by Johnny Marr
I went on to New York to work on the Dennis Hopper movie. I was stood playing the guitar, with Herbie Hancock producing me, when I sensed a very intense presence breathing on my neck. I was playing to a scene of a police car driven by Robert Duvall, and as I did so Dennis Hopper put his face right next to mine and hissed, ‘Make it sound like the cops, man … make it sound like the cops.’ I carried on playing as he prowled around the room, scrutinising the action on the screen, then what I was doing, and then the screen again. I summoned up howls and siren sounds in a way I’d never done before, and when the scene was finished he stood two feet away and stared at me, completely deadpan. I stared back at him and didn’t say anything, then he broke into the most dazzling, enigmatic grin and said, ‘I like you, Johnny.’
I had no idea what was going to happen when I left The Smiths. For all I knew I might have had to go back to square one and start all over again. I didn’t know I was going to get a call from Paul McCartney or Dennis Hopper or Talking Heads; I just knew that I wanted to play guitar, the same as I had since I was a kid. I did sessions simply because I got interesting invitations and because it was great; I liked making records with great people, so playing sessions seemed the perfect thing to do. I didn’t want to be in a band, or at least I thought I didn’t, until Matt Johnson came back into my life and invited me to join The The.
I heard from Matt completely out of the blue. He was about to enter into a new phase after Infected, and now that The Smiths had ended he followed up on the pact we’d made in 1981, before our paths took off in different and extraordinary directions. We arranged to meet at an Iggy Pop show at Brixton Academy, and it was great to see him again. Backstage in Iggy’s dressing room after the show, Matt was telling me about his plans to put together a new version of The The, and Iggy, who doesn’t miss a trick, said, ‘Are you guys working together? You should do something together.’ It was the perfect initiation, an auspicious beginning sanctioned by the great man himself.
In the intervening years since I’d slept on his couch to get The Smiths a record deal, I’d followed Matt and what he was doing, and with Soul Mining and Infected he’d made a couple of albums that I really loved. The The had not been a group in the conventional sense but was more of a title or moniker for whatever project Matt was working on, having collaborated with different musicians and pursuing his interest in video and film. The plan was to put together a band to make a record and go on the road for the first time, and as well as being an opportunity for Matt and I to work together, it was good timing. I’d taken on a manager in London called Marcus Russell on the recommendation of Ken Friedman, and my office then became the management for The The. I was already living between Manchester and London, so I would work with The The and then go back up north to record with Bernard when he wasn’t working with New Order. The only remaining thing that Bernard and I needed to sort out was a name for what we were doing. We were in a meeting with Peter Saville and he was pressing us about it. Bernard looked around the room and saw that the name on the air-conditioning unit was ‘Electronic’. He pointed to it and said, ‘We’re called Electronic.’
The mood around The The and Electronic was really positive and forward-thinking. Bernard and his girlfriend Sarah moved in with me and Angie while they were looking for their own place. I’d known Sarah for a long time, and the four of us became very close. In 1988 everyone in Manchester seemed to be going through a time of liberation, and it was no different for me. I was young and I felt free for the first time in ages.
Matt Johnson is one of the few partners I’ve had who is the same age as me. We’re both self-taught working-class boys who grew up in the seventies Britain of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath and came of age as the Thatcher regime took its toll on our generation. While I had been busy in The Smiths, Matt had been on an intrepid journey of his own, and had been putting himself in some extreme situations physically and psychologically during the making of his most recent work. He immersed himself in world events and turned me on to a lot of things, most notably Noam Chomsky and the essays of Gore Vidal. HQ for The The was in an old building in Shoreditch that had once been a gentleman’s outfitter’s. It stood on the corner of two streets, with Matt occupying the one big space of the store’s second floor, so that we spent most of our time in an intense orange glow from the street lights that flooded through the windows around us. In the daytime the place felt like a Hitchcock flick or a detective movie from the fifties film noir, and filled with suspense. At night the ambience was nocturnal and more like New Orleans at 3 a.m. or Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, and Matt and I would stay up drinking vodka and listening to Ennio Morricone, Tim Buckley and Howlin’ Wolf.
Shoreditch in those days was really run-down and edgy. Sometimes we’d go out in the small hours to a dive in King’s Cross and come back at dawn, the London traffic and commuters blighting our reality. Being in The The also opened my eyes to the psychogeography of London, as the two of us would wander around the parts of the city that Matt had written about in songs like ‘Perfect’ and ‘Heartland’:
Beneath the old iron bridges, across the Victorian parks
And all the frightened people running home before dark
Past the Saturday morning cinema that lies crumbling to the ground
And the piss stinking shopping centre in the new side of town
I’ve come to smell the seasons change and watch the city
As the sun goes down again.
Matt often looked out at the world for his inspiration rather than just talking about himself. His words evoked his environment, and I could personally relate to the songs I was playing.
The other two members of the new The The were musicians I already knew. David Palmer had played on Infected and was in demand by everybody. I first became aware of him when he was in ABC; he was the drummer all the drummers I knew wanted to be. The bass player was James Eller, who had been in Julian Cope’s band. I’d heard a lot about him from my friends, and he would’ve been the first person I’d have called if I was forming a band myself. All four of us wanted to play together, and when we were eventually joined by an ace keyboard player called D. C. Collard, The The became very tight as friends as well as a very good band.
