Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  ‘Just some papers,’ said Stuart, sounding extremely weedy and very English. The novelty of his accent distracted them for a second.

  ‘Hey, where you guys from, England?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said amiably.

  ‘Whereabouts? London?’

  ‘Yeah, London,’ I replied, not wanting to disappoint them or get into any further geographical details. I would’ve answered yes if he’d said Shropshire.

  Angie and I started to walk away and Stuart followed, and as we made our way down the street a voice behind us shouted, ‘Watch out with all that money!’ We left our new friends laughing and moved on quickly down Haight. When we got into the taxi to take us back to the hotel, Stuart looked at me and then opened the case. Inside was $8,000 of the band’s money that he had yet to put in the bank.

  My and Angie’s wedding was very sweet. The rest of the band and the road crew jumped in a few taxis to the church and trundled inside, where the groovy female minister was waiting to marry us. It was a gorgeous Sunday morning, and I was touched that the roadies turned up, having made the effort to shave, and obviously having rummaged through their cases to find an appropriate shirt or the nearest thing to it midway through a tour. We all stood in a semicircle and the minister said some nice words about love and commitment. I looked around and saw a genuine emotion in everyone as they watched Angie and me officially declare our devotion to each other. It was one of those times when I was suddenly aware that we were both so young. It was a timeless moment, and one that I felt was serious and significant in my life. It didn’t matter to us that our families weren’t there. Angie and I had been living an unconventional life for a few years now, and our families were used to our lifestyle. It was a really nice ceremony, and it was perfect that the band and crew were with us as at the time that was our world.

  The two of us went to the Golden Gate Bridge to have some wedding photos taken by a photographer who’d been found for us at the last minute by Rough Trade. After we’d commemorated our special day, the photographer refused to be paid and offered his services free of charge because he liked the band. It was a nice gesture, and I promised him guest passes for the show the next night. We played at the Henry Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland, and as I was being escorted out of the building and into a waiting car I saw the photographer and heard him screaming, ‘You fucker, I’ve been out here all night! There were no tickets! You’re not getting those photos, man.’

  I turned to the tour manager in shock and asked him if he’d remembered to put the photographer on the guest list. He looked at me sheepishly and said, ‘Er, yeah … I think so …’ A few weeks later, Rolling Stone magazine contacted Rough Trade to say that they had been offered my wedding photos for $5,000. They asked me what I wanted to do, and I told them to stuff it. I wasn’t about to pay someone who would go to a national magazine with my wedding photos. Angie and I ended up with one photo of us coming out of the church that was taken by a fan who happened to have her camera with her. It seemed to bother everyone else more than it did us, but it would have been nice to have had some.

  Having finished the American tour, Angie and I moved into our first house, a three-storey Victorian in Cheshire, about five minutes away from where I’d lived at Shelley Rohde’s. Getting our own house was a big step. We got a £70,000 mortgage, and after putting down a third of the price as a deposit we had £1,000 left over for furniture, which we spent on two paintings we liked. Angie’s parents bought us a washing machine and dryer for our wedding present, and we scrounged a bed off one of our friends. We kept the curtains from the previous owners and we inherited an old upright piano in the kitchen. The people we bought the house from were an Irish family with five children. They opened their cellar every Friday for the local kids to use as a disco, and there was a little stage down there with some lights, and the names of some rock bands sprayed on the walls and ceiling.

  From the minute we moved in, my house became the new improved Smiths HQ, with my roadie Phil living in a room on the top floor, and Andrew making a return, along with our lighting man John Featherstone, who would stay with us whenever he was nearby. The band were around all the time, and the crew and tour buses would meet up at mine whenever we were going anywhere. I liked having my own domain, and I liked having a lot of activity around me. I was becoming ever more nocturnal, and I would often stay up with Phil or Andrew listening to music, and then I’d make demos when everyone had gone to bed. I’d wake up in the afternoon the next day and the house would be busy with people running around and the phone ringing. Morrissey once remarked that ‘every room in your house is like a soundcheck’, which was completely accurate and which I took to be a compliment. The other band members bought houses at the same time. Morrissey got a place in Hale Barns, ten minutes away, and Mike got his house ten minutes away in another direction, just around the corner from Andy, who rented a flat. It was a good period for all of us. We’d made some money and were the most popular guitar band in the country, we’d come out the other side of our time living in London, and we knew what it took to have our kind of hits.

