Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  All of us considered Manchester to be as important as London, and this was the attitude that John Kennedy had when he tirelessly pestered national magazines like The Face and i-D to come up to do features on his friends. It didn’t matter to John whether his friends were in bands, or DJs, or on the dole. What mattered was that they had a city-centre attitude, and looked striking in some way. I was interviewed for a magazine about being ‘a face on the scene’, and I was also on another television programme, this time about fashion, where I was interviewed by Shelley Rohde. As I was living in her attic, it was a bit odd for us both, but Shelley took advantage like a true pro, and threw me with her very first question – ‘Why are you wearing that cap?’, which was a good opening gambit and totally valid. JK suggested that for the TV show and the magazine I call myself ‘Johnny La Mar’, which I didn’t, even though he was actually serious about it. Some of the names he gave people stuck though, like ‘Spikey Mike’, or even ‘Mind of a Toy’, which was a personal favourite of mine.

  I started DJ’ing with Andrew on Thursdays at Exit. Some nights would be packed, especially when JK had managed to put on an event, and some nights would be just us and our mates. It didn’t make any difference to us what was going on, as we used the place as our own, hanging out and drinking Harvey Wallbangers and playing whatever records we liked, which was usually a lot of James Brown and John Lee Hooker, with some new alternative stuff like Gang of Four’s ‘I Love a Man in Uniform’, and Josef K’s ‘The Missionary’. After we’d locked up, a bunch of us would proceed noisily through the city centre to get the night bus to Andrew’s flat on Palatine Road near Factory Records and continue our experiments in inventing ourselves and our lifestyles. I’d usually stay up all night, psyched on life, or occasionally I would squeeze on the couch with two people I vaguely knew, with four other people on the floor who I didn’t know at all, and then two hours later I’d get up and race to the bus stop to get to work.

  While I was supposed to be working in the shop I was starting to spend more and more time next door in Crazy Face, a situation which did not go unnoticed by my boss. I would often go over to Joe’s office on Portland Street at lunchtime, play the cassettes of the new songs I was working on and get dreaming out loud. Everything was a philosophy to Joe – he would philosophise about anything, and he always had a theory about something that was terribly important and that no one else had ever thought of. He once spent days working on the idea that Jackie DeShannon had invented British guitar music because of the twelve-string motif on the song ‘Needles and Pins’, and trying to figure out the extent of her influence on The Beatles because they toured with her in the US. He made a cassette with a mix of her songs, followed by Beatles songs that he’d worked out were directly influenced by DeShannon, and it has to be said he made a pretty convincing case.

  Joe would also talk a lot about how things really were in Manchester in the fifties and sixties. He hated the mythology that had come to define the city – this idea that it was some kind of dark and dreary purgatory – and said that it was put about by people who were either not where it was happening at the time or who had watched ‘too much Coronation Street’. As far as Joe was concerned, it was all just a pseudo-northern cliché. His was a youthful Manchester that exploded after the war into colourful music and film with clothes to match, and he saw that my Manchester was turning out to be the same. One day he leaned over to me in his uniquely conspiratorial way and pronounced, ‘This is your city,’ which made me really think it was.

  Other lunchtimes I would go over to my friend Rick’s second-hand shop in the alley on Back Bridge Street to borrow a polo-neck sweater and then run round the corner to Carl Twigg’s antique shop on King Street West and chat with him about what had gone on in town the night before. My friend Tommy, who worked in the Virgin Records store, would order re-releases of Motown singles I couldn’t get at Rare Records, and I would dart in there to pick up a copy of ‘(Come Round Here) I’m the One You Need’ or ‘Put Yourself in My Place’ before running in to see Angie at Sassoon’s, and then return to X-Clothes, where I would be predictably late. The best times to be working in the shops though were at the weekends in the summer. I would wander around town after work on a warm Saturday evening before the clubs opened, on my way to meet my friends, aware of what it is to be young. I would stand on a corner and look up above the buildings on King Street, and even though I only had a fiver in my pocket, I’d know it was as good a place to be at that moment as anywhere else in the world.

  The Smiths It Is

  SOME NIGHTS I’D spend on my own in the attic at Shelley’s. I needed the solitude to think and the time to write new songs. I was finding inspiration in all sorts of music, but mostly I was listening to the girl groups. I wondered if the approach on those records could be applied to a guitar band, and I worked on eradicating any traces of traditional rock guitar that might be in my songwriting, while trying to maintain my own sound. I wanted what I was doing to be modern, and I wanted my friends to like it and think what I was doing was cool.

  Morrissey and I would speak most days on the phone, and sometimes he would come into the shop and we’d make arrangements to get together at my place. Occasionally I’d go over to see him at his mother’s house. It was after one of these afternoon visits, when we were standing on the pavement as I was leaving, that he held out his hand and presented me with a small white card. On the card were three names written in blue biro: ‘The Smith Family’, ‘The Smiths’ and ‘The Walking Wounded’. I took a moment to consider as I didn’t know if I liked any of them, but I decided that ‘The Smiths’ was the one I disliked least, so I pointed to it. ‘OK then,’ said Morrissey with a smile and a bow of the head, ‘The Smiths it is.’ I said goodbye and walked down the road towards Old Trafford train station. I thought about the new band name for a minute and it sounded like a family, and I liked how simple it was, then I thought about it some more and decided that it was great. The Smiths – it fitted. The Smiths it was.

