Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  THE SMITHS WERE a political band. As Margaret Thatcher carried out her systematic and ruthless dismantling of the country’s industries and communities, it gave the new generation of artists a common enemy to unite against. Such was the discontent among the young, it was a given that you were in opposition to the government, and as the music press were in opposition too they gave the bands a national platform and we were literally all on the same page.

  The month before we recorded ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, we’d been asked to play a free outdoor concert billed as ‘Jobs for Change’, in support of the Greater London Council led by Ken Livingstone, and were more than willing to show our solidarity alongside Billy Bragg, who was also appearing. Billy had been playing shows himself in support of the miners’ strike, and was becoming known as a champion of the people. I had a great deal of respect for Billy, not only as a songwriter but for his commitment to his beliefs. He liked guitars and loved Motown too, and we became good friends, with common foes and heroes.

  The turnout for the GLC concert was huge, by far the biggest audience The Smiths had played to. I was so nervous I threw up before going on. We went out to 10,000 people, some of whom were hanging off balconies and screaming out of windows around the square behind the GLC building, and during the set I could see people climbing on the outside of the buildings and dangling from the roof.

  After the show, Mike and Andy threw some flowers from a window in the GLC to fans, who then clambered on top of a vehicle belonging to the caterers, causing damage to it. There was a huge fracas as the backstage staff came gunning for us and we were threatened with all manner of retribution. The band had to be escorted out of the place to avoid a showdown, but before we made our escape I was introduced to Ken Livingstone. It was the first time I’d met a politician, and I was astounded by the self-assurance of the man. It was a surprise to find that someone who was seemingly one of the good guys could also be in the fame game. I naively assumed that if you claimed to be on the side of minority groups and represented equality for the less fortunate, you might show some signs of humility.

  Nearly a fortnight later we found ourselves on our way to play the Glastonbury Festival. We’d been reluctant to participate, because to us festivals were a relic from the hippy era and were usually very low-key affairs in out-of-the-way places, with old people dancing around to forgotten bands in the cold. It was Geoff Travis who insisted The Smiths play Glastonbury. He informed us about its musical legacy and impressed on me the importance of its political agenda and allegiance to the CND anti-nuclear campaign. At the time, Glastonbury pretty much consisted of ‘the big field’, where the main bands played; ‘the muddy field’, where everyone stayed and which was actually bigger than the big field; and ‘the shit field’, where no one went to. The ticket price was £13.

  We arrived on the site in a run-down 1970s white Mercedes limousine that someone at the record company had rented for us, probably for a laugh. It was entirely inappropriate for anyone other than a 1970s TV star, but after being in it for a few miles all the band came to like it. We were shown to the nearest empty Portakabin, and I saw for the first time an actual tour bus. It was a huge shiny thing and belonged to Elvis Costello. I thought it looked like a mansion.

  The four of us and Angie stuck close together and dared not stray more than ten feet from our bleak cabin for fear of contamination by the rural festival vibes. We had a few photos taken and then climbed the high stairs to the stage. The dreary damp morning had turned into a beautiful Saturday afternoon, with everyone in high spirits as the rain finally abated and blue skies appeared overhead.

  We started our set to a half-empty field, but it soon started to fill up. After playing a few songs to a crowd seeing us for the first time, it occurred to me again just how different we were from most of the music that was around. In those surroundings we suddenly seemed very fast and very intense, and a lot of our songs were quite short. Glastonbury was our first experience of playing across a huge divide between the band and the audience, but it didn’t deter one young fan, who took it upon himself to scale the steep iron barrier and invade the stage. It was a daring move, and as he climbed up, a security guard rushed towards him to throw him down. Admiring his guile, I moved in to help him up, which pissed off the security guard, and we got into a stand-off while the band carried on playing.

  When the rest of the crowd saw all of this, it inspired more of them to clamber on to the stage, and before anyone could do anything about it there was a whole mob dancing with us. We finished playing and left the stage having showed Glastonbury what we were about. As I was making my exit with my guitar, one of the stage crew grabbed me around the neck and tried to pull me down the stairs. Scott Piering rescued me and then hurried me into our cabin as more stage crew and security came after us. There was a lot of tension backstage, and when we came to leave we found that the tyres of the Merc had been slashed, not as retaliation for the stage invasion, but as the caterers’ revenge for the damage to their car at the GLC show twelve days earlier, as it turned out they were also at Glastonbury. We decided to get out of there before we caused any more drama, and we got a ride back with the crew. Much later the consensus in the media was that The Smiths’ set at Glastonbury was a turning point in the history of the festival and helped usher in a new era. If that is the case, then it was totally accidental, and you’re welcome, I’m glad to have been of service.

  Meat Is Murder

  WE CONTINUED TO play shows around the UK and Europe, and I’d come back to my flat for a few days here and there before setting off on more dates and promotional duties. I’d started writing songs for the second album, and even though we’d had a great run of hit singles, the music industry and the media were taking up more of our time and all these distractions had made me disenchanted with life in London.

