Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  In 1999, Bernard and I made the final Electronic album, Twisted Tenderness. It was a much more guitar-orientated record, and I had a really good time making it. It had been nine years since we’d started working together as Electronic, and in that time we’d done everything we’d set out to do and more. Not touring had worked out fine for me, as I was able to be around for my kids, which is a luxury for a musician, although I did pretty much live in the studio. I was working on a lot of different things during this time with a lot of different people, and I’d taken my interests in technology to the limit and learned all the ways of making records. It was time now for me to get back out on the road with a band, and Bernard felt the same way about reconvening with New Order.

  As always, I was looking to do something different. I was listening to the psychedelic bands of the sixties, and the German bands commonly referred to as ‘Krautrock’, especially Faust, with their combination of tranced-out slink and pastoral spaciness. I wanted to play songs that were hypnotic, and in one of our meetings Zak declared, ‘We should have a two-hour set list, with just five long songs on it, and be lucky if we get through three.’

  The mindset I was in was reflected in the books I was reading. Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky opened my imagination to a lot of concepts and possibilities. I liked the imagery of esotericism. The language intrigued me, and the more material I devoured, the more it influenced my life and my thinking. I wanted to know everything about it, and when I found Aldous Huxley he became my absolute favourite writer and thinker. I collected first editions and tracked down tapes of his lectures, and the more I found out about his work, the more I had to explore. It was interesting to me that in spite of the fact that he got better as he got older, Huxley’s reputation rests on the work he did in the first half of his career, and as masterful as Brave New World is, it’s comparatively slight compared to the towering achievements of The Perennial Philosophy and the essays and lectures in the second half of his life for which he is far less known. The culture surrounding The Doors of Perception is a legacy which is much less than Huxley deserves, and it illustrates the reductive nature of fame and how you can become defined by something you did in your youth, despite doing work in later life that’s equally substantial.

  Through all my reading and thinking, I kept coming across a word: healers. I was reading Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, and the word jumped out at me as a great band name. I remembered a conversation I’d had with Keith Richards about bands with good names, and having informed him that ‘The Rolling Stones’ was pretty much as good as it gets, we both agreed that Little Richard’s ‘The Upsetters’ and Bob Marley’s ‘The Wailers’ were decent contenders. I thought the name ‘The Healers’ was perfect, and I decided I wanted it to be the name of my new band. I told Joe and Zak about it, and they suggested that it should have my name attached to the front to make it more commercial. I saw the logic in it and agreed, but I secretly plotted to drop my name from it once people knew who we were.

  The Healers was an experiment to break out of the ‘four guys with guitars’ format. It was liberating to be part of a large group, and the line-up grew with the addition of Liz Bonney on percussion and Lee Spencer on synthesisers. We were all set to start playing when Edgar Jones left to join Paul Weller’s band, but after a recommendation from Noel Gallagher we enlisted Alonza Bevan from the recently defunct Kula Shaker on bass, and with the addition of a second guitar player from Manchester called Adam Gray, The Healers were one big, happy, six-piece electro space-rock family ready to sneak out into the world.

  Going out as the frontman with The Healers was a step into the unknown, and because we hadn’t put out any songs yet, none of the fans or press knew what I would be doing. My plan was to develop the band’s sound by doing it live and I adopted the philosophy ‘I’ll do what I feel like, even if it means the audience have no idea what’s going on’. It’s a noble idea, but a bit of a drawback when you’re known for doing something else entirely, and people definitely wondered why I was standing in the middle of a bunch of space-rock trippers. I was also asked a lot about how daunting it was to be the frontman, as if by migrating from lowly stage left into the glory of centre stage I would dissolve under the blaze of the spotlight. I wasn’t daunted, but at the beginning I had no idea how it was going to go – I hadn’t been the frontman since I was a kid. I’d heard John Lee Hooker say that when he was onstage he would get the feeling from the audience and give it back amplified, and when they gave that back again he would amplify it some more. It sounded like a good strategy. I employed it and it worked out well. I liked fronting my own band, and it helped that they were all heavyweight people. The shows were loud and loose, and the audiences were with me.

