Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  When we went back into the BBC studios to do ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ on Top of the Pops, Morrissey lay in a sick room all day and we had to use a stand-in for the rehearsals. When it came time for the cameras to start rolling, I thought he wouldn’t make it through the performance, and a few dates into the tour we had to re-schedule some of the shows. There was a lot expected of him from the record company, the media and the fans. The rest of the band didn’t expect anything other than whatever he had to give, and he knew we would circle the wagons and take on whatever pressure he was feeling in any way we could.

  All of the activity in the pop world meant that the band now needed to move to London, and I was suddenly meeting with accountants, lawyers and PR people. The business of running everything was escalating, and I was spending more and more of my time in the back of a car on the way to appointments and photo shoots. The first thing I did when I started dealing with lawyers was to get my name changed legally so that I was finally and officially Johnny Marr.

  I moved into a second-floor flat in Earls Court with Angie. She got a job as a receptionist in Vidal Sassoon’s office in Mayfair, and her dad drove all her stuff down from Manchester. Angie’s moving to London at nineteen was a concern for her family, but they knew that she and I had to be together, wherever that might be. Our flat quickly became the full-time hang-out and HQ for the band, and for me it was a sanctuary where I could write songs, listen to music, and hide away from the day-to-day business that I wanted to get away from. At Earls Court I learned a lot about the effects of cocaine, which makes you think you’re really having fun while it sucks all of the love out of the room. It’s a great drug for wasting lots of time, words and money, especially if you’re a twenty-year-old pop star with a penchant for staying up all night and wearing sunglasses indoors. I liked living in Earls Court. It was good being able to walk around the streets at all hours, and it was good that I liked being around Australians and gay guys too, as Earls Court in 1984 was swarming with backpacks and leather vests.

  Getting into the charts and making some money meant the band could all indulge ourselves a bit, and I discovered the guitar shops in west London. I had dragged the rest of the band into my beat group period by continuously viewing a Beatles documentary that had become available on VHS and obsessing over a Hollies Greatest Hits album, and it inspired me to buy an old Gibson J-160 acoustic like the ones used by both bands. Morrissey, meanwhile, had been devouring Herman’s Hermits songs, which also featured the Gibson J-160, so I took that as an omen and it made the guitar an absolute must-have. I also bought a 1964 Epiphone Casino, the same guitar that Keith Richards used on the classic Stones singles, and with these new treasures I was ready to get on a roll.

  The Smiths had recently had a hit with ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’, which I’d written in New York, and before that we’d had success with a version of ‘Hand in Glove’ that we recorded with the sixties legend and Morrissey’s favourite Sandie Shaw. Working with Sandie was a good experience. She brought a positive spirit to the band and educated me about Buddhism, which she was very involved in at the time. It was surreal to play behind a voice that I’d heard so much from another time, and it was unquestionably surreal that I had made a wild prediction to Morrissey that we would write a song for Sandie when we were in my attic room at Shelley’s.

  Our singles all had great picture sleeves, and from ‘This Charming Man’ onwards we always put three songs on the 12-inch vinyl. We tried to make the B-sides and the extra tracks special, and with every release I had the reaction of friends, fans and other musicians in mind. The day a new Smiths record came out was an event for fans, as kids around the country made their way into record shops. I knew that those fans would be examining the sleeves and the label on the bus ride home, just as I had done myself, and I was proud that we were continuing a tradition of pop culture that I always thought was so important.

  The British music press engaged with The Smiths pretty much on a weekly basis. Morrissey was giving the papers plenty to write about, and delivered a manifesto to our audience expressing his singular passions – usually with some controversy and which I often found funny, especially if it involved the royal family or the prime minister. I was more than happy to let our frontman take care of business and he did it extremely well, although we were sometimes starting to notice just how infrequently the rest of the band were referred to in interviews.

  The Smiths aesthetic drew heavily on the imagery of the early 1960s in a way that I thought was truly innovative. I became well versed in the films Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey and a lot more from the period. There was plenty to like in those films, but I didn’t view them as portraying a great lost era or some romantic ideal. Life in a two-up two-down with no hot water was something that my family had managed to work our way out of, so I never mistook hardship for virtue or associated poverty with romance, nor did I want to go back there.

  I had my own, quite ambivalent relationship with the media. They would rarely mention the music in interviews or want to know why I played the guitar the way I did. The press’s interest in me was mostly about how different I was from Morrissey, as if we were two characters from the Beano comic, with me as Dennis the Menace to his Walter Softy, and the articles that did involve me would usually include the term ‘gregarious’. Some journalists would interpret my geniality as unsophistication, especially in contrast to Morrissey’s erudition and verbosity. I wasn’t expected to have an opinion on Oscar Wilde, which was just as well as I thought his talent was spoiled by his smug self-regard and pomposity. At that point in my life I thought Sterling Morrison was cooler. Being famous and young and coming from Manchester, I learned that when someone thinks you’re a thick northerner they’re showing you all their cards and ultimately giving you the upper hand, and once I was able to get over the impulse to punch their face in I would go along with it and sometimes play up to it just to take the piss. My role in the band as hyper-motormouth was of my own doing though, and that was fine. My heroes had attitude, and I figured that as long as you could back it up you could wear your hyperactivity and attitude as a badge of honour. In interviews that Morrissey and I did together, I would sometimes chime in with cocky pronouncements and he would burst out laughing. I loved it when that happened, the audacity of it, and we encouraged each other because we were friends.

