by Johnny Marr
The ultimate awards ceremony is the Oscars. Inception was nominated for four, and I was pleased for everyone who was involved in the movie. I’d been warned that the Oscars would be excruciatingly boring, but I found it very entertaining. The thing about the red carpet is that you’re expected to look into every camera and talk into every microphone that’s stuck in your face about films you’ve not seen, to people who are not listening, and who suddenly vanish as soon as someone more famous arrives, which is every minute. The other thing about the red carpet is it’s very, very long, so I decided that I would pass the time by critiquing every outfit that I saw. It was good – fabulous, actually – those gowns really are impressive. Scarlett Johansson was the winner, in a maroon lace Dolce & Gabbana.
In 2007 I was made a professor of popular music by Salford University, which was something that I didn’t see coming, and it meant I had to give an inaugural lecture. I called the lecture ‘Always from the Outside: Mavericks, Innovators and Building Your Own Ark’, and it was about infiltrating the music industry, and examined the idea that some people have that the music business is a kind of specific physical place furnished with thick carpets and sexy lighting where dreams automatically come true, and that you need a specially appointed insider to gain you admittance. I put forward the idea that almost all innovations in pop culture have been facilitated by outsiders with no previous experience but who possessed a vision and maverick spirit, people like Brian Epstein, Andrew Oldham, Malcom McLaren, Joe Moss and Rob Gretton, who were the entry point or portal to a successful career for so many important bands. Giving a lecture was another leap into the unknown, but people seemed to like it, and although it was a lot of work, it was worth it. A couple of years later I received a Doctorate of Arts by Salford University, which means that I’m both a doctor and a professor, although no one’s ever called me either yet. I was also made an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society by Trinity College Dublin, which I thought was great as I’m in such company as William Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Helen Mirren.
All of these things are amazing for someone who’s known for playing the guitar, and the most amazing thing of all was to be invited to an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama as an official friend of Tibet, which came about after I had helped to arrange an event for the Dalai Lama a couple of years before. His associates had heard that I’d given my support to the Freedom for Tibet movement, and were aware that I would put their flags over my amps. I was shown into a room with Angie and a few other people, and the Dalai Lama thanked us for our support. It was fairly humbling and quite a surreal experience, and he didn’t ask me if The Smiths were going to re-form, which I thought was very cool.
One of the privileges of having your own band is that you get to invite your favourite people to join you onstage. I’ve been invited myself to be a guest so many times by other musicians, so it’s a nice thing for me to be able to return the compliment, and a nice thing for the audiences too. Ronnie Wood, who I always love to play with, my friend Kevin Drew from Broken Social Scene, Neil Finn, Robyn Hitchcock, Billy Duffy and Noel Gallagher have all got up to play encores with me. Bernard Sumner and I re-formed Electronic for a night when he joined me for ‘Getting Away with It’, and it became something of a tradition that whenever I played in New York Andy Rourke would come onstage and play a couple of Smiths songs. It’s always a special thing for us. There’s something that happens when we play together that works exactly the same as it did in when we were in The Smiths.
My son Nile has played with me onstage and on record. He and Sonny grew up around artists and guitars, and he taught himself to play when he was young. He started out doing his own solo shows, and spent his teenage years playing wherever he could and learning to be a songwriter. He put his first band together after we moved to Portland, and got involved in the Pacific Northwest scene before starting to release records with his band, Man Made. He works constantly and lives between Manchester and Portland, but spends most of his time travelling with his band in their van. Sonny sang backing vocals on songs like ‘European Me’, ‘Dynamo’, ‘Upstarts’ and ‘Easy Money’. She lives in London where she works in publishing and sometimes plays a Dakota red Fender Mustang guitar. My kids are often asked about what it was like growing up around The Smiths, but they were born a long time after the band had ended. They learned about The Smiths from the outside world. I didn’t talk to them about it much or go in for the old war stories, and they weren’t asking to hear them. We were all busy with whatever we were involved in at the time, and kids never live in the past. Nile and Sonny grew up around Modest Mouse and The Cribs, and they think of those bands as family. They know whatever they want to know about The Smiths; they’re of a different generation, and they have their own tastes and opinions on it all.
Too Late to Stop Now
WHEN I GOT to Manchester on the Playland tour, I played at the Apollo. It had been a dream of Joe’s that I should play there, as he knew all about my history with the place as a boy and because we’d never done it with The Smiths. There was another personal reason why Joe wanted to get to the Apollo. He had been diagnosed with cancer, and he knew he didn’t have a lot of time. We saw each other and talked a lot when we got the news. He was adamant that the tour went ahead, and he was immensely proud of the way things had turned out for me. He saw the Apollo show as my homecoming, and he told me that he would be there even if it meant I had to bring him in an urn.
