by Johnny Marr
One night, I pulled up outside the Haçienda and two characters who I knew were in one of the gangs approached me and offered to park my car. Valet parking was not a service you expected at the Haçienda, but I knew better than to refuse and played along. Later, when I was leaving, one of them approached me and said, ‘Wait here, I’ll get your car for you.’ I waited on the street, and then my car appeared, which was a convertible, with the roof down and the two gangsters in it. They stopped and got out, and as I got in my car they sat on the bonnet and one said, ‘All right, John? Just like to have a chat.’
‘Uh-oh,’ I thought.
‘How’s it going, man?’ he said, smiling while still sitting on the car.
‘Yeah, great,’ I replied, trying to sound not unfriendly yet as remote as I could be under the circumstances. ‘What are we doing?’ I asked.
‘We just wanted to have a word,’ he countered, ‘about the gig at the G-Mex.’ I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘We’re putting on a night at the G-Mex … you and the Mondays.’
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I offered, not knowing where the conversation was going and trying to get a game plan in my mind as quickly as possible.
‘Yeah, we’re putting you on, you’ll be headlining, don’t worry about that,’ he continued. ‘We’ve got the merch all sorted and we’ve got some DJs.’
By now I’d got the gist of what was going on and I jumped in: ‘Oh … right. The thing is, I’d be up for it, course … but it’s Bernard, you see. He doesn’t like playing live … hates it.’
‘Well done, Johnny boy,’ I said to myself, ‘problem solved.’
Unfortunately, my new friend on the car was well used to blag and he was already way ahead of me. ‘No, we’ve sorted it with Barney, he’s well up for it. He said to talk to you about it.’
I knew that was bullshit and my instinct kicked in and told me to just start babbling. ‘Well, the thing is, right … we’ve only got a few songs … and they’re very complicated to do with just the two of us, you see.’ As soon as I started talking like this, his manner changed from conceit to contempt. I saw my chance. ‘We’d need a lot of samplers, yeah? Samplers, for the sound, and the er … the EQs, y’know? Graphic equalisers … with midi and hard drives, a lot of hard drives.’
Mr Gangland looked totally baffled, as if he’d just realised that I was a poncey artist and not one of the lads after all. I could tell that he was suddenly disappointed in me and was thinking, ‘That Johnny Marr’s a bit fuckin’ weird.’
I started my car and tried to maintain a look of disappointment about all that midi and hard-drive business, and with a ‘Shucks, maybe next time, fellas’ resignation I pulled away as fast as I could and put my foot down. Back at my place I told Angie, Bernard and Sarah about it and how brilliantly I’d saved us from a very tricky predicament with one of the gangs. Bernard listened for a bit and then said seriously, ‘I think it sounds all right, maybe we should do it.’
‘Getting Away with It’ was Electronic’s first single and featured Neil Tennant on backing vocals. It was released in December 1989 in advance of our first album, which was on Factory Records, a gesture of respect from me to Tony Wilson and something which Bernard did out of loyalty to the label. In America we were contracted to Warners because of The Smiths and New Order. One night I got a call from one of the heads of the record company on the East Coast to say that he was meeting with Morrissey and that I should consider getting back together with my old partner. When I politely declined, he said, ‘It would be better for Electronic if you reconsidered.’ I never knew what prompted the call but I thought it was inappropriate when I was working on something potentially lucrative for the label.
The popularity of ‘Getting Away with It’ took me by surprise and it became the most successful song I’d had in America. With it came Electronic’s reputation as a ‘supergroup’, a press angle we understood – after all, we were, or had been, members of The Smiths, New Order and Pet Shop Boys. But we were uneasy about it too, as the supergroup tag usually conjured up an image of bored, self-indulgent rock stars who only got together when the limo came to pick them up. Electronic was far from that. We worked in the studio every day and considered ourselves more akin to the club musicians putting out 12-inch records on independent white labels, or the new kind of group that was emerging, like Mark Moore’s S’Express, which I really liked. I was also inspired by Brian Eno, who didn’t appear to impose any limitations on what he did or how he did things, and his method of using the studio as an instrument was an idea I was interested in taking as far as I could.
