Johnny Marr

by Richard Carman

  ‘Did You See Me Coming’ opens with Johnny again, this time sun-drenched, acoustic Marr, as Tennant’s lovely song celebrates the start of a relationship born of a chance encounter. The more claustrophobic ‘Building A Wall’ has Johnny on guitar, and on the synth-driven retro-Dr Who track ‘Pandemonium’ he contributes guitar and harmonica again. The track was originally written for Kylie Minogue, and has hit single written all over it, though it was never released as such. The album, however, was Chris and Neil’s best-performing work for more than a decade, charting at number four in the UK and higher across Europe.

  ‘Did You See Me Coming’ and – in Germany – ‘Beautiful People’ were both released as singles, and the album released in the spring of 2009. One song co-written during the album sessions, ‘The Loving Kind’, made its way onto Out of Control, the fifth album of British power-pop group Girls Aloud. Johnny – after a passing remark that he had enjoyed the guitars on some of the early Girls Aloud singles – was invited to play a part on the album too. It might seem an odd mix, but girl groups of the sixties were one of the bonding themes of the early Morrissey and Marr relationship, so why not girl groups of the noughties? A self-confessed lover of pop rather than rock, the idea that pop is crass and commercial “is an old-fashioned rockist conceit,” he told Uncut. The Smiths were, after all, primarily a pop group. For the Girls Aloud sessions he devised a guitar part for the wistful ‘Rolling Back The Rivers In Time’, and added vamping harmonica to the closing bars of the jaunty ‘Love Is The Key’. The album also provided Girls Aloud with their fourth number one single in the UK. ‘The Promise’ was another Higgins/ Xenomania track, high on sixties production values, Supremes-style video and winner of the Best British Single award at the 2009 Brit Awards – vindicating Johnny’s pop taste in joining the project.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE MESSENGER

  Tracks that Johnny had written had graced movie and TV soundtracks for years. John Hurt’s An Englishman in New York featured ‘How Soon Is Now?’, Shaun of the Dead had used ‘Panic’ and 500 Days of Summer was in many ways an illustrated guide to The Smiths. But these were trawlings of Marr’s back catalogue, tracks picked from history to enhance a scene or a character. 2009 brought an opportunity to contribute to a new and major soundtrack, and to work with one of music’s most successful and iconic composers.

  Hans Zimmer had had an inauspicious but very visible start in pop, but one nevertheless associated with a number one record and the launch of MTV; he can be seen, fingertips on keyboards, towards the end of the Trevor Horn and Buggles’ clip for ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, the song that launched the nascent TV channel in 1981. But appearing in other people’s videos was not what fate had in store for the German musician. He moved into film work, and his first credit was as composer of electronic music for the Jeremy Irons’ movie Moonlighting in 1982. After working on various projects, including Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Launderette, he was commissioned to write the score for Rain Man, which won an Academy Award. Zimmer’s score was nominated too, and a year later the same pattern was repeated when his work on Driving Miss Daisy was nominated, while the film itself won the Best Film Oscar.

  Zimmer was quickly established as Hollywood gold dust, and his extraordinary CV includes contributions to the scores of some of the biggest movies of all time – lots of them. 2009’s Batman movie The Dark Night was a high watermark for director Christopher Nolan, with Heath Ledger’s joker becoming one of modern cinema’s most iconic characters, and many critics hailed it the best movie of recent times. The movie grossed over $1 billion, and Zimmer’s contribution, while not awarded an Oscar itself, was not overlooked. For his next piece Nolan turned again to the atmospheric pen of Hans Zimmer.

  Throughout the music for the film Zimmer used a technique that both developed character and created atmosphere. Adopting a series of repetitive, cyclical motifs, several pieces begin in a mood of solitary, reflective minimalism, recalling Michael Nyman or Philip Glass. As the piece develops, however, more orchestration is added, more instruments join the developing theme, until what began a thoughtful “little” piece develops into a fully orchestral monster. It’s astonishingly effective as Zimmer is not only a great orchestrator, but also has a handy way with melody. These are moody, atmospheric or emotional pieces, but they are catchy too. Something, one might imagine, that might appeal to the guitar player who wrote ‘How Soon Is Now?’