  The Smiths had become known for many things: quiffs, jangly guitars, National Health specs and flowers. We were associated with disaffection, discontent, and how grim it was up north too. All of it was accurate, but one thing we had become synonymous with more than anything else was a thing called miserablism. If you’d have asked anyone in the street about The Smiths, they’d have invariably said the word miserable, and regardless of the fact that much of the band’s output was laced with a lot of humour, the tag spread through the media and would stay with us for ever. Like all media tags it was reductive, but then again, if you keep putting out songs with the word miserable in them then you haven’t really got much cause for complaint.

  The Smiths’ success meant that we were busy doing things for pop magazines and television shows at home and sometimes in Europe. It was at this point that I succeeded in cultivating one of the most radical hairstyles that I or any man has probably every worn. I grew my hair into a sixties-style woman’s beehive after becoming obsessed with Estelle Bennett from The Ronettes. I watched a video of the three girls performing ‘Be My Baby’ on The Big TNT Show so much, it inspired me to take my hair literally to a whole new level. I’d comb the fringe down to my eyes and send the top up and over in what’s known as a point parting. The make-up and wardrobe people at the TV shows would be amazed when I walked in with a perfect girl group bouffant, and it was adopted by some of the braver and more committed male fans in the audience. There would be the quiffs at the front and the beehives over my side. I started wearing a lot of blue eyeshadow around the same time too, to make the whole thing complete.


  While this new pop-star life was happening, the band was always playing shows and travelling, but the best thing for me was writing new songs. One day, I was playing my Gibson acoustic on the mattress in the back of the van, on our way up to a gig, when a riff appeared, inspired by the speed and momentum of the journey. I played it over the next few days and it developed into a song that I thought would be good for the next single. Angie had gone back to Manchester for the weekend and the band had a rare couple of days off, so I found myself alone in the flat. I’d upgraded my early Teac cassette recorder for a four-track Tascam Portastudio and a Roland Dramatix drum machine. I decided that after I’d demoed the next A-side I would try to come up with the B-side and then the extra track for the 12-inch while I had the opportunity.

  The A-side was fun to put down. It was a fast rush of a tune done on the acoustic, and after working on it for a while it felt complete. The Smiths hadn’t had such a short song before, around two minutes. I liked the fact that Buzzcocks singles were short, so two minutes ten seconds it would stay. I approached the B-side completely differently. I’d been living in London for six months and I was missing Manchester and I hadn’t seen my family for a while. Thinking about my family made me remember a song that my mother liked, and I strummed around the chords and tapped into a feeling of melancholy until I had channelled the right spirit and came up with a very pretty tune and the B-side was done. After completing the two songs by Saturday, I hung around the flat on the Sunday, listening to what I’d done and thinking about writing the third track for the 12-inch. I thought that because the A-side was short and fast and the B-side was short and waltzy, I should try to write something long with some kind of a groove. I rolled a joint, plugged in my new Epiphone Casino and started playing a rhythm. I’d been a long-time fan of The Gun Club and I liked their style of swampy blues, and with that in my mind I kicked around a trancey kind of riff that after a while morphed into a slowed-down Bohannon. As I went around and around, the tune started to get psychedelic in my headphones and I knew I was on to something. I programmed a simple beat on the drum machine and recorded the hypnotic rhythm guitar, and then came up with a two-note phrase that I put on top. What I’d done was nothing like the other two songs, and nothing like anything the band had done before either. When Angie got back I played her the demo and she thought it was great. Then I took the cassette of the three songs round to Morrissey’s, having written ‘Fast’, ‘Irish Waltz’ and ‘Swampy’ on it. He worked on it for a few days, and when he’d finished the lyrics the songs became ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ and ‘How Soon Is Now?’.

  In the meantime, Scott Piering, our radio and TV plugger, had stepped in temporarily as a surrogate manager. He didn’t have the authority to sanction transactions on the band’s behalf, particularly if it involved finances, and that meant I was responsible for things like approving the budget for studio equipment and vehicle hire. I found the constant calls from the record company annoying, especially on the days I was going into the studio, and Scott repeatedly tried to impress on me how crucial it was that the band appointed either him or someone else as a manager to look after our affairs. I agreed with what Scott was saying, it made complete sense, and he was a good guy and had our best interests at heart. He was worried about our situation with the record companies, lawyers and accountants, but unfortunately he didn’t realise that his anxious calls and crisis meetings at my flat were becoming too much for me to deal with.

