by Johnny Marr
The David Cameron situation picked up more and more press interest over the following weeks, to the point where Mr Cameron himself was called on to comment during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons. The Labour MP Kerry McCarthy stood up and said that Mr Cameron must be feeling upset about being banned from liking The Smiths, and then added, ‘The Smiths are, of course, the archetypal student band. If he wins tomorrow night’s vote, what songs does he think the students will be listening to? “Miserable Lie”, “I Don’t Owe You Anything” or “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”?’ Mr Cameron took the opportunity to show his true indie cred: ‘I expect that if I turned up I probably wouldn’t get “This Charming Man”.’ Good one. It was all very jolly and I thought it was totally bizarre.
The vote Kerry McCarthy was referring to in her question to the prime minister was the proposed bill to increase the tuition fees for a university education from £3,290 to £9,000, even though there had been a promise not to do so in the run-up to the election. The coalition went back on that promise, and it brought students out all over the country in organised protests. British students had been betrayed by the deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, and their future was in jeopardy as they faced more cuts in education and crippling long-term debt. Fifty thousand demonstrators marched through London, and I was proud to see the students make a stand and call the politicians to account for their broken promises. It’s a rare thing and I thought they were honourable. Things came to a head in Parliament Square on the day that the new laws were passed, when the police came down on the students using a tactic called ‘kettling’, where they corral people into a confined area and hold them against their will for hours in the cold. The students bravely held on to their convictions though.
The day after the Parliament Square protest, I was sent a photograph of a protestor called Ellen Wood who was confronting the police and wearing a Smiths T-shirt. I looked at the photograph and it took me a few seconds to grasp what I was seeing. A young woman in total defiance, facing down a force more powerful than herself but which appeared weaker because of her conviction and belief in what was right. It was incredible. I stared at the photograph again, her stance, the Houses of Parliament. I thought at first it must have been photoshopped, but it was absolutely real. The significance of her wearing the Smiths shirt made quite an impact on me. It occurred to me that, aside from the music we made, that picture could be the most powerful testament to The Smiths’ legacy. I saw the Houses of Parliament behind the girl in the Smiths shirt and I reckon that pop music doesn’t get much more powerful than that. That a group I had started by knocking on a door would end up being that symbolic was staggering. The only other person I knew who might comprehend it the same way was Morrissey, and so I sent him the picture by email. There’d been no contact between us for a long time, but it made sense to me and I thought it was a fitting opportunity to make a friendly gesture. I got a reply within minutes. He hadn’t seen the picture and he was equally as surprised and impressed by it. Our communication continued for a day or so, some pithy remarks went back and forth, and although I felt I’d created a moment of friendship, on some level I felt an air of disaffection and distrust remained between us. It was a shame.
I continued working every day and the songs started to pour out. Very quickly I had what I felt was a good album, although I wasn’t sure exactly how I would present it. I did know that I didn’t want to join someone else’s band, and I thought the music should be energetic, and sound good on the way to work or school. Now that I was based back in England I felt like I was reconnecting with my musical roots and the values of the bands I was into when I was starting out. I wanted two guitars with loud drums, and lyrics that reflected what I saw going on around me – something I came to think of as ‘outside music’. It seemed that a lot of rock music had suddenly become extremely earnest, and too concerned with expressing some inner turmoil deep down inside, some personal malaise we all shared – as if all modern music had to be about conquering adversity as we all stand as one in a field. What was this communal distress that everyone was singing to the skies about? I thought it might be good to do something that was about other things – cities, environment, society, other people.
I had an idea about the way we fetishise technology, and I wrote a song about a man who wins the lottery and swaps his wife for a cardiac machine with which he has a loving relationship. Another song, called ‘Say Demesne’, was inspired by a street in Manchester where teenage prostitutes work; and from a TV show I saw in America about children who’d had surgery in order to help them become famous, I wrote a song called ‘Sun and Moon’. A few weeks into the process my co-producer James Doviak said to me, ‘This is a solo record, right?’ I didn’t know the answer to that. I’d assumed that I would go under the name of The Healers, and it was only when Doviak suggested it that I thought about going under my own name. I lived with the idea for a couple of weeks and it made sense. When the time came to find the other band members, I enlisted Doviak to play second guitar and keyboards, and I invited Iwan Gronow and Jack Mitchell, who I’d produced when they were in Haven, to play bass and drums. Jack and Iwan were not only friends, but the best rhythm section around as far as I was concerned, and it was good that my band wasn’t just me and some hired hands.
The album was recorded in Manchester, New York and Berlin, and the picture on the cover was taken in Berlin by my friend Mat Bancroft when we were walking under a bridge as the sun came up. Mat took out his camera, and said, ‘Do something that shows how you feel about your life.’ I thought about the question and then started walking like I was on a tightrope, trying to keep my balance. Mat took the picture and said, ‘That’s the album cover.’