  Hans Zimmer describes himself as “a hermit.” The score for Inception started, as his work often does, on a computer screen – one man, one keyboard, in a dark studio lit by candles – with an Egon Schiele painting gazing down on him from the wall. Ideas come slowly. “A lot of notes are easy,” he says, “but to just have a few that seem to say the same thing – it drives me insane.” As the themes developed to bring out the colours in Nolan’s script, these were gradually brought in front of a small orchestra to be re-imagined. The effect is to turn the tables on how synthesizers were originally developed, which was to imitate real strings, or real woodwind. Here, Zimmer brought pieces of digital, synthesised sound to the orchestra, notated or recorded, and said, “Okay, guys – you imitate that.”

  The effect is stunning, bringing an interplay to the score that mixes organic and synthesised sounds in a rich, rich way. As the process continued, Zimmer began imagining another colour in the palette, a sound that would illuminate the piece differently. The instrument that he heard was a guitar. “But there’s a hideous thing that happens when you have guitars and orchestra,” he explained. With a little repeating riff, and “bad sample guitar sounds” to toy with, Zimmer speaks of suddenly realising who he was writing for, and when he told Nolan that he thought “someone like Johnny Marr” was what he was after, Nolan knew exactly what he meant. “To me,” he said, “that meant that’s exactly who we are going to have.”

  Both Nolan and Zimmer were obviously very aware of what made Johnny Marr tick. While playing Zimmer’s compositions, Johnny was very much left to “sound like himself,” and that freedom contributes to the veracity of the overall sound. “Even though some of the parts sound simplistic,” Johnny told Guitar World, “I had to really work it out by detuning and playing in weird positions. Then there were the odd time signatures and key changes to deal with. But I really love Hans’ voicings, so it was fun to work them out.”

  What worked best about the music for Inception was that in many ways it told a different story than the script told. As a movie that never took the intelligence of the audience for granted, but allowed every viewer to write their own movie in their heads, the music did that as well. It’s as though while a director might work with a lighting director to dress a scene in one way, so Zimmer’s music lights the movie in a different way. It was an elegant work that Johnny was proud to have been involved in, and immediately started talking up, wanting to do more movie work. When the film was released in the summer of 2010, Zimmer – perhaps unable to easily let go of a piece that clearly meant a lot to him personally – arranged for a concert to play the entire score live with a full orchestra, and arranged for it to be transmitted via the internet. The gig allowed the musicians to jump the velvet rope of the premiere, allowing thousands of people around the world to premiere the music in their own homes. So, on July 13 2010 Johnny joined Hans and a studio theatre full of players to perform the music live. Typically modest (and happy to admit he is terrified on stage), Zimmer told one interviewer that “having Johnny Marr there, having someone who knows what they are doing on stage – it helps.”

  The event was beautifully lit, beautifully staged, beautifully recorded, and beautifully played and sung by musicians in beautiful ball gowns. And in the middle stood Johnny Marr, ex-Smith, Manchester lad, guitar hero. And he played beautifully too. As the evening ended, Johnny held up his now trademark white Fender Jaguar to the audience and was walked to the front of the stage with Zimmer’s arm around his shoulders – another notch on the musical bedpost of this remarkable man.
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  At the end of 2009 Johnny had another opportunity, this time to score the soundtrack for an Antonio Banderas’ movie The Big Bang. Director Tony Krantz and he had met in the eighties, when a mutual friend involved in managing bands was associated with The Smiths in North America. Krantz was very much aware of Marr and his music. Having been the muscle behind such TV greats as ER and Twin Peaks, The Big Bang was one of Krantz’s first forays as a movie director. A Raymond Chandler/Mickey Spillane-style film noir detective thriller, but with a secondary theme incorporating particle physics gags throughout, the film was well received but didn’t set the world alight. Banderas plays the part of Ned Cruz, a private eye hired to find a Russian stripper. Listening in his car to Boomslang, it occurred to Krantz that Johnny Marr would be perfect to provide an atmospheric soundtrack. A copy of the script was sent to Marr, who was immediately impressed and a wee bit nervous. “I liked the script,” he explained, “but was saying, ‘I don’t think I’m the right guy!’” But, despite doing the worst selling job he could, Marr got the gig.

