it was all about, and then I’d look around and see older guys in their late teens hanging around by themselves with serious expressions.

  Rare Records on John Dalton Street was a compulsory stop: there you’d find row upon row of meticulously arranged gems from the 1950s to the present day – although I usually went in on my own as my mates couldn’t comprehend why I would even listen to a Dusty Springfield record, let alone buy one.

  Some of my mates were prodigious thieves. I’d come out of a shop oblivious to anything that had happened, and then around the corner be presented with an album cover pulled from under a sweater, or be shown a pair of jeans underneath the jeans they were already wearing. My friend Marv was so supremely gifted, he once laid out five pairs of sunglasses on the bus: one from each coat sleeve, one from each sock, and one from the hood of his jacket. It was like a magic trick. Everyone stole album covers from the record shops. Phoenix Records in the student precinct was the easiest, as it was out of the way and the pungent smell in the air meant the staff were sufficiently … preoccupied. We’d be in there, seemingly browsing the latest offerings by Jethro Tull or Ted Nugent, while Marv would be deftly slipping any number of half-decent record sleeves up the front of his jumper and inside his jacket. I went in there once to buy a Mott the Hoople album, but couldn’t because Marv had already nicked the cover.

  A few of my friends were into heavy rock and prog music, but even though there were guitars in it I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t like old-looking guys playing flutes or anything to do with dragons and robes. I would go around to someone’s house to check out their records and hear a lot of classical keyboard players noodling about, and what guitar playing there was sounded like it was going around in circles and didn’t appear to have a point – or if there was a point it was to show that the musician had been practising a lot. I also noticed that in the heavy rock scene there were never any girls – it was a girl-free zone – and that’s never a good sign.

  My parents went out every Friday night and sometimes on a Saturday too. Claire and I were meant to be babysitting Ian and would sit in front of the TV and innocently say goodbye, then as soon as the tail lights of my parents’ car disappeared at the end of the road, a gang of kids would pile in the back door with bottles of cider and we’d have a party. Claire’s friends would be in her room, and me and my mates would be in mine. Ian would love it as we’d let him stay up watching whatever TV he wanted.

  One night, when me and my friends were listening to Neil Young and sitting around devoutly with my red light bulb on, I heard the usual pounding of disco music coming from my sister’s room next door. Claire liked other sorts of music, but she really liked disco and she really liked to dance. As I tried to persevere with the introspective meditations of After the Gold Rush, my sister opened my door and, after surveying the scene, declared, ‘You look like you’re having a good time’ and danced off. I followed her into the disco next door. The music was amazing, uplifting and melodic, and the guitar playing immediately caught my attention. It was by a band called Chic, and the guitar player was called Nile Rodgers. I was totally hooked and listened to Chic for weeks until I knew every note. I loved the harmonic chord changes as much as the infectious rhythm in the guitar playing, and I worked out that when Nile Rodgers plays, you hear his heart in one hand and his soul in the other.

  The first punks I saw in Manchester were in Market Street in 1976. It was a startling thing – not for the usual reasons like scruffy leather jackets and spiked-up hair, but because the first punks in Manchester looked like small, effeminate thugs. Their hair was short, which was strange at the time, and they usually wore blazers. Leather jackets would come later, after everyone saw The Ramones. The punks I met had stud earrings and drainpipe jeans, V-neck sweaters with no shirt underneath and plastic sandals or baseball boots, and they knew they looked weird.

