Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  Claire had just left school and was working as a dental nurse, and Angie was working as an assistant at a solicitor’s office. I was paying my parents some rent and having to pay off my fine, so I really needed some money. Angie was on a lunch break in town one day when she saw a bundle of cash lying in the street. No one else had noticed it, and when she picked it up and counted it there was £60 there. It was an amazing bit of luck and kept us going until I got my first month’s pay.

  There would be four of us working in X-Clothes. Lee was the manager; he demanded I show deference to him from my first day, and I decided it would be best not to get on the wrong side of him or he’d make me pay for it. Jules was the assistant manager. She was a real music fan and good at her job, and she and I got along straight away. The other person was Russ, who had moved to Manchester from Sheffield because he was an X-Clothes acolyte and really wanted the job. As the youngest I was assigned all the menial tasks at first, like sorting hangers and moving boxes. It was fine and someone had to do it, but I also recognised that my new boss was putting me in my place just in case I got too above my station.

  Starting up the shop from scratch was not just a new beginning for me but for all of us. The day we opened, the place smelled of fresh paint. All of us were style freaks and were excited about what we were selling; we were on board with the aesthetic and we knew a lot of other people in Manchester would be impressed. X-Clothes established itself straight away. Musicians in bands, people from other shops and everyone from the clubs came in to check the place out. The most impressive people in terms of style were the kids from the outskirts of town. I’d thought that anywhere north of the city centre was stuck in the sticks, but there was a bunch of rockabilly kids who’d come in who were so correct in every detail, right down to their socks and choice of hair product, that they could’ve been in a fifties film. They each had their own favourite star: Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Montgomery Clift. I became friendly with them and even managed to get one of them, who I called Rockabilly Geoff, a Saturday job.

  I loved working in town, and I already knew a lot of the customers from Stolen From Ivor and the Cave. It was good for the shop, but it alienated me from the boss. He would clip my wings by sending me out on errands, but I was happy to go along with whatever he threw at me, and I’d smoke a cig and just thought of it as being part of the job.

  Adapting to my new situation helped me put the past behind me. Life was still uncertain and I was yet to find new friends, but I was optimistic about starting something different. I missed hanging out with Andy, but he was in a place that I’d had to get away from, and I liked the energy and promise of a fresh situation. I started to think about the music I wanted to make in the same kind of way. I wouldn’t write songs with a bass player and drummer in a rehearsal room, I’d do it on my own. I knew I’d be forming a group at some point, but I wasn’t inclined to start looking for other musicians yet. I decided to write a whole lot of new songs and get as good as I could at it. I was back in my parents’ house and I applied myself to working on melodies and riffs on my own. I got into learning the song structures on girl-group records and Motown singles, and I listened obsessively to records by Phil Spector and worked out how they were put together.

  In the shop we took turns playing the music we liked. Russ loved Killing Joke and Fad Gadget and pretty much everything from his home town, so we’d have all the Sheffield bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Human League and Clock DVA, with some Throbbing Gristle thrown in. Jules played The Stooges and The Fall and anything else as long as it was The Velvet Underground. Lee liked The Associates, which impressed me, and also Kraftwerk, but then he’d spoil it by suggesting Frank Sinatra, which for some inexplicable reason was a bit of a thing in the early eighties and was greeted with much derision from the rest of us.

  All the bands on Factory Records came into the shop. Tony Wilson asked me one day if I’d be interested in joining Section 25, one of his bands. He gave me a tape and I liked it, but I wanted to have my own band and I told him I couldn’t do it. Around this time the graphic designer Peter Saville came in with another guy from Factory called Mike Pickering. They’d just been to a meeting about a new nightclub they were about to build, and mentioned a designer called Ben Kelly and New Order. They pulled out a roll of blueprints and laid them out on the shop counter. It looked impressive, and Mike and Peter were very excited about it. I asked them what the club was going to be called and they said, ‘The Haçienda.’

