Johnny Marr

by Richard Carman

  As the team came together, one more major change took place which confirmed the identity of The Smiths proper. While Steven had long-abandoned his Christian name for the iconic-sounding moniker ‘Morrissey’, John Maher decided that it was time to distance himself from any potential confusion regarding his name and his background in the Manchester music scene. It is hard to see how anyone would have confused the rake-thin, stylish guitarist with newcomers The Smiths with the frenetic blaster behind the kit in the six-years-in-the-public-eye Buzzcocks, but while John Maher remained a member of the highest-profile Manchester punk band, Johnny decided to change his name to Marr. The song-writing partnership that was Morrissey and Marr was officially born.

  ‘Hand In Glove’ backed with a live recording of ‘Handsome Devil’ was released in May. The band had briefly considered releasing it on their own independent label – according to Morrissey very much at Johnny and Moss’s instigation. May also saw a series of gigs that pushed the band more firmly into the limelight.

  Fewer debut singles have sounded better. Live, the song was an electrifying beast too: Johnny’s cyclical riffs carried the rhythmic attack as presciently as that of Joyce and Andy. Early in their career there was a unique lyricism in the playing, a melodic onslaught as well as a metronomic tempo. Behind Johnny, Rourke’s bass playing was equally incisive, his funk background not lost amongst the darker clouds of Morrissey’s lyric. “I tried to do a tune within a tune,” Andy explained retrospectively in Bass Player in March, 2006. “I wouldn’t be happy with a bass line unless you could hum it.” On top of this exquisite mix, Morrissey – in the band’s first two officially released songs – revealed himself as a unique lyricist and vocalist, as new and fresh as could be. His vocal both bland and tantalising, his lyric mundane and intriguing, the mix of desperation and urbane wit was irresistible.

  ‘Handsome Devil’ contained the same lyrical polarity. Not many bands aiming at the top of the singles charts would have dared blend a Velvets-like hint of sado-masochism with a cod-music hall lyric. Johnny’s aggressive intro recalled early-Sixties Joe Meek recordings, as well as the repeating-riff influence of Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn. All with a swagger that The Ants could never achieve however charming their own Prince tried to be. Like so many later Smiths singles, both tracks carried storming introductory bars, relentless and punishing passages that would grab the listeners lapels and drag them in. Part of the appeal of The Smiths sound was born of practical necessities. Morrissey’s vocal worked best in a lower key than the band were often happy playing in, and so both Andy and Johnny employed capos across much of the material on the band’s first album, raising their own pitch but lowering the key, setting the musical tone higher and the vocal range lower. So was born one integral part of The Smiths’ sound.

  The moment was ripe for The Smiths, as pure as pure could be. “The debut affair of the year,” said i-D magazine of the single. For NME there was an “indestructible self-belief and irresistible intent,” while Irish mag Trouser Press noted two “punchy numbers of great promise.” The band themselves were aware of the record’s sensational feel. “It really was a landmark,” Morrissey was to tell Jamming the following year, while to another interviewer he described it as “searingly poetic… and yet jubilant at the same time.” “I felt my life was leading up to ‘Hand In Glove’,” agreed Joyce. “My life began.” For Johnny it was a dream come true, the fulfilment of a decade-long dream fuelled by practice after practice, rehearsal after dreary rehearsal in bands going nowhere. Recalling his own tactile love of the collectible seven-inch single, he proudly boasted “it was a fantastic piece of vinyl.” For Joe Moss, the reason why the band hit so hard and so fast was because of the absolute freshness of everything they did, the urgency and energy bounding through every bar.

