Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  Over the next few days we were in contact and planned to meet up again. I was genuinely pleased to be back in touch with Morrissey, and The Cribs and I talked about the possibility of me playing some shows at some point with The Smiths. For four days it was a very real prospect. We would have to get someone new on drums, but I thought that if The Smiths really wanted to re-form at that point it could be good and it would make a hell of a lot of people very happy, and with all our experience we might even be better than before. Morrissey and I continued our dialogue and I went to Mexico with The Cribs a few days later, and then suddenly there was radio silence. Our communication ended, and things went back to how they were and how I expect they always will be.

  We Share the Same Skies

  THE CRIBS PLANNED to record our album in Los Angeles with the producer Nick Launay, who we knew from his work with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Nick Cave, but first we went to a stranger’s barn in Oregon City that Gary had found advertised in a local newspaper. The place had the ambience of a serial killer’s hideout mixed with a touch of kidnapper’s lair, and looked like the Amityville Horror had actually taken place there. Every day we’d drive down the deserted country roads into the middle of nowhere and the owner, who was an amateur guitar merchant with a slightly sinister air, would be waiting to drink some beers and have God knows what kind of fun with the fellas. There were tatty old dolls and children’s toys lying around but no children, and our mulleted host was always alone. We were stoic though, and there was an album to be written, so we stayed in the dimly lit barn without ever coming out in order to complete our mission, and also because we were frightened. Being imprisoned in a barn did the trick. We wrote some good songs in record time and then got the hell out of there and didn’t look back.

  We made it to California to make the Ignore the Ignorant album. The sessions should have been plain sailing, but I was out at a friend’s place one day when I got a call from Ryan to say that Ross was in hospital. He’d taken up skateboarding the day before the sessions were to start, went to the steepest hill in LA and threw himself down it. Suffice it to say he was going very fast, and when he jumped off to try to stop he fell and broke his arm. It was bad news for a drummer, and completely out of character for Ross, who is one of the smartest people I know. The day before the sessions, and he was in the hospital with a broken wrist. Somehow he found a way to play the drums, and we recorded the album in the LA sunshine. Ross suffered for his art, and there was pain in every beat.

  Having a good producer and bandmates working as a team meant I could get a bit of time to myself. We were staying in the valley where the roads are straight and long, and my running regime went into overdrive. If I had the time before 11 a.m. I would run five miles in one direction and then come back. Alternatively, if I had some time in the evening, I would get more ambitious and take off towards the mountains in the distance, with the road stretching out ahead of me. I’d be thinking over things and clearing my head or listening to old northern soul or some electro. After seven miles the endorphins would kick in and I’d be running towards the hills. I’d carry on until I reached ten miles and then I’d turn around. On the journey back I’d be tranced out; the music would be going and I’d be in a meditative state, feeling amazing, the sun now low. I’d have run twenty miles when I got back to the studio, and every couple of days I’d do the same. A few weeks went by, and I was so fit I reasoned that if I just went the three extra miles on the way out, then by the time I got back I’d have run twenty-six miles, which is the marathon distance. I went for it one evening, and afterwards I was totally wrecked and spaced out. My mind wasn’t functioning and I had nothing left. I walked into the kitchen in the studio and I saw a strange look on Ross’s face, a look of concern that his new guitarist might expire before the record was finished.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah … I’m … er …’ I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t think.

  Twenty minutes later I came around, having fallen into the deepest sleep I’ve ever slept, even more than when I went out digging with my dad. I had to mentally reset, but aside from aching a lot I was then fine and ready to get back to recording. The day afterwards I felt great. I was on a high from the achievement of doing the marathon distance, so I did it again. This time it was mentally easier as I knew I’d done it before. I got back and reset, but I avoided Ross as I didn’t want to worry him. Two marathons in two days sounded good. I felt OK the next day, so I attempted a third. There’s a theory that the third time of doing something difficult is the hardest, as you’re over the feeling of achievement, and the novelty has worn off, like day three of quitting smoking. My third run was really difficult for those reasons, and probably also because I was wrecked. I didn’t run the next day, but I did one the day after that, and then the day after that. By the time I’d finished I’d done five marathons in a week. I surprised myself and it really felt like an achievement, even more so when I looked back on it, but I was doing so much running at the time that I didn’t make a big deal of it.

