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Well before Margaret Thatcher entered Downing as Britain’s first female Prime Minister in 1979, Britain’s inner cities had become dirty, dishevelled and run-down centres of disaffection and unrest. From the summer of 1976, punk was a response to the culture in which flippant DJs and pompous, high-earning bands had taken the fun from the music business just as successive governments had taken the job prospects away from millions of school-leavers. If we’d ‘never had it so good’ in the late Fifties and early Sixties, by the time the Sex Pistols were launched upon an unsuspecting London public via their now legendary early gigs and TV shock tactics, the youth of Britain was ready for a chance to shout and scream. Just as the mods, rockers and beatniks had done before them, they really caused a stir. In Manchester, this was reflected in the famed summer of 1976 gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, when local scenesters Peter McNeish and Howard Trafford organised the first appearance of the Pistols in the city [the definitive account is David Nolan’s I Swear I Was There – The Gig That Changed The World]. By the time the band returned in July, Peter and Howard’s band Buzzcocks had the support slot, and Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto (as they came to be known and loved by millions) were the leading lights of Manchester’s nascent punk scene. Buzzcocks went on – even after Devoto’s defection to form Magazine in 1977 – to be a long-standing favourite for many who remember that summer as one of the most exciting in pop music’s history. Their singles ‘Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have)?’, ‘Orgasm Addict’ and ‘What Do I Get?’ define all that was great about not just punk, but pop music in general. Tense, stylish and fun, witty and heartbreakingly sincere, with a wash of punk insouciance glazed over the top of lovelorn pop. Thirty years on, Buzzcocks are compared to The Ramones and The Velvet Underground, among the most influential bands of all. Buzzcocks remain one of Manchester’s finest exports.
And then there was The Fall. There was Warsaw – soon to become Joy Division. Slaughter And The Dogs. The Nosebleeds. The Worst. The Blue Orchids. The Frantic Elevators. The Albertos. Manchester was responsible for some fine bands, and some pretty ropey ones. Alongside the first punk explosion sat John Cooper Clarke, the ‘behind-the-shades’ punk poet whose appearance owed more to hip Dylan as to Johnny Rotten. Joy Division and The Fall emerged as the two bands ‘most likely to.’ In Mark E Smith and Ian Curtis, they both had enigmatic, uncompromising front-men with clear agendas and a lot to say. The death of Curtis at once put an end to the potential of Joy Division and launched New Order upon the world. The influence of both bands is prime to this day.
The influence of Shelley and Devoto’s early punk enthusiasm is not just felt in the sounds that Buzzcocks created however. In bringing the Sex Pistols into Manchester, they drew a crowd from which were born bands that would be amongst the most important in Manchester’s musical heritage and would enliven immediate rock history. Mick Hucknall, Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, Tony Wilson and Mike Pickering were all allegedly present to see the Sex Pistols at that feted Lesser Free Trade Hall show. New Order and Joy Division, Factory Records, Simply Red, The Hacienda club, M People – all were born in some sense out of these cathartic musical events. Pickering, one of the brains behind M People and Quando Quango, was the man to book The Smiths into their first public gig, and would later work with Johnny on at least two occasions.
But at the Sex Pistols gig was another kid looking for a reason to believe. A young man by the name of Steven.
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Punk was an immediate call to arms for teenagers everywhere. Not since an army of Bowie clones had peopled a hundred high streets in the early Seventies was there such an immediate rush among across the nation’s youth to join the movement. Punk was the excuse everyone had needed to dress up, get out and get into trouble. Have fun and cause offence. Of course, the movement was about much more than just music. The music attracted a crowd with a certain fashion sense, it didn’t create it. A link between fashion and music features in the punk story and in Johnny Maher’s. The Pistols were born of Malcolm McClaren’s King’s Road boutique, Sex. In London in particular, punk was a fashion statement as much as a musical force, but by the time it had hit the provinces the two had become almost inextricably linked.