  I was working one evening on a demo with Andy when there was a lot of banging and shouting outside. We stopped to look out of the window and saw the band’s ex-tour manager from the previous UK tour standing on the street below and holding up an infant while shouting about being fired. Andy and I laughed it off for a minute, but involving his child really bothered me and creeped me out. The guy hadn’t worked out for the whole band, but again it was me that everyone came to when there was a problem. It was a sign of how untenable things were becoming.

  I wanted to be back in the creative atmosphere of Manchester. It had an attitude that suited the band, and as soon as we got back, I felt we were where we should be. I liked being in a community who would measure our worth against the Velvets and Iggy, rather than who we were up against in the charts and magazines that week. Angie and I had moved into the Portland Hotel until we could find a place of our own. We were both happy to be back, and ran around town as we had before, seeing our friends and going to gigs. Andrew had continued to DJ at the Haçienda and had also opened a hairdressing salon in the dressing room backstage, which served as the new daytime hangout. Everyone was getting their hair cut there, and any time I went in I would end up in a conversation with Bernard Sumner and Rob Gretton or someone from Factory Records. Sometimes bands would arrive from out of town, excited to be playing at the famous Haçienda, and they’d find their dressing room full of Mancunian stoners with no intention of clearing out. Andrew was so charming that later on the band would appear onstage with brand-new Smiths and New Order haircuts, inspired and extremely high.

  We decided to record our album in Liverpool, and we’d pile into the old, rusty, white Mercedes limo and drive the twenty-odd miles to an industrial estate somewhere on the outskirts of Merseyside. The band had elected me to produce the album instead of John Porter. It was unexpected and surprising to me, as we were coming off a run of hit singles, but if the band trusted me enough to do it then I’d take it on. I’d liked working with John and he’d brought us success, but it was a musical decision, as my sensibilities were more alternative, which was what we wanted. There was no animosity, and we would employ John to wo
rk with us again in the future. Also working on the album with us was a young engineer called Stephen Street, who we’d met at an earlier session and who would play an important part in our recording career. Stephen was around the same age as us, and like me wanted to make great records. We got totally focused on the job at hand, and the album was sounding good from the start. The only problem for Stephen Street was that because none of the band could drive he had to get behind the wheel of the white limo and chauffeur us through the streets of Liverpool every night.

  I took my role as the band’s producer seriously, though I always credited the job to me and Morrissey, or me and Stephen Street. Working without an established producer meant I had to follow my own instincts, and there were never any arguments or disagreements in the studio between the band members about the direction of the record or the way anything was going. I was inspired by the songs we were writing, and the return to the north was definitely the right move as it influenced me to follow a sound with a northern spirit. ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, which opened the record, was a breakthrough for the band. Andy’s bass playing was his best so far, and it demonstrated his innovation. There were so many inspired moments from everyone. Morrissey’s singing had taken on an even more supple quality, especially on ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ and ‘Well I Wonder’, and Mike’s drumming on ‘What She Said’ and ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ was exceptional. We were firing on all cylinders and doing it ourselves.

  Towards the end of the sessions, Morrissey and I were sitting in the control room when he asked me what I thought about calling the album Meat Is Murder. I thought it was a great title: it was strong and made a statement. It fitted us perfectly. Then we decided we should do a title track. Vegetarianism was by no means an odd concept to me. Angie was vegetarian when I met her, and when I first met Morrissey and discovered he was vegetarian I never had a second thought about it. I’d always been amazed when people thought it was a radical lifestyle choice. Before we made the Meat Is Murder LP I ate meat because I’d been brought up eating it, but the moment my band had a song called ‘Meat Is Murder’ I stopped and never ate meat again.

  My decision to become vegetarian was a natural commitment to the principles of the band, and a mark of solidarity with my songwriting partner and my girlfriend. I didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before. It wasn’t like I was making any huge sacrifice anyway, as my diet then consisted of chocolate, Coca-Cola, coffee and nicotine, and the times that I did sit down to eat I’d have scrambled eggs and chips for five minutes and then start running around again. There was no ideological motive for me becoming vegetarian at the time. I never thought about animals as a child, and my only experience of them growing up in Ardwick and Wythenshawe was ‘I hope that dog doesn’t bite’ or ‘Your cat hates me.’ What I thought was interesting about becoming vegetarian was when I stopped eating animals I really started to appreciate them much more. I discovered an empathy with animals and started noticing the serenity of cows in fields, and the beauty of horses, which brought a new and very welcome dimension to my world. It happened quickly and I was surprised. Fundamentally I realised that animals are innocent.

  My approach to writing the music for the song ‘Meat Is Murder’ was to make something as dramatic and doomed-sounding as I could while still allowing it to be a song to sing over. Experimenting with guitar tunings that steered me into a heavy mood, I eventually came up with some chord sequences. I thought about how horror films sometimes use a plaintive nursery-rhyme motif to convey a sense of dread, or threat to innocence, and I found a few notes on the piano that suited it perfectly. I was essentially composing a soundtrack for the horror that an innocent animal experienced. Morrissey had the music for a day, then came in with the finished words and recorded the lead vocal in one take.

