Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  By the time we made Dusk, The The had been together as a band for almost five years, and we’d played all over the world and knew each other very well. It was always creatively intense in The The, but the atmosphere in the studio when we made this album was especially poignant and affecting, and I sometimes found myself having to leave the studio for a while because I was overwhelmed. The song that was the most powerful and emotive of all, and which I think is one of the greatest songs of all time, is ‘Love Is Stronger Than Death’, with its opening line Me and my friend were walking in the cold light of mourning, which described Matt and I walking through London after Eugene died. As the track went along and I listened to Matt singing, I played the harmonica with tears streaming down my face. There were other moments on Dusk that were totally The The, and which only that band could do. ‘Dogs of Lust’, ‘Helpline Operator’ and ‘This Is the Night’ all conjured up the restless nocturnal life I’d known with Matt in London and New York, and ‘Slow Emotion Replay’ was so pretty that on the take I sang an impromptu harmony down my harmonica mic just because I was so happy when we were doing it. I love the record. It captured a spirit that I share with Matt, and ‘Slow Emotion Replay’ has some of my favourite The The lyrics:

  The more I see

  The less I know

  About all the things I thought were wrong or right

  And carved in stone.

  So, don’t ask me about

  War, Religion or God

  Love, Sex or Death

  Because …

  Everybody knows what’s going wrong with the world

  But I don’t even know what’s going on in myself.

  When I was in The The, Matt was criticised for addressing such issues as the war in the Middle East and religious fundamentalism by some people who said that he was taking things in pop music too seriously. Songs like ‘Armageddon Days Are Here Again’ and ‘Sweet Bird of Truth’ proved him to be prescient and also courageous for a modern rock musician. Spiritually and mentally, Matt is one of the bravest people I’ve ever known. The way he appears in the videos for ‘Infected’ and ‘I Saw the Light’ is what he’s actually like, although he’s also very funny. In The The we were trying to find some truth, truth about the state of world and truth about the human condition. Matt once said to me, ‘True inspiration travels through the ages like an arrow.’ It’s a big concept to take on for a rock group, and Dusk is one of the best things I’ve ever done. Sometimes, when I’m out in the world, someone will present me with a copy of Dusk or Mind Bomb to sign and they always ask, ‘When is Matt Johnson going to make another record?’ The records mean a lot to people, and being in The The was a very important part of my life. It’s amazing that after our first meeting in Manchester as teenagers, Matt and I fulfilled our pact and had success together.

  When the time came to go on the road again with Dusk, though, I had to take a step back. I didn’t want to leave Angie and the baby, and it was time for me to explore somewhere closer to home.

  Having a baby around the house brought a lot of change to our lives, and it was great being a family. It was hardly a conventional household as the place was always busy with musicians coming and going. My studio was state of the art, and Bernard was sometimes working on things for New Order, and used it to record some of the music on their World Cup song, ‘World in Motion’. As always, my life was following whatever music I was making, but I’d take time to get out to the park with Nile and watching him gaze at the birds, and chasing him around, put me into the real world, which I no longer always felt the need to escape.

  Kids love music, and Nile loved Kraftwerk and also Bob Dylan, and he would amuse himself in the studio, playing with the gadgets and listening to everything while I was working. My son’s first ever favourite song was ‘There She Goes’ by The La’s. It was a big hit when he was an infant and it was on the radio all the time. Lee Mavers, who wrote and sang it, came over to my house for us to feel out the possibility of doing something together. We got along, and after a while we picked up two acoustic guitars and started playing some songs, ‘I Can See for Miles’ by The Who, and some Stones and Bo Diddley. We were really getting into it when my son came toddling in to hear what was going on. Lee said hello to him and asked him what his name was. Nile answered, and then I asked him, ‘What’s your favourite song, Nile?’