  Things were going well, and it was time to find somewhere of my own to live. Money-wise I was making just enough to travel to and from work, and to pay off my fine, so I didn’t quite know how I was going to go about it, but I knew it had to be done. It was around this time that Ollie May, who I’d met back in college, started coming into the shop. Ollie wasn’t the usual Mancunian X-Clothes customer; he was Swiss and from a comfortable family who had moved to Cheshire in the nicer part of the North West. He was intellectual and quirky in an endearing way, and his grandfather had been a famous Swiss philosopher. We were talking one day and I told him I was looking for somewhere to live. ‘You should move into the house I live in,’ he said. ‘There’s a room going on the top floor, ten pounds a week – it’s Shelley Rohde’s house.’ Shelley Rohde was a journalist and TV presenter, and Ollie had been living as a lodger with her and her family for a few months. It sounded perfect, but it seemed a bit odd just to turn up on Ollie’s say-so. Ollie assured me that it would be fine though: the family were easy-going and it was a very bohemian kind of household.

  I loaded my clothes, records, guitar and an amp into my dad’s car, and he drove me to my new home. I’d grown up with the idea that when you were old enough to get a job you left home, or if you didn’t get a job you would be kicked out, and I assumed that my dad would be glad to see the back of me. I got my things into Shelley’s house and when I said goodbye to my dad I saw in his face that he was sad to see me go.

  My room was on the top floor; it was small and had a sloping ceiling, and Ollie’s room was across the landing. The rest of the house felt creative with a bohemian air about the place. Along the walls on the stairs were photographs from films and TV shows that Shelley had been involved in, and at the bottom of the stairs was a big framed poster of the biography she had written about the artist L. S. Lowry, which I took as a sign to count my blessings. I didn’t see anyone from the family for the first two days, until Shelley’s son Gavin came into my room to introduce himself with his younger brother Dan. They were interesting and friendly and into playing music, and I appreciated the welcome. I eventually met Shelley and she was fairly nonchalant about having another lodger living upstairs. We got to know each other, and everyone did their own thing and acted like I’d always been there.

  It was inspiring being in an artistic environment and nice to have Ollie across the landing. He was a lively person and busied himself by listening to jazz-funk records at deafening volume. I would hang out with him occasionally, but most of the time I’d be in my room listening to The Shangri-Las and The Crystals and analysing all the Brill Building records I could find. This music seemed to come from a time when pop was more hopeful, and I thought these records were more unusual and better than most of the modern stuff that was around. I bought a cheap sofa bed and I didn’t have a television, so my nights were all about music. I’d recently traded my Les Paul for a red Gretsch Super Axe and a Teac cassette machine that had an overdub facility. I’d work on a chord sequence until I was happy with it and then record a second guitar part on top. I would then bounce the two tracks together and experiment with putting more guitars on. I could build up the tracks by bouncing and overdubbing and create my own wall of sound. Eventually I had a lot of tapes of chord patterns and riffs done entirely with guitars, and Ollie and I would listen to them over and over. It was great to have the freedom to work on things, and I really liked having my own domain.

  There was only one problem with Shelley’s: the cat. It was big and white and
was the most malevolent thing I’d ever come across in my life. I’d always had a problem with cats, ever since my parents brought home a scrappy little thing which Claire christened ‘Fluffy’. I didn’t trust Fluffy, and I didn’t understand why I was expected to accommodate a creature who was totally manipulative and wanted to bite me all the time. We would be alone in the house and it would stare at me and play mind games until I gave in or went out of the house altogether. My friend Paul had a cat that controlled everybody in his house. It would preen around with an attitude of ‘this is what I want you to do for me’ and would then act all innocent and pretend to be nice.

  I tried to avoid Shelley’s cat whenever I could, but if I had to go into the living room or kitchen it would be lurking, ready to pounce. Its favourite thing was to jump on to the back of the chair you were on and linger behind your head, purring ominously. If you tried to get up or moved suddenly, it would scratch and bite you. I’d be stuck watching a TV show for hours, and Shelley’s daughter Michelle would say, ‘Oh, look … he really likes you!’ as beads of sweat trickled down my forehead – until the beast prowled off to terrorise someone else.