  On May 6, a meeting took place that was to shove the nascent Smiths into another gear in terms of reputation and profile. As Ken Garner recounts in The Peel Sessions, BBC producer John Walters was tipped off about the band’s gig at the University Of London Student’s Union by Rough Trade promoter Scott Piering. The Smiths were supporting – from well down the bill – The Sisters of Mercy, and Waters was impressed not only by the reputation that the band had brought down from the frozen north but also by their stage charisma. While Waters later claimed to have merely recognised the band as “a lead worth following”, it was definitely the enthusiasm of his colleague back at ‘the Beeb’ who picked up and carried Johnny Marr and his band to the nation. Waters was, of course, famed as the producer of John Peel’s radio show, and he offered the band their first Radio One session on the spot. The session – which took place less than two weeks later, on May 18 – was produced by BBC legend Roger Pusey and engineered by Nick Gomm, and immediately set a standard that – even to this day – both fans and band members feel was rarely bettered on tape. Tracks recorded were ‘What Difference Does It Make?’, ‘Miserable Lie’, ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ and ‘Handsome Devil.’ All four songs – and these versions of them – became firm favourites for many fans over and above the official album-released versions.

  May also saw the band’s first interview with NME, a second London gig at The Electric Ballroom, and unfounded rumours that Mike Joyce might be replaced by Simon Woolstencroft on drums. It is difficult, throughout the story of The Smiths, to ignore the relentless parallels with The Beatles. But just as Ringo was – by snooty music heads in the Sixties – often dismissed as a tub thumper who, had he never met John, Paul and George, would be on the club circuit, so did Mike Joyce often get a very rough and unfair ride. In fact, Ringo’s drumming was revolutionary and to the discerning ear one of the best things about The Beatles. Likewise, without Mike Joyce’s punk input, The Smiths would have been a very different band, and assuredly not the one we all fell in love with.

  Grant Showbiz recalls Joyce’s live input fondly. “A more technically proficient drummer might have really fiddled with [The Smiths’ sound], and taken it in a different direction,” says Grant. “Whereas Mike would just nail the beat and fly through it.” The sound of The Smiths in full flight is – whether you were in the audience or listening to live tapes – exhilarating. For Grant, the meat in this resolutely vegetarian band came from the drum kit, and he acknowledges the comparison with Ringo’s input in The Beatles: “It’s silly to say The Beatles thing – but there was an element of this guy just bashing the fuck out of the drums at the back.” It wasn’t just the ‘bashing the fuck out of it’ though. The beauty in the performance came via the incongruous meeting of Mike’s drumming with the rather more esoteric thing happening out front. To Grant, while Johnny’s instrumentalism and Morrissey’s lyric was “sometimes quite a pretty, fey thing,” the key to the blend came from Mike “nailing it, and making it dirty and hard.”

  The band were most definitely on a roll. The John Peel session aired at the end of the month, and immediately there was a major response from Peel’s listeners. “You couldn’t buy pre-publicity like that” said newly appointed promotions man Scott Piering. The immediate demand for the band was such that the session was twice repeated on Peel’s programme within six months. The Smiths were becoming well known nationally, and back at home in Manchester the flames of their developing notoriety burned high across the city. “I was aware of them emerging, and the people in Manchester talking about them,” says CP Lee, then the notorious singer of Manchester’s wonderful and anarchic post-punks Albertos Y Los Trios Paranoias. “In fact, there were more people talking about Mr Moss – in that he was doing something.” Lee’s point, that it was Joe Moss having a band that was getting somewhere that was attracting much of the attention locally, demonstrates the surprise amongst much of the Manchester music community that The Smiths were now leading the game. “None of them were known, as musicians,” says CP. “The only real contender was Morrissey because he had sung with The Nosebleeds… and was known as a character around Manchester. But the rest of them were really
unknown entities, so there was more talk about [Moss] managing them more than anything else.” CP Lee was a close friend of Richard Boon, then involved with Rough Trade distribution, and was regularly in the Rough Trade office himself. He remembers the buzz there too. “To me they were such an unknown quantity. They appeared like a little nova – a super-nova – bursting out of nowhere. It was very, very noticeable.”