  Krantz left Johnny to his own devices for much of the movie. Originally, he worked direct from the script and then developed individual themes. Only at that point did he pick up a guitar and put the pieces together. The experience of having worked with Zimmer informed the process too. Rather than write the best piece first, cramming it into the first scene, and then writing a second piece to illuminate the second, Zimmer had explained the process of putting together an entire suite, which illustrated the whole movie, and then breaking that down into parts that could be used. The process worked for Marr, and he enjoyed the element of not having to release an album of songs – “handing in your homework,” as he put it – that would be reviewed and critiqued across the world’s press. Johnny’s soundtrack was a mixed blend of dark, claustrophic drones, pacy theme-pieces, Morricone-style solos, and it works perfectly. He even found a place for daughter Sonny’s vocals.

  Marr clearly enjoyed film work, and particularly the process of working with Zimmer. A one-off project was to write the theme tune for David Cross’s RDF/Channel 4 comedy, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, but when Hans told him, over lunch in London in 2013, that he was working with American songwriter/rapper Pharrell Williams on the score for the new Spider-Man movie, Johnny went wild with enthusiasm. So much so that before they left the restaurant the music was already half-written. “This lunch started at noon, and four hours later we’re singing riffs to each other,” said Zimmer. “As a kid,” Marr explained, “[Spider-Man] was my favourite superhero. Bar none.”

  Working this time with a bigger team that included Williams, Alicia Keys, Kendrick Lamar, Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger and Junkie XL, Zimmer created an impromptu band that worked together to create songs that were incorporated into the score. He dubbed them “The Magnificent Six”, responsible for the sort of music that Zimmer imagined would inhabit the mind of the young Peter Parker. Inhibited at first by the number of big names in the room, egos were left at the door. Zimmer explained that he didn’t pick big names because they were big, but because they were good. “Let’s channel being in our first band,” Hans told the ensemble of Spider-Man fans. Johnny’s riffing as Spider-Man drops through the chasms of the New York streets channelled that perfectly. The cultural clashes that sparked from the sessions created a perfect urban musical landscape that perfectly fitted the New York setting.

  “To have Pharrell Williams sitting there with Johnny Marr – the guy who wrote ‘Happy’ and the guy who came from The Smiths… it couldn’t have been nicer or more collaborative,” Zimmer was to say afterwards. His relationship with Johnny is clearly one built on massive amounts of mutual respect. Each talks of how much they learned from the other, but more tellingly they really like one another. At the time of writing, the pair were working on the new Peter Sollett movie Freeheld and happily discussing in interviews the invitation for Zimmer to work on Johnny’s third solo album.

  * * *

  For a vegan rock and roller in his forties, if playing on best-selling movie soundtracks wasn’t diversion enough from the tour/album/ tour routine, summer 2010 found Johnny staring down the barrel of a meat-eating plant at the RHS show at Tatton Park in Cheshire, England. Plant cultivator Matthew Soper developed the hybrid pitcher plant over nine years’ work in the south of England and named it Sarracenia Johnny Marr after his favourite guitarist. Johnny turned up at the show, touched to have had a labour of so many years named after him, to be photographed with the other Johnny Marr. He planned to have a guitar painted in its colours, and – when asked if the fact that the plant was carnivorous bothered him – said, “I don’t have any complaints about lions being carnivorous, you know? Nature is the way it is….”

  By early 2011 Johnny’s time as a member of The Cribs was coming to a natural end. As with Modest Mouse, there was no animosity or great falling-out, just a series of events that brought the project to a close. Key amongst these was Johnny’s itchy feet for solo work. Initially he was considering a new project for The Healers and had started to write on his own again, with an eye to bringing that project back on line. Marr planned to put out two albums over the coming year or so, and wanted to work on more soundtrack work too. “Touring with Ryan, Gary and Ross has been fantastic,” he told the Evening Chronicle, “and Ignore the Ignorant something I am really proud of. We ended up doing so much more than we originally set out to do, and I have made three good friends.”

