Johnny Marr

by Richard Carman

  “One of the things about making records,” says Marr, “is that for it to work you have to be totally and utterly in love with it for those three minutes, and you have to be able to hear that love in the tracks.” While real love and true passion was missing from the pop world in 1982 and early 1983, Johnny and Morrissey knew how to love. “That might be a particular idiosyncrasy of mine,” says the guitarist.

  Johnny’s compositional methods have been outlined piecemeal over the years. What is clear is that the song develops from feeling – what Marr has called “an uneasy feeling” that he tries to harness. When the muse is active, Johnny closes down other distracting elements. “I try not to party,” he says. “I keep myself really straight and sober, which is, I guess, the opposite of what people might expect. I get up early and stay up late, sleep as little as possible and harness that disconcerting uneasiness.” Marr likens the feeling to “knowing a storm is coming and [knowing] that something is going to happen.” While this method served Marr best in his post-Smiths days, often during the early and heady days of the band’s career the group component would overtake the individual creative element. “We were incredibly pragmatic in approach,” he says. “We’d do batches of three songs at a time. We’d sit down and say, ‘Let’s write a song.’” The discipline of Leiber and Stoller was paramount. “Morrissey would come round to my house and we’d do three songs just like that. Then he would go away and do the lyrics, and three days later he’d be in the studio recording it.” Morrissey and Maher were remarkably prolific, recording seventy songs in four years, and part of that urgency came from what Johnny calls Morrissey’s “emotional and physical necessity” to write. It made the process easy, “and in that way we propelled each other towards this endless supply of songs.”

  Johnny has called the process “incredibly romantic.” This was not, of course, in the sense of amour, but romance with a capital ‘R.’ Heightened sensation, heightened perception, heightened emotional involvement typified the Romantic poets – Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth – and this was the ‘romance’ that the two writers experienced together. “The songwriting process, and the songs we produced, are sacred,” Johnny was to say after The Smiths’ split. “And still are to me now.” ‘Suffer Little Children’ and ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ were amongst the first, brilliant flowers of this new musical romance. Morrissey moved our hearts because his writing was so fine. Johnny moved our hearts with his passionate guitar. And they dragged us onto the dance floor too. Paraphrasing Joni Mitchell, a great song needs a little something for the heart, a bit for the mind, and something to get you on your feet. Between them, Johnny and Morrissey did that in spades.

  “I have never related to the Jeff Becks of this world,” says Marr. “I have never seen the guitar as a solo instrument. When I started to write songs, I wanted my guitar to sound like a whole record.” Marr’s comments confirm his compositional premise: “I consequently developed almost a one-man-band style.” In relation to the oft-quoted comparison with the Phil Spector ‘Wall Of Sound’ – where Spector embellished tracks with multi-tracked drums, piano and strings – Johnny again relates his own attitude not to individual traits in the Spector sound, but to the entire package. For Johnny, as the guitar was an orchestra, so Spector was “the overall musician.” “Not purely sonically, but you could hear in his records that he was completely obsessed. There were no spaces – any harmonic suggestion was realised. It’s a kind of production thing.” Marr’s composition was a complete process from start to finish – individual songs conceived as a production exercise as much as a progression of chords or melodic structure. “If you’ve got four or five musicians playing then you will get loads of natural harmonics and spaces in there between the instruments. Spector was someone who would hear all these tiny suggestions and then fill every one in… [a] big, big, dense apocalyptic sound which I definitely connected with.” Johnny hears ‘the whole thing.’ “I’ll play a new song and hear piano and strings and then I try and play all that on my one guitar,” he told Martin Roach.

