Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  I didn’t like working in Ivor’s: the shop was too straight and I felt confined. I’d met a guy who worked in a shop called Aladdin’s Cave that sold clothes that were more rock ’n’ roll, and he told me there was a full-time job going. I went in to see the boss, and he hired me on the spot. The new job was better: the shop was more underground and the customers were more outsider types. The music was better too, as they played the stuff I liked from the alternative rock clubs. The owner of the shop was a much older guy called Mike who wanted to know everything about my life outside the shop. He’d ask me about where I went and what music I liked, and he was particularly interested in what I wore and why.

  I assumed his enquiries were driven by shrewd commercial motives, as he started to sell my type of clothes and then gave Angie a job and borrowed some of her clothes to copy and sell too. It worked for him as each week the shop got busier and it soon became the most popular place for young people in town. Working in a clothes shop was perfect for me. Aside from being around the clothes, it gave me time to play whatever music I wanted all day. Wire, The Cramps, Magazine and Siouxsie and the Banshees were all on rotation, as were old favourites by Human League and David Bowie. The other thing that was good about working at the Cave was that I got the opportunity to go to Johnson’s.

  Angie and I had been devotees of Johnson’s for a long time. The shop was on the King’s Road in London, in the area known as World’s End, and I found out about it when Billy Duffy got a job there and I went to visit him. The owner was Lloyd Johnson, a style aficionado and original mod who had started off with a stall in Kensington Market in the late sixties. In 1978 he opened the King’s Road shop, not far from Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s infamous shop, Sex. The Johnson’s style was a reimagining of classic rock ’n’ roll retro, something which Lloyd called ‘stagewear for the street’, and it was worn by bands like Stray Cats, Johnny Thunders and Iggy Pop. The Cave sold some Johnson’s clothes. They were expensive, and Angie and I could only afford them by working for weeks in order to pay them off. The Cave also sold clothes that were suspiciously like Johnson’s but not the real thing, which neither Angie nor I would have been seen dead in. Eventually I struck up a deal with the boss whereby Angie and I would go to London to pick out things that we liked, and bring them back to sell in the shop, and he would give us free Johnson’s clothes in return. Angie would stay at my house and we would get up at five thirty in the morning to catch the train to London. When we arrived at Euston we’d take the Underground train to Sloane Square and walk the length of the King’s Road to Johnson’s, looking in on a great shoe shop called Robot along the way.

  The trips to Johnson’s were never anything less than a total event for us. Angie would be in a La Rocka leather bike jacket and leather skirt, Vivienne Westwood shirt and Johnson’s bike boots. We would get to Johnson’s and Lloyd would welcome us with a friendly ‘Aw! Look at these two little lovebirds, aren’t they lovely!’ and on one occasion he took us to the warehouse to show us some designs he was working on that were inspired by the Japanese kamikaze pilots and that would become his most famous creations. In the shop we’d pick out as much as we could and stuff it into two bin liners each. We’d then stagger back down the King’s Road with the bags and make the journey back to Manchester, where Mike would meet us. We’d give him the clothes we’d bought and pick what we wanted for ourselves, which we got on the condition that we wore them in the shop – which we would’ve done anyway. Pretty soon our friends started to make requests for us to get them clothes from London. We made a couple of trips and were able to sell clothes cheaper than the Cave. It was better than our friends paying inflated prices, and it gave me and Angie a decent income for a while. It also helped to stop counterfeit copies, and suddenly there were a lot of people walking around Manchester looking like Stray Cats.

  One day, in 1981, a young man and woman walked into the Cave with clipboards and asked me in a formal tone if I would be interested in appearing on a television show about unemployed youth. I was confused and pointed out that I was employed by the shop, but they went on to say that it didn’t matter that I was employed – I was what they needed. The woman ticked off a list of types: ‘We’ve got a punk, a student, a posh girl, a skinhead …’ They didn’t know what I was, but they thought I’d be good on the telly. I’d get £30 for every show for six weeks, and that sounded very good to me. I told them I’d think about it and I’d let them know.

  As the couple were leaving, Mike came over and asked me what that was all about. I told him, and Mike, who never missed a commercial opportunity, made a suggestion: ‘You should do it. You could wear one of our suits each week. It would be a good advert for the shop.’

  Ordinarily I would have joined in the spirit of enterprise and helping out a friend, but I had long since decided that the boss was not someone I wanted to be friends with. ‘No, I’m not wearing one of the suits,’ I said. ‘I’ll wear my own stuff.’

  ‘What about a Johnson’s suit?’ he said. ‘You could wear a different one every week.’

  That sounded great to me and I pushed it further. ‘I’ll wear one if you let me keep it,’ I said, ‘ … and pay me thirty quid.’

  He paused to think about it. I couldn’t believe he was even considering it. A free Johnson’s suit every week – I would’ve done the TV shows just for one, and now he was considering giving me £30 a week on top of that. ‘Twenty quid,’ he said.

  ‘OK then,’ I replied, and I started planning which Johnson’s suits I was going to wear on the telly and what I was going to buy with my £300.