In August 1990, Electronic played our first shows with Depeche Mode at Dodger Stadium in LA to 80,000 people each night. When we got to the airport to fly out, we were met by a reception committee of Mancunian gentlemen who I’d known from round the clubs. They’d taken it on themselves to embark on a field trip and form our entourage for the duration, only letting us out of their sight to go to ‘check out that Compton an’ all that’, which they’d seen in rap videos and decided was the place of most cultural interest in the Golden State. When we arrived in LA it just so happened that Happy Mondays were also in town, recording their album Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, and Sunset Boulevard was suddenly infiltrated with unusual-looking girls and boys, all loved up in Travel Fox trainers and 22-inch flares.
For our first shows we assembled a collection of our friends to play with us, and I brought Ian out to work as an all-round Mr Fix-It. Having my brother with me was great; he had just left school and we had always been really close. Ian could play drums, guitar and bass but never actually wanted to be in a band. He’s extremely conscientious, and us working together meant that my family were more directly involved in my world again.
The two nights at Dodger Stadium were a brilliant debut, and Pet Shop Boys did a couple of songs with us. On the second night, Bernard, who had been out celebrating the night before, having forgotten he had to do it again the next night, was extremely hungover. He walked up to me during one of the songs and said gravely, ‘This is the worst fucking moment of my life.’ All right, Bernard … yeah! Woohoo! He survived, and did a remarkably good job considering. Those first two shows were my favourite shows Electronic ever did.
Anyone who knows Bernard Sumner or knows much about him will know that he’s very into sailing boats – big boats, yachts. I had never been in a band with anyone who could sail before, and as time went on it became clear that I would probably end up joining him – either that or Bernard would continue to refer to me as ‘Mr Studio’ and ‘Mr Chronically Unsociable’. I was intrigued by the idea of sailing. Me, Angie, Bernard and Sarah, on a yacht on our own, in the middle of the sea – what could go wrong? I guessed that Bernard was probably pretty good at it, seeing that he spent so much time doing it, and thinking about it, and reading about it, even in the recording studio.
I first went sailing with him in the Lake District in England. It was pouring down with rain and very windy and everyone thought I’d hate it, but as we cast off and I stood at the front of the boat with the rain lashing down I loved it. The four of us sailed a lot, around the Mediterranean and the Caribbean and California. Having to deal with the ocean, I learned that aside from negotiating a sixty-foot vessel through open waters it’s also a great lesson in acceptance and mindfulness. You have to accept that nature is in charge and is a much bigger force than yourself. You can’t outsmart it or overpower it; if you don’t comply you are in serious trouble, and even if you do comply you still have to be pretty vigilant and pay attention.
In Hamburg, Bernard and I decided to conduct our interviews for the day while sailing around the lake in a little dinghy with one sail. The journalists turned up, expecting an intense, in-depth discussion about The Smiths and New Order, but instead they had to try to act cool while rocking around on the water and ducking their heads to avoid getting hit every time we decided to turn, which was every time they asked a question about The Smiths or New
Order. That is how to do interviews.
As Electronic was just the two of us, it meant that Bernard and I ended up doing a lot of travelling together, and if you travel a lot with someone who is afraid of flying you will catch it off them. I caught my fear of flying off Morrissey. He and I always sat together on planes and he hated flying. In my attempts to calm him I became hyper-aware of every whiff of turbulence, as he would clutch the seat or me, until eventually I was worse than he was. Billy Bragg hated flying too, and he didn’t help matters. One day, on a flight to San Francisco when I made the mistake of asking him about tranquillisers for Morrissey, he said, ‘Tranquillisers won’t save him as we’re hurtling towards our doom, John. Do you know that when a plane hits the sea, it has the same impact as when it hits concrete?’
‘Er, no, Bill, I didn’t know that,’ I said, suddenly more nervous.
‘I’m just saying,’ added Billy, ‘and don’t forget we’re in a pressurised metal tube hanging 30,000 feet in the air – it’s unnatural. Peanut?’