  Back in Manchester, the post-punk hierarchy was surprised by the rapid ascension of The Smiths. The inner circle of the tribe, or the ‘elderly members of the village’ as Lee describes the generation that had emerged from punk, hadn’t spotted this little outfit sneaking through the door. “You had a lot of people who had had a crack at it – Buzzcocks had made it, and I suppose you could say Mark E Smith made it,” says Lee, “but a lot of people like The Distractions and The Blue Orchids hadn’t. Suddenly here was this upstart team with no punk credentials. In a sense, anti-punk, you might say, who appeared from nowhere and [were] doing sell-out tours.” There was a certain amount of professional jealousy in Manchester about that, that led to a kind of dismissal of Morrissey and of The Smiths. It wasn’t that they were seen as a flash in the pan, but Lee believes that this is where the disparaging ‘Oh it’s all miserable… heaven knows it’s miserable…’ mockery of The Smiths started, to cut the band down to size in their home city. Twenty years on, it still surprises CP Lee that the band’s ascendance was so rapid. “It does amaze me,” he says. “When I listen to the stuff… where did they come from to play like that?” Where indeed!

  Grant Showbiz also recalls how it was the live Smiths that really shook him, how their musicianship was spectacular right from the start. “I saw them on their fifth gig, and… in a funny sort of way they were more formed live [than in the studio].” Grant found ‘Hand In Glove’ difficult to get a handle on, to quite understand where they were coming from. “[It] always sounded like a rush to me, and then seeing them live – it was suddenly nailed.” As sound engineer on virtually every concert The Smiths played, it is natural that he should find their live shows the more exhilarating, but it was more than that. For Grant, the live band was the key to understanding the albums and the singles. Having seen the way the songs worked live one could, then – as Grant puts it – “file back into the record.”

  Manchester got a chance to try and figure this conundrum out when the band lined up at The Hacienda in early July for their first gig there at the top of the bill. It was a major night for the band, but also for The Hacienda itself. Over the course of the summer, the band began the recording sessions with Troy Tate that were to evolve slowly into the first album. Ensconced in Wapping’s Elephant Studios, the sessions were intense and the work was focused and dedicated. “It was very exciting,” Johnny told Johnny Rogan for Record Collector in November 1992. “Troy was a really nice guy.”

  The Smiths were riding high on the success of their debut single (number 25), had a clear agenda for their sound and for their image, and were honing a style and an ethos that would see out their career. Johnny was excited to be working on the album, and while he had reservations about the sound evolving on certain tracks, for a while he was happy to go along with the work. Introduced to the band by Rough Trade, Troy Tate had even produced his own single, ‘Love Is’, for the label; however, the sound of the album received mixed responses from the group themselves. According to Johnny’s 1992 interview with Rogan, Morrissey was more disappointed than himself, but the implication is that the dissatisfaction came from both the senior partners, while manager Joe Moss reportedly preferred the Tate sessions to the finally released product. Mike Joyce has also expressed a fondness for those recordings, telling Select magazine that he thought it had more atmosphere than the final version. What is clear is that Tate’s album captured a very different Smiths to the one finally released in the spring of the following year.

  There’s certainly a different feel to the album in its ‘Wapping state.’ Various bootleg versions of the numerous takes that the band produced have circulated over the years. What is consistently obvious is that, as a studio band, The Smiths were more primitive than they would become with only a few more month’s recording experience. The sessions have a ‘demo’ feel about them, inevitably, as they were never completed as ready for release. Most notably, Marr’s guitar work is less developed. In terms of the writing process, some of the tracks were composed in full by Johnny, who would then present them to Morrissey for lyrics to be added, or Morrissey would present a set of lyrics to Johnny for the reverse process. By whichever method a particular song was composed, the band as a whole would often put down much of the music and then hand over to Morrissey, who would add his vocals as the last act on each track. That process was, according to Mike Joyce “one of the most fantastic things about working with The Smiths,” waiting with immense anticipation for Morrissey to finish the songs off. They were never disappointed. “He’d just spring this lyric on you,” remembered Mike.

  Everyone surrounding the band was hyped up. This was clearly a band going somewhere fast. But what is interesting about the process was how much each individual member of the band fell in love with The Smiths themselves: without undue lack of modesty, Rourke, Joyce, Morrissey and Marr became the biggest fans The Smiths had, or would ever have. That desperate passion was one of the most significant elements in the band that was passed on to their expanding fan base.