  As it turned out it I made my actual debut out front with Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders backing me, at the Linda McCartney tribute concert at the Royal Albert Hall in April 1999. After playing with The Pretenders, I then played a couple of songs with Marianne Faithfull and then played again with Paul McCartney.

  Going out with The Healers was good, and felt very natural. I would always work at getting better, same as I try to do with everything, and it was the next new road to creative possibilities.

  Bert Jansch had been out of the public eye for a long time when I met him. He continued to be a great musician, performing low-key shows and putting out records through the eighties and nineties, but as far as the music scene and certainly the media went, Bert conducted his career well below the radar and without the need for critical validation. He was someone who’d really inspired me in my formative years, and had done the same for Jimmy Page, Neil Young and Bernard Butler, along with a legion of other guitar players. His influence had stayed with me throughout my career, and I’d borrowed his style for ‘Unhappy Birthday’ and ‘Back to the Old House’ by The Smiths.

  Bernard Butler and I had become good friends and I thought of him as a kindred spirit. Bernard told me that Bert Jansch was playing a show in a little room in the basement of a pub in Crouch End and suggested that we go along. We watched in awe and due reverence along with Bert’s loyal following – who Bernard dubbed ‘the Muswell Bills and Muswell Jills’ – as Bert moved brilliantly through his repertoire of old classics and introduced some good new songs too.

  When Bert had finished and was packing his guitar away, Bernard said to me, ‘Go and say hello to him.’

  ‘What?’ I replied.

  ‘Go …’ he said, now enunciating very slowly, like he was taking to an old-age pensioner, ‘over … and introduce yourself.’

  ‘OK,’ I said meekly, and I shuffled towards the man who had been an enigmatic figure in my imagination for years. ‘Hi … Bert?’ I muttered.

  Bert stopped what he was doing and looked up at me. ‘Yeah?’ he enquired with a stern look on his face.

  ‘I’m Johnny Marr, and I’m … er, a guitar player. I … just wanted … to say great show and … I’m a big fan …’

  At that point Bernard came over to bail me out. He’d met Bert before, and gamely attempted to get a bit of conversation going between his suddenly very inarticulate friend and his friend’s hero. After our first awkward meeting, Bert and I became very friendly. I would visit him and his wife Loren at their house in Kilburn and we’d play guitar together. Bert’s reputation for being uncommunicative and terse wasn’t accurate; he just wasn’t into small talk. He had a lot to say about a lot of things. He told me about hitching around France in his early years, and about tracking down guitars and guitar players as a young man in Edinburgh, and he also talked a lot about the beatnik scene he’d found himself at the centre of in London in the early sixties. One of the first questions I asked him was whether, when he was in Pentangle and they were playing their hybrid psych folk music, they thought the so-called ‘heavy’ bands were really lightweight posers, the way I had imagined? He smiled; he’d never been asked that before. He picked up his tea and, still grinning, he said, ‘What do you think?’

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sp; Bert and I talked a lot, and about serious things. I was honoured that he thought highly of me and that he valued our friendship. He was a discerning soul with an authentic cool, and as with Joe Moss I sensed Bert saw something in me that I didn’t see myself. I always felt good after I’d spent time with him. We communicated some deeper things when we played guitar together, and the playing was often really wild. One of us would pick up on the atmosphere in the room and start a riff, and the other would join in. Once we’d established what we were doing, we’d both start to take the music further out until we were on a journey together. When we got to a place that was pretty or heavy, we’d stay on it until we’d had just enough, then we’d move on somewhere else and where we’d been was gone. Sometimes these guitar excursions were long, and other times we’d just go out for a little spin. Wherever we went, though, was always good.

  Once when he was on the road, he came to stay at my house. He arrived when Angie was out, and we were playing our guitars in the kitchen when she came in. Angie was a fan of Bert’s, and it was the first time she’d met him. He and I were in the middle of an intense improvisation, and as I looked up from my guitar she was standing behind him, wide-eyed and mouthing the words, ‘OH … MY … GOD! IT’S BERT … JANSCH! OH … MY … GOD!!’ She was dumbstruck. I had never seen her as impressed. She really knows her guitar music and hadn’t heard us improvising before. She’s always said that it was the best guitar she’s ever heard me play.