  Crazy Face

  QUITE SOON AFTER X-Clothes had got going, I started to visit the shop next door, which was called Crazy Face. It was a different kind of place from X-Clothes, slightly more mainstream but with its own distinct identity. It sold more retro, American-influenced clothes, and was by then a successful independent brand, with two other shops in town and a factory too, where they made all the stock and had the main office. I would hang out and chat with the girls who worked there, and I soon noticed that the music that was playing was a very specific mix of original rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll and soul. One day I asked one of the girls what it was they were playing.

  ‘I don’t know, some old thing Joe makes us play,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s Joe? I asked.

  ‘The owner, it’s all his stuff.’

  I’d also noticed that there were a lot of original black-and-white press photos of people like Marlon Brando, Jeanne Moreau, The Shangri-Las and Little Richard. It was pretty unusual in a clothes shop at the time, and I was intrigued about who was behind it all.

  One day, when I was on a break, I wandered into Crazy Face and saw an older guy I’d not seen before standing by the counter. He was wearing a beat-up black original leather flying jacket and what seemed to be American railroad baggy work pants, and looked very much like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. As a couple of the girls said hello, he stuck out his hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Joe.’ He had a warm way about him, so I put my hand out and said, ‘Hi, my name’s Johnny … I’m a frustrated musician.’ It seemed like a normal thing to say, and we struck up a conversation which eventually turned to the subject of the guitar. Joe told me that he owned a Gibson acoustic and that he’d been trying to master the intro to ‘My Girl’ by The Temptations with not much success. ‘I’ll show you how to play it,’ I said, and he was pleased enough to invite me over to his office across town the next day during lunchtime to show him how it was done.

  70 Portland Street was a nice-looking old building on the edge of Chinatown. It had a big, blue, church-style wooden door that led to five floors of machines, with people cutting and assembling patterns everywhere and an empty basement shop downstairs. Joe ran the place with a curious style of both placidity and all-seeing scrutiny. As with his other shop, which was called Tupelo Honey, the name Crazy Face came from a Van Morrison song. The office itself was about a ten-minute walk from X-Clothes, and about four minutes if I ran, which I usually did in bike boots and with a cigarette in my mouth.

  That first day when I went over to hang out with Joe didn’t feel like a regular day. He was in his early thirties, and it was unusual to be hanging out with someone that much older than me. Joe was very cool. He was a grown-up, with a family, and ran a business, but he was still a free and easy guy. Here was someone who was talking to me like I was an equal but had already lived a real life. He had been a genuine beatnik in the sixties, and had seen the Stones and The Beatles and The Animals. He’d been to America too, and it seemed like he knew everything. We clicked with each other immediately, and he was as intrigued by me as I was by him.

  When I was in his office he handed me his Sunburst Gibson acoustic. I took it, sat down and played Smokey Robinson’s ‘The Tracks of My Tears’. When I finished he stood up and said, ‘Do it again.’ I played it again, and when I got to the end he said, ‘I’ve never heard anyone play like that – what are you doing?’ I was buzzed that he liked my playing, but I hadn’t really considered what I was doing to be anything out of the ordinary. I did it the way I’d taught myself, the way I played everything. Then I played ‘My Girl’ for him, which was the tune he wanted to learn. He was really impressed and told me that he’d been around a lot of guitar players in the sixties and seventies but had never seen anyone play ‘with the tune going and then with another tune going on top’. When Joe told me this, and said it so genuinely, it was the first time I really believed I had something. Until that point it had seemed like everyone I’d been playing with had either assumed that I was totally confident and so were reluctant to give me too much praise, or they felt they were in competition with me for some reason. Either way, I had finally met someone I could believe when they told me I was really good, and that person was Joe Moss.

