Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  Shortly after Kirsty’s death, I went out to LA and stayed in the Hollywood Hills, where Aldous Huxley lived. I had started to feel unwell and I didn’t know why. I stayed on my own in California for a couple of weeks and read and tried to get better. I would look out at the view of the city at night and think about life in the music business. I’ve always felt lucky to do what I love, and I have done since even before I was in The Smiths. When you follow a path that’s a vocation, without ever stopping to question why, you can sometimes get caught up in other considerations and forget that what you’re doing is about expressing something that’s in you. Some people do it through painting and some people do it through acting, and if you have something that connects with other people then you’re lucky. Through music, the people who follow you have something of you in their life, and in some ways they’re like you, even if they think they’re just a fan. It was a strange time, and I needed to think about what I was doing. I wasn’t getting better and my symptoms were getting worse. I’d developed a constant cough, even though I no longer smoked, and I seemed to be walking around with a slightly high temperature. At first I thought I might shake it off, but then it rocketed into a full-blown fever with freezing-cold sweats. I got to a doctor who recommended that I get home as quickly as possible. On the plane back to England, I was in bad shape. As soon as I got to the doctor in England he told me that I had pleurisy, and if I could I should lie in front of a fire for a few weeks, wrapped in blankets, until I got better – that or go into hospital for a while. I did as he said and sat in front of a fire with a blanket around me every day. It was bad news. I was freezing and shivering and felt like I had a truck parked on top of me. After a couple of weeks I started to get better and then I’d have an occasional relapse for a day or two, which was worrying, but slowly I came out of it and got back to normal.

  One evening I got a phone call from Neil Finn, who I’d met at the Linda McCartney concert in London. He was planning to put on a week of shows in Auckland with his friends and favourite musicians, and wanted to know if I’d fly over to play the concerts with him. I wasn’t sure that I was ready to get on a plane and fly to the other side of the world after recently being sick. I was planning on lying low for a while, but after hearing Neil’s new solo record One Nil and really liking it, I decided to go.

  Angie and I flew out to New Zealand, and on the plane were Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway from Radiohead. It was good to meet them and we compared notes on the songs we needed to learn for the week of shows. It was an intriguing prospect. Neil Finn’s shows have been known to be spontaneous and free-flowing, and he sometimes selects whatever song he feels like from his catalogue. It means that as a musician playing behind him you have to be on your toes and sound like you know what you’re doing, but it’s also stimulating and a lot of fun.

  When we got to Auckland, Neil and his wife Sharon welcomed us into their world and the feeling around their family and all the musicians was positive and warm. In the band with Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway were my friend Sebastian Steinberg from Soul Coughing, a songwriter and singer who I loved called Lisa Germano, and Neil’s long-time friend Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam. The shows were sold out and due to start three days later, and Neil let it slip that we would be playing around twenty-eight songs and also filming the gigs. We rehearsed each day for around twelve hours, and I took advantage of the jet lag by waking up at around 5 a.m. to start learning some of the songs on my own. When the day of the first show came, the whole of Auckland knew about it. People stopped me in the street and shouted from their cars as I walked to the theatre, and it occurred to me just what an amazing thing it is to have people on the other side of the planet know who you are just because of the way you play the guitar.

  The musicians went under the collective name of ‘The Seven Worlds Collide’ and everybody involved had to be on exactly the same wavelength to make it all work. It was ambitious, but Neil’s so good up front that with the right intention and some luck it promised to be a pretty special event. When I walked on for the first night, my head was swimming with titles and key changes for all the music I’d just learned. At the soundcheck, Neil asked me if I’d mind playing a Smiths song. I’d not played a Smiths song since the band split, and I hadn’t intended to. The idea spun me out at first, but I had to make a quick decision and I realised that I had to be OK about the past and that The Smiths are my legacy. When we played ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’, everyone went crazy. It was a nice thing to give that song back to the audience and to give it back to myself, and I have Neil to thank for it.

  After the shows in Auckland we all felt like we’d really gone through something together, and the friendships Angie and I made with the Finn family and the other musicians have been long-lasting. In Ed O’Brien I found another kindred spirit, who as a musician has gone from strength to strength with Radiohead and who remains one of my closest friends.