  The only thing about the band’s destiny that I didn’t feel was in our own hands was the ongoing matter of management and how we were going to deal with the outside world. It was a problem for me that would just not go away. We’d found an equilibrium of sorts, having recently taken on a manager called Matthew Sztumpf on a trial basis. Morrissey had presented Matthew to me as a potential candidate, and after the trial period was over Matthew had done a good job and there was really no reason to look for anyone else. He was a decent guy and trustworthy, and had done very well with Madness, who Morrissey liked. It was a relief when Matthew came on board, and he and I became friendly and I thought our management issues might be over. But then on the day when we were leaving America to come back to England, I had the same kind of visit to my hotel room as I’d had from Scott Piering and a few other people: Matthew wanted to know where he stood and why he was getting strange vibes from the band that he wasn’t really going to be our manager. I assured him that everything was fine and that we wanted him permanently, which I believed was right, and the right thing for the band. It was embarrassing for both of us, and I felt bad about it. I didn’t see why there would be a problem. He sat with Morrissey and me on the plane home and everything seemed positive, so I assumed that all was well.

  A few weeks later, the band was scheduled to appear on a live chat show. It had been arranged by Matthew and the record company to promote our new single, but Morrissey didn’t want to do it and he pulled out of it on the band’s behalf at the last minute. It didn’t bother me, but there was a big drama at the BBC and Matthew was very angry about not being told. He confronted me, saying that his position was untenable and the incident signalled the end of our relationship with him. I didn’t care if we were on the show or not, I just wanted someone else to step in and deal with it so I didn’t have to.

  The Queen Is Dead

  IT OCCURRED TO me one afternoon that the next Smiths album had to be a serious piece of work. I was walking through my kitchen when it hit me that, amazingly, the band were now being talked about in England in the same exalted terms as bands like The Who and The Kinks, and that we had come to mean a lot to a generation of music fans. It was at this moment that the pressure of it really hit me. Our previous album had been number one, and we’d had a run of hits. As great as the situation was, it felt to me that if I was to accept that kind of praise and be compared to those kinds of artists, then I would be similarly judged, and this revelation, far from being a cosy ego trip, was suddenly overwhelming and froze me in my tracks. I knew that the next album had to be the best I could possibly do. The stakes had got higher, and greatness was a possibility for the band if we were prepared to go for it. I stood and thought about it, and then I said to myself, ‘You’re going to have to dig deep, whatever it takes.’

  Morrissey came over to my house one night. There were some other friends knocking around, and after so
cialising for a while we decamped to a room on our own and I picked up my Martin acoustic. I was ready to play him the songs I’d been working on, and as usual we sat just a couple of feet away from each other, with me on a chair and him on the edge of the coffee table. There was the customary sense of anticipation as I hit the ‘record’ button on the cassette machine on my knees and started strumming a tune. It was a waltzy ballad that was tentative in the verse and then kicked into a dramatic chorus, building in intensity as it went along. There was a lot of promise in the tune, and we knew it would be good for the new album. I’d been playing the next one for just a few days: it had a breezy minor chord pattern that went to an uplifting chorus, and I’d inserted a rhythmic skip from The Velvet Underground for some mischief, as they’d copied it from the Stones. At first I thought the song might be a B-side because it came to me so easily, but as I played it there was something certain about it, an indefinable quality that comes out of nowhere. We were getting the feeling that we had something good. Then I threw down a third tune, just because we were on a roll. It was in total contrast to the others and sounded like Sandie Shaw or an eccentric vaudevillian romp. I drove Morrissey back to his place with the cassette of the three songs that would become ‘I Know It’s Over’, ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ and ‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’.