  My parents usually let me go wherever I wanted. I was always out, at youth clubs, or at someone’s house, listening to records. I rarely stayed in the house, and if I did I was in my room, practising, until Ian had to go to bed, then I’d find somewhere to go. All the bands came to Manchester and it was an important city on the live scene. The word would go around that someone was playing, and I would head down to the Free Trade Hall or the Apollo and make my way around the back where about seven or eight lads would be waiting to sneak in. There was a big set of double doors at the Free Trade Hall, and we’d stand around until the opening act started, then a few boys would push one door as hard as possible while someone else would try to get their hand inside to pull the bolt off the inside. Once the doors flew open, the doorman, an old boy who’d been at the place for years, would try in vain to grab the tearaways charging at him, but he never caught anyone. Sometimes we just kicked and kicked at the doors until the poor old fella came to see what was going on and we’d rush him before he could do anything about it. Once inside, we’d dash into seats or hover about as inconspicuously as possible until the security men gave up the search. I saw everyone who came to town whether I liked them or not, and I always got in.

  Someone told me that the old blues band Fleetwood Mac were playing at the Apollo. I knew of Fleetwood Mac from ‘Albatross’, a slow instrumental track from the sixties, and I also knew the riff from their song ‘Oh Well’. I assumed they were a bunch of old long-haired blokes, but I didn’t have anything else going on so I walked over to the Apollo and waited around on my own. As I was standing by the side doors, a huge Bentley pulled up beside me and a very tall man stepped out with two beautiful blonde women, one on each arm, and a big glass of red wine in his hand. They walked up to me and the man raised his glass of wine, then smiled and made a gesture as if to say, Yeah, son, this really is as good as it looks, before the three of them walked through the doors. I stood in awe, stunned by the beauty of the young women, and I thought to myself, ‘I am definitely going to do that for a living.’ I had to see what the show was like, and we kicked open the doors just as they started. The guitarist was flailing away on a white Les Paul while one of the girls, who was the lead singer, was spinning around. It was very good and quite commercial, and nothing at all like an old blues band. They finished the set with the single ‘Go Your Own Way’, which I’d heard on the radio, and a few weeks later their album Rumours took over the world.

  Almost everyone hanging around the gigs and estates took drugs. There was plenty of teenage drinking around too, but smoking hash, or ‘draw’, was really the thing and it became an intrinsic part of life. The other local pastime was taking magic mushrooms. They grew in abundance on Brookway Fields and we would boil them up into a psychedelic brew, and then wander around Wythenshawe, hallucinating. Gangs of girls and boys would hang around outside the shops at night when there was nowhere else to go. I’d be stood in a shop doorway with a few of Claire’s friends and some kids would come around the corner tripping and be climbing on the dustbins and rolling around on the floor and have no idea where they were. Some people became psychotic and were to be avoided for fear of a random confrontation or a never-ending conversation, and some would be walking around the estate in sunglasses and sandals like it was California at the height of summer.

  Aside from it being something to do, I liked psychedelics and altered states, and when Patti Smith came into my life, with her transcendental poetry, quoting Rimbaud and William Blake, I was really good to go. When I was fourteen I went to see Patti Smith at the Apollo, and I was so looking forward to it I bought a ticket in advance. Her album Horses had been a huge influence on everyone, and she’d even had a cha
rt hit with ‘Because the Night’. I was a big fan of the album Radio Ethiopia, especially the singing, which had pure rock ’n’ roll abandon, and I played the album every day. Through being a fan of Patti Smith I found out about CBGB’s and the New York scene with The Voidoids, Talking Heads and Television, whose guitarist, Richard Lloyd, was brilliant.

  I went on my own to the Patti Smith show, but when I got there I saw Billy Duffy with a couple of guys in the bar. I went over and he introduced me to Howard Bates from Slaughter and the Dogs; Phil Fetcher, who I recognised from Wythenshawe; and a guy with glasses called Steven Morrissey, whose name I’d heard because he was in a new version of The Nosebleeds with Billy. I said hello and then went to see what was happening inside the hall.

  I was stood right at the front when Patti Smith came on with her band, and it was like witnessing an incantation. I thought she was on another plane. The show was electricity, rock ’n’ roll and ritual, and the stage seemed like a different dimension, one I knew I had to live in myself. The next day the world felt different. It was another sign along the road.