  The Meat Is Murder album was released on 11 February 1985 and went straight into the charts at number one, knocking Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA off the top position. Aside from it being an achievement in itself, the album was a success to me because we still sounded like ourselves and if anything were more uncompromising than ever. The album came out in America with ‘How Soon Is Now?’ added at the start, which really annoyed me because we’d made a brand-new piece of work with a coherence and a unified sound, and as important as ‘How Soon Is Now?’ was, it came from a different artistic intention. The American record company exercised their right to disagree with me and Morrissey though, and as a result ‘How Soon Is Now?’ became a big alternative song and introduced a whole generation of American music fans to our new album and to the rest of The Smiths’ music after that.

  America

  IN THE MID-EIGHTIES, America was going through a healthy resurgence in alternative music, known for obvious reasons as college rock. The Smiths, New Order, The Cure and Depeche Mode were all finding an appreciative audience, who were seeking out an alternative not only to the music scene at the time, but to the obvious jock culture that championed all things mainstream and macho and marginalised minority groups. This polarisation of the conventional versus the unconventional, or ‘winners and losers’, was very prevalent when The Smiths went to America on the Meat Is Murder tour, and I got the message from the audience that they felt we understood them and that we represented some kind of liberation.

  The shows were just as impassioned as back at home and maybe even more so. There was a whole generation of American boys who were dissatisfied with the model of masculinity they had been expected to conform to and that was irrelevant and totally out of date. They saw in the British bands a way of being that was anti-macho and pro-androgyny, where the question of whether you were gay or straight didn’t matter at all. I loved the shows on The Smiths’ first American tour. We were into another new phase of the band, and I felt genuine appreciation for what we were about. When we played to American kids we arrived fully formed, and they loved the fact that we were so different from all the other bands. Morrissey would whip up the crowd from the first word, and I would back him up while keeping up the intensity with Mike and Andy. Our audience understood that we were a new kind of guitar band with new values, and that we were more than ready to actually rock out.

  Angie was with us on the tour, and that made me happy and everyone else happy. She and Morrissey had their own friendship and would go out on expeditions together during the day. As well as being a naturally positive person, she cared about everyone and put the needs of the band before her own. I thought I was the luckiest person alive. I had as intimate a relationship as you could have without it actually being physical with my songwriting partner, who I loved and who I thought was a great frontman; I had a girlfriend who was the love of my life; and I thought my band was the best in the world.

  We played two nights in New York. There was a lot of talk going around about the place being overrun by the Mafia, and as we were walking onstage I was very pointedly introduced to an imposing-looking man dressed all in white and wearing a white fedora who definitely didn’t look like a Smiths fan. Both shows were manic and highly charged as usual, and at the close of the first night I got into an altercation with a brawny security man who was being unnecessarily forceful with a fan. I kicked him from the stage, and when that didn’t stop him I took off my guitar and clubbed him with it. He went down, and then I noticed that his colleagues had seen the incident. It was the last song of the show, and as soon as I hit the final note I sped out of a side door and hoped that I wouldn’t encounter the man in the white hat. At the next night’s show I played without looking up from my guitar the whole time, diligently concentrating on my fingers and avoiding the deadly glares from the security men seeking revenge for the previous night’s slaying.

  We went back to the hotel after the show and avoided the bar as usual. The band and crew would always hang out together in a couple of the rooms, smoking and drinking and listening to music. We had the next two days off, as we were travelling to San Francisco, and Angie and I were excited as it was the city we
’d always wanted to go to. When we got back to our room, Angie was still buzzing about San Francisco and said, ‘We could go to Haight Ashbury, or we could go to Golden Gate Bridge,’ to which I replied, ‘Or we could get married.’ We stopped for a few seconds and looked at each other and then started laughing. ‘What do you think?’ I said seriously.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘let’s do it.’

  We were both excited and kind of amused to be getting married. Not only was it the right thing, but it seemed like a fun thing to do. The next morning I frantically started making arrangements with Stuart James, who was our new tour manager, for me and Angie to get married in San Francisco.

  Our promoter was the legendary Bill Graham, who had put on all the shows at the Fillmore in the sixties. When he discovered that Angie and I were getting married, he offered his assistance in any way he could, which was very kind of him and also very helpful as I didn’t know the first thing about getting married. I knew I had to find a church of some sort that wasn’t actually religious. It being San Francisco, there was everything from the Church of the Living Desert to the Church of the Not Too Bothered, and we found a nice Unitarian in a circular modernist building that was perfect.

  On the day before the wedding we had to get blood tests and Bill found us a doctor on Haight and rushed the legal process through. Angie was impressed that we’d got the blood tests for our wedding on Haight Street, and it had to be worth several thousand rock ’n’ roll points having Bill Graham arranging your wedding, even if it was just making a few calls. We got brought back down to earth though when, coming out of the doctor’s, we were stopped by three dudes wanting to inspect the contents of our tour manager’s conspicuous-looking briefcase.

  ‘What you got there, man?’ one of the dudes said. ‘A cool few thousand?’