  We didn’t waste any time waiting to record new songs, and the first sessions for The Queen Is Dead album were booked for Studio Three at RAK studios in St John’s Wood.

  The first song we recorded was ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, which we’d been playing in soundchecks and which sounded to me like a single. It was good to kick the sessions off with a banger, and it was good too because we’d invited Kirsty MacColl to come down and sing backing vocals. It was the first time we’d met Kirsty. She was immediately great to have around, outgoing, smart and funny, and she knew a lot about making records. She and I stayed in the studio playing songs and singing until early the next morning, and from that night my relationship with Kirsty would become one of the great friendships of my life.

  The band completed a couple more songs over the following few days, and then one morning we came together to record the new one we’d just written, ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’. I decided to record it using the Martin acoustic I’d written it on, so as to capture the breezy quality, and I ran through the chords with Andy and Mike, who were hearing it for the first time, while Stephen Street made some adjustments to the sound. The music came together quickly, which is usually the sign of a good song. It was always an important moment for me when we were putting down something new, but with ‘There Is a Light’ it was obvious that we might have some magic, and it felt like the music was playing itself. All my expectations were surpassed though when Morrissey got behind the microphone and we played the song as a band for the first time. Every line was perfect as the words and the music carried us along on our own new anthem. We were high with it, and after just a few takes we had one of our best ever songs, and something that felt at the time like pop music and beyond.

  I always loved working, but I also had an objective because it felt like there was a lot at stake. I took my place behind the mixing desk and smoked spliffs and drank a lot of coffee and I attended to every detail of the record. Smoking pot in the studio never hindered me. It helped me shut out the outside world just enough to do the job. I regarded smoking a joint as the same as smoking a cigarette with two sugars. Sessions would start at eleven in the morning and we would work all day until eleven or midnight, when we couldn’t hear anything any more, then we’d come back and do the same the next day. I didn’t need anything else in my life. My world was the studio, and I tried to ignore everything that might distract me.

  I made a new discovery during the making of The Queen Is Dead that would be a benefit to the band and a significant step towards the future. I’d heard about a new keyboard called the Emulator, which was a digital synthesiser that could call up orchestral sounds or sound effects. It opened up a whole world for me as an arranger. The first thing I did on the Emulator was the strings on ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’, and I would use it a lot more to make what I saw as a progression from the previous records. Using the Emulator, I could orchestrate what I was doing in addition to using guitars, and I started thinking about possibilities and a different kind of sound.

  We made a good start to the record, and then came a serious disturbance in the form of the band’s recently acquired lawyer. I don’t know how he came to be appointed by us, but he wore an earring and would put his feet up on the desk to show off the sneakers he wore with his suit while he tried to impress us with his rock ’n’ roll credentials. The first time I met him he said there was an important issue he needed to discuss with me and Morrissey. Apparently the contract we’d signed in Joe’s office between us and Rough Trade was about to expire with the completion of the new album.

  The rest of the meeting was equally illuminating. The lawyer had already been in negotiations with EMI on our behalf, and he was keen to assure us that they would be delighted to give us a home, it was all just a matter of informing Rough Trade. I’d never really had a problem with Rough Trade. I liked the people and respected Geoff Travis and Scott Piering, and even though the label could sometimes be a bit makeshift, I thought things had gone very well for all of us, so leaving them sounded a bit drastic. But re-signing with the same label apparently wasn’t an option; it now appeared that we needed to make the next big step in our career, which sounded logical. I had absolutely no expertise in these matters, and even though we were a very successful band it didn’t occur to me that we could’ve signed with anyone we wanted. If it was necessary to leave Rough Trade, then EMI sounded like they were promising a regal future for The Smiths to enjoy happily ever after, and I was fine with the band getting bigger. That EMI had refused our demo of ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ in 1982 was an irony that hadn’t escaped me, although I wasn’t sure Rough Trade would see it that way when they got the news. It was a big situation and a lot to take in. I wondered what Joe would’ve had to say about it.