  From then on I kept my runs down to ten and fourteen miles, but I would do the marathon distance once every few weeks if I could. I stayed with that regime for a year or so and then fell into a pattern where some months I would do less and sometimes more. Eventually I ended up averaging around thirty-five miles a week, eight miles some days and ten miles others, and now if for some reason I go for more than two days without running at all I really don’t like it.

  In LA around that time I woke up to the news that Michael Jackson had died. I was staying in town, and when I tried to leave the hotel I couldn’t get out of the building because there were so many people on Hollywood Boulevard. A reporter recognised me and stopped me to ask what my favourite track was from Thriller. I was wondering how best to answer the question, so I decided to just be honest. I told him that I didn’t like Thriller. He looked at me like I was mad or joking, or was a very bad man, but I was just being honest. His death was tragic, but of course I didn’t like Thriller, I was in The Smiths.

  The Cribs’ album Ignore the Ignorant was great, and went into the Top 10 in England. ‘We Share the Same Skies’, ‘City of Bugs’ and ‘Cheat on Me’ were all stand-out songs. We toured for eighteen months, playing frenetic shows to very raucous crowds. There were almost as many girls at Cribs shows as boys, and from the moment we took to the stage in a howl of feedback a mass of bodies swarmed in celebration and forgot about school and college for a night. I’d let the fellas go on in front, Ryan bouncing on as everyone went mental, and Ross starting the gig by standing up on his drum stool while crashing his cymbals, and I’d follow Gary, who walks onstage cooler than anyone I’ve ever seen. I’d plug in and go into the riff to ‘We Were Aborted’ and it was full-on, screeching guitar noise and the audience singing along from start to finish. The Cribs play to the max, and by the end of the set Ryan would be laid out on the stage, spinning round, while Gary rammed his bass against his amp and Ross kicked his drums off the riser. I made the loudest and weirdest noises I could to accompany the chaos and it was carnage; everyone was spent.

  I finished touring with The Cribs in 2010 after doing the summer festivals. It was a good time, and the sun even came out at Glastonbury. The last show we did together was at Reading Festival, which was a fitting place to finish as it completed the circle on the stage where I’d made my first official appearance as a member of The Cribs. The thing about all the bands I’ve joined is that we became very close friends. I couldn’t have travelled around, sleeping in bunks and waiting around airports and venues all day, if it hadn’t been that way, and that’s the way it was with The Cribs. It was great to have been part of the band, and it kept me connected to what being in a band is really all about. We’d toured for a couple of years and made an album, and when the band were planning to take some time off I, as usual, started to think about doing something different next.

  The New York Marathon is the most prestigious one to run. Angie had entered me w
ithout telling me, and so I found myself standing on Staten Island at six in the morning in the freezing cold with 50,000 other runners, waiting to cross the starting line. When you begin a marathon, you feel like you’re involved in something really momentous, and it’s a strange thing and an odd proposition to have to tap into a feeling of solitary concentration while being surrounded by so many people all feeling the same way, to say nothing of the twenty-six miles that lie ahead. It was a good day to run, blue skies and bright sunshine. I was glad that I’d done the distance before, and I was thinking about all the bridges and taking in the views. Like most people I love New York, and running freely down the streets through all the boroughs is definitely the best way to see the city. The thing I had to adapt to the most was the crowds. I’d got into running by myself, and the solitary nature of it was one of the main reasons why I liked it. But having everyone cheering and seeing all the smiling faces makes you get into the festivity of it, and it feels like a celebration of the city as well as of the human spirit. The diversity of the tens of thousands of people you’re running with in the New York Marathon is extraordinary. There are people there from all over the world and every kind of life, and as you all struggle through this serious test of endurance together, you realise that you really are a part of the human race. My goal was just to try to enjoy it and finish under four hours, and I did it in three hours fifty-four, which I was OK with. By the end of it I was pretty wiped out, as you might expect, and finishing in Central Park I’d forgotten just how hilly that place is, but it’s these kinds of experiences that make you realise you really can get over your limitations sometimes. I felt like I’d really been through something, and I’d do it again.