  By the end of the summer, the sessions with Tate had been put on hold, with Tate taking a back-step into Smiths legend. The band were immersed in gigs that would further cement their live reputation around the UK, while their radio presence was improved even further. With gigs in the Midlands and London under their belts, the BBC decided to invite the band in for a second session, this time for The Kid Jensen Show in June. The session was broadcast in early July. Back in Manchester, the band returned to top the bill at The Hacienda. In August, a third BBC session was produced by the man who would, over the coming months, have a huge influence on The Smiths as a recording band, and on Johnny in particular.

  John Porter, a former member of Roxy Music, produced the session at the legendary Maida Vale studio on August 12, taping versions of ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’, ‘Accept Yourself’, Pretty Girls Make Graves’ and ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ – tracks that he would become much more familiar with in the coming months. While the session would be broadcast on the Jensen show in early September, events of the late summer gave the band a vital but essentially unwelcome slice of tabloid publicity when The Sun newspaper began attacking Morrissey’s lyrics. The band were suddenly headline news, and while the focus was very much upon Morrissey, the misinformation and scandal caused by the controversy – based upon the lyrics of ‘Handsome Devil’ and the notion that the BBC had banned a Smiths song from its airwaves (it had actually decided not to broadcast the version of ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ for the next Jensen session) – gave the foursome a taste of things to come in terms of tabloid sensationalism.

  In September, yet another session was recorded for Peel, featuring the first recording of ‘This Charming Man’. As the autumn progressed Johnny and the band had played in all corners of the UK, been interviewed or reviewed by the majority of the British music press and were back in the studio at work on the album. This time John Porter was in charge of the sessions, having agreed with Rough Trade to take over the production of the debut album. While the initial intention was that Porter would essentially just remix the album and knock it into shape, it became clear to all the parties concerned that a re-recording would be a preferable option. “Through a mutual friend,” Porter said in 1994, “Geoff asked me if I’d take a listen to the tapes.”

  Johnny had been working on new material, and over September and October the band settled, with Porter now officially on the books, into Pluto Studios in Manchester. ‘This Charming Man’ was one of the first tracks to be recorded – slated to be the Smiths’ second single after Geoff Travis had heard it in session at Maida Vale. The
music had been written by Marr on the same night as he penned ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ and ‘Still Ill’ – typifying his batch-writing of songs in groups of three to present to Morrissey – all born of the wandering Marr imagination on the train journey back to Manchester after recording a session for Radio 1. Fortunately for all of us, Johnny has always been able to keep his musical ideas in mind should they occur to him away from a recording or writing environment. According to Ken Garner’s book, In Session Tonight, it was a “happy, casual but serious decision” by Travis and the band that led to ‘This Charming Man’ being chosen as the single, and the Peel take was broadcast three times before the re-recorded version was released officially in the late autumn. Simon Goddard has noted the “near jazz-like complexity” of the chord progressions that define the song’s chorus, the Tamla feel to the verses, its “impossibly captivating” feel. The track is indeed one of finest moments in The Smiths’ canon. Famed for its fifteen tracks of guitar overdub, the main instrument used was not the supposed trademark Rickenbacker, but a thirty year-old Fender Telecaster, with several tracks of acoustic guitar mixed up for good measure. Constantly looking for ways to add both polish and the sense of impetuous creativity, Porter also included – at the end of the chorus – the sound of Johnny dropping knives onto the instrument – adding to the vibrant colours that the record invented.

  The single was released on October 28, 1983, in both seven- and twelve- inch formats. Morrissey’s lyrics were inimitably complex – his perfect mixture of the mundane, arcane and emotionally compelling. While Johnny’s guitar work was stunning, the vocalist had also proved himself by now to be completely in control of his work both as a writer and a singer. Promoter Scott Piering realised there and then that the blistering debut of ’Hand In Glove’ was no fluke, and Travis too was hugely impressed with what his new signings had on board. Mike Joyce found himself immensely enthused by the experience of watching his own band develop so beautifully, so quickly. As he recalled, in Q magazine’s 1994 retrospective article, “we’d have the music finished, and Morrissey would come in and sing… It was just so moving… such an experience to hear your singer singing like that over a track that you have just done.”