by Johnny Marr
We travelled and travelled, and the band’s history and status in America meant that we went to a lot of places that I’d never been before. My lifestyle on the road became more ascetic. I went completely vegan, which I’d been considering for a long time, and I upped my running distance to ten miles and would time my runs so that I’d finish just before showtime and I’d be vibrating as I walked onstage. The shows were so much fun as I felt so good, and I couldn’t imagine living life any other way. When we were in Canada, I ran in the snow along the road towards the traffic as the cars were making their way to the venue, and wherever we were and whatever conditions we were in, I’d get out and do my routine, even if I was completely stuck and it meant doing laps around an arena in Arizona.
The band would go back to Portland periodically after being away for a few weeks. It didn’t make much sense for me to be going back and forth to England, and eventually Angie and I bought a house and the family came out to stay whenever I got back into town. One Sunday, I was in Portland and was invited to a party where I was introduced to a British guy who, it turned out, was Gary Jarman from The Cribs. Before I’d left England there were two bands that I’d really liked: one was Franz Ferdinand and the other was The Cribs, who I first heard when ‘Hey Scenesters’ came bursting from the car radio one night and nearly stopped me in my tracks. Gary and I saw quite a lot of each other in Portland. We were the only English musicians in town, and we’d get together when we were both back in between Modest Mouse and Cribs tours.
I started to miss England, and I was missing my family and Joe. British music culture was an undeniable part of my DNA, and being away for a few years had made me think about my influences and the sound and attitude of the bands that I’d grown up with. My and Gary Jarman’s friendship was a connection to the UK and to home for us both, and it was good to find someone who had similar interests. I went back to the UK with Modest Mouse on tour, and the shows were all sold out. We played Glastonbury and the Royal Albert Hall, and it was nice to be back.
The morning of the Manchester show, I was in a hotel and was woken up by a phone call from Angie to say that Isaac was in the hospital. He’d been attacked the night before in Nottingham after the rest of us had left town, and had been hit in the face with a bottle. It was a serious situation. He’d had to have his face stitched up at three in the morning, but he was on his way with the band’s legendary mascot and spiritual leader, Tim Loftus, to make the show because he didn’t want me to miss playing Manchester. When he met up with the rest of us, his face was so cut up I couldn’t believe he’d be able to play, but we did the show and Isaac got an excuse to legitimately wear an eyepatch onstage. Being back in Manchester for a couple of days gave me an opportunity to introduce everyone to Joe Moss and show the band around my home town. One day I was with Joe Plummer, and I pointed out Shelley Rohde’s house, where I’d lived when I put The Smiths together and where Morrissey and I wrote our early songs. It was the first time that I’d remembered that the road was called Portland Drive. Later on, when we got into town and I showed Joe where The Smiths had rehearsed in Joe Moss’s Crazy Face offices and where we first played ‘Hand in Glove’, I noticed that we were on Portland Street.
The Pacific Northwest coast of America and touring with Modest Mouse was my full-time existence for four years, and it brought a huge amount of changes in my life. My kids had grown up with me being in an American band, and in Portland we had found a new home town. I’d cultivated a completely new lifestyle while travelling and playing with Modest Mouse and it had been the best time of my life. I’d had a number one album in America, had started building my own guitar, and had even sung ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ to my wife on Elvis’s porch. It was all good, and I felt like it was time again to write some songs and make a new record.
Modest Mouse booked another round of touring in Japan and Australia, and then America again, this time with REM. I was tour-fried and I needed to go back to England, and with no recording for the band on the horizon I felt like the next tour would probably have to be my swansong with Modest Mouse, for a while at least. There was no bad feeling, everybody understood, and me and the band felt that we could easily work together again in the future. We went out on the road with REM, and at one show the stadium got struck by a bolt of lightning during our set. I saw it come from the sky and hit the venue, and the band all stopped for a few seconds as the audience started fleeing, then we continued with the song very nervously until we were called off the stage by officials.
Peter Buck from REM and I were already friendly, having hung out together in Portland. I saw him holding his set list one day, and I grabbed a pen and wrote ‘Fall on Me’ on it because it was my favourite REM song. The band added it to their set, and they asked me to play it with them every night in the encore. After the shows, depending on the time difference, I’d stay up and call Joe. I’d be out on my own with the trucks behind the venue, and we’d catch up with everything and talk about all sorts as always.
