Marr and Butler’s playing on Crimson Moon is delightful, with Bernard’s perhaps being the more erratic – appropriate for a player like Jansch, who has no concept of ‘middle-eights’ or bar lines. Particularly haunting was Johnny’s plaintive harmonica on ‘The River Bank’, while his backing vocals on ‘Looking For Love’ were beautiful too. Johnny appeared on Later With Jools Holland in July, with Bernard and Bert alongside him, playing ‘The River Bank’ live. It was a briliant performance.
Bert Jansch was rightly feted in celebration of his sixtieth birthday in 2003. The BBC arranged and filmed the event in which characters as diverse as Bernard Butler and Ralph McTell teamed up to celebrate Jansch’s life and music. Even if they didn’t play together, for Bert it was remarkable that such a diversity of players should appear on the same bill. Marr, of course, was in his element.
For Jansch, Bernard Butler was a bit of an unknown quantity, but he knew that he had come to his work via Johnny’s love for it. Johnny Marr he knew well. “Johnny is unstoppable,” said Jansch. “He is guitar-mad! Endless – he just goes on and on!” On the subject of the famous rock guitarist, who has someone to tune his guitars for him, Bert smiled wryly, “I didn’t know what a ‘guitar tech’ was until I met those two!”
* * *
It was the members of the coalescing new band who talked Marr into standing up and fronting the ensemble. Whilst a decade before he had re-iterated his lack of ambition as a front man, now it seemed an inevitability, and he adopted the role with relish. Back in 1989, Johnny had told NME that he never wanted to stand in front of a group: “I know I will never be as popular, sell as many records or be as famous as Morrissey or any other singer I work with… and I don’t want that.” However, in The Healers he took centre stage for the first time. It was also a joint decision between Johnny, the band, management and label, that the band be called (in full) ‘Johnny Marr And The Healers.’ “‘The Healers’ on the posters – we may get 500 people,” said Johnny, explaining that that is how he would have preferred it. “But if it has my name on it, we may get 504.”
As Johnny came up with the basic concept of The Healers and recorded demos of the songs likely to be worked on, he also sang the vocals. All along he figured that he would ultimately add a singer to the band to take care of the final vocal job, and had listened to a number of demos from prospective vocalists around Manchester. One or two were even in mind for the job. What happened was that a democratic process proved to Johnny that he was actually the best man for the job himself. Presenting the demos to the band, the musicians themselves decided who they wanted for their singer, and elected Starkey to deliver their ultimatum: they wanted their lead vocalist to be their guitar player. By the time The Healers were his priority, Johnny was cool enough and confident enough in his abilities to accept the job.
Singing live toned up Johnny’s vocal chords. The band played their first gigs in the spring of 2000, kicking off in the northern England town of Lancaster, where they played for nearly an hour and a half. While Lancaster was a ‘secret’ warm-up gig, their first advertised show was in Coventry, to an audience of about three hundred people, too many of whom clamoured for Smiths songs throughout. More importantly, the gig was a warm-up for dates to come, because The Healers were booked to support Oasis on their forthcoming tour. Johnny was asked whether it was ‘humbling’ to be supporting a band that he had helped get off the ground in the first place. It wasn’t as though Marr had had to beg for the gig. “I didn’t ask to support them,” he answered. “They invited me out.”
In fact, by now it was pretty obvious to anyone concerned that what really motivated Johnny Marr was the studio, and that any gig, headlining or supporting, was more about fun and the transference and sharing of energy rather than ego. “I didn’t really give a shit about supporting Oasis, and I didn’t see it as being humbling,” he said. “And I think humbling experiences are good for you, anyway.” Johnny had also enjoyed recent tours more than he had ever done in the days of The Smiths, and for the first outings of The Healers everything went well. The bands played six shows in seven days, in Milan, Zurich, Vienna, Leipzig, Warsaw and Berlin before returning to the UK for two dates at Bolton’s football ground, the Reebok Stadium, where they shared the support slot with the reformed Happy Mondays.