  Maher’s playing style attracted attention early on. “Johnny would do interviews, and he wouldn’t cite the usual guitar heroes,” notes Alberto vocalist and academic CP Lee. “I specifically and distinctly remember him talking about the influence of English folk-rock. It’s now very apparent – because we know more about it – but [at the time] I detected the likes of Bert Jansch and Davey Graham. And it’s what made his sound unique – it’s definitely not American guitar-playing.” Billy Bragg spoke to me and also recalls talking to Johnny about his own guitar playing and the influences upon it. While most journalists summed up his style through analogies with The Byrds, Bragg was surprised that a British player should spring to Johnny’s mind first. “I said, ‘What were your influences in America?’” remembered Billy. “And he said, ‘Martin Carthy.’ If I would make reference points on people like Terry and Gay Woods, he would know them. It wasn’t beyond him, and he’s worked with Bert Jansch as well. [All that] is what he brought – that I thought was really great – to The Smiths.”

  Early in the history of the band, Johnny was keen to emphasise that it was the band that was important, not individual members of it. This was not his vehicle, nor indeed Morrissey’s, but a group concept from start to finish. From that moment The Smiths were a unit. While he could not relate to self-indulgent guitar heroes, neither was he overly inspired by solo singer-songwriters. But The Smiths would represent the very best of pop music, whether it be Fifties, Sixties or Seventies. “We’re trying to bring back that precious element which is, I suppose, reminiscent of an earlier time,” he told Bill Black for Sounds. “Lots of common ground, but with separate influences to bring out something we believe to be the best we’ve ever heard.” This would be tempered – crucially – by Johnny’s own experiences. “I am a white musician,” he says, “born in the Sixties, in the provinces. And that is the way it sounds.” While Johnny would go on to earn respect, and an enviable reputation, for being able to walk into any studio in the world and ignite the work in hand, he never became a whingeing guitar soloist. “When that stuff is bad – it’s the worst,” he says.

  While the general music scene was stagnant – unless you were in the hair-dressing or lace industries – there was some fun in the singles charts: Soft Cell, Culture Club, The Jam, Bow Wow Wow, ABC and XTC, Bananarama/Fun Boy Three, Adam Ant and the resplendent Associates all made serious inroads into the top twenty in 1982, along with an air of style or fun. However, a number of these were already five-years-old as acts, and pop was in perhaps its most vapid phase since the sterile months of the late Fifties and pre-Beatles Sixties. There was little heart, precious little soul, virtually no wit (Madness and Blondie aside) and equally little musicianship. The record-buying public didn’t know it, but it needed The Smiths more than it needed anything: while Steven and Johnny sat head-to-head and planned their future, any discerning rock critic might have come up with a formula for a band that could shake the early Eighties up again, like punk had done six or seven years earlier. The band to re-energise the charts and the hearts and minds of the people who listened to the music would be a singles-orientated band (like the Pistols) with a predominance of guitar-driven pop. They would have both wit and wisdom, controversy but with substance: music needed punk all over again, but newly minted for the new decade.

  Music needed The Smiths.

  * * *

  Morrissey and Maher knew they had what it took. Johnny’s increasing versatility and accomplishment as a guitarist set against Morrissey’s faith in his own concept of stardom and his proven, tried and tested ability as a writer convinced the pair that they were more than viable contenders. Put simply, they both knew what a great record should sound like, and they knew there weren’t many of them around. Johnny has spoken of early singles by Sparks and Roxy Music as influencing his feel for what was right – and ironically several of these involved future Smiths producer John Porter. For Maher, the perfe
ct equation involved a great intro, a great outro, and “something interesting in between”. He cites Roxy’s ‘Love Is The Drug’ as a perfect example: the car engine starting, the cigarette lighting.

  They were controversial contenders from the outset too. Set to become probably the most notorious of all The Smiths’ released songs, ‘Suffer Little Children’ was inspired in part by Emlyn Williams’ account of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, in his 1967 book Beyond Belief. One of the duo’s first compositions, it could not be further from the chart pap of Shaking Stevens’ ‘Oh Julie’ or Shakatak’s ‘Night Birds’. It was an astonishing accomplishment for such a new partnership, but at the same time encapsulated so much of what Smiths music would come to mean to people – stylish, melodic, mood-driven, lyrically intense and musically dense. And with a hint of the mournful. For everyone who grew up in the north-west of England in the mid-Sixties, the Moors Murders were a part of their childhood, a news story that eclipsed almost every other, a chilling reminder that, even in the day-glo Sixties, we weren’t as safe and secure in our luxury as we thought we were. Williams’ book contains the title of the song as one of its own chapters, and numerous references in the song – notably ‘find me, find me,’ the chilling call of the murdered children from their graves – are in direct reference to the best-selling book.