The most tangible evidence that punk had hit town was that kids went out and formed bands of their own. The Sex Pistols were at one and the same time both so good and so bad, that everyone recognised in them something that they could get off their backsides for and do themselves, at a time when nobody else in society seemed interested in them. Punk was the first truly DIY ethic in pop music since skiffle, when a guitar and a washboard were all a band needed to get started. In its earliest days, pop songs were written by professional song-writers, who would present finished songs to artists to perform under studio direction. Via Buddy and The Beatles, artists soon performed their own material. By the end of the Sixties, artists were not only writing and performing their own material, but the biggest owned their own labels too, like Apple and Beggars Banquet. But in order to be successful, even the most self-managing bands still had to be accomplished as musicians or singers. Punk demonstrated to everyone that if they had something to say they could simply go out and say it, and do all of the above, regardless of how well they could do so. And they could have it done by tomorrow. And in Manchester – as everywhere else – they said it loudly and proudly.
For Johnny Maher punk was a sword with two edges. The Smiths were never a punk group, but they had its influence scrawled all over their attitude to the record industry, their love of the three-minute single, their rhythm section, and their uncompromising belief in their own selves. At the time, Johnny watched the movement from a slight distance. He kicked against it largely because of his current interest in English folk music, derided by the hard-line punk movement. At the same time, he was too young to get in on punk’s earliest flourish, those first, influential Manchester gigs. Only twelve years old when the Pistols first came to the city, the first gig that Johnny attended was The Faces. But punk was more than just suburban thrash from south London, if you had the ears to hear it. The American bands embraced by the movement appealed to Johnny much more. Early on, he managed to see Iggy Pop, and it was the related bands such as Television, Patti Smith and The Stooges who joined Bolan and Sparks in Johnny’s pantheon of rock gods. Johnny also recalls seeing Rory Gallagher live at around the first time, and the Irish guitarist became an influence that Johnny still recognises today. “He scared the life out of me,” Johnny said. “He was so intense – I couldn’t believe it. I can remember staying off school for a few days… trying to play along with his records.”
Johnny remembers that, after endless attempts, the day after seeing Rory live he finally cracked the Gallagher code and turned a corner in his own playing. “I sussed it out,” said Johnny. “And the penny just dropped… ‘I can play!’” Rod Stewart and his careering guitarist Ronnie Wood became major influences. The one thing that Johnny did that really expanded his knowledge of music and developed his own fluency and playing was to go out and source the people who had influenced these bands in the first place. The influence of Bo Diddley is heard throughout Johnny’s career. He first heard it in the disco funk of Hamilton Bohannon, whose ‘Disco Stomp’ was a firm favourite, but traced the influence back to its original source. Television’s Richard Hell had a clear effect on Johnny, but at the same time he was helplessly drawn to melodic old hats like Simon and Garfunkel.
Simultaneously, there was a huge cross-cultural process in progress. The Beatles had taken American pop music and sold it back to the States in a different guise. By the early Seventies, American bands were coming over to the UK to find their market. Most British kids had Americana about them at every turn. Bolan and Bowie were very ‘English’ in their original concepts, but washed with American input, so that while Ziggy stood heroically on the rain-washed streets off the back of London’s Regent Street, by the time of Aladdin Sane, Bowie was dissecting N
ew York and Hollywood too. Bolan dipped into the American Riff Songbook on regular occasions to colour his psychedelic boogie. Gary Glitter could only have been born of a generation raised on holidays at Butlins or Pontins, but US bands like Sparks came over to the UK and found their most receptive markets.
In the mid-Seventies you could choose to take the ideological line, or accept that everything was there for you. While Maher didn’t follow everything that appeared on Top Of The Pops he was not prepared to discard Motown, Phil Spector and The Ronettes – his next love – for the sake of The Clash. “I felt [punk] was definitely for the generation before me,” Johnny was to say many years later in a published conversation with Matt Johnson on The The’s website. “One of the things about punk in the UK was that, as I remember, it was very political… as if lines were drawn.” If you were on the right side of the ideological line then you were in, but waver across that line at your peril. “To me that seemed to hang over our generation like an albatross,” said Marr. If joining the club meant ignoring so many other great artists and bands, then Johnny was not interested.