I called the album The Messenger, but two days before I was due to deliver it to the record company I decided that something was missing. I was happy that it was banging and ‘outside music’, but it felt like it needed something personal about my life. I came up with a tune on the guitar, and I got the band over and we finished the music in a day, which left me one day to write the words and sing it. I listened to the music, and the feeling of it made me think of the day when I decided to leave school and walked around town with Angie, dreaming of being in a band. A day when I imagined my future was there for me, if I was prepared to go for it and do what it took. I was working on that feeling, and then I realised I could sing the story of that day: Left home a mystery, leave school for poetry. I sang it and I asked Sonny to put a background vocal on it, as she’d done on some other songs on the album. It brought a good dimension to the song, and as we were mixing the track Nile came over and suggested a final guitar part for the instrumental section. I thought he should play it, and what he did was perfect. ‘New Town Velocity’ made it on to the album and it became a lot of people’s favourite.
You can have a lot of considerations when you’re making a record: is it as good as the previous one? Should it sound different from the others? Will people like it? And on it goes. It makes sense to have some ideas about what you want to achieve, and different people have different motivations. I went into my solo record very deliberately, with just a few considerations, and I ignored anything else. The first was that I wanted to write songs that I thought would be exciting to play live in concert. This meant that any ideas that might come up in the studio which we couldn’t recreate as a four-piece would be dismissed. I’d got to make records with a lot of different bands over the years, and I’d started to like touring and travelling more and more as time went on. I really appreciated the live experience later on in my career, which was a good thing, and what I did live became more of a priority. I like the physical act of being onstage. It charges you as it drains you, and it’s a powerful thing to be surrounded by the volume of the music. And when it’s all over and I’m sitting on the bus, I shut right up and watch everyone else’s post-gig excitement and feel fairly serene. Something else I wanted for my solo record was that fans wo
uld like it, which may seem very obvious, but you can go into a creative endeavour with the intention of challenging expectations and wanting to break away from what you’re known for, and that’s something that I’ve done a lot. I’ve always believed that it’s the prerogative of any artist to not be typecast and to experiment all they want, but if you’re carrying around an attitude about it when you’re older to the point where you dismiss what you do best, then you’re ignoring your good luck and you need to drop it. I decided that if my songs came out sounding naturally like me and felt right, then that was fine. I would leave it to the audience to decide.
When I finally became a solo artist I had an audience. It’s extremely gratifying to find that a lot of people have stayed with me throughout all the different things I’ve done, and it’s an amazing thing to know that there are people who have grown up with you. Some of my audience were in school when they first heard me in The Smiths, and the music I’ve made over the years has been a soundtrack to their lives. My audience love guitar music, they know what I’m about, and they’re glad that I’m still doing it. There were a lot of young people at my shows too who had come to The Smiths years after we broke up, or who had been introduced to me through The Cribs and Modest Mouse. It all made for a good mix of people.
Once I started playing shows with my band, we got on a serious roll and wanted to be the best live band around. It seemed to me to be a good ambition. Fronting a four-piece new wave band with a guitar was natural and not terribly different from what I’d done in my teens. Singing with Modest Mouse and The Cribs had been good practice, and I knew how I wanted to sound. There’s so much mythology around singing, the most common myth being that unless a song is delivered with the utmost emotion and sincerity then it’s not authentic. I don’t hear any histrionics in The Velvet Underground, or any crooning in the Buzzcocks, and the singers that have inspired me – Ray Davies, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Eric Burdon – don’t go in for any of that stuff, they’re cool.
My gigs were a rousing affair from the off. The album was a hit, and me and my band played all the new stuff as well as my favourites from the past. All the solo songs worked live, which meant that when it came to playing songs by The Smiths or Electronic I felt I’d represented my current direction well enough, and playing the old songs became a celebration and gave the crowd something they knew and loved. I would be asked if playing Smiths songs was a hugely emotional thing for me, or cathartic, but those moments are as much about the audience as they are about me. When I do ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ or ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ I’m giving everyone something they love. It’s about the power of music and what it means in people’s lives. Some people would inevitably compare the way I do Smiths songs to Morrissey, which is as redundant as it is absurd. I can’t imagine what everyone’s reaction would be if I stepped up to the microphone during one of my shows and delivered a Morrissey impression. It wouldn’t even be funny; I have no idea what that would be.
Enjoying touring made me want to go around the world as much as I could, and for a while I didn’t stop. We went to America a few times, and Australia and Japan, as well as around the UK, and then did it again and again. In 2013 I went back to play Glastonbury. I’d been back before with Modest Mouse and The Cribs, but for some reason that year felt like a real return. The weather was glorious and people knew the new songs, and when I played the old ones there was no stage invasion, just a lot of people sitting on their mates’ shoulders, singing along with tears in their eyes. These days I’ve got my own tour bus, although I’d still be OK with showing up in the old white Merc.