  Morrissey and Marr

  LIFE IN TOWN was fast and exciting every day. It seemed like there were new possibilities in music and fashion for my generation, even if there weren’t in employment and industry. Music-wise I was noticing all of the new guitar stuff that was around by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine and Talking Heads, which had developed from the punk scene; as well as the new kind of pop that was turning up by The Associates, Simple Minds and Grace Jones, which drew on the fashions and styles coming out of the nightclubs. This wave of musical diversity was new, and seemed very different from the too-familiar voices of the established post-punk scene, which for people of my age was now starting to feel tired, even if it had been great once upon a time.

  Retro culture was starting to develop, with second-hand clothes stores appearing on a few of the back streets. Some of my friends were working in these shops, and if an X-Clothes customer was trying on an item that was the wrong size or too expensive, I would send them around the corner to get it at Reflex, my mate’s place, or at the Antique Market. Lee would be annoyed when he found out, but people would then come back to our shop because they trusted me, which would annoy him again.

  A club night had started once a week in a place called the Exit, and Angie and I went down there one Saturday night. The place was buzzing with young people, most of whom were shop assistants and hairdressers working in town. The music was loud and the atmosphere was full on, and everyone was all dressed up with somewhere to go. We’d been in there about five minutes when a record came on that immediately hooked me with its scratchy rhythm guitar. I had to know what it was and who it was by, so I weaved my way across the dance floor and over to the DJ, who was elevated in a booth like a preacher in a pulpit. A young man in a pink shirt and with a huge white quiff with a trilby perched on top leaned over and shouted, ‘Johnny Marr!’, and I realised it was Andrew Berry, the star hairdresser from West Wythy. ‘What are you up to?’ he shouted.

  ‘Just out on the town,’ I bellowed back. ‘What’s this record?’

  ‘This one playing now? It’s Bohannon, “Let’s Start the Dance”.’

  ‘Ah, Bohannon,’ I thought. It was the same kind of guitar I’d heard on ‘Disco Stomp’, and with that Andrew invited me and Angie into the DJ booth for the rest of the night to choose records, catch up and drink free Harvey Wallbangers. Meeting up with Andrew again was a major moment for both of us. I had never forgotten him – he was charismatic and one of those people that everyone remembers after they meet them. We connected when we were younger and we picked up where we’d left off. After that night we started
to meet up every day, and the two of us had a shared sense of adventure and a joint motivation to make something amazing happen.

  Angie had left the solicitor’s and had got a receptionist’s job at Vidal Sassoon, just down the street from me and around the corner from where Andrew was working at Toni & Guy hair salon. She and I would meet up after work and then a bunch of us would go over to a gay club called the Manhattan Sound, in Spring Gardens, where the manager, Dennis, would let us sit around and play whatever we wanted on the record decks before the place got busy. One of the friends who would be out with us was called Pete Hunt, and there was another friend who was Pete Hope. They were usually together and were therefore always referred to as ‘the two Petes’.

  Pete Hunt ran a record shop in south Manchester called Discount Records, and one night he told me he was going travelling around Europe and asked if I would keep all the records from the shop in my room at Shelley’s until he came back. I was amazed: to have all the records from a record shop in my bedroom was like a dream I would’ve had when I was eleven. The only snag was that my attic room was small. But I’d worry about that when the time came. The other thing that Pete Hunt told me was that when he was in London the week before, trying to find the Wag Club in Soho, he’d met a guy on the street who was also going to the Wag. They ended up hanging out, and Pete thought that me and his new friend would get along, so he’d invited him up to Manchester to meet me. He also told me that the guy had made an amazing record and that his name was Matt Johnson. He sounded interesting, and I was impressed to hear that he’d made a record. A few days later Pete played me Matt’s album, which was called Burning Blue Soul, and when I heard it I was even more impressed. It was really innovative, experimental and very psychedelic. It knocked me out, and I was looking forward to meeting the person behind it.