  I was burned out by the time Zak and I had taken The Healers back around the world again. I needed to find some new inspiration and make some new memories somewhere, and I wanted to change my story. I decided to go to Morocco and see what might happen. I’d always wanted to go to Tangier because writers and artists like Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Christopher Gibbs had lived there, so Angie and I packed up and headed out to an ancient riad on the edge of the desert. When I was out in Morocco, I got into nutrition and started studying metabolism and practising meditation. I wanted to see if the isolation could take me to another place in myself and in my life. I would go up on the roof when the sun came up, watch the Atlas mountains in the distance and shed the effects of the touring and studios. I was determined to change my lifestyle beyond just not drinking, and find a fresh perspective to take me into the future. I’d long since grown out of any interest in drugs, and I wanted to try to rid myself of as much toxicity as possible. I made every effort to disengage with any media as much as I could, to see what effect if any it might have on my life. Everyone seemed to be hooked on the world news. I avoided all newspapers and any television, and it was interesting to discover that I didn’t feel uninformed about anything that I thought was important. It was liberating, and I figured that anything I really needed to know I would get to hear about eventually.

  One evening, I was sitting on the roof looking out at the dusty red road that stretched out towards the mountains and it seemed like a good place to run. I didn’t think about it too much, I just went out and started running and it felt natural. I was enjoying the novelty of it, and I told myself that I could stop any time, and pretty soon I forgot it was supposed to be difficult. I kept looking ahead and soon I fell into a rhythm, just noticing my breathing and the sound of my feet hitting the floor. I’ve been hearing music in my head for as long as I can remember, and noticing the stillness and quiet of my surroundings with the silhouettes of the palm trees scattered around felt good with every step. When I got back I made a pact with myself to go again the next day. They say that it takes eight times for something to become a habit and eight weeks to become a lifestyle. I started running every day and it became a habit, then it became a lifestyle that, no matter how hard it might get now and then, I have never regretted.

  When I got back from Morocco things had changed and my regime gave me a new kind of idea about who I could be. I liked not drinking, and not drinking made getting healthy a lot easier, if only for the fact I no longer had to deal with hangovers. People think that if you get into fitness you have to deprive yourself of all the things you like, but if you’re super-fit you can eat whatever you want and drink as much as you like and stay up late. You just tend to not want to do those things because you’re feeling too good to bother with them. As for any idea that getting healthy means that you automatically become conservative or ‘straight’, that’s complete nonsense. If anything, getting super-fit gave me more attitude and sped me right up.

  Portland

  IN 2005, JOE came over to see me because he’d had an unexpected
enquiry from the American band Modest Mouse, who wanted to know if I’d be interested in joining them. It was a strange thing: I’d been given a lot of music on The Healers’ tour by a friend who thought I’d like the bands on the current American scene, and I’d been listening exclusively to Lilys and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and particularly Broken Social Scene and Modest Mouse. The new American bands gave me a renewed enthusiasm for current guitar music and provided a perfect antidote to the UK’s post-Britpop scene, which aside from a couple of bands I considered to be something of a dead-end, one-way street.

  I was intrigued by Modest Mouse. When I hear something for the first time, I’m usually able to identity the influences in it, but with Modest Mouse I couldn’t put my finger on what it was they were doing, I just liked it. It seemed to oscillate between some kind of bleak poetic emotion from an American landscape one minute, to tough confrontation and then the absurdity of life the next. I loved the imagery in the words and the way it was built on guitars. It could only have come from America, which at the time sounded like a good thing to me.

  I got a call from the band’s leader and frontman, Isaac Brock. We had a long discussion and he invited me over to Portland, Oregon, to join the band straight away. It was an unusual conversation. Isaac was a total stranger, calling me out of the blue, but having heard his music I was curious about him as a musician. He was engaging and he had a strong vision for what he wanted to do. We agreed to talk again, and after giving it some thought I proposed that we get together for a writing period in Portland to see how it turned out.

  I looked forward to visiting Portland. It was somewhere I’d liked when I’d been on tour, and I’d never had enough time to really see it. I was aware of its reputation as one of the more liberal-minded American cities, and the singer-songwriter Elliott Smith had told me a lot about it when I’d met him a few years before, as he was living there at the time. I thought playing with Modest Mouse could be good, but I purposefully avoided absorbing myself in their music from then on, as I wanted to bring my own sound and sensibility to it. It was an interesting prospect and might be an adventure, but before I could go I had something else to do.

  Patti Smith had invited me to play at the Meltdown Festival she was curating in London. She’d been an inspiration since the night I stood at the front of the stage at the Apollo as a fourteen-year-old boy. I got to the Royal Festival Hall with my band and I was introduced to Roy Harper, who was also on the bill. I was a fan of Roy’s music and I was pleased to meet him, then I discovered Neil Finn was in London to play, so I invited him on stage to do a couple of songs. During the soundcheck, Patti’s guitar player and band leader Lenny Kaye suggested that he and Patti and Roy join me in my encore. Patti came to the stage to say hello, and I thanked her for filling up my mind with Radio Ethiopia in the mornings before I went to school and I told her how she’d been a connection between me and Morrissey when I formed The Smiths. She was happy to hear about it and told me she was pleased how things had turned out, and when it came to the encore I played a Strawbs song called ‘Lay Down’, with Patti Smith singing on my mic on one side of me and Roy Harper singing on the other, and I wondered what I’d done for things to have gone so right.