  In 2000, The Healers played at the Scala Cinema in London. I walked off the stage at the end of the show, and five minutes later my guitar tech ran into the dressing room, ashen-faced and shouting, ‘Where’s your guitar? I think your guitar’s been stolen!’ The house lights went up and everyone scurried about, looking for my Gibson SG, which I’d played throughout the whole tour. I knew it was gone. It being London there were a lot of guests filing into the dressing room, and what was supposed to be a celebration was turning into a wake as everybody came to say how sorry they were about my guitar being stolen. The police came, and on the security-camera footage we saw a guy walking out of the front doors with the rest of the audience, holding my guitar as if it were normal. It was amazing: he’d just clambered up onstage, taken it and walked out.

  Even if you’re very lucky and you get to own a lot of guitars, you still get very attached to an instrument. I choose the guitars I use not only for the sound or the way they make me play but also because I have an instinct about them. You get a feeling for a model you think you need to play, and when you find the one that clicks you love it. I go through things with my guitar like it’s a companion. Standing backstage, waiting to go on, I’m playing it, locking in with it, and thinking about me and the guitar. When you turn up at a recording session, your guitar needs to deliver something for you. I’d been playing that SG exclusively, and when the realisation hit me that it was actually gone, I was depressed. Since I’d been a kid I always thought that anyone who could steal a musician’s instrument was lower than the low. I issued a statement with the promise of a reward for any information leading to the return of my guitar but heard nothing back. It was on the national news, and I had guitar dealers all over the country calling me to say they were on the lookout.

  I was in a taxi going through Hyde Park a couple of days later when I heard about the theft of my guitar on the radio. I told the driver to turn around and take me to where Bert lived in Kilburn, and when I got out of the cab I really hoped that he’d be there. He answered the door and I sat down with him and told him about my guitar being stolen. He sat quietly, and when I was finished telling him he looked at me for a few seconds and said, ‘You’ll find another one.’ I knew he was right, he had such serenity about him. I finally felt a Zen-like acceptance of the situation, and it became a perfect lesson in detachment that the Dalai Lama himself couldn’t have matched, even if he’d had his guitar stolen and he knew Bert Jansch.

  I did get another guitar that I loved, and people would sometimes ask me about my stolen SG. Ten years later, I was in Toronto when I got a call from Joe. A policeman who was a fan had taken it upon himself to try to find out what had happened to it. After putting the word out for months, he eventually got a tip-off about a guy who had once claimed to have had a guitar that was mine. The policeman followed up the information and went to investigate it. He found the guy and in his apartment was my guitar. I’d finally got it back.

  The lifestyle I’d fallen into had started to be not good. Over the previous few years I’d got into the habit of drinking on a night-after-night basis, and night after night turned into week after week and month after month. Staying up in the studio, getting together with friends, hanging out with whoever, or even on my own, had become habitually accompanied by booze, and even though I never drank in the day, whenever I heard myself say ‘I never drink in the day’, I knew I was actually saying ‘I drink every night’, and that became an issue for me.

  I knew a couple of people who didn’t drink. I noticed that they didn’t look like death in the morning and never needed to apologise for saying some stupid shit the night before. I hated the idea of falling into the cliché of the middle-aged rocker, hanging out in my friends’ dressing room drunk. It’s messy, and it was not a vision I had for myself. I thought about it a lot and I knew I had to change, but it took me a while to get my head right. Society is set up so that everybody drinks, and it’s unusual if you don’t join in. I was lucky in that I’ve always liked to change, and once I saw that I was giving myself the gift of freedom from something that was no longer fun, and giving myself something good, as opposed to thinking that I was denying myself something nice, I kicked drinking into touch for ever and never looked back.