  Another early product of the new partnership was ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle.’ According to Simon Goddard, the lyrics predated Johnny’s writing partnership with Morrissey by some time. Goddard quotes Richard Boon, who knew Morrissey through Linder Sterling, having heard a home demo of the lyric as far back as 1980. ‘Handsome Devil’ also dates from this initial writing period. Within weeks the Smiths canon was coming together. With alarming speed, by autumn the band was ready, rehearsed and planning their first live gig.

  The Smiths’ first public appearance is another landmark legend in their story. They appeared as support to Blue Rondo A La Turk at a fashion show at Manchester’s Ritz, on October 4, 1982. The Ritz dance hall had a history going way back in the musical past of Manchester. Only yards away from The Hacienda, Morrissey had sung there already with The Nosebleeds. Blue Rondo A La Turk represented everything that Maher and Morrissey’s new band rallied against: an absurd name taken from a Dave Brubek jazz number, a ten-piece ensemble and a bubbly interpretation of the currently trendy demob style. The Smiths – Johnny, Morrissey, Mike and Dale Hibbert on bass – were determined to make a statement. With only three self-penned songs and a cover – albeit three songs soon to be established as classics – they added a temporary fifth member to their number. James Maker was a close friend of Morrissey, reportedly so like him in his manner that the pair were at the time almost inseparable. Maker is usually cited as the band’s dancer for the gig, and he supplemented Joyce’s rhythmic drumming with maracas and tambourine, a role that Morrissey himself would adopt on stage many times in the years to come. Maker’s role was largely to grab the attention of the three hundred or so punters. “I was there to drink red wine, make extraneous hand gestures and keep well within the tight, chalked circle that Morrissey had drawn for me,” Maker was to tell Simon Goddard. “My involvement was not part of any long-term plan.”

  Determined to make a mark, the band’s initial profile and styling could easily have been perceived as ‘gay’. Dale Hibbert remembered being specifically groomed for the public image. “I got carted off,” he told David Nolan, “given some clothes – ‘these are your clothes.’ Taken to a hairdressers – ‘this is your hair cut.’ And they said, ‘We are probably going to have an image as a gay band.’” This came as some surprise to Dale, who was very much married and a father. But the gay market was easily identified and, since Bowie’s Seventies gender-bending, represented a substantial market. With the new romantic penchant for make-up and effeminate garb, it had become increasingly easy for bands to promote themselves directly to the gay audience to get noticed, without actually being gay.

  There were plenty of other bands around appealing to a gay audience or promoting a gay image. Culture Club and Soft Cell both had major hits over the course of the year 1982. The Smiths might have seemed a natural choice to take the next slice of the pink pound, with Morrissey’s beguiling ambiguity. But The Smiths were always too tough for that, too stylish even in this earliest incarnation, to be pigeon-holed so glibly. The Smiths had a sophistication that the above bands never achieved, their message too mixed, their dynamic too mature. Inevitably they did attract a substantial gay following, but their guitar, bass and drums drive encouraged badge-wearers from every supposed minority faction – students, gay libbers, vegetarians, animal rights activists and so on. What Hibbert’s comments do reveal is a sense that Johnny and Morrissey already had a clear notion that the band would – whatever it turned out to be – have an agenda, a profile of their own rather than following someone else’s fashion trend. The Smiths were going to be something.