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Of all the kids whose interest turned to playing music rather than just listening to it, Maher was quickest among his peer group to learn the practical elements of guitar. Chord structures and progressions, picking techniques and fingering came easily to him, naturally, almost as though there was a predetermined route for him to follow. “By the time I was ten or eleven,” he told Guitar Player in 1990, “I started to buy T. Rex records.” ‘Jeepster’’s Howlin’ Wolf riff was the first Johnny had learned, later back-tracking (as he put it) into Motown. “I’d try to cover the strings, piano and everything with my right hand, trying to play the whole record on six strings.” This orchestral approach to the guitar mirrored that of impeccable Canadian guitarist Joni Mitchell, who herself has spoken at length of trying to cover an entire orchestra’s sound across the six simple strings of the basic guitar. “That’s one reason why I am so chordally oriented,” Johnny went on to explain. “Why key changes and the strategy of arrangement are really important to me.”
He picked up from everywhere and everybody. Johnny found he learned more, and enjoyed the life more, if he hung out with the older boys from around Wythenshaw. He stored every lick and chord that he could find. Johnny’s wealth of musical knowledge gradually became immense, a trait that he has continued to display over the years since. His enthusiasm for music, his ability to remember everything he hears and maybe one day use it somewhere in his own music, is legendary. Smiths soundman Grant Showbiz remembers visiting Johnny at home many, many times over the years, and testifies to the fact that music was always there. “Whenever I went to Johnny’s house,” recalls Grant, “which was an awful lot of the time in those days, Radio One was on absolutely permanently. And I can remember it being the same ten years later.” Showbiz can only think of one other musician with the same kind of all-inclusive referencing, and the same enthusiasm to share the process of listening to music with anybody. “Peter Buck (of REM) has an absolutely encyclopaedic knowledge of music, and so has Johnny. And he’ll just say, ‘This B-side by The Dells – listen to the middle eight, listen to what the organ’s doing’ or whatever it is. And suddenly, it’s eight hours later!” Such was the process of assimilating a myriad of musical influences for the young Johnny, as it remains today for the adult; hang out, listen to music, talk about music, play music.
Future Cult hero Billy Duffy was one of the older kids who showed Johnny new chords. Marr remembers how “I met guys who were only thirteen or fourteen, but took themselves so seriously as musicians, they were already legends in their own minds.” As well as picking up guitar tips, Johnny was also open to the record collections of everyone he met. In addition to the bluesy rock of Rory Gallagher, Johnny breathed in the soulful West Coast folk of Neil Young, the articulate British picking of Martin Carthy, Davey Graham and Bert Jansch (to whom Johnny was introduced by Duffy). Along with Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention, Johnny also fell for Thin Lizzy, the pristine manufactured pop of Motown and the romantic, Byrds-influenced guitar jangling of Tom Petty. Like his friends, Johnny soon came to consider himself a musician, not just a music fan.
“When I got into Nils Lofgren,” Johnny explained to Martin Roach in The Right To Imagination And Madness, “there was no turning back.” Increasingly, and throughout his teenage years, Johnny was to be seen around the streets of Wythenshaw with a guitar case and a bagful of attitude and confidence. “It was just to let everybody know that my whole identity was as a guitar player,” he continued. “I was very cocky…” Besotted by New York New Wave, intrigued by the old waves of acoustic British folk, Johnny’s boundless enthusiasm made up for his inescapable youth. “I could pick like Bert Jansch, but I wanted to look like Ivan Kral from the Patti Smith Group,” he said.
At the same time, Johnny began to realise that there was only so far that he could get by playing other people’s riffs. He needed people to play with and he needed to write. Maher was starting to write songs for himself, and he needed people around him off whom he could bounce ideas and share the playing more formally. “As soon as I could string a few chords together, I started putting them down on a cassette recorder,” Johnny recalls. What was important to him was the guitar. The idea of being the next Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton was anathema to him: Johnny Maher never wanted to be a guitar hero. For Johnny it was always the guitar and the songs that were important. As it gradually dawned on him that he needed some kind of context in which to play and write, so he needed a band to play with.