  When I stopped drinking, I would meet people who would often assume that because I didn’t drink I must have suffered a ‘my drink-and-drugs hell’, especially because I’m a musician. They would hear I didn’t drink and imagine that I’d spent the eighties dangling my children off a roof with Ozzy Osbourne, which I didn’t. I like not drinking, and I’m not one of those people who have to be cosseted from other people’s partying. The other thing that happens when you quit drinking is that some of your friends start acting weird and getting paranoid about being drunk because they think you’re going to judge them. I wouldn’t judge anyone, and I doubt I could ever be a puritan. Other people’s choices are their own business, although as a drug I don’t think booze has ever managed to make anyone cooler. I’ve stayed up late all of my life and I still do, and if I’m having a good time with people who are drinking at 4 a.m. and it’s funny or interesting, I’m right there. If, however, I’m stuck with some fucked-up person who’s telling me the same thing over and over again, then I’ll look at my watch and get out of there and I’m already into tomorrow.

  The Healers’ album was called Boomslang, after a dream I had about a snake, which I took as symbolic because of the idea of snakes being unpredictable and shedding their skin. I had the songs all worked out before I recorded them by playing them live, but before the record was finished I felt I needed to capture a particular feeling that was around me at the time and had become a concept in my mind for the whole of the summer. The idea was to cross the sexuality of the blues with the eroticism of electronica. I was staying with The Healers’ electronics wizard Lee Spencer and percussionist Liz Bonney in London, and I came up with a song called ‘You Are the Magic’. When we finished the recording, I had a seventy-minute ‘aural movie’ that was essentially a soundtrack for psychedelic sex. I intended to release the song in its full form and may still do it some day. The Healers’ album was finished in 2003, and ‘You Are the Magic’, ‘The Last Ride’, ‘Bangin’ On’ and ‘Down on the Corner’ represent what my life sounded like at that time.

  I’d take time out from music by going snowboarding, and escape to Canada or France with Angie and the kids to get energised. These vacations were a lot of fun – precious time that I’d spend with my family and get away from everything. The mountains pr
ovided a different mentality and outlook from the music business. It’s a good thing for the mind as well as the body to get away from the obsessive nature of being an artist, and as anyone who’s ever been on a snowboard will tell you, it takes a mindful approach and plenty of physical attentiveness to go to the top of a mountain and throw yourself down on a piece of plastic, hurtling at top speed.

  The End of a Perfect Day

  WHEN THE PHONE rings at an unusual hour, you get a fleeting sense of dread. I heard about Kirsty MacColl’s death from my friend Matt, who guessed that I might not know and thought I should hear it from a friend before I heard it on the news. I couldn’t believe it. She’d been killed by a powerboat while she was out swimming with her sons? It couldn’t be right, no, no, it wasn’t right. Kirsty had been scuba diving in Mexico with her two boys when a powerboat owned by a rich business tycoon had sailed illegally at high speed into designated safe waters and killed her. The last thing she did was to push the boys out of the way and save their lives, but she couldn’t save herself. I’d spoken with Kirsty not too long before. All I could think about was the upbeat conversation we’d had and how well things were going in her life. She had a partner, James, who she adored, and she’d finally got over the stage fright which had plagued her for years and was loving playing shows and singing onstage. I could tell she felt loved, not only by James but by music fans, and as her mate I was pleased for her because she really deserved it and I knew music fans did love her. Kirsty and I always talked about writing more songs together, and I was proud of the records we’d made. She had been kind to me when she let me live in her flat when I was in The Smiths, and she was a good friend who would call you out if you were being a dick. Her death hit me really hard, and was made all the worse because of how it happened. It’s bad enough to lose someone through illness or even from a tragic accident, but that she was killed by an act that was suspect and should’ve been avoided was a tough thing to accept. She really was a magnetic person, and my eternal memory of her will be of when I was round at her house and she’d entertain us by playing her favourite records while she danced around and sang along. She would lose herself in ‘Surf’s Up’ or ‘See My Baby Jive’, and it was a lovely thing to see her carried away by her passion for melody. It was a privilege to know her, and when she died I felt, like all her friends did, that me and Kirsty just weren’t done.