  Ruth Polsky flew into London from New York uninvited and appeared to appoint herself as our manager, which I found out one day on the stage at the Lyceum. I was struggling with my guitar sound at the soundcheck, when all of a sudden she appeared on the stage beside me and declared, ‘Hi Johnny! I’m your manager!’ She beamed a big smile and hugged me tightly, crushing me and my guitar. I didn’t even know she was in the country, and hadn’t spoken to her since the Danceteria.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, me and Morrissey had a meeting this afternoon and I’m going to take over for you. Isn’t it great?!’

  I didn’t know which I was more angry about, being informed by someone that they were now my manager or being informed onstage while I was trying to get my sound. I attempted to remain calm, but the look on my face screamed, No, it’s not great, it’s not fucking great at all, and her expression changed to that of a child who’s been told that Father Christmas is an axe murderer.

  The situation was farcical, and I wasn’t going to get into it at the soundcheck. As the band all took refuge in the dressing room, Morrissey explained how Ruth had turned up at his place unannounced and insisted that she should represent us and now she was announcing it to everyone. There was a confrontation backstage between Ruth and Scott over who was going to be the band’s manager, and Scott made it clear to Ruth that the band had no intention of her representing us. Meanwhile we went onstage and played the show, which went surprisingly well and was a testament to the band’s resolve. Maybe we were all getting a bit too good at dealing with absurdity.

  The studio was always a creative haven for me. I loved every session, and they would always go all night until the next morning. Every Smiths record was done on a budget, which meant that we had to maximise what time we had. In July 1984, we went into Jam Studios in Finsbury Park with John Porter to do the three new songs for the next single. ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ came together quickly. I used a trick that John showed me called Nashville tuning, where you replace the bottom four strings on a regular guitar with the strings from a twelve-string to get a more ringing sound. ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ was a matter of capturing the poignancy of the song without adding too much. I played the melody on the instrumental section on a mandolin, which was tricky to get right but was worth the effort.

  Having done the A-side and the B-side of the single, the pressure was off and we started on ‘How Soon Is Now?’. We recorded the backing track as a three-piece, and we spent a couple of hours playing alongside a LinnDrum drum machine in the background to get the feel right. My basic guitar track was done on the Epiphone Casino without any effects. The rhythm was steady and catchy, but I was worried that the song might not turn out as I hoped, as I thought that we’d lost the hypnotic quality and psychedelic atmosphere that I’d liked on the demo. It was a long instrumental track when Morrissey came in to do his vocal. John got a balance for him in his headphones, and I sat behind the mixing desk and waited for him to sing as the tape started rolling. After eight bars Morrissey started the vocal, and I loved it. I turned to Mike and Andy, who were sitting at the back of the studio, and we all knew we had a great track in the making. A couple of takes later and the vocal was finished.

  It was already late when I started doing my guitar overdubs, and as I listened I was still bothered that something was missing. Since I was very young I’d loved the sound of tremolo, or vibrato as it’s sometimes known; it was mostly associated with the great Bo Diddley. It hadn’t been used on a pop record for a long time, and for years I’d been looking for an opportunity to feature it somehow. I knew immediately that the effect would work, and we decided to take what I’d already played from the tape, and send it out through the tremolo on my amp. It sounded like a good idea, and then John suggested that instead of using one amp we could use two amps for stereo, one left and one right – better still, as there happened to be four Fender Twin Reverb amps in the studio, why not send the sound through all of them? John and I went out into the live room to manually control the speed of the tremolos for them to stay in perfect time with the track. We crouched in front of the two Fenders, John on the right side and me on the left. The engineer fed the straight guitar track through all four amps, and we turned them up, really, really loud. It was a mighty sound, and the song was becoming everything it should be. It took us a long time to get the whole thing done, as every time one of the amps went out of sync we’d have to go back a few seconds and drop
in. It was around three in the morning and the rest of the band had gone, leaving me and John to the Guitarchestra. The second guitar figure that went on top of the tremolo riff was good on the demo, but I wanted to make it darker so I decided to play it with a metal slide to give it more of a howling effect. I recorded it with a lot of echo and then added a harmony to make it sound more intense and paranoid. Occasionally, if you’re lucky, your work takes on a life of its own and pulls you along with it. You follow the momentum and forget about time and food and sleep. You’re in the flow; it’s inspiration, and as Picasso once said, ‘Inspiration does exist, but it has to find you working.’

  ‘How Soon Is Now?’ took on a life of its own at around five in the morning. The whole building was pulsing, and it sounded so good that I plugged in a white Stratocaster and improvised a wild lead solo to finish it off, just because I felt like it. As I sat in the back of a taxi heading home, I stared straight ahead for the whole journey, completely dazed and numb but with a strong sense that I’d really been through something. It was dark when I woke up the next evening, and I peered over at the bedside cabinet to see the cassette that I’d taken back from the studio with ‘How Soon Is Now?’ written on it. I wondered what everyone would make of it.

  Glastonbury