After Bolton, the band headed way out East, appearing at the Fuji Rock Fest in Japan, then in Barcelona. By September, the band was back in the UK, playing gigs in Portsmouth and London. As the writer, guitarist and singer, Marr invested more of himself in the experience than ever before, but thankfully the gigs routinely received a good reception. The first incarnation of The Healers tended to ramble through the songs live. “I wanted to really stretch them out and jam,” said Johnny. People were curious, but went away impressed by The Healers, by Johnny, and – in many cases – particularly by Zak Starkey. Taking the full glare of the spotlight was clearly a risky strategy for Johnny, but he carried it off with aplomb. He would draw comparison with other notable Mancunian vocalists, of which there were of course many to choose from, but perhaps a rock audience in the twenty-first century could forgive and forget the past, and take Johnny Marr on his own terms. For Johnny, as always, his eyes were on the present and the future, not on the past, and if the comparisons irked him, he kept a dignified silence. If he was compared to Ian Brown or Liam Gallagher, so what? As Morrissey used to tell some of the early Smiths audiences – if you don’t like it, leave.
In September Johnny joined an all-star bash to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of John Lennon. The sessions were held at George Martin’s Air Studios in Hampstead, and included the Gallagher brothers, Ron Wood, Donovan, Lonnie Donegan, as well as Sharleen Spiteri and Jools Holland. Sounding fantastic, the evening was kicked off by Johnny, Noel and Gem Archer playing the Lennon classic ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, accompanied by sitar and percussion. Towards the end of the year, Johnny followed up the dates that he had played with Oasis by sitting down with Liam Gallagher and laying down some songs. Within a week, Liam was reported to have written, and Johnny played on ten songs that would be considered for the next Oasis album. Liam apparently said the songs were better than anything by either Radiohead or John Lennon. The tracks remain unreleased as recorded with Johnny, but the next Oasis album – which Marr would ultimately play on – featured three of Liam’s songs.
Outside of The Healers, Johnny was also busy on tracks with two of his former collaborators, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. Nearly twenty years into their own career, the sessions for Release, to be heard publicly in 2002, saw the band eschewing again the synth pop of their early years and developing a more rounded, organic sound, with Johnny’s guitars prominent in the mix. With Johnny approaching the tender age of forty, there was no sign of any kind of mid-life crisis as the team worked on tracks at Tennant’s home in north-eastern England.
“We were very much on our own,” Chris Lowe told Sylvie Simmons, “in a very organic situation, and it all just sort of evolved.” While Tennant and Lowe had written many of the songs on guitar, Johnny’s final input was paramount, and the tracks that worked the best were the ones that were more guitar-oriented. A few years previously, Johnny had joked with an interviewer that Neil Tennant was ‘a closet Ritchie Blackmore’, but – he noted – was very melodic in his playing. One of Johnny’s roles on Release was to ‘re-do’ Tennant’s own guitar parts, digging into the tracks that Tennant and Lowe had put together, picking out elements on the guitar that brought them even further to life, just as he had done with Billy Bragg over a decade before. If the album was a departure for the Pet Shop Boys, nothing could encapsulate this more than the fact that the piece was critically compared to Oasis, surely as far away from what the Pet Shop Boys were perceived to be by their public as possible. “If we had wanted to,” admitted Tennant, asked about the songs on the album, “we could have turned them all into dance tracks… [but] we just felt there’s so much dance music around nowadays what w
as the point?”
Much of the middle of the 2001 was occupied with a tour that Johnny undertook alongside Neil Finn. After that brief meeting at the Linda McCartney tribute concert, Finn simply called Johnny out of the blue and asked him if he wanted to go out on the road again.
Finn had been playing a few low key gigs around New Zealand with bands made up of local amateur musicians, who would cover his hits and those of Crowded House and Split Enz, the two bands with whom Neil is most closely associated. To end the tour, Finn decided to form a little band of his own and contacted Johnny, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Phil Sedway and Ed O’Brien from Radiohead amongst others about sharing a bill.
“It was a whimsical notion I had around Christmas,” said Neil Finn. For the gig in Auckland, Neil decided his new little band could be something special for the town. “I was going out to do a tour with a band of strangers every night,” Neil continued, “and I thought it would be good in Auckland… to do something in Auckland that Auckland would never normally get.” As Finn explained, “it took a few phone calls.”