The names of Johnny Marr’s first bands have gone into the legend of pre-Smiths history. For one interviewer in the USA, Johnny claimed his first band was simply called ‘Johnny Maher.’ The Paris Valentinos was the first example of John Maher actually formalising an arrangement amongst his friends to form ‘a group.’ The Valentinos comprised Kevin Williams on vocals and bass guitar, Bobby Durkin on drums and Andy Rourke on second guitar. One half of The Smiths was almost in place at this very early stage in Maher’s career, when the teenage lads would hang out and plan their route to fame and fortune. “We had more names than we did songs,” Johnny was to say later. One day they were a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young outfit, and the next they were Television. Those early gigs were heard in the echoing chambers of local church halls and at Sunday mass. Gradually it became apparent that Williams – older than Johnny by two years – had other fish to fry. While he handed the bass role in the band over to Andy, he pursued his other creative love, that of acting. A member of Manchester Youth Theatre since the age of thirteen, Williams enrolled in Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre. While he appeared as a ‘helper’ on the irrepressible Cheggars Plays Pop, under the name Kevin Kennedy he then played the role of the inimitable Curly Watts in Coronation Street for some twenty years, one of UK TV’s best-loved soap characters of all time. By 2006 Kennedy was appearing as ‘The Child Catcher’ in Manchester Palace Theatre’s production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It’s interesting to note that Johnny repeatedly found himself in the company of other talented people who would go on to achieve fame in other spheres, or who had already done so. Williams himself described his own period of working with Maher as a privilege. “To see that germ of genius in Johnny’s bedroom,” he told film maker David Nolan, made it clear that “…this guy (was) going to be brilliant.”
It was the summer of 1977 that saw Johnny and Andy’s first ever gig in front of a willing public on the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Day. The band played Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It On Home To Me’, covered a decade or so before by The Animals. Before the song was complete, the performance was halted when the singer was dragged puking from the stage – Johnny’s first experience of rock ’n’ roll excess! With only one other proper gig to their name, which was at The Squat, a venue near Manchester University, The Paris Valentinos came to a withering halt. Johnny’s next gig, on his stripped-down Telecaster copy, a la Rory Gallagher, came as replacement guita
rist with Manchester’s Velvet Underground-inspired Sister Ray. It was a stop-gap appointment with a band that was going nowhere. With Sister Ray, Maher supported Manchester’s nearly-men The Freshies.
The Freshies later reached the UK charts with their single ‘I’m In Love With The Girl On The Checkout Desk Of A Certain Manchester Megastore.’ The Freshies were the brain-child of Mancunian performer Chris Sievey, who also created the TV comic-book Mancunian Frank Sidebottom – he of the large papier-mâché head. Frank was, of course, The Freshies’ biggest fan, and in a wonderfully ironic turnaround, achieved far more mainstream success than The Freshies ever did themselves.
Sister Ray was a brief diversion for Maher, but one of The Freshies’ former keyboard players, Paul Whittall, became part of Johnny’s next, more important, career move. Whittall was working with one of Wythenshaw’s more achieving musicians, Rob Allman. Allman was a friend of Billy Duffy, the Wythenshaw kid who already had great ambition as a guitarist and had joined Manchester’s punk legends The Nosebleeds. Fate spiralled the future Smiths closer together, as Steven Morrissey had joined The Nosebleeds as vocalist to replace the legendary milkman/singer Ed Banger. In the meantime Allman and Whittall began working with Maher, Rourke and ex-Paris Valentino drummer Bobby Durkin, under the name White Dice.
Like The Cure, Japan and hundreds of bands before them, White Dice responded to a talent-scouting ad in the music press, spotting a chance of putting themselves before some of the real decision-makers in London pop. The cassette demo that the band sent to F-Beat Records boss Jake Riviera – the brains behind Stiff Records and the early careers of Elvis Costello, Madness, Dr Feelgood and The Damned – won them an audition in London slated for April 1980. The band threw themselves into rehearsals at Andy’s house, with Rob and Johnny sharing writing credits on new material. It was Maher’s first experience of a song-writing partnership, and it was mainly their own material that they played at Nick Lowe’s home studio between Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, where the session took place. Paul Carrack, who spent a lot of time in Lowe’s studio, remembers it as “a converted front room.” The band was as impressed with their meeting Lowe’s then-wife, Carlene Carter, as they were with the process of making the demo, but Riviera was disappointed with the results. A phone call confirmed their worst fears a few days later – and in the meltdown that followed their initial enthusiasm, Bobby Durkin left the band. There was a handful of summer gigs, writing sessions and rehearsals, with Johnny occasionally taking the lead vocalist role, but White Dice weren’t to last.
Johnny Marr Page 3