During the tour, the Fender guitar company, who’d heard that I was redesigning my Jaguar, approached me to make my own signature guitar. I could design a guitar to my own exact specifications, which they would then add to their range and sell in guitar stores around the world. It’s a prestigious thing to have a guitar named after you, and a real honour to follow in the footsteps of people like Les Paul and Chet Atkins, who were the pioneers of the modern electric guitar. I’d been playing a Fender Jag since I’d joined Modest Mouse: it was perfect for my style and it sounded like me. But as much as I loved them, there were a number of things about the Jaguar that I knew I could improve, and I started to think about how to make it perfect. I tried out a lot of old Jags, testing them and comparing them in different environments to get the best out of them that I could. I was experimenting in rehearsals and soundchecks at first, but then I got brave and started testing them during concerts, as there’s nothing quite like standing in front of several thousand people to help you make your mind up about something quick. The Modest Mouse and REM tour got to New York, and we were playing Madison Square Garden. I’d borrowed an old 1960s Jag to test it out, and I was supposed to make sure it was working before the show but I’d forgotten to do it. Midway through the set, I plugged it in and went to kick off a song, I started strumming and there was … nothing … just complete … silence. The band were all looking round at me, waiting to start the song, and my roadie was frantically running around the stage and cursing me for not checking the guitar before the show. I picked up my working one and I got through the rest of the gig, but it taught me to always make sure that an old guitar is actually working before playing it at Madison Square Garden. Modest Mouse had booked a second show in Brooklyn later that same night. After our set I played with REM and then jumped in a cab to catch up with Modest Mouse and get onstage in Williamsburg. We started the Modest Mouse show at around three thirty in the morning, and when the night was over I walked out on to the sidewalk at seven o’clock, dazed but feeling good, having played three times in one night in New York.
The New Fellas
BACK IN LONDON I was being given a lifetime achievement award by Q Magazine at the Grosvenor Hotel when a striking indie rock star bounded up to me and said in a Yorkshire accent, ‘Hey Johnny, I’m Gary’s brother Ryan, from The Cribs. We should do a single together,’ before he bounded off in another direction. I liked the idea of it – a 7-inch EP of explosive guitar music. I got it in my mind and I thought we should do it.
I had some ideas for songs: I was being pulled back to the clang of two guitars and the adrenaline of punk, and I was picking up the sense of disaffection that informs the best UK music. I wanted to kick up some noise and I had some good riffs, and then The Cribs asked me to join.
I first played with The Cribs in February 2008 at Glasgow Barrowlands, and it was not unlike when The Smiths played there in 1985. I sidestepped every pint of beer that came towards my guitar, and swerved every shoe that rocketed past my ear. The
ir gigs were a high-energy experience and an exuberant communal celebration. It was loud and exciting, and I had to concentrate to avoid getting swept away by the cyclone that was howling around me. To me The Cribs played street UK guitar music but with the attitude of an American band. They had grown up devouring the US alternative culture in the nineties that had been led by bands like Sonic Youth and Nirvana, which meant that The Cribs were different from their peers, who didn’t have quite the same anti-corporate ideology, nor the same force.
Musically I fitted in by weaving my guitar playing with Ryan in much the same way as I did when I played with Isaac, and I tried to make it an agenda for us to have a very deliberate two-guitar assault. When I first met Ryan, he was a prominent figure in the music press, and seemed to them to epitomise the kind of unpredictable character who could throw himself off something dangerous any minute. It would have been easy for him to accept the mantle of the new Mr Notorious, but he was too serious and too multifaceted a person to go for it. The band cared too much to fall for a short-term pay-off and had no taste for the mainstream. They had their sights set on a legacy of impassioned shows and making records that meant something to fans.
When we came to write songs, I suggested that we go to a dingy practice room in a big old mill on the outskirts of Manchester, because I thought what we were doing needed to be able to work in that environment first, and then once we knew that it was working we could take it back to my more comfortable studio. It might have puzzled the band that someone with a professional studio would choose to go to a run-down room somewhere, but they understood the logic of it and trusted that I knew what I was talking about. The key moment for me and The Cribs came when we set up our gear to play. It’s a simple thing, but to me that process is both ritualistic and completely natural, as if you’re born to do it, and if you see that in someone else you know you’re made of the same stuff. The Cribs set up their gear the same as I did, and when we were ready to go I said, ‘I’ve got this one,’ and played a stinging riff that we all fell in with immediately. It sounded good, and within forty minutes we had our first song. The next few days we all threw in ideas, and by the end of the week we had a bunch of good songs, which perhaps appropriately enough sounded just like The Cribs only with me playing. The chemistry worked, and because of that we decided to keep playing together. I’d thought that the idea of being in a gang was behind me, but there are some things that you can’t change. I guess it just depends on meeting the right gang.