  Inception

  ANGIE AND I were at the movies one night in Manchester. We were watching the trailers when Angie leaned over and said, ‘There’s a new Christopher Nolan film coming out that looks really good.’ A couple of trailers went by and then one came on for a new film called Inception, with Leonardo DiCaprio. ‘This is it,’ she said, ‘check it out.’ I watched it and I liked the music and noticed that it was composed by Hans Zimmer. When we got back home from the cinema, we’d only been in the house five minutes when the phone rang.

  ‘Hello, is that Johnny Marr?’ said the voice. ‘This is Hans Zimmer.’

  I’d never met Hans Zimmer before or spoken to him, but he’d got my number and told me that he wanted me to work on a film he was doing. Hans had written the score and had intended to get ‘someone like Johnny Marr’ to play on it, but then realised he should track me down and get me to do it. I asked him what the film was, and he told me it was the new Christopher Nolan film Inception, so I told him about the trailer and he explained that they’d used a different score as it hadn’t been finished. It was a very weird coincidence, too much to get my head around, but our conversation was great and Hans was charming and the idea of doing something with him on the film was too good to miss. I’d first become aware of Hans Zimmer’s work from the film True Romance, and then became a big fan of the soundtrack for The Thin Red Line. I’d just scored a movie myself called The Big Bang starring Antonio Banderas, which had been a good experience, but working on a film with Hans Zimmer was something else.

  I went to Santa Monica to meet with Hans and Christopher Nolan and saw the film for the first time. Inception was a conceptual story about the potential of the human mind and the world of the subconscious, where the main character steals secrets and seeks redemption by breaking into people’s dreams. I thought the film was great: it was something new and clever. It was totally original, and Hans’s score was emotive and beautiful. Hollywood soundtracks don’t usually feature guitar, but I could hear myself on it as soon as I watched the film. Hans and Christopher were very open to me trying out different things, and I was free to approach the movie whichever way I wanted.

  Working on a film is entirely different from writing songs. A song is a subjective endeavour and you’re working to meet your own criteria, whatever they might be. The music for a film has to express some aspect of the emotion that’s happening on the screen, and emotion doesn’t necessarily have to mean ‘emotional’. A scene can have many different emotions – tension, fear, sensuality, joy – and while you’re watching a film and engrossed in whatever’s happening, the music can help to tap into all kinds of things. It can give the story another dimension and more complexity.

  I worked long days and late nights on Inception, immersed in the emotion of the film as I played. It’s a curious thing, but there are some artists who, when you hear their music or see their paintings, have a quality in their work that makes you connect with them and so you assume that you will get on. That happened with me and Hans Zimmer. He was the person I thought he was when I heard his music. We understand each other, and what we do together has become a very important part of my musical life.

  The night of the premiere of Inception I played the score with Hans and the orchestra at a special concert in Hollywood. Performing such dramatic music, with some of the greatest musicians in the world in the orchestra behind me, was one of the high points of my life, and afterwards, when the film was done and Inception was number one at the box office, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t have been able to do it when I was younger. I didn’t have the technical facility or mindset to accomplish it back then. Sometimes there really isn’t any substitute for experience.

  Individual Citizen

  BEING ON THE move with Modest Mouse and The Cribs for five years, I was onstage more than I’d ever been before, and my world turned into the space between me and my amp. I was travelling so much that I had to get into it or I wouldn’t have been able to make it work physically or mentally. When you’re young and first start touring, the constant travel and lifestyle always has an impact, and health, home life and relationships between band members are affected by physical burnout, hangovers and living in a bubble. I adapted to years of touring when I got older by getting as fit as I could, and using the travel and activity to energise me, especially in cities. I got to see more of the places I went to than I had done at any other time in my life, and I had the disposition and mentality to make the most of it.