  My main priority was to find other musicians and try to record a demo. I started to look more seriously for a drummer and a bass player from the people who were coming into the shop. I considered a couple of the rockabilly guys who were around, but they were too out of town and too deep into the retro fifties thing to be an option. I got Pommy over to mine a couple of nights to try him out, but even though we got along really well it was obvious that he was never really going to make it as a guitar player. We kicked around some ideas, but he ended up saying, ‘I can’t play these chords, this is torture.’

  Simon Wolstencroft was the obvious person to get in on drums. We’d already been in a band together and he was a good drummer. There was, however, the problem of Si’s new-found enthusiasm for hard drugs, though I figured that somehow it could be worked out. I called Si at his parents’ house to tell him about the new band and to ask him if he’d play with us.

  ‘What’s it called?’ enquired Si.

  ‘The Smiths,’ I said.

  ‘The Smiths?’ he replied. ‘Haha haha ha ha … ha haha ha haha … haha ha haha.’ It wasn’t exactly a vote of confidence.

  ‘Thanks, Si,’ I said, ‘you’ll get it when you hear us.’

  After more amused incredulity at my new band’s moniker, Si agreed to come and check us out. Now all I needed was to find somewhere to make it happen, and the only place I knew of was Decibel Studios, the scene of the crime.

  Going back to Decibel after what had happened with the cops was an uneasy prospect for me, but the excitement of getting our songs down on tape made up for it, and so I managed to convince the owner, Philippe, to give me some free studio time on the condition that I wouldn’t have the SAS or Special Flying Squad kick in the doors and smash the place up.

  Another condition of using Decibel was that the studio engineer, Dale Hibbert, would be around to watch us and essentially make sure nothing terrible happened as a result of my being there. Dale was a likeable fella who’d once helped me enginee
r a Freak Party demo. I didn’t know him very well, but we’d talked about The Velvet Underground, which gave us some common ground and which I always took as a sign of someone I could relate to.

  When I’d first met Dale he was playing bass in a band, and although he didn’t look the part I asked him if he’d be up for playing on the demo for The Smiths, as not only was it the obvious thing but it would also give me a chance to play with a different bass player than Andy and see how it worked. Things seemed to be looking good for us until I got a call from Si to tell me that he was having second thoughts about playing with us and didn’t want to leave his job. It was a blow, and I couldn’t understand why it was so hard for other people to get on board, as I had such a strong sense that I was on the right track. I couldn’t let us fall at the very first hurdle, so I tracked down Bill Anstee from Sister Ray and asked him to play drums on the demo instead. He was sceptical at first, and then he agreed to come down to a rehearsal. I was relieved when he showed up, but I knew immediately that it wasn’t going to work and that he didn’t like my new band. Maybe it was because we were singing about the Moors murderers, but he was so nice about it I actually felt bad for him. There was no way I was going to let the chance of a free night in the studio disappear though, so I went back to Si with the biggest bag of weed I could get and he finally agreed to come down to play on the demo the following week.

  All the while I was wondering about whether I was going to be able to find anyone as good as Andy on bass. I ran through the songs with Dale, but it didn’t sound right. I even packed him off to Andrew to get a decent haircut, but no, it still didn’t sound right. When the night came to finally make the demo, Si showed up with his kit and we ran both the songs down. We did ‘Suffer Little Children’ first and it went surprisingly well for our maiden voyage. I was pleased with how quickly it came together, and to hear ourselves in a studio for the first time felt like validation and a massive step. When we came to record ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’ though, my doubts about Dale were there for all of us to hear. I had written the bass line, and even though it was just six notes repeated over and over, he just couldn’t get it. We tried a few times and were as supportive as we could be, but in the end I had to play the bass on the demo myself.

  From the minute I got the cassette of the two songs we’d recorded I was off around town on the rampage. I went from shop to shop, playing it to everyone I knew, and if you were in town and you had ears and didn’t see me coming you were going to hear it. Such was my enthusiasm for my new band that even though the tape was two really downbeat songs which I was starting to realise had been very badly recorded, you would have to put up with hearing it just to get rid of me. I would play the tape in X-Clothes four or five times a day, and when my workmates informed me that they’d heard it enough, I would nip in next door to make sure the girls in Crazy Face had heard it that day. Once I played it really loud in the shop at three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon when the place was totally packed, and when most of the customers left it didn’t deter me one bit. I was probably quite annoying.

  Morrissey was doing some band promotion himself, and decided to take the tape to Factory boss Tony Wilson. Tony later went round saying that he turned down an opportunity to sign The Smiths to Factory, but he knew I would never have signed The Smiths to Factory, even then. I liked Tony, but I’d already refused invitations to join a couple of his bands and I wouldn’t have had my own band dressed up in khaki shorts for anyone. I was sure that if we were to be on an indie label it should be Rough Trade, and definitely not Factory. After he met with Morrissey, Tony came into the shop to tell me that he thought we were ‘special’, and that the press would love us because ‘your singer was a journalist’, which I took as a snide remark and to which I gave him my usual reply of ‘Fuck off, Tony’.