What was wrong with these guys, these bards of England? It was one of the downsides of my empathy with lead singers that I assimilated some of their idiosyncrasies, and my experiences as an international traveller were ruined by hideous terror until I got myself over it, but not before I managed to pass it on to Bernard Sumner.
In spite of many years of blissful air travel with New Order, Bernard was now in a band with me, and Electronic did a lot of flying. We hit the mother lode when we went to the Philippines to make a video and had to fly in a helicopter several times over a volcano to get a dramatic aerial shot. We discovered that we were going in a military helicopter, which meant it didn’t have any doors, and being something of a trooper, and eager to prove that unlike me he wasn’t a total wuss, Bernard heroically let me sit in the middle of the plank of wood that was our seat, with him on the outside and the cameraman on the other. As the chopper rose and hovered unsteadily above the ground, I saw something in his face I hadn’t ever seen before: I saw dread. For some reason I found Bernard’s unease really, really amusing and it set me off on a fit of uncontrollable laughter, and the more acute his discomfort the funnier it became as we zoomed across treetops and over the jungle where Apocalypse Now was made. I was having the time of my life, howling and whooping and absolutely loving the experience. I realised that Billy Bragg had a point about a pressurised metal tube in the air being unnatural. But this was fine: I was totally OK with no doors and the open air and the propellers whirring above us – in fact it was great. Bernard, however, had very different feelings about it, and he was praying for it to stop with an expression of both utter terror and wild anger at my hysterics. ‘Fuckin’ hell! Fuckin’ hell!’ he screamed. I thought I was going to die from laughing. From that moment I never had a problem on a plane ever again. No matter how bad the situation, I’m cool with flying. Thank you, Bernard, you’re a mate.
‘Get the Message’ was a record I was really proud of. I first heard the finished version on the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka one night after I had played a show with The The. Angie had arrived with a tape of the mix with Bernard’s new vocals on it, and she was excited for me to hear it because she knew I would love it. I sat in the low-lit coach on the train in Tokyo station, and as it pulled away to Nagoya I put the song on. As I heard it start up, and then the half-spoken vocal began – ‘I always thought of you as my brick wall, built like an angel, six feet tall’ – I was blown away. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew we had done something totally unique. It wasn’t The Smiths, it wasn’t New Order, it was our own – and it was cool.
Because we weren’t a band in a traditional sense with a permanent line-up of musicians, Electronic didn’t tour, which was mostly my decision. We promoted our records by doing interviews and lots of them. We’d fly into a city in Europe or America and spend the whole day talking to the press, and then fly to the next city and then the next, and so on. It was intensive and we were always asked the same questions, but we managed not to send ourselves and each other insane. Our decision not to tour was partly because we’d both done a lot of it recently with The The and New Order, but mostly because I enjoyed making records so much, and if you gave someone like me the opportunity to spend as much of my life in the studio as I could, then that’s what I would do. I’d been doing sessions since the start of my career, and I’d played on other people’s records all through my Smiths days. I considered it to be one of the privileges of my life to be able to collaborate with someone I respected and to contribute my sound and ideas to their record.
I had been visiting Billy Bragg in the studio when I heard him kicking around an idea that was half reggae and half ‘Louie Louie’, with some interesting phrases about sexuality. I heard something good in what he was doing, so I took a tape of it home. I worked it up into what I thought was going to be a demo, but it was sounding so good I decided to make it into a record and hoped that Billy would like it. He came to my studio and liked the track, and over the next few days we made the single ‘Sexuality’, with me producing. It was a great pop song with brilliant lyrics. ‘Sexuality’ became a chart hit in the summer of 1991, and I produced and played on some more things with Billy.