  On those tours I got a lot of ideas for words and music. Some things went into the records, and other ideas I collected in notebooks. After a while I started to imagine a record inspired by the things I saw in the cities and from observing people and the culture. Musically I was more interested in the punchy riffs that were not unlike what I was doing in the bands I was in before The Smiths, and I kept writing down words and titles with a sense that they would turn into something.

  I started working in the studio at unusual hours, around 5 or 6 a.m. My sleeping habits had always been unconventional, and the previous years of touring had left me in a perpetual but useful state of jet lag. One morning, on the way back from driving Sonny to school, I was thinking about how the British prime minister David Cameron had been saying in the media that he was a fan of The Smiths. I thought it was odd that he had decided to namedrop The Smiths, as anyone who was a fan of the band would know we were against everything he and the Conservative party stood for. I wasn’t having it that he was a fan, but if he wanted to say that he liked The Smiths, what could I do about it?

  My friend who looks after my social media had been coaxing me to use Twitter for quite some time in order to engage more with people and let them know what I was doing. I considered Twitter to be a bit of fun at best, and whenever I used it I was usually as surreal and frivolous as possible. Without thinking too much about it, I picked up my phone and typed, David Cameron, stop saying that you like The Smiths, no you don’t. I forbid you to like it. Satisfied that I’d made my protest, I went to take a nap.

  A couple of hours later, the phone rang and I was woken up by a call from Joe. He didn’t realise that I’d been asleep, and he said in his usual understated manner, ‘What do you want me to do about all the requests I’m getting? Do you want me to follow any of it up?’ I d
idn’t know what he was talking about, and asked him what he meant. ‘The Cameron thing,’ he said, ‘the Twitter business, it’s crazy.’ While I’d been asleep the tweet I’d sent had completely blown up. It was being retweeted by thousands of people and had been picked up by the press all over the world. I got out of bed and saw my phone was full of messages. There were emails from my PR asking me to do interviews with everyone from BBC News to the New York Times. When I’d gone to sleep I had around 10,000 followers, and when I woke up I had 30,000.

  It was totally bemusing, and also very funny. The idea of anyone ‘forbidding’ someone else to like anything was very amusing to me, but I did appreciate the opportunity to pull David Cameron up for making a claim on The Smiths. He had tried to co-opt the band and appear credible by association, and through social media I’d been able to respond to it in my own way. There were a lot of fans who didn’t like the prime minister, and they were genuinely irked that he was aligning himself with the band, and the overall reaction to what I’d done was one of widespread hilarity and glee.

  I rolled along with it for a while, and it was interesting to witness some of the more disappointing aspects of our society that come out on social media, and to see just how aggressive some people love to be. There was the inevitable reaction from some scathing types who were eager to vent and saying things like, Where the hell does Johnny Marr get off forbidding anyone to like his music? And better still: I bet Johnny Marr wouldn’t give back the £10 Mr Cameron spent on buying The Queen Is Dead. I was amazed. Anyone who didn’t see any humour in the situation, regardless of their politics, had to be a bit stupid, and anyone who seriously thought that David Cameron had actually bought The Queen Is Dead had to be very stupid indeed. The only thing to do was to have some fun. Sonny and I would spend the car journey to school every day coming up with things for me to say. We’d be sitting in traffic, composing tweets and falling around in hysterics. I would write something and then say, ‘No … no … I can’t say that, some people will kick off,’ and she’d add something extra that would make it even funnier and then dare me to send it: Dear Lord, please forgive me for making fun of the government. They are really nice and doth be very kind to poor people and students. Amen. Minutes later I’d get a torrent of abuse from humourless morons accusing me of being a rock star socialist heathen, and we’d reply, Oh, and also their fans doth have a brilliant sense of humour. Thank you … Amen.