  For the three brothers too the time was right to let Johnny go: while new material had been worked on, it didn’t feel right. Gary was building a studio in Portland, ready for a break, in which he and the others could just work in there for fun, trying out gear and relaxing. The Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull produced an ash cloud that killed flights in Europe for a week or more. Gary got stuck in the UK and couldn’t return to work in the US. No one was happy with what was being written. It came as a blow but no surprise when Johnny took the opportunity to move on again. “I knew straight away,” said Ryan, “that Johnny was leaving the band.” It was an opportunity for the brothers to go back to being a trio, and to build on what they had gained from having Marr in the band. For Johnny, his creative instinct was kicking in, and it was time to go back to being Johnny Marr again.

  Permanent relocation to the UK from Oregon reconnected him with the atmosphere he found most creative. Indeed, Manchester is a creative city by nature. A downtrodden, dirty city in Marr’s childhood, the destruction caused by the IRA bombing in 1996 and Manchester’s subsequent affluent rebuild into a smart, hip city did not affect its inherent creative heart. It was to here that Johnny returned and it was not lost on interviewers that both his home city and Portland have reputations for being, well, rainy – maybe staying indoors meant people created more! Johnny was happy to talk Manchester, happy to talk cities, as the lyrical content of much of the new work he was developing had a theme of urban dysfunction. “There’s a slight uptight quality that is in the UK,” he told a reporter from The Japanese Times. “More angsty, people trying to create some colour under the grey skies.”

  “The music came first,” said Johnny. “The fact that Messenger is a solo record came second.” The songs developed as demos at such a rate that it never occurred to Marr that they could be for Modest Mouse, The Cribs or even The Healers. “[I] didn’t want to have anyone else collaborate on them, as they were pretty much fully realised,” he added. Several of the songs came about “lyric first”, an unusual process for someone whose career has mainly been about writing music to jigsaw into someone else’s words. “I had a bunch of lyrics that needed to be turned into songs,” Marr explained. “I turned to [the Jarman brothers] and said, ‘I think I wanna write thirty songs.’ And in my experience, anyone who says that – you don’t get in their way!”

  Johnny assembled a band of friends, including production cohort James Doviak on keyboards and backing vocals. Doviak had been in and out of Marr’s music on guitar and keyboards since the ea
rly noughties and had played with The Healers. He brought in bass player Max James, while on drums Marr called Jack Mitchell, late of Haven, who had the unusual claim to fame of having replaced Noel Gallagher on drums in the band Tailgunner. Scattered across the album were Johnny’s now-adult son and daughter, Sonny and Nile (named for one of Marr’s early heroes and latter-day stage companions, Nile Rodgers). As a unit they are tight as a snare skin, heavy when required, and sniper-accurate across all the tracks.

  The Messenger was released in February 2013. Recorded mainly in Manchester, with occasional visits to Berlin, the album comes out of its corner with its gloves up, punching first and hitting hard. ‘The Right Thing Right’ sounds like a lost, great Teardrop Explodes single – Johnny Marr at his best. Marr’s voice is confident, powerful, and more convincing than on Boomslang. His head is “in the south”, but his heart is in the north. Lyrically, it’s a dense start, but a proclamation in pure pop: Johnny Marr is back writing catchy three-and-a-bit minute wonders. ‘I Want The Heartbeat’ maintains the intensity, buzzsaw guitar lines strewn at a frenetic pace. It’s ambitious, personal, distinctive, and again, tailor-made for a heaving summer festival crowd. For listeners looking for Smiths’ references, there’s a whisper of ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ in the acoustic strumming of ‘European Me’, heavy on reverb and long, sustained chords that fill the room. Dispassionately looking out across a vista of bleak European migration, of souls searching for a better life but ever moving on, the highlight track features Johnny’s daughter Sonny on backing vocals and son Nile on guitar respectively.