  The band took a break from making the album to appear on Top of the Pops that autumn with our latest single, ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side’. It was our eighth appearance on the show, and we’d become old hands at turning up to mime for the nation. It was a nice occasion for me, because Billy Duffy was also on the show with his band, The Cult, who’d been enjoying considerable success themselves. Billy and I met at the BBC, and although we didn’t mention it we were both aware of the novelty of the situation. We’d started off on the Wythenshawe estate with dreams of being in bands, and here we were together on Top of the Pops. I watched him when it was his turn to go on, and it was the same as when I’d watched him from the stairs at Rob’s house. He was a mate I could relate to, and although seeing each other didn’t exactly put our feet back on the ground, it made us realise just how far we had come.

  The Smiths needed to get back into the studio. We did a small run of shows in Scotland, which was good, but I was becoming disenchanted with touring. The lifestyle on the road was running me down, and it had taken me away from making the album, which had become an obsession. We decided that the best thing to do would be to go into a residential studio where we could get away from everything and work on the songs until the album was done. We settled on a big old farmhouse in Surrey called Jacobs Studios. We got to the studio the night before we started, and chose our rooms. There was a small cottage at the end of the grounds away from the main house, and I moved in there. I set up my four-track and a couple of amps so I could work on the songs and keep myself to myself if I wanted.

  Earlier in the year, a new Velvet Underground album of lost tracks had come out, called VU. Everyone I knew in Manchester had devoured every single note of the Velvets that was available up to then, so the discovery of unheard material was like the discovery of ten new Commandments. I became infatuated with the song ‘I Can’t Stand It’. I lo
ved Lou Reed’s vocal and was particularly taken with a few seconds of Sterling Morrison’s scratchy rhythm guitar that comes in just before the singing. Sterling Morrison had been a big inspiration for me in the early days, and I loved the way he played. I fixated on ‘I Can’t Stand It’; its simplicity and the way the rhythm hooked me was just the same as when I’d heard Bohannon and Bo Diddley. People are often very impressed by guitar playing that shows off technical prowess, but I’ve always fallen for a guitar that goes ‘da-da-da-da-da’. It’s primal and human, and it avoids the ego trap that gets in the way of making a simple statement. I assimilated Sterling Morrison’s scratchy style into a chord change I was working on, and from that inspiration I ended up with a six-and-a-half-minute howling wipeout track called ‘The Queen Is Dead’ which would be the title track of our new album. When we cut the song, I’d been playing through a wah-wah pedal, and when I put my guitar back on the stand it made a feedback noise that was in exactly the same key as the track. I asked Stephen to put the tape machine into record, and I kept the guitar feeding back on the stand and rocked the wah pedal back and forth to make a ghostly kind of howl. All I kept thinking as I was going through the track was, ‘Don’t die on me, feedback. Don’t die,’ and it kept on going. It was a glorious bit of luck. When I got to the end I walked back into the control room and the band all applauded. A couple of days later Morrissey recorded the vocal and it was one of our best performances. It was a brilliant lyric and a great composition, with space for the band members to show exactly what we could do. The Smiths had been dismissed in some quarters as a kind of whimsical indie pop. The title track of our new album would prove how wrong that assessment was.

  The sessions continued and were inspired and industrious, but it came at a price for me personally. I pushed myself and didn’t dare let the intensity stop for a minute. I’d always been small and ran on nervous energy, but the incessant full tilt of my lifestyle was starting to show and I dropped down to around seven stone. After working all day, I’d go back to the cottage and stay up all night, working out what I was going to do the next day. I rarely drank when we were working, but I was downing brandy at night and balanced it out with coke to keep going, then after a few hours with the headphones on I’d crash out. I’d get into the control room to start work the next day, by which time Morrissey had worked out what he was going to do on the track and was ready to record his vocal. I rarely thought about food unless it was absolutely necessary. I’d just get on with recording and sometimes someone might make me a sandwich.