  One person who didn’t like the tape was Si, and that was a problem. Morrissey and I had thought we’d found our drummer, and we even had Angie take some photos of him as a band member, but Si didn’t want to join and he didn’t like what we were doing. He also thought we had no prospect of making money. I told him he was making a big mistake, and I suspected his judgement, but I respected him for being honest with me and so I resigned myself to looking for someone else.

  We needed to find someone and find them quickly, as I’d got us our first gig on a night that JK was putting on at the Ritz in town. He and Andrew had devised a fashion show that was meant to showcase a couple of designers and the scene we had going in Manchester. The main headliners were a band of London salsa scenesters called Blue Rondo a la Turk, whose act was to groove around energetically in zoot suits and blow whistles. We would be fifth on the bill, before the fashion show and the drag act, and the semi-naked dance troupe.

  It was exciting that we had a gig. I’d been busy working on new songs, and I’d make tapes and give them to Morrissey to write his lyrics. We’d decided that at the Ritz we’d play ‘Suffer Little Children’, ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’ and a new one we’d written, called ‘Handsome Devil’. We also planned to do a song by the girl group The Cookies, called ‘I Want a Boy for My Birthday’, which I realised would send out a message that not only didn’t bother me but which I was fairly amused by and quite excited about.

  We met with a couple of drummers through word of mouth but none of them struck me as lifers or prospects, until one day Pete Hunt came to tell me about a guy he knew who lived in Chorlton called Mike Joyce. Pete seemed quite serious about his friend being considered, and at that stage serious was what I needed. I’d had enough of people who were casual; I wasn’t expecting the same level of dedication as myself and Morrissey, because we were obsessed and were sailing the ship, but I felt that whoever was going to be in the band had to be committed. Pete assured me that Mike and I would get along and that he had been in a band called The Hoax, who I knew nothing about, but I trusted Pete and he suggested that Mike should meet me at Legends that night. It sounded good, so I made my way over there later on.

  Legends catered for a slightly more cider and goth crowd than the hip hairdressing set at Exit, and the lights and sound system meant it was a good place to derail your senses. At some point early in the evening Pete came over with Mike Joyce. He was friendly and confident, with an edge to him that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and his look was a kind of spiky punk, which wasn’t my thing but which he managed to pull off. He asked me about the band and what we had going on, and I told him about the gig and what I was into, and before I knew it we were getting drunk and joking like we knew each other. We got along on a few levels, the first one being sense of humour. Mike liked a laugh, and I found him very funny and irreverent. He was quick and in your face, and he was looking for something good to do while having fun doing it. When I asked him about his interest in my band and the possibility of him coming down to a rehearsal, he was vague and said he was already in a band called Victim. I couldn’t quite make out the situation, as they were originally from Belfast but might be going back home. I didn’t know if he was saying that they were splitting up or that he was going to Belfast with them; it sounded like both. Whatever was happening, it didn’t seem like they were doing very much, and I left Legends hoping that Mike was a decent drummer and that maybe he could play with us at the Ritz.

  A couple of days later Mike turned up in the shop, and after some small talk he agreed to come down to a rehearsal so we could check him out. He’d been listening to the tape, and although he wasn’t sure about the band, his flatmate had liked it and thought it was worth giving it a go. I went to help him pick up his drums from a dodgy dive in Manchester, and we got together in Spirit Studios for an audition with Morrissey and Dale.

  The four of us gathered in the dusty, cold, half-built concrete bunker, a couple of feeble light bulbs making it particularly dreary, as though we were underground captives. I introduced Mike to the others, and he appeared to be nervous. I made an effort to get everyone acquainted, but there seemed to be some tension in
the room. I wondered if Morrissey wasn’t keen on Mike and was thinking that Si was more right for us, but I elected to get going with what would be easiest by playing ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’. Mike picked up the song pretty quickly, and I tried not to make it obvious that I was examining his playing. He was doing fine, but there was something off about what I was hearing and I wasn’t sure what it was. I knew I was playing the guitar correctly and it wasn’t Morrissey’s singing, so either the drumming wasn’t good enough or the bass wasn’t right. At this point Dale’s shortcomings as a musician were back on my radar, and I couldn’t ignore it. Things got more relaxed when we started the new song ‘Handsome Devil’. I’d built it from a riff that I had come up with when I was in the Valentinos, and I was thrilled to be playing the first rock ’n’ roll song in The Smiths’ repertoire. We played ‘Handsome Devil’ a couple of times and I made a mental note to myself to ‘write more of these’. After going through the other songs, things wound down, and as I was accompanying Mike up some half-finished breeze-block steps on the way out, he turned to me and asked if I thought he’d done all right.

  ‘Yeah,’ I assured him, ‘it went well.’

  ‘Oh good,’ he replied, ‘because I took some mushrooms earlier and I can’t tell.’