  ‘“There She Goes”,’ Nile said matter-of-factly, not having any idea who the man was or why I was asking, and with that Lee stood up and delivered the whole song like he was singing to 20,000 people. Nile stood motionless in astonishment, his mouth wide open as Lee Mavers sang to him. It was a lovely thing, and also quite full-on. Lee and I played together a couple of times, but we didn’t take it any further. He had his thing to do and I had mine.

  The guitar scene in England post-rave was still very vague and had yet to find its raison d’être. The revolution in electronic music in the previous few years meant that regular rock bands seemed strangely redundant, and although some bands were trying to assimilate the new technology while still keeping the values of rock, I wasn’t much interested in that.

  The time was right for a new paradigm in guitar music, but at that point I didn’t know where it was going to come from. The La’s were the guitar band that everybody I knew was talking about, and when I first heard them I sensed that they might signal some kind of sea change.

  Electronic were planning our follow-up album, and the studio was being taken care of by Ian, with Angie overseeing everything. Ian was in and out of town quite a lot, and he was often given cassettes of bands’ demos by people wanting him to ‘pass this on to your kid’. He always conveniently forgot to bother passing anything on to me, having grown up with people asking him to do that kind of thing all the time. We were busy one day when he mentioned in passing that he had a friend who was putting a new band together, and then he mentioned it again a few weeks later, saying that he had bumped into this friend in town and the new band were pretty good. For Ian to say that a band was ‘pretty good’ meant ‘very good’ in any other language, and he passed me a cassette with a cover that had a picture of a Union Jack that looked like it was being flushed down a toilet. I put it on a shelf somewhere and forgot about it. A few days later, we were driving through town when we passed a hunched figure in a duffel coat walking in the pouring rain.

  ‘That’s Noel,’ Ian said.

  ‘Noel?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, Noel,’ said Ian, ‘the guy whose tape I gave you a few weeks ago.’

  It was raining hard and I pulled the car over and we shouted to Noel to get in. I said hello and he seemed fairly reserved. I was playing a Bob Marley and the Wailers live CD at full volume, and we drove around for a while before going to find a guitar shop. After that, we went for a cup of tea, and the first thing he asked me was what I thought of the tape, which I hadn’t heard. Realising there had to be at least one song on it, I told him, ‘I really like the first one, a lot.’ I took to him straight away. He was smart and had an inscrutability about him. I saw his passion for what he was doing, and he was very serious about being a songwriter. It was obvious that he had a vision that he had to follow through.

  After talking about Neil Young and guitars for a while, I dropped him off at his place, and when I got back to my studio I rifled through the cassettes on my shelf and pulled out the one with the flag on it and read some of the titles: ‘Columbia’, ‘Married with Children’, ‘Fade Away’, ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Star’. I stuck it in the machine and pressed ‘play’. What I heard sounded new yet immediately familiar in a good way. When music sounds familiar it can sometimes mean it’s just ordinary, but it can also mean it’s very right. I recognised some reference points: it was flying the flag for classic rock but had a thing of its own, and there wasn’t anything else like it. It was so … Manchester. I listened more closely and then decided to call Noel now that I had examined his band more thoroughly. He picked up the phone and I told him that I liked his band and asked him if he
had any shows coming up. He told me he was working on getting some gigs, and we arranged to meet at his place the following night to go and see The Verve, who were playing in town.

  Noel, along with nearly all of Manchester’s bohemian aspirants, was living in an apartment block called India House. I knocked on his door, and when he let me in I was introduced to a young kid sitting on the couch with an amazing haircut – super short at the front and long at the sides – and who was flanked by two pretty young girls so enthralled by him and his hair that they didn’t seem to notice anyone entering the tiny flat. I looked around the cramped space, and Noel proudly showed me his two most valuable possessions: an Epiphone guitar and a large fish tank.

  I looked into the tank, pointed to one of the fish and said, ‘What’s that blue thing called?’

  And then from behind me came the voice of Mr Haircut, who said, ‘Fuckin’ fish.’

  ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘attitude – very good,’ and we took off to go and see The Verve.