The day of the show, Joe married his long-term partner Sarah, and we all got off the tour bus in the morning and went to the ceremony. It was a great day, and later, when it was time to play, I walked out at the Apollo for the triumphant homecoming show that Joe had wanted, as he stood on the side of the stage and beamed with pride. It was perfect, he got to see it and he loved it, and at the end of the night the whole of the Apollo sang ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ to him and Sarah. As I walked off the stage I went over to him and he hugged me and said, ‘Well done, Johnny … not bad for a kid with a guitar.’ I remembered something he used to say when we first started out, and I told him, ‘Too late to stop now, Joe. Too late to stop now.’
Joe battled his illness right up to the last night of the Playland tour. He hung on until the very last show was over. He continued to be my manager and was looking after me right up until he died. Joe’s death left a hole in my life that will never be filled. He was more than a manager, he was my mate, and he had such a specific way of doing everything that to know him meant to know a philosophy, and a philosophy doesn’t die.
‘Not bad for a kid with a guitar’: I thought about that phrase a lot. When I met Joe and introduced myself as a ‘frustrated musician’, it was because I was. When you’re young and starting out, the thing you crave most is to be heard, and to get the chance to do what you love. Fame and money and status are dreams, but being heard is what you need. You need it because you’ve worked at trying to get good enough and you have to know if you’re right. If you get to be heard and find out that you’re right, you can communicate your ideas and visions about everything to people who you hope will like it, people like you, and that is being an artist. I grew up looking for a way to make the world more exciting and more comprehensible, and I was fortunate enough to find a way to do it with something I loved. It didn’t mean that life became instantly easy or any less incomprehensible, sometimes it made things harder, but it gave me a direction and a passion and that’s all you need.
There was a time in my career when I was referred to as ‘a journeyman’ or ‘gun for hire’, as if joining bands, playing the guitar on people’s records and collaborating with my favourite artists was anything other than totally great. My choices have always made sense to me. I followed a mission that I was lucky enough to be given as a kid, and my nature always stayed the same. I was first known for being in a very big band, and it was everything I’d dreamed and more. I worked hard to put it together and then make it a success with the others, and as great as
we were, The Smiths could only ever have lasted as long as we did because of the differences in my and Morrissey’s personalities. I understand the appeal and security of staying with the same group for forty years, but I couldn’t ever imagine doing it myself. It was never in my stars to be doing the same thing for ever. I’m good at running groups and I’ve done it since being a kid, but I was always my own entity and I always needed to feel free. I wanted to keep getting better and learn about all the different ways of creating guitar music, and the only way I knew how to do it was to take things as far as I could in whatever situation I was in, and then move on. I’ve had the best job in the world. I’ve joined my favourite bands with my favourite people, and my heroes became my friends. I love my work and I’ve always appreciated the good luck that’s come with it.
I’ve never found out why I was so attracted to the guitar as a kid and why it had to accompany me through life. Being a guitar player has been my identity, to the outside world and to myself. It’s been that way since I saw my first one in a shop window as a five-year-old boy, and I’ve never known life any other way since that moment.
Building my own signature guitar was a total obsession. Once I had a prototype I used it in every situation I could think of to make it as versatile as possible. I gigged it and gigged it while constantly making improvements, and after playing hundreds of shows with it I brought it into the studio, and then took it to another level with orchestras on film soundtracks. By the time I’d finished it, my signature Jaguar had evolved into what I consider to be perfection, and it was only then that I gave it to Fender to remake it faithfully so that every one with my name on is identical to mine.
When it finally became available, the Fender Johnny Marr Jaguar received the award for Best International Instrument, and that felt like a real achievement.
I can’t say what it is that’s happened in my life that I’m most proud of: the bands I’ve been in, finding the love of my life, my kids, the songs, or having a flower named after me. For a Mancunian-Irish kid with a guitar, it’s all’s been pretty good. I may be most proud of the fact that I’m still doing what I’ve always done, and I hope I always will. It’s something to be proud of, that – and having my own guitar named after me, and painted white, the same as the one I got at Emily’s.
Acknowledgements
WRITING THIS BOOK has been an interesting and enjoyable experience and I’m glad to have done it. I’d like to thank everyone at Century for making it happen and Susan Sandon for her time and expertise in helping to guide the poetic spirit. Thanks are also due to Carrie Thornton and Graham Sim.
Many thanks to Dave Cronen for management and to Derek Fraser, Andy Booth and Pat Savage for all the help day in, day out, and to Mat Bancroft, Jane Arthy and Andy Prevezer and all at Tibor Jones for the great work and support.