When it was announced that I had joined Matt Johnson in The The, it was rather predictably met with negativity from some areas of the British music press. Matt was called on to defend our collaboration and was denounced for having the audacity to harbour a fugitive from The Smiths. That we both maintained a belief in the mission of The The made the indie militia all the more suspicious, but the pettiness galvanised us. We were committed to what we were doing, and we thought that people who actually bought records and paid to go into concerts might like what we were doing. They did, and the album we made, called Mind Bomb, went into the Top 5 and the shows sold out everywhere.
The first thing we recorded was a song called ‘The Beat(en) Generation’, which became Matt’s first Top 20 hit. When we recorded the album’s opening track, ‘Good Morning, Beautiful’, a story of a satellite addressing our planet and an exposition on humanity’s self-destruction, we did it in the middle of the night, having been ingesting psychedelics for several days. When I plugged in my guitar, Matt approached me conspiratorially with saucer eyes and said, ‘Can you make it sound like Jesus meeting the devil?’ His request made total sense to me and I summoned up the appropriate response, which he followed by hollering demonically into an old blues mic, ‘Who is it? Whose words have been twisted beyond recognition in order to build your planet Earth’s religions? Who is it? Who could make your little armies of the left and your little armies of the right, light up your skies tonight?’ It was stunning.
Playing in The The, I was given the freedom to try anything and encouraged to do things I’d not done before; fuzz sounds, industrial noises and radical echoes were all employed in the spirit of experimentation.
In contrast to The The’s intensity, we were seriously into having fun, and the
more puerile the activity the better. AIR Studios was several floors up on Oxford Street, the busiest street in London and always teeming with shoppers and tourists. Every morning Matt would buy fifteen pounds of overripe tomatoes and we’d have a contest to see how many of the public we could target. We didn’t hold back and we didn’t discriminate. We splattered women, businessmen, children and pensioners. We did it a lot, and the more out of hand it got the funnier it became. I’d be laughing until my face hurt. It was the best recreational pastime anyone’s ever devised in a recording studio.
Because Matt had made a lot of abstract and what’s known as ‘textural’ sounds on his previous records – playing keyboards through old effects pedals that radically alter the natural sound of things, together with some studio techniques – I had to devise ways to reproduce them on the guitar when we eventually went on tour. It was a challenge trying to make such diverse sounds. I’d remembered seeing a quote from an older guitar player that said all musicians reach a creative plateau where they’ve learned all they are going to learn and they stop developing, something that struck me as a really depressing notion. I’ve always intended to keep improving and learning my craft, even if I have to lock myself away to do so. When I joined The The, my guitar technique improved considerably. I learned everything I could about the new guitar technology: programming devices, filters, modulation, backwards effects, and any way of changing the sound with pedals, something that I came to think of as ‘producing with your feet’ and which would become invaluable in the future.
The The went around the world, and I finally got to go to Japan and Australia. I was twenty-five years old and miles away from where I’d been as a member of The Smiths. I felt like I was back to the person I’d been before then, and in a new place, having new experiences, in a new situation. In Greece we played at the Acropolis in Athens. I’d been out doing interviews in the sun all day and got sunstroke. I had no idea how incredibly unpleasant sunstroke can be. I was sick and hallucinating when I walked onstage, and after standing completely still and holding on through the first song, Matt came over to me and asked if I was all right.
‘Are we on the Acropolis, Matt?’ I enquired.
‘Yeah,’ he said, laughing.
‘Oh, good,’ I said. ‘That’s OK then.’ And I carried on with the show.
The The had been out on the road on and off for almost a year when a terrible tragedy struck. Matt’s younger brother Eugene lay down on the bed one day, complaining of a headache, and died suddenly aged twenty-four. It was devastating. The band all tried to rally round for Matt and his family, but we felt useless and it was heartbreaking to see my friend having to deal with such a catastrophe. We broke from the tour for a short while and then took up again. I don’t know how Matt did it, but he got through it and at the end of it we made a live concert film from the Royal Albert Hall called The The Versus the World, which captured the band as it really was during that period.
Get the Message
IT WAS JUST me and Bernard Sumner in the studio when Electronic first started working together; no producers, no engineers and no other musicians. We moved around, plugging things into other things, and did everything ourselves. We had no strategy other than to try something new, and for me that meant a wide-open set of possibilities. I saw working with Bernard as an opportunity to experiment with electronic music and to learn as much about working with machines as I could. I wanted to program drumbeats and write the most out-and-out synth pop I could muster, regardless of what anyone might think. Bernard thought I was mad to be going so against my own grain, and our conversations were often on a similar theme:
Him: ‘Put some guitar on it.’
Me: ‘No.’
Him: ‘Put some guitar on it, Johnny.’
Me: ‘It doesn’t need it.’
Him: ‘But everyone’s going to blame me and say it’s my fault.’