I was asked a lot about being in a band with three brothers, as if plates were being thrown around backstage and guitars were always being smashed over people’s heads, but there was none of that. What it really means is that they have a bond onstage and off, and for them this is a strength. It was definitely unusual to be joining a band that’s a family, but it turned out that being in the Jarman family was a special privilege, and my role was more like the half-brother who’d come back from the indie wars. We all stayed at my place in Manchester when we were first recording, and both our families became very close. My kids had spent their teenage years around Modest Mouse and The Cribs, and they couldn’t have been happier about it. We were all in it together: the Marrs and the Jarmans, and a Rhodesian ridgeback called Riff.
The Smiths business was ticking over in the background, on and off and now and then. The band’s catalogue had been signed to Warners by Morrissey and me in 1992, when we were advised to rescue it from Rough Trade, who were on the brink of bankruptcy. Rough Trade owed a lot of money, but they had managed to hang on to their business by selling Smiths records and then using the money they made to pay off debts before paying the band, so none of the band received any royalties for a long time. With very few options and no time to do anything else, Morrissey and I managed to make a hurried deal with Warners to put The Smiths’ records out and to stop the catalogue falling into the hands of the receivers. It wasn’t the greatest deal in the world, but at least it got the music to people we already knew.
The first thing Warners did when they acquired The Smiths’ catalogue was to reissue all the albums on CD, which meant that they remastered them. Mastering is the last stage of making a record, whereby all the songs are put in the correct order with the required length of silence in between them. The volume of each song is checked and adjusted so everything is at the same level and it all hangs together and hopefully will sound perfect.
I always attended the mastering process for The Smiths’ records. I regarded it as a professional obligation as a producer, and I wasn’t about to let someone mess around with the sound of the records after I’d put so much work into making them. There’s a lot you can do in the mastering process to make a record sound better if needs be. You can add high-end equalisation to make it sparkle more, or you can add or reduce bass levels to make it more or less weighty. Unfortunately for The Smiths, I wasn’t consulted when the catalogue was remastered for the CDs in the nineties. The albums all came out after some mastering engineer had randomly made all kinds of adjustments, which meant they sounded nothing like they did to me when I made them. It was a huge source of frustration and disappointment to see the albums released when I knew that they sounded wrong, and I was determined to put it right. Warners and I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a solution, which was further complicated by the continued legal battles between Morrissey and Mike Joyce. After a lot of struggle, I reached an agreement with Morrissey and Warners. I would take The Smiths’ master tapes and master all the records again with a top mastering engineer so that our catalogue would be as it should be, once and for all. It would be a long process and a massive undertaking, but I believed it was worth it.
Going through The Smiths’ album catalogue and working on it song by song was a real labour of love. I started with ‘Hand in Glove’ and went chronologically to the end. I knew every guitar part, bass note and cymbal crash, and when I analysed the records I was struck by how good the band were as an ensemble and just how young we all were when we were together. My job was to be as technical as possible in restoring the records to exactly how they sounded in the studio, but I was able to recall the exact intention and emotion that went into every note and word when each song was originally made. Working on the records again made me proud of the band, and I texted Morrissey and Andy and said, You can really hear the love in it. It was good to get a nice reply from both of them.
The negotiations with Warners meant that Morrissey and I were in a rare period of communication. One day in September 2008 we contacted each other, and as we were only a couple of miles away in south Manchester we arranged to meet up in a pub nearby. I was happy to see my ex-songwriting partner. It had been ten years or more since we’d last seen each other. There was a lot to talk about. I was interested in what he was doing, and we compared our experiences of living in America. Both of us had been touring a lot over the previous few years, and we talked about playing shows and the places on our travels, things we liked and things we didn’t like so much. It was good. We caught up with personal news and family and reminisced a bit, and we talked about how the list I’d made for the band on the day we first got together at Shelley’s had come true.
The orange juice went down and the beer went down, and our conversation turned to deeper things. Morrissey started to talk about how, with so much water under the bridge, our relationship had become owned by the outside world, and usually in a negative way. We had been defined by each other in most areas of our professional life. I appreciated him mentioning it, as it was true. The landlord couldn’t believe what he was witnessing, as the drinks kept coming and we sat talking for hours in his quiet pub. We talked, as we always did, about the records we loved, and eventually our conversation turned to ‘that subject’. There had been rumours for years in the press that The Smiths were about to re-form, and they were always untrue. I had never pursued any offer for the band to re-form, and I had never wanted to. We talked about the most recent rumours and where they might have come from, and i
t was interesting that the subject appeared to be up for discussion. It was definitely nice to be together, and then suddenly we were talking about the possibility of the band re-forming, and in that moment it seemed that with the right intention it could actually be done and might even be great. I would still work with The Cribs on our album, and I made it clear that I’d do that first, and Morrissey also had an album due out. We hung out for a while longer, and after even more orange juice and even more beer we hugged and said our goodbyes.