Special thanks to my family and to Bill and Mary Brown for all the love and understanding, and especially to Nile and Sonny for being such great people who make me proud; and to the friends who’ve been with me for so long and who’ve played an important part in my story: Jon Savage, Fiona Skinner, John and Kathy Featherstone, Neil and Sharon, Andy Rourke, Zak, Liz Bonney and Lee Spencer, Christine Biller, Leslee Larson, David Palmer, James Hood, Guy Pratt and Mark Mahoney. You know I love you. And thanks to my bandmates – James, Jack and Iwan – for being the best.
I’d like to take this opportunity to acknowledge all the guitar techs and road crews who’ve worked with me over the years, especially Bill Puplett for taking such great care of my guitars and for doing such a wonderful job in helping me build my signature Jag.
Finally, I’d like to say thank you to all the people who have bought the records and come to the shows, and who have been with me through all the twists and turns. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.
1. 19 Brierley Avenue, Ardwick. ‘I was aware that I came from the inner city.’
2. With my mum and dad. Ardwick, 1967.
3. Some of The Tribe, sometime in the sixties. My mum and dad second left.
4. My mum and dad out on the town.
5. Me and Claire just after I got my first guitar. ‘My sister was sweet but you didn’t mess with her.’
6. Art room at St Augustine’s, 1977. ‘Andy Rourke was the only other kid in my year who didn’t have a regulation haircut.’
7. Claire just back from school. She’s smiling because it’s Friday, which means dancing.
8. Taken off from school again, aged fourteen. Just after the Patti Smith gig, 1978.
9. With my brother Ian in 1979, just after I joined Sister Ray.
10. Back at my parents’ working out a new way to write.
11. Billy Duffy in his pink punk shirt that he left in the back of the amp for me.
12. Just after Angie and I first met. ‘Angie was up for an adventure.’
13. Working in X-Clothes. ‘What is everybody looking at?’
14. Off to see Iggy.
15. With Angie one night at the Ritz, Manchester, 1980. ‘She was so beautiful and so totally cool.’
16. A few days after I knocked on Morrissey’s door. ‘I was wearing baggy 1950s Levis with bike boots.’
17. Si Wolstencroft. ‘Morrissey and I had thought we’d found our drummer. He was good and he looked the part.’
18. At Drone Studios on day one of The Smiths’ official line-up playing together. ‘It’s a profound irony that the very first thing The Smiths did when they got together was to start laughing uncontrollably.’
19. ‘We had the same obsession and dedication.’
20. Joe Moss totally believed in me and the band.
21. The first famous Smiths image. In the black leather coat I’d got when I worked at Ivor’s and the Ray-Bans I got from X-Clothes.
22. ‘I started thinking about how the Perry Girls looked around town.’
23. With Andrew Berry in Earls Court. ‘I’ve always had a best mate.’
24. The Ronettes inspired me to take things to a whole new level.
25. Earls Court, 1984.
26. Just about to go onstage with the Gibson 335. Belgium, 1984.
27. ‘A young fan took it upon himself to scale the iron barrier. Before anyone could do anything about it there was a whole mob dancing with us.’
28. ‘I loved the 1985 US tour.’
29. Oxford, 1985, aged twenty-one. ‘I took my role as the band’s producer seriously.’
30.
31. On the road, 1984.
32. ‘I had an intimate relationship with my songwriting partner, who I loved, I had a girlfriend who was the love of my life, and I thought my band was the best in the world.‘
33. Red Les Paul. Soundcheck, Paris.
34. After the confrontation with the Warners executive backstage in LA.
35. ‘I was becoming disenchanted with touring.’
36. Setting up my sound with Phil my roadie and our soundman Grant Showbiz. New York, 1986.
37. Backstage. US tour, 1986.
38. The wake-up call. ‘I had to check that I was still alive.’
39. Kirsty MacColl. ‘One of the great friendships of my life.’
40. The Wool Hall. ‘Making Strangeways was a brighter time. I was in my element and then something suddenly changed.’
41.
42.
43.
44. The The, left to right.’ me, James Eller, David Palmer, Matt Johnson.
45. My guitar style worked in The Pretenders and Chrissie gave me a lot to think about.
46. With Matt Johnson on top of the World Trade Center. ‘Matt and I fulfilled our pact.’
47. Nile and Sonny, 1996.
48. Me and Billy Duffy reunite at Electronic’s Dodger Stadium debut.
49. Electronic. ‘Everyone was going through a time of liberation.’
50. Joe looked after me from when I was eighteen.
51. With Bert Jansch, 2003. ‘We communicated when we played together.’
52. The Healers. Ardwick Green Park
.
53. Dr Johnny, The Night Tripper, 2003.
54. Modest Mouse. ‘The best time of my life.’ Tom Peloso, Joe Plumber, Jeremiah Green, Eric Judy, Isaac Brock.
55. ‘Hey! … Busy!’
56. ‘On our nautical balalaika carnival to who knows where.’
57. The Cribs. ‘I had to concentrate to not get swept away by the cyclone howling around me.’