We worked on and off for a while in between The The’s and New Order’s schedules, recording a lot of ideas until we had our method of writing. I would start off a song with an idea for a verse or something on a synth, and Bernard would make suggestions, then he would take over for the next bit and vice versa. Other times one of us would have an idea for the whole song and the other one would help him realise it. In spite of my urge to do otherwise, I would still always play guitar on the songs, but usually after I had tried to make it sound like a synthesiser. It was important and necessary for me at the time to do different things from what I was known for. It’s the prerogative of any artist not to want to repeat themselves over and over again. Unlike in the visual arts, it’s one of the stranger aspects of pop culture that musicians are often expected to try to repeat things that have brought success, which to me is as absurd as expecting David Hockney to continue making splash paintings for the rest of his life.
Bernard and I genuinely hadn’t anticipated how incessantly we would be asked by the press, ‘Are The Smiths going to reform?’ and ‘Are New Order splitting up?’
My new partner liked plenty of The Smiths’ songs and respected what we’d done, but he really didn’t give a fuck about dealing with the gossip or the media in general, and he wasn’t into maintaining an aloof persona, even though he’d been a successful frontman for years. His philosophy was to get the music out there and to enjoy what you work hard for, and to try not to let the destructive aspects of fame affect your sensibilities or your inner world. Amen, brother.
Building my own studio was an inevitable next step for me, and I was really excited about it. I could do whatever I liked and go in there whenever I wanted, which meant I was in there all the time. When Bernard went away for a week, I found myself messing around one sunny afternoon with a bass sound I’d sampled off an old soul record. I was playing around with it and came up with something that sounded really good. I programmed a drumbeat, and with the rhythm track happening it sounded perfect already and I knew exactly what the guitar should be. I played some chords on a twelve-string acoustic and added a string arrangement, and before I knew it I had an instrumental track that was unlike anything I’d done or heard before. On the Saturday night, when Bernard got back from his week away, there were a lot of people round at my house before everyone went out to the Haçienda. I snuck on the new song in between the other records and said to Bernard, ‘What do you think of the new demo?’
He looked at me curiously and said, ‘Is this us? What?!’ It was a great moment. We played the track a few times and everyone was loving it. Bernard said, ‘Call it “Get the Message”.’
Having a lot of people on the scene permeated a lot of what we did. There was so much partying going on it’s amazing anything got done, but it absolutely reflected the times and it all fed into the direction of our record. There would usually be a gathering like that somewhere before everyone went to the Haçienda. We would go into town and surrender to the revelry and hear the great new music that was becoming more and more influential by the week. 808 State, The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays were all on our home turf, and Manchester was the centre of everything.
Some nights I’d stay working in my studio when the city was buzzing. Around five in the morning, my brother Ian would phone to warn me that a gang of loved-up crazies was heading my way from a house party in Moss Side. Ian was the Vibe Protector, heading off the wrong kind of people with me on their radar, and making sure I wasn’t harassed. He was only sixteen, but he was street-wise and very protective of his big brother.
Shortly after Electronic formed, we got a message through a friend that Neil Tennant would be interested in working with us and that maybe we could record something with Pet Shop Boys. We loved the Pet Shop Boys’ records, and on the day that Neil and Chris Lowe were due to come to my studio I started work on an idea that sounded like a chorus for a song. When Neil and Chris arrived, we all worked on the idea until eventually we had a backing track for Neil to take away; he wrote the lyrics and it became ‘Getting Away with It’. We went to the Haçienda that night and
all reconvened the next day to write another song, called ‘The Patience of a Saint’. It was an interesting and successful collaboration that was exactly what Bernard and I had envisioned for Electronic when we’d first talked about a new way of doing things, and it was the start of a creative relationship between me and Pet Shop Boys that would last a long time.
The impact of the Manchester scene could be seen all over the country as more and more people flocked to the city to join in the ‘Madchester’ experience. Suddenly it was the hippest thing in the world to pretend that you’d come from the most socially deprived areas of the city and speak as if you were a barely educated urchin from a young offenders’ institution. Unfortunately a lot of people started to act that way too, which was a side effect of the scene that I found disappointing. Having come from the inner city, I’d seen the aspirations of working-class people and suddenly there were these characters walking around wearing their lack of opportunity as a badge of honour, which was confounding to me and a regression for ordinary people. It may have been part of putting Mancunians in the spotlight for a while, but it also devalued what some people had been working for all their lives, namely pride and the victory of elevating themselves through betterment and discipline. What had started out as authentic was turning into a depressing stereotype of the northerner, which set back the image of the northern working class forty years, and created the dreaded cultural phenomenon that is the ‘Manc Man’, or professional Mancunian. There were even people around who were pretending to be from Manchester, which I doubt had ever happened before.
A new, much more serious aspect of the culture also took hold. The economic opportunities of the new drug trade created heavy violence, and the togetherness that had been there at the beginning turned to edginess. Gangs started to take over, and became self-appointed kings of the nightlife, especially in the Haçienda, which was by now the most notorious nightclub in the world. Manchester had become Gunchester. It was a dilemma for Bernard, one of the owners of the club, and I found myself in a couple of encounters with some dubious people who were part of a world I had no interest in.