  We stood near the back – me, Noel and Ian, and the haircut kid in his blue Adidas tracksuit top with white stripes. His look and stance echoed the Manchester casual look from the late eighties, but because he was young it now meant something different – less nightclub, more street and rock ’n’ roll.

  The Verve played a new kind of rock for a new time. Based on the classic touchstones, their music was a reaffirmation of the values of guitar bands that had been put aside in recent years, and it resonated with a new generation of lads, who were tired of the contrived mainstream techno pop and who couldn’t relate to the negativity of the new American bands. British kids were reclaiming punchy, catchy guitar culture, with the look and message to match. It had started with The La’s, and I’d heard it in Noel’s tape. Something was in the air and summer was coming.

  I arranged with Noel to see his band play. He’d run round the corner to the students’ union in Manchester and insisted that they give him a gig or else they’d burn the place down. They were the first band on that night, and so at seven o’clock Ian and I went to the top floor of the university building and waited for the show to start with the twelve other people who were in attendance. I didn’t know who the other members of the band were, besides Noel, and as they walked on the stage I noticed the drummer had short curly hair – not Syd Barrett, weird-guy curly hair with groovy ringlets, more like Dave Barrett, normal-guy-who-sits-behind-you-in-science-class curly hair. ‘O … K,’ I thought, he can always grow it. Then I saw the bass player, who Ian told me was called Guigsy. He looked very chilled out, and he was followed by a regular-looking fella carrying a hollow body guitar over to his amp. ‘Is that the singer?’ I thought. ‘Ian, who’s that?’ I said.

  ‘Him?’ said Ian. ‘He’s Bonehead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bonehead,’ Ian confirmed.

  ‘Bonehead?’ I asked. ‘The rest of the band call him Bonehead?’ I wondered if it was meant to be an insult or endearing or both – either way it was funny.

  At that point I noticed that Noel had sneaked on from behind his amp. He looked very serious with his Epiphone and he appeared to be scowling. He was surveying his equipment and inspecting the audience when on walks the kid who I’d met in the flat – Mr Haircut … Mr Fish. He sauntered over to the middle of the stage with his nose in the air and was looking around at everyone quizzically while shaking a white, star-shaped tambourine for no apparent reason. I thought he must be the dancer, like Bez from Happy Mondays, then Ian said to me, ‘That’s Liam, he’s the singer.’

  ‘Well’, I thought, ‘if he sounds half as good as he thinks he looks then this is going to be interesting.’

  I didn’t know he was Noel’s brother, but when I saw the two of them together I suddenly saw that this band had a real front line, and within a few seconds of howling feedback they crashed into a deafening assault on a tune that I slowly came to realise was ‘I Am the Walrus’.

  The sound was massive and deliberate and electrifying, and thirty seconds into it I knew that a lot of people were going to like them. I had no idea how big they were going to be exactly, but I knew that they were going to connect with people and that they had something great and an authentic spirit. They played a six- or seven-song set, and when it was finished Noel came over and asked me what I thought. I told him I was blown away. I was happy for him that his band were so good, and over the following week I couldn’t get that performance out of my mind. I called my manager, Marcus Russell, and told him all about this band and that he really should come to see them. I was persistent, and he agreed to check them out when they next had a show.

  I called Noel again and asked him if they had any shows and he immediately replied, ‘Yes, this Friday.’ When I asked him where the gig was, he said it was at the university again.

  I don’t know if he put the phone down and ran round the corner to sort it out, but I got back on to Marcus and said, ‘Oasis are playing on Friday, you have to come up,’ and up he came.

  When we went to the university this time, the crowd had swelled to twenty-five. On come Tony – the drummer – Bonehead and Guigsy, and on come Noel and Liam, and they go into ‘I Am the Walrus’ very, very loud. The set was just as good as the last time, and when they were finished Marcus turned to me and asked, ‘Well, what do you reckon?’

  Ian and I said, ‘Yeah, they’re fucking brilliant.’