Johnny was intrigued – Finn’s new material, the album One Nil, had impressed him, and the more he thought about it the more he really wanted to get out and do the gigs. On arrival, the band rehearsed for three or four days, and when the band hit the stage they were supported by Betchadupa, Neil’s eldest son’s band. Dates in the Antipodes were followed by a European tour (“which I had no idea I was going to do,” said Johnny, “until I got back from New Zealand!”), and according to Marr it was one of the best experiences of his career. “In the past,” said Johnny, “I always had to be dragged by the collar by the lead singer,” whereas this tour was a joy. “I didn’t realise how great Neil was until I started playing with him,” Marr admitted, “[but] when you get inside those songs you realise what a talent he’s got.” During the tour, Johnny ‘allowed’ Neil to cover much protected/little played Smiths songs. They included ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ and ‘How Soon Is Now?’ – perhaps two of the most sacred songs in Johnny’s back-catalogue. The pair shared the vocal duty. “We got better as we went on,” said Finn.
Meanwhile, Johnny was working hard on his own new material too. The new Healers song ‘Down On The Corner’ was played at virtually every gig, and often Neil would ask Johnny to run through the song for the purposes of sound-checking too.
By the time the tour reached the UK, and Manchester, they were really flying. Of the gig in his local home theatre, Johnny observed that “I haven’t seen the Manchester Apollo rock that much since Thin Lizzy.” In the spring of the following year, Johnny re-joined Finn for a series of concerts on the west coast of America. The response from the Californian audiences was as enthusiastic as it had been elsewhere. The ensuing live release, Seven Worlds Collide, was testament to the fantastic experience that the band enjoyed. As well as becoming friends with Neil Finn – who Johnny clearly respects extremely highly, Johnny got to know Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam and Lisa Germano too. Johnny was to work on two of Germano’s own solo albums in the next few years.
Although The Healers had been out alone and had toured with Oasis, there was still no published evidence of Johnny’s ‘solo’ project. Nonetheless, work continued on his return from the Finn tour, and the first fruits of it were released in early October. The EP ‘The Last Ride’ was completely unlike anything Johnny had released before, and he was happy for it to be considered a new beginning. “It’s really nice for people to know where I am at,” he told one interviewer, “and not have to talk about the past all the time.” ‘The Last Ride’ was a postcard from where Johnny was at in the early years of the new century, and that was certainly a mighty long way away from The Smiths which was, after all, nearly two decades previous.
Heathen Chemistry, the dull new Oasis album, was released in the summer of 2002 to a better critical response than some recent Oasis records. To some degree the media love affair with Burnage’s finest had run its course, and the Oasis congregation was now a more settled church, a firm fan base rather than a Pavlovian response to anything the Gallagher brothers did. The album featured a number of contributions from Johnny. With a laid-back feel from Oasis, the record showcased several of Liam’s songs as well as one each by ‘new boys’ Gem Archer and Andy Bell. While Johnny was never likely to have replaced Paul Arthurs, his relationship with the Gallaghers was still good. ‘(Probably) All In The Mind’ was very reminiscent of The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, and Johnny added an uncomplicated but raw and effective solo. ‘Born On A Different Cloud’ – one of Liam’s songs – featured Johnny on slide guitar. He played a really effective session that recalled the slide of George Harrison as much as Liam’s fantastic vocal revisited John Lennon’s. ‘Better Man’, a rocking track much in the tradition of The Stone Roses’ ‘Love Spreads’ was Johnny’s final cut on the album, another one of Liam’s songs on which – as well as guitar – Johnny also contributed backing vocals.
On the subject of Johnny Marr, Noel Gallagher is hysterically funny. “There’s nothing he can’t do on a guitar,” says Gallagher. “You can’t be influenced by Johnny Marr, because he’s unique. You can’t play what he plays.” Noel rises to his subject with enthusiasm. “Even he can’t play what he plays. He told me a story of trying to recreate ‘How Soon Is Now?’, and it was like an Abbot and Costello sketch… even he’s not as good as he is!”