  The TV show was called Devil’s Advocate and was broadcast live every Sunday. I would be sat with ninety-nine other ‘youths’ while the presenter, Gus Macdonald, introduced topics to do with unemployment and young people in the UK and we’d give our opinions. When I told my parents I was doing it they were impressed that I’d been asked to participate and thought that I must be quite clever. It was a good premise for a show, to give a national platform to unemployed teenagers, but I felt a little weird about being on there when I had a job. My intention was to say very little and leave it to the others who were genuinely more interested in being on the show and genuinely more unemployed too. The producers had a different idea though. They put me on the front row and I sat there in a Johnson’s suit that only rock stars could pull off, or indeed afford, until they realised that I wasn’t contributing very much. On the two occasions when I did, I mumbled and looked very nervous, like I wanted the camera to go away.

  With the money I’d made from the TV show and working at the shop I was able to buy a second-hand black Gibson Les Paul, which was the first proper classic guitar I owned. I’d spend most nights playing it in my bedroom and working on ideas for songs. I’d sit on the floor with my guitar and record ideas on to a cassette while Angie lounged on the bed, flicking through magazines and looking at record covers. Sometimes I would practise on my own and feel like I was getting nowhere and that everything had been done before, but then I’d put a chord in a different place on the neck or change its shape around and would make a discovery. I noticed that certain chords sounded more like how I felt, like I was playing something that was personal to me and that I could relate to. I was looking for things that evoked a sense of yearning but with a kind of optimism, and that started to develop into an identity of my own that I liked. Bit by bit these discoveries became my vocabulary on the guitar, and I was sounding more and more like myself. I had a notion too that if I could I should try to make some kind of statement. Something contrary to everything else I’d already heard before. I just had to find out what I wanted to say.

  By now I’d lost touch with Bobby and I’d been told about a really good drummer from south Manchester called Simon Wolstencroft. He heard I was forming a band, and he came round to meet me one evening. Si was very cool. He was the same age as me and very laid-back, he looked great and had a style that was pure bluebeat. I told him that I wanted to form a band that
had a rock sound but didn’t play actual rock songs – I was interested in something new and groove-based, like Gang of Four or Talking Heads. Si’s hero was Topper Headon from The Clash, who at the time were moving along similar lines with songs like ‘Radio Clash’ and ‘The Magnificent Seven’. He was excited about the idea of the band, and he agreed to join on drums.

  The first time we got together was in a basement of a carpet shop we’d borrowed from a friend’s boss, which was so cold and damp my guitar was crackling and giving me electric shocks. We persevered for a couple of nights until I couldn’t take any more and went to find us a room in a new place I’d heard about near town. Decibel Studios was in an old mill building in Ancoats, on the edge of the city centre, and was owned by a French guy called Philippe. The studio was only half built, and Philippe offered to let me use it for free two nights a week if I helped with the building work. I went over every night after working in the shop and within a week of carting bricks and putting up walls we had a place to practise.

  The band started off as me, Si and Andy, and my plan was to audition a singer. I didn’t want to front the band, and I wanted a four-piece line-up with guitar, bass, drums and vocals. The first night at Decibel we were playing a song called ‘Freak Party’, which sounded like a kind of new wave Funkadelic, when Si suggested that our song title would be a good name for the band. We were playing a new kind of music that sounded young, and it was a good feeling to be going into the unknown. I felt like I was on the verge of something.

  A guy collared me in the shop one day and asked if I knew where he might be able to sell a painting that a friend of his had mysteriously ‘found’. I’d made the mistake a few weeks earlier of telling him about a pot dealer who was also a fence, and now he’d come back to me with this business idea. I told him I’d look into it and hoped it would just go away, but he was a forceful and persistent character and I eventually gave in and agreed to introduce him to the fence to shut him up. A few weeks later, I was rehearsing with Freak Party when the door was suddenly kicked off its hinges and three very aggressive, burly men stormed in the room and shouted at us to ‘Fucking stop right now!’

  We stopped.

  ‘What’s your name?’ one of them screamed.

  ‘Simon Wolstencroft,’ said Si.

  ‘And who are you?’ he shouted at Andy.

  Andy told them, they all glared at me and one of them barked, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Johnny—’ I said, and with that all three of them charged at me and rammed me up against the wall and off my feet.

  I had no idea what was going on, but I knew it was serious trouble. One of them went through my pockets and I thought ‘It’s a bust’ – but then I saw that they weren’t interested in whatever was in there and knew it had to be something else. Two of them kept me up against the wall. My guitar was still plugged in. ‘Klaang!!’ … Klaang!!’ the guitar was blasting through the amp and feeding back massively as they wrestled it off me. Then one of them took off my shoes. ‘Uh-oh’, I thought, as I realised I was in really big trouble and I would be going to a cell.

  Angie was sitting on a desk in the reception outside as two of them dragged me into the corridor. The cops shouted at her ‘You stay there!’ and I saw the dismay on her face as they hauled me backwards down the iron staircase to the front door. They put me in the back of an unmarked car, and I watched Andy and Si get into another. I still had no idea what was happening and told myself to keep quiet as the cop on the back seat next to me hit me in the ribs every time we sped around a corner.