One morning, in the middle of the Madchester scene, I answered the door with no idea that I was supposed to be doing anything. I was greeted by an extremely awake and lively Billy and band, bright-eyed and chipper, having arrived from London to make a record as we’d planned. I immediately saw that to Billy I probably looked like I thought I was a rave messiah, dressed all in white with bare feet and a bright orange David Bowie Low haircut. Throughout the session, Billy kept complaining that he didn’t like his producer not wearing socks. I protested that it was a seventies new wave thing rather than any Mediterranean beach situation; but I was also living a life at that point where I couldn’t fathom socks, or anything else for that matter that didn’t make sense on hallucinogens. It was remarkably fortuitous that the song we were recording happened to be a very psychedelic track, called ‘Cindy of a Thousand Lives’, which I thought was totally brilliant. Luckily for me too, Billy is someone who understood my genuine attempts to balance unpretentiousness with an occasional hedonistic eccentricity befitting a rock star, and he was amused by my quirks.
When we did ‘Sexuality’ and ‘Cindy of a Thousand Lives’, it was obvious that we should get Kirsty MacColl to sing on them as we’d all worked together before and were a bit of a gang. I’d recently written an instrumental track and sent it to Kirsty to get her opinion on it. She called me back the next day and said, ‘I’ve written a vocal on it and it’s a single.’ We did the song, which was called ‘Walking Down Madison’, and it became a hit. When she was finishing the album, she needed a title for it. Kirsty was very witty, and her working title for the album was Al Green Was My Valet. I thought she needed something else, and because I used to live in her flat I suggested Electric Landlady, as a pun on the Jimi Hendrix album. I was joking when I said it, but she ended up using it for her album.
The other sessions I did at that time were with Pet Shop Boys. I always looked forward to them, and I never knew what I’d be called on to play. Sometimes the records would be symphonic and orchestral, and sometimes they would be hi-tech crafted pop. Although the image of the Pet Shop Boys is of two stylish men in well-appointed rooms letting the machines do all the work, this is not entirely true – except for the stylish and well-appointed bit, which is completely true. My sessions with the Pet Shop Boys have been concentrated affairs and have always been inspiring. Neil and Chris are never short of ideas, and I’ve ended up employing a lot of different guitar styles. I’ve played on more Pet Shop Boys songs than any other musician, my favourite song being ‘This Must Be the Place’, from the album Behaviour, but there have been so many good ones, and when I’ve worked with them I’ve always felt a sense of occasion.
Nile
I GOT OFF a plane in 1991 after being on a promotional trip with Electronic, and Angie was at the airp
ort to meet me. It was a hot day in England, and she arrived in my old Mercedes convertible. I was driving home on a country road when she said, ‘I have something to tell you, we’re going to have a baby.’ I was delighted, and pulled the car over to the side of the road to process the news. Finding out you’re going to be a parent means fifteen minutes of total elation followed by a brand-new parental concern – concern that it’s going to be all right, concern that you can handle it, and so on. There’s a lot of excitement and joy, but being a parent for the first time you worry about most things until the baby is born. The news was great for all of us, and starting a new generation brought both our families closer together.
My son was born on a Friday night in Manchester, and Angie and I named him Nile, after Nile Rodgers. We loved the music and respected the man, and we liked the idea that our child had the same name as a river. When he was born I already knew my son, which is something often said by people about seeing their kids for the first time, but it was true. I got an impression of what his nature was, and it’s never changed since the moment I first saw him. After staying in the hospital for a few hours, it was late and time for me to go. I drove back with all the windows down and went through every red light on the way. I reasoned that if the police were to stop me, they wouldn’t be so heartless as to bust a guy who’s just become a father, and even if they did I really didn’t care.
Dusk
IN EARLY 1993, The The went back into the studio to do the follow-up album. It was to be called Dusk, and I knew it was going to be special. We moved into the basement of the building in Shoreditch and immersed ourselves throughout the whole process in atmospheric darkness lit sparingly by psychedelic oil lamps projected on the walls. I was staying in South Kensington, and I’d drive by the river and along the Embankment on the hazy summer mornings with the roof down on my way to the studio, accompanied by our keyboard player, D. C. Collard, who was staying with me. The journey to the sessions in the morning was the only daylight I’d see, as once I’d descended into the studio I was fully engaged in the world we were creating and I rarely came out less than fourteen hours later.