  The Ritz gig was a runaway success. Joe Moss, seeing the band for the first time before an audience, thought they were superb. In particular he thought the show was a ‘showcase’ for Johnny, highlighting both his songs and his ability on a live platform. If he had doubted The Smiths at all, he cast all those doubts aside. As he was to tell Q magazine more than a decade later, “there was only one place they were going.”

  Throughout the rest of 1982 the band continued to progress, both in terms of writing and performance, as rehearsals were stepped up. It became apparent that family man Dale Hibbert didn’t quite fit. Johnny realised the natural bass player in his band should be Andy Rourke, with whom he had a natural synergy. Johnny invited Andy to join the band at a session booked at Drone Studios in Chorlton during December. One of Johnny’s contacts had convinced the mighty EMI that this was a band worth an audition, and with a small advance from the record company, Dale had booked the session with the intention of producing a professional demo. It was on this evening that Andy officially replaced Hibbert in The Smiths. The Smiths proper was born, and the permanent line-up of Marr, Morrissey, Rourke and Joyce recorded three tracks: ‘Miserable Lie’, ‘Handsome Devil’ and ‘What Difference Does It Make?’, all destined to make it into the Smiths recording canon proper. Reunited with Johnny in a band, Andy Rourke found the transition of joining The Smiths easy. “I had a good understanding of where Johnny was coming from,” he was to tell Bass Player magazine years later. “That was a luxury we had with The Smiths – everything just clicked.”

  Simon Goddard has charted the progress of ‘Miserable Lie’ from this early demo through to the finished, officially released version on the band’s first album. What is clear is that both the songs and the band developed both lyrically and musically over the coming few months, with Johnny’s guitar sound being amongst the most notable developments. The funky undertone in the Drone version of ‘Miserable Lie’ betrays Johnny and Andy’s partnership in White Dice, while by the time later producers Troy Tate and John Porter had got hold of it, the layered guitar sound so symptomatic of The Smiths was fully evolved. Likewise, ‘Handsome Devil’ included a soon-to-be-discarded sax line and ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ featured backing vocals from Johnny, which were also dispensed with.

  Visually, the band were compelling too, the antithesis of so many bands around at the time, and good-looking to boot. “It just so happens we’re handsome,” Johnny later told Sounds with endearing confidence less than a month after they signed their first contract with Rough Trade. “We didn’t rope in good-looking chaps on bass and drums. It just happened that way.” Great looking they were though. Morrissey’s increasing penchant for outsized blouses from Evans (a high street chain catering for over-sized ladies of a certain age), Johnny’s shades, Mike’s chisel-cut Irish good looks and Andy’s boy-next-door handsome features complemented one another perfectly.

  The haircuts were an important part of the look, cut by Johnny’s friend and DJ Andrew Berry. Early fan Joanne Carroll remembers the scene around the Manchester clubs with fondness, and r
emembers that where she used to get her barnet cut was all part of the sense of belonging to the happening Manchester scene. “Getting my hair cut at the bottom of the Hacienda, which at that time was a hairdressers,” is one of Joanne’s fondest memories. The atmosphere, and relationship between punters and pros was warm and friendly. “We knew [Andrew Berry] really well. I remember Johnny Marr being [in the hairdresser’s chair] frequently too.” On the day that Johnny and Angela got engaged, the little bunch of like-minded fans and friends from the hairdressers got together. While Joanne and her friends knew of The Smiths, it was Johnny that they got to know the best. “The day he got engaged we went out and bought a card for them,” remembers Joanne. Not that the other Smiths were unfriendly, but it was Johnny who seemed to have the warmest relationships around the circuit in the early days.

  Grant Showbiz was startled by the Smiths’ haircuts too. Because they all went to Andrew for their ‘styling’, says Grant, “[that] meant they all had the same sort of haircut and it was unlike any haircut you’d seen.” At the same time, their dress sense was unusual too. As well as having been shorn by the same hairdresser, Grant remembers that “they all dressed the same too. They had these beads round their neck, they had these weird clothes you had never seen before… beamed down from planet Manchester.”