  It was only when we arrived at Longsight police station that I was informed that I was going to be arrested for receiving stolen goods, and the reason it was so serious was because the painting was a famous work by the Mancunian artist L. S. Lowry. I sat on my own in a grubby pale green cell and thought, ‘You’ve really done it now.’ I stayed in the cell all night in my leather trousers and my Only Ones T-shirt. A different policeman would come in every couple of hours to kindly let me know that I would be going away for a long while. They seemed to really enjoy telling me, ‘You won’t be seeing that little bird of yours for a long time,’ and were amused that I was in a band and wore make-up. They let me out the next night and I saw a lawyer a couple of days later. He informed me that I would most likely be sent to a juvenile prison for eight months to a year.

  Angie and I spent the night before the court date saying goodbye to each other; we were both still in shock. People had been telling me they knew so-and-so who’d look out for me in prison, which was supposed to be comforting, but it wasn’t. I had been around some unscrupulous types, but it was just part of growing up in my environment. I couldn’t believe that one unthinking step had got me into this situation. It would mean no Angie and no guitar, and a potential prison sentence.

  I stood in the magistrates’ court and watched everyone else who was involved get sent down. The judge finally came to me and miraculously decided to let me go with a £300 fine. It was incredible: the judge had showed me mercy and I was walking out of there. Standing in that court room that day made me realise more than anything what I was. I was a musician. Not only that but, by my count, getting busted while I was playing my guitar meant at least one million rock ’n’ roll points.

  Freak Party continued rehearsing at Decibel and we started looking for a singer. We auditioned a couple of people. One guy looked great but insisted on singing ‘The Flowers of Romance’ over and over until I couldn’t take it any more. After what felt like hours we told him, ‘Thanks, we’ll call you’ and he left. Shortly after he became a very successful model; I couldn’t listen to ‘The Flowers of Romance’ for years.

  Si told me about a friend he had been in a band with, called Ian Brown. He was the same age as us and was into good music. I asked Si to invite Ian to come and sing with us, but he was in the process of starting a new band of his own. Soon afterwards I got to know Ian. I had a lot of respect for him and we became friends.

  I was spending most nights at Andy’s, which was becoming a total madhouse. We had continued to live without any boundaries, and though it was fun at first it had got to the point where the place was a lawless free-for-all. I’d been around since Andy’s parents first split, and the brothers were like my own. I considered the place a creative refuge as much as an alternative to my own home life, but drug use was becoming more serious with some people there and things were starting to feel dark. I found myself being introduced to some characters that I had a bad feeling about, new kinds of reprobates who had no interest in music and would bring only bad things.

  The first alarming sign was when, completely out of the blue, one of my friends said, ‘We’re getting some heroin tomorrow.’ ‘What?’ I asked, and he continued to talk about scoring smack the next day. I was shocked to see that the others seemed totally OK with it, and then I realised the reason why: they were already smoking it. At that moment I knew that I had to get out and move on, but I didn’t know how to do it. I was angry and disappointed with them all, especially Andy, for keeping it from me. There was now a divide between me and Angie and everyone else, and we watched our friends very quickly turn into vampires as the dealer dished out smack all day, lording it over them while they followed him around and laughed at his bad jokes. I hated the dealer not just because of his profession but because he was utterly moronic and knew nothing other than how to sell drugs and steal from people. He wasn’t worthy to be around, let alone admired. My friends may have been roguish, but they were young and still quite innocent until the heroin arrived. I carried on the band with Si and Andy, hoping it would all play out and that things would get back to how they were before. I was angry with them for getting into it, but my band was my life and I didn’t think I had any other choice.

  One night, the three of us drove back to Andy’s in Si’s car after a rehearsal. I still wanted to find a singer, but it was early days; the music was getting good and I felt something would turn up eventually. When we got there, I w
alked into the kitchen and saw one of my friends shooting another one of my friends up with heroin. I froze and they looked at me. I just turned around, found Angie and said, ‘Let’s get our things, we’re leaving.’ Angie kept asking me what had happened as I stormed upstairs to collect our things, but I was so angry I couldn’t speak. I packed our clothes into a bag and we walked out. I didn’t say goodbye to any of them. A line had been crossed and there was no more band and no more friends. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but whatever it was the next day would be day one.

  X

  A NEW SHOP called X-Clothes was about to open in Manchester. I’d stopped working at the Cave and made a totally clean break with the past; now I needed to find a new job. X-Clothes was an independent company with one shop in Leeds and one in Sheffield. It had built up a loyal following of customers who were into alternative fashion, and was owned and run by a great couple called Sue and Jeremy. They were proud of their independence, and manufactured clothes on their own X-Clothes label as well as representing the best alternative designers like Vivienne Westwood, Susan Clowes and Stephen Linard; their aesthetic was high-end London hip with a bit of punk and rock ’n’ roll thrown in. I went for an interview with the owners and their no-nonsense assistant, Gina. It was more of a grilling than an interview, and they asked my opinions on politics, fashion and alternative culture. I was impressed that they were so fastidious and that they wanted all aspects of the shop to be perfect, so when I got home and they called to say I had the job I was fairly elated.