Travelling and working so much inspired me, and before I finished touring with The Messenger I was making another album, called Playland. I would write songs on the road and then record them in between dates. In London I was recording in a studio by the river. I had put down an instrumental track that I liked, but didn’t have the words. It was late at night and I went for a walk, and in the maze of concrete and glass I came across some drunk, obnoxious City types gorging on a cash machine, totally oblivious to a young couple sitting freezing on the floor with a blanket around them. After deflecting some of their moronic jibes, I walked away, imagining a scenario where one of them woke up to find they were homeless, having merely dreamt their status. I walked back to the studio with the song ‘Speak Out, Reach Out’ ready to go: Sophisticated minds, you are your country, situated in a line in my city, reach out to get what you want ’cos all you’ve got is all there is. Joe encouraged me to pursue my lyrical preoccupations: he liked how I was inspired by the Beats, and he thought I was really on to something with the new stuff. The title Playland came from a book called Homo Ludens by a Dutch writer named Johan Huizinga, about the role of play and creativity in society, which I married to my memories of the seedy arcade of the same name in Piccadilly Gardens in the seventies. When it came out, Playland became my second Top 10 solo album, and the first single, ‘Easy Money’, turned out to be one of the most successful songs I’ve ever released.
Going solo also meant doing a lot of interviews, and it was interesting for me to see how much I’m considered to be a political artist. It’s partly due to the stance taken by The Smiths, but it may also be due to the fact that there appear to be so few musicians these days who have an interest in voicing political opinions or social concerns. I come from a generation for whom the issues in society and the way the establishment operates is expected to be commented on by musicians. My coming of age in Britain during the Thatcher years, and observing subsequent events, only strengthened my belief that the powerful always act in favour of the privileged, and will forever treat the less fortunate in society as inferior in order to maintain inequality. It’s not about me standing on a soapbox. When you’re identified as having political ideals, there’s an assumption in some places that you’re always looking to criticise, but if you come from a working-class background and find yourself being asked about inequality then you’re bound to have a view. I also consider it to be the prerogative of the artist to make fun of the establishment. Otherwise, what’s the point?
It’s difficult in interviews to avoid repeating yourself when you’re asked the same questions all the time. In my case, the entirely predictable thing that everyone knows is coming is: ‘Will The Smiths ever re-form?’ I’ve had thirty years of head-scratching with that question, and on occasion even had some fun with it. It’s bizarre that an interviewer might actually be thinking that the answer could be: ‘Yes, we’ve just decided to re-form this morning. Now let me tell you about it.’ The other thing about that question is that I have to assume that the person asking it has never once seen any of my interviews, because if they had they’d have seen me already answer it in every way possible. I’ve tried to avoid being all heavy and saying, ‘No way, over my dead body,’ because if I do I know the main headline will be: ‘Marr Says He’d Rather Die Than Re-form Smiths’. And if I choose to say, ‘Well, you never know, I’d like to see the fellas,’ then I know I’ll have a month of ‘Marr Says Smiths Might Re-form’ all over the place, which is worse. What most other artists would do is to have someone inform all journalists, ‘No questions about The Smiths,’ but then it appears that you’ve got some big problem and can’t handle talking about your past. You can’t really win. It used to frustrate me, but it doesn’t any more. You just have to hope that the journalist is a bit clued-up on and cares enough not to ask such a predictable question, but if not, at least nowadays I can say ‘Google it’, which is quite helpful.
Awards are a funny thing. You wait for thirty years for one to show up, and then a load of them come at once, or something like that. I never got an award when I was in The Smiths, but when I put The Messenger and Playland out I was suddenly presented with quite a lot of them. I’d been to ceremonies in the past and was happy to present awards to other musicians, as it was always well deserved and meant a jolly-up with people I rarely got to see. I didn’t ever crave awards
myself or need them for self-worth or validation, because I only get that from what I do. The thing I find interesting about musicians getting awards, as opposed to actors or television people, is that musicians aren’t really supposed to give a fuck about getting them, because rock culture is built on the idea of rebellion. In the television and film industry it’s different, because winning an award is taken as an accolade and a sign of quality and success. When I’m asked in interviews about awards there’s sometimes a trace of cynicism, but all I know is that when I’m standing in a room, applauding Pete Townshend or Ray Davies for getting an award, I’m thinking, ‘I appreciate what you’ve done and I’m happy to be here to honour you,’ so whenever I’ve received awards I take the gesture in the same spirit and I’m genuinely honoured to look out and see a roomful of people who I respect all happy for me and wanting me to know it.