Another production credit came Johnny’s way in 2002 when he worked on the first album by Joe Moss’s recent signing Haven. Between The Senses was a strong album, compared in parts to Travis and Coldplay. In a series of events closely resembling the birth of The Smiths, Joe Moss, on holiday in Cornwall, was invited to see the band play live. Although Moss was still managing Marion, and they were gradually dissolving under his gaze, he liked the band that he saw, and invited them up to Manchester, getting them some support slots with Badly Drawn Boy in the process. Haven and Joe Moss got on really well, but the band and Johnny hit it off straight away. Johnny and Haven were to work on the follow-up album in a year or so’s time.
* * *
In the spring of 2003, the BBC marked the twentieth anniversary of the release of ‘Hand In Glove’ by broadcasting live from Salford Lads Club, by now firmly ensconced as The Smiths’ ‘own Abbey Road’. Andy Rourke had been playing with Badly Drawn Boy, the Mancunian sensation whose work had rightly become feted nationwide. Mike Joyce was drumming with new band The Dogs, including former Oasis guitarist Bonehead. Johnny was of course playing with The Healers. Lisa Germano, who had met Johnny through the Neil Finn tour, released her critically acclaimed album Lullaby For Liquid Pig, on which Johnny played a part. Germano’s solo career – she first appeared in the mid-Eighties playing violin for John Mellencamp – was well-established, and her Geek The Girl was one of the highlight albums of the previous few years.
Despite so much activity, The Healers took off on tour, and their dates through 2003 made it one of the most extensive jaunts of Johnny’s career to date, encompassing a dozen countries and varying from small clubs to major stadia. The band kicked off in the USA in mid-January in Hoboken, New Jersey. Although Johnny had played many times in the USA, and loves the country dearly, he was as nervous as hell when he took the stage at Maxwell’s. His first words to an American audience as a Healer summed his pre-gig nerves up perfectly. “I can’t speak for everyone else,” Johnny told the crowd, “but I’ve been shitting myself!” The band played three dates at Maxwell’s before heading to Philadelphia, Washington and New York. By February, via Toronto, the tour arrived on the West Coast, where The Healers played at venues such as LA’s Troubadour and appeared live on The Late Show with David Letterman. Apart from playing songs from the album, Johnny also regularly performed the Bob Dylan classic ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ to the delight of audiences.
Still avoiding Smiths covers in the set, and sticking to largely tracks from Boomslang, the band played two gigs at the beginning of March to finish off the world tour. T
he first was back in the home town of Manchester, while the second was a triumph at the ULU, where so long ago The Smiths had been introduced to John Walters, had been invited to their first session for John Peel, and had set off on the mighty journey that Johnny was very much still a part of.
Long-awaited, The Healers’ first album Boomslang was finally released to a modest but generally enthusiastic reception in February 2003. Inevitably the album was compared to The Smiths and to all the other bands who had come out of Manchester shouting, from Oasis to The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays. The comparisons were not always entirely fair, nor were they by any means all positive, but many reviewers and fans fell in love with the record. The fact was that the idea of a Johnny Marr album on which Johnny sings all the songs was hard to get our heads around, but as always with his work, the album works perfectly if it is viewed as a snapshot of where he stood at a given time and in a given place. The album isn’t the culmination of Johnny’s career, and critics looking for the ‘final solution’ to twenty years of shunning publicity while crafting immaculate pop year after year were searching in vain. Johnny wasn’t trying to sound ‘like’ anyone, not least any of his former bands. With his ears constantly on contemporary bands, he was aware of how much his output would be likely to be compared to others too. “It would be undignified for me to try and sound like The Strokes, or Coldplay,” he explained. “God Forbid! I just wanted to make sure the [album] was wide awake, and natural and honest.”
The fact that Marr took the microphone and the centre stage for the first time in his adult career signalled that this was a different Johnny Marr altogether from the one we were used to. Not least the confidence he exuded in discussing the project. For one riotous Canadian interview, Johnny was asked whether, looking back at the Linda McCartney tribute concert, Sir Paul had been familiar with Johnny’s own work. “Linda was a fan,” said Johnny. “And Chrissie Hynde probably played him some stuff. He just said I should have started singing a long time earlier. He said I was amazing, and he’d wished The Beatles had had five people in it!”
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