  One of the great things about punk was that it was easy to customise your school uniform. I got a torn white shirt from the jumble-sale box in the Sacred Heart one night when we were rehearsing, and for the first time ever all the boys in school were trying to find the original old St Augustine’s blue blazers with pink stripes that were now de rigueur and the height of street fashion.

  Going to school started to become more and more like an inconvenience for me. My older friends had left Brookway and would be making plans to do interesting things during the day while I had to sit in a room with boys I had nothing in common with, being patronised by teachers who to me were unimpressive and not even doing a decent job of it. I started to skip out of school a couple of hours early in the afternoon and go into Central Library in town, or stay at home some mornings and go into lessons later in the day. The school would ask for a letter from my parents and I’d tell them I’d bring one and then not bother.

  I’d have to stick around all day, though, if I wanted to play football. I liked playing football and liked all the lads on the team, but I didn’t much care for it when I had to trek up north somewhere to another school on a Saturday morning. Trials were being held to get on the team for Manchester Boys, and the school put me up for them. I went over to try out, and got picked. After that I went over to try out for Man City’s youth team. It was a big deal to go to the training ground and see some of the players coming and going. Witnessing the dedication of the boys who wanted to be footballers made it even more obvious to me that I was a musician, and the fact that I was the only person wearing eye liner on the pitch said it all. I didn’t hear any more from them. I played for a couple of seasons with a bunch of great guys in a Sunday league team in my neighbourhood, but I was much more into music and to me football was just a good game.

  One afternoon, a teacher told me that I had to attend a meeting with him the next morning. It sounded serious, and when I got there Andy Rourke was waiting too. I assumed we were in trouble, but then the teacher informed us both that Andy would be moving to my class, and that he wanted me and him to stick together. His parents had just split up and he had chosen to deal with the situation by taking lots of drugs and coming into classes smashed. It was a tough time for him, and the school was threatening to expel him unless he could pull out of it. The teacher also informed me that my truancy had become unacceptable. So with some prescience and unconventional logic, he reasoned that the best thing for us both would be if me and Andy hung out full-time.

  Andy and I took to the new arrangement with gusto. He would get a bus from his house to mine in the morning, and I showed him how to not get on the second bus to go to school. We would wait around the corner until my mum went out to work and then sneak into my house until lunchtime. We’d go into school later on and sit together in classes, and then go back to his house in the evening. Andy’s home life was very unusual, as he and his three brothers, all teenagers, were living on their own. His dad was often away and his mother lived in Spain. His younger brother, John, was twelve, and Andy and I were fourteen. His next older brother, Phil, was fifteen, and the oldest brother, Chris, was seventeen. We had a comfortable house completely to ourselves and carte blanche to do what we wanted, and what we wanted to do was play music and experiment with drugs.

  The relationship between me and my parents had by now become quite turbulent. They disapproved of my nonconformity and were frustrated by what they saw as my rebelliousness. My dad and I didn’t talk much. He was a quiet guy to begin with, but now I was running around, doing what I wanted and not bothering to go to school, he thought I was headed for disaster. As far as my dad was concerned, his son was wild, and he was half right. Things would escalate for my folks when I came home one day and told them I’d joined a notorious band from Whalley Range called Sister Ray.

  My own band had been trundling on and rehearsing in the school hall. Chris had lost interest in being a singer, so the band had elected me to take over on vocals and the obvious move was to get Andy in on second guitar. With two guitars and Andy and Kev on backing vocals, the band was more power pop and did songs by The Cars, Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City’, ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’ by Eddie and the Hot Rods, and ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ by The Only Ones, who had become my favourite band. I liked being the frontman – I was OK with being the leader and I liked having the sound of the band around me. Vocally I was going for something between Johnny Thunders and Patti Smith, and the next step was to turn the riffs I had into songs of our own. Kev, our bass player, told me that Sister Ray had heard about me somehow and had contacted him to ask if I’d be interested in playing with them. They had a new record coming out and were planning on doing some gigs. He warned me that their singer was something of a loose cannon, which sounded ominous, but he told me they were a really good band, so I agreed to meet with them.