  Noel came over to me and I introduced him to Marcus and they talked for a while. On the way back to my place I was thinking about the show and how good it was to see something new. A few days later I got a call from an unusually excited-sounding Noel to say that he’d played a show at King Tut’s club in Glasgow and run into the Creation Label boss, Alan McGee, who’d offered them a record deal on the spot. Noel wanted to sign the deal but he didn’t have a manager and he asked me what I thought. I interpreted his call as a scrupulous display of protocol to see if I was cool with him approaching my management, and I said, ‘You and Marcus should get together.’ He asked if I was sure and I assured him he should do it.

  I could already sense that some momentum was starting to build for the band. I told Noel that if I had one bit of advice I could pass on to anyone it would be to keep writing more and more songs, because when you do everything can fall into place, but without the songs no amount of business can take care of anything. It was the smartest thing I could think of, although I’m pretty certain he knew it already.

  Another thing I told him was to get a back-up guitar, because he was taking so long tuning up in between songs. ‘That’s all right for you to say,’ he said. ‘I’ve just got my Epiphone.’

  I put the phone down and thought about it for a minute, then I went into the studio and looked at my guitars. I decided it would be good if I turned up with the 1960 Les Paul that I’d used on ‘Panic’ and ‘London’ with The Smiths and which used to belong to Pete Townshend. I put it in its case, drove round to his house and said, ‘Here, you can use this.’ It was the only moment that I or anyone else has ever seen Noel Gallagher lost for words.

  Oasis put their first record out and they immediately started to get a lot of attention and were suddenly everywhere. Noel was talking about the guitar, and he said the first thing he’d done with it was to write the song ‘Live Forever’. I went to see the band, and when I saw him playing it I realised that the guitar belonged to him. The way he held it, the timing of us meeting, him starting out on his journey and the songs he was writing with it … it all felt right and it all made sense and I was very happy for him. I had no idea how big Oasis would be. I just liked Noel and I liked his band.

  Their success was so phenomenal it meant big changes in my office. What was originally just me and my manager and an assistant on a borrowed landing space in west London turned into a big new office with lots of extremely busy assistants and was complete madness in a very short space of time. Midway through their first national tour, I got a manic phone call to tell me that the night before in Newcastle the band had
got into a fight onstage with some of the audience and the Les Paul I’d given Noel had got damaged. ‘So what do you want me to do about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Have you got another one we can use?’ came the reply.

  I looked at my guitars and reasoned, ‘Well, he’s accustomed to playing a 1960s Les Paul from The Smiths and The Who, so I can’t send him something crappy.’ I grabbed my black 1970s Les Paul that I used on The Queen Is Dead and stuck it in its case with a note that said, ‘It’s a bit heavier, in weight and sound. If you get a really good swing on it, you’ll take some fucker’s head off – Love from Johnny’ and I sent it up to Newcastle.

  One of Kraftwerk living with one of The Smiths is a mad concept, but it happened. Mark Reeder, a friend of mine and Bernard’s who ran a record label in Berlin, suggested that we invite Karl Bartos to work with us on Electronic’s second album. We knew all about Karl’s time with Kraftwerk, and we arranged to meet him in Düsseldorf. Bernard and I had expected that because Karl was one of the pioneers of electronic music he might want to employ the latest technology when we worked together. We imagined him sending us files of programmed music for us to play on, via the wonders of the new modem line. When we got to Düsseldorf, we were met by a cool-looking guy who was very much a working musician and nothing at all like a showroom dummy or a robot. We sat outside a cafe and had ice cream, and when we asked Karl about how he would like to proceed with the recording he said, ‘Easy, we get in a circle with our instruments, and we jam,’ which was a surprise. Karl then showed us around his studio and demonstrated how Kraftwerk made the sounds on some of their records. Bernard Sumner was astounded as Karl casually played ‘Computer Love’, ‘Autobahn’ and ‘Trans-Europe Express’.