  When I went out to Portland, I didn’t have any idea about how things were going to go with Modest Mouse. To some people it could seem like eccentric behaviour to just up sticks and travel 4,000 miles, seemingly on a whim, to go and play with a band I’d never met before, just as I was about to record my own album, but to me I was doing what I’d done since being a kid, and following a musical instinct. In the back of my mind I was prepared for it to not work out, but something told me that if it did work then it could be really great. I knew a few people who had had some dealings with the band, and the words that kept coming up were brilliance and unpredictable, which seemed OK to me, and made the prospect all the more intriguing.

  I checked into the hotel and unpacked my bags and Isaac came over to take me to his house so that we could start writing straight away. We were talking on the journey from the hotel, and it turned out that the things I’d done that he liked most were the songs with Talking Heads. It was unusual for me to be better known for something I’d done after The Smiths, and I was excited about what we might do together.

  The two of us set up facing each other, and I noticed that Isaac played full volume through a Fender Super Six amp, which is three times the size of a usual amp and was pointing right at me. I knew that my regular Fender Deluxe would never compete, so I plugged into one of his spare Super Sixes so we were even. As I did, I spotted a black Fender Jaguar guitar on a stand, gathering dust. I liked the look of it and I asked Isaac if he’d mind me using it. A jug of wine then appeared next to Isaac, and the two of us switched on and started playing, full blast and full assault.

  Twenty minutes later we were improvising manically and blasting riffs at each other. I was starting to feel woozy as the journey and jet lag came down on me, and things began to get surreal. Isaac put on a 1940s flying cap and goggles, and halfway through playing he stopped and came three inches up to my face and asked, ‘Got any riffs?’ I liked his directness, no messing about, and I did have a riff. It was something I’d been playing in Morocco that was funky and jerky, and I started to play it. Something about playing the Fender Jaguar made the riff lift off, and Isaac grabbed a mic and started singing words from straight out of the air – ‘Well it should’ve been, could’ve been, worse than you would ever know, the dashboard melted but we still had the radio’ and then reeled off a stream of verses about a car tearing down a mountain with bits falling off but it was all OK because we still had the radio. Verses went by as he sang a complete song in his flying cap and his goggles. I liked it. I’d never seen anyone reel off verse after verse like this before: ‘The windshield was broken but I like the fresh air you know?’ I liked playing the Fender Jag too, it felt like the guitar I had been looking for all my life, and we developed the song until the two of us were a bit crazy with volume, wine and jet lag.

  ‘Have you got any more riffs?’ asked Isaac, and as it turned out I did, and we both dived into it with heedless enthusiasm. Another lyric appeared: ‘We’ve got everything, we’ve got everything, we crashed in like waves into the stars.’ It was 3 a.m. and I’d been going for about twenty-eight hours. ‘We’ve Got Everything’ sounded like another good song to me, and we were joined by a member of Modest Mouse called Tom Peloso, who started playing a trumpet and a synth.

  Back at the hotel, I was awake after a couple of hours, wondering where I was. As I came round I realised that I may have written a couple of really good songs for Modest Mouse with someone who wasn’t a stranger to me any more. We arranged to get together early the next day, by which time I was feeling like it was time for bed, and we listened to what we’d done the night before. It appeared that the Portland experiment might work out.

  The plan for the next few days was that the other members of Modest Mouse were going to arrive one by one, and we would eventually all be playing together to work on the new songs.

  Tom Peloso, who was the band’s multi-instrumentalist, was already with us, and Joe Plummer was the first of the two drummers to arrive, followed by Eric Judy and Jeremiah Green, the bass player and drummer who had formed the band with Isaac in 1992. It’s a slightly odd situation arriving with your guitar into an existing group of tight-knit people. The first thing you want to do is assure everyone that you’re all right and don’t think you’re a big shot. All the guys in Modest Mouse were intuitive and smart and very welcoming, and they liked the songs that Isaac and I had already started writing. Since I was young I’d usually avoided standing in a room and hoping that songs might happen just by simply jamming. I learned that it can often lead to hours of aimless meandering, and it had actually been a motivation for me to learn how to write songs in the first place. With Modest Mouse the atmosphere around everyone was easy-going but still creative enough to be pulling music from out of the ether, which is what star
ted to happen.