  Sister Ray had been on the Manchester scene for a couple of years. They were fronted by Clive Robertson, who was known for being a maniac onstage and off, and they’d just had a song out on a compilation album called Identity Parade. They were adults, and I wondered how it would work with me playing with them, but they were determined to have me in the band and we set up a rehearsal. Their songs sounded like a cross between Hawkwind and The Stooges, and I liked the idea of playing something so full-on and punky, but I didn’t imagine I would stay with them for very long as when we met I found the vibe around them to be heavy in a strange way. We rehearsed in a grim basement in the red-light district of Whalley Range, and it was claustrophobic, dark and intense. Sister Ray were very loud and had a genuine air of threat about them. At fourteen I was thrown in at the deep end, and hung on to my guitar as each song came at me in a storm of woozy feedback and the singer screamed things like, ‘Gimme some pills to swallow down with booze, gonna get me a rope, put it round my neck’ – he didn’t hold back.

  Going over to Whalley Range at night with my guitar was perilous. I always ran to and from the bus stop and tried to time it to the minute so I wasn’t standing on the street on my own. We rehearsed for a few weeks, and the next thing I knew it was in the local newspaper that I had joined them and we were playing a gig. The first proper show I ever played was with Sister Ray, and was appropriately enough at the Wythenshawe Forum. A gang of kids came from the estate to witness my debut, including the Valentinos, who predictably sneaked in. It was a fierce set, and a baptism of fire as the singer went mental and got into an altercation with one of the other bands after we played. I left the show with Andy and Bobby and made plans to get back to playing with the Valentinos. I wanted to do my own songs, and I knew that was it for me with Sister Ray.

  Angie

  STACKING SHELVES AT the Co-Op in Wythenshawe’s Civic Centre was not my thing at all, but I needed money. I was only there for four or five torturous weeks, but it was long enough for me to bring myself to the attention of the supervisor, who looked ex
actly like Margaret Thatcher and acted exactly like Margaret Thatcher and whose name, funnily enough, was Maggie.

  The woman loathed all life forms, and her hatred of me and my skinny jeans and pointy shoes knew no bounds. From the first night of my employment she found the most demeaning jobs for me in the hope that I would mess up and have to do it all again – whether it was climbing the highest ladders and stacking 200 cans of dog food, or getting under the counters in the dust and dirt so my non-regulation school uniform would get filthy. Suffice to say I wasn’t planning on staying very long.

  At the end of January after a week of heavy snow, the bus drivers went on strike, which meant I had to walk the eight miles to the Co-Op. I took off in the freezing cold, and as I passed a bus stop near Brookway High School a few girls shouted to me, ‘Johnny, are you going to Gill’s party?’ I didn’t know about a party and I didn’t know Gill, so I just replied ‘Maybe’ and left it at that as I continued on my mission to get to work for my shift.

  The evening drew in and got darker, and the sodium lights came on, turning the snow pale orange. There was no one on the streets and hardly any cars on the roads, and as time passed and I walked and walked I got lonely. I’d just turned fifteen, and all I wanted was to get ahead and go somewhere. I didn’t want to be walking for miles in the snow on my own to some place where I’d be put down and disrespected just because I had the gall to not hide my dreams. All the while I had the whole of The Only Ones’ album going through my head. I loved the band, and I knew every note and word. I felt like I was walking on spirit alone.

  When I got to work I got word from one of the women on the checkouts that I had to go and see Maggie. I guessed I was in for some shit, and when I went to the office she said I was fired for being ten minutes late. To have the woman get in my face after the heroic expedition I’d just completed was so ridiculous I started laughing, and then really laughing. That Maggie was getting more annoyed made me giggle all the more, and the more annoyed she got the funnier it all was to me. It was hilarious, I loved it, it was perfect she flipped.