Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  It could be a bit edgy around Ardwick, and even as a little kid I had to watch myself. I was in the street one day when a much older kid grabbed me for no reason and started pounding my face into the pointed tail lights of a parked Ford Anglia car. I couldn’t get away, and Claire ran to the house to get someone. When he eventually stopped, blood was gushing all down my face. My mother came out and because we didn’t have a car or a phone she ran down to the main road and straight into the traffic, and stood holding her hand out in front of an oncoming car. The car stopped and she shouted for the driver to take us to the hospital. When we got there, a doctor stitched up the gash over my nose, which left a permanent scar.

  I was always over at my gran’s. She liked a drink and was good fun and she let the kids run a bit wild. Gran lived near the Apollo with my dad’s young brother Mike and my Aunt Betty, and her house would often end up in a party. My Uncle Mike was just in his teens, and because he was so young he was more like an older brother than an uncle. Mike seemed to have it all: he was doted on by his older siblings and he had the latest clothes and gadgets. He had moved from Kildare, and with no father around and my gran being so free he could do whatever he wanted, and he made the best of it. It was great having someone older to hang around with, especially someone who could do what they wanted. He took me with him to the Belle Vue Aces’ speedway races on Saturday nights, and he was a major George Best fan. I thought Mike was the coolest thing going.

  Other things close to home were much more disturbing, however. Being a child around Ardwick and Longsight in the 1960s, it was impossible to not be aware of the Moors Murders. The horror of what had happened had rocked the whole country, but the shock of it was felt even more acutely in the North West, where the events took place. The pictures of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady seemed to be an ongoing fixture in the newspapers and on the television, and I picked up half-heard details from the adults’ conversations about tortured children and tape recordings. Depravity was a difficult thing to fathom, but I realised that something monstrous was going on, and it was even worse that one of the victims, Keith Bennett, had lived nearby and had been on his way to a house near my gran’s when he was taken.

  Around at my gran’s I would see some musical instruments that belonged to my Aunt Betty and her friends. Betty was the main musician in the family, and she knew a lot of the Irish musicians who were playing in bands around Manchester. She was great to hang out with and she could pretty much get a tune out of anything. All my relatives were well aware of my obsession with music, and regardless of me being a child they talked to me like I was a grown-up. There were a lot of get-togethers, and a lot of smoking and drinking. No subjects were off-limits, and no type of language either.

  A lot of nights there were parties, with everybody playing instruments and singing. I would hang around the adults in anticipation, taking in the wildness and hearing the banter and conversations about who turned round to who and ‘told them to feckin’ feck off’. They were lively nights, and I sat on the floor, watching and listening to handsome men and pretty young women rocking as the night got more raucous and the bottle caps flew off. One of the benefits of being around young Irish people at the time was that my parents weren’t into the traditional music and rebel songs – they thought that belonged to another generation. My family liked pop music, rock ’n’ roll and country music. Hearing the guitar riffs on the rock ’n’ roll songs made a big impression on me, and I was always trying to work out what it was I was hearing. The more I noticed the guitars, the more alluring it all was, and the combination of the sound and the wild exuberance it brought out in everyone made me want to make music myself that would evoke the same kinds of feelings.

  My gran was usually up for dancing, and by dancing I mean jiving, and jiving fast. All the chairs and tables were moved back, and she was up and off like a demon, elbows swinging and shoulders bouncing as she whirled around the floor. I was seven at the time and it was an amazing sight. Not all of the men would get up, but if my dad was in the mood and the right Elvis Presley song came on he and my mum would jive, and I thought they were fantastic.

  As the night wore on it would be time for the instruments to come out, and everyone would sing songs. My dad’s sister May would sing a couple, and then my Auntie Ann would sing. I liked the songs Ann sang, like ‘Black Velvet Band’, and I’d be waiting for it to be her turn. She had a poignant way of putting a song across, a way of singing that was tinged with sadness. Then my dad would take out a harmonica and give it to me and show me how to play the tune. In those late nights, sitting around with everyone playing and singing, the slower tunes took me to somewhere else, to a place of yearning and a beautiful melancholy that I understood but that was only expressed in music. In those melodies I discovered a different side to life, and the outside world faded out. It was something I thought was real and unspoken, and I learned that you could chase that feeling down. The music was my way into somewhere, as well as a way out.

  I saw my first electric guitar in the Midway pub on Stockport Road in Longsight. The pub had a big room at the top where we used to go for parties, and Betty would hire her friend’s band, The Sweeneys, to play. The parties at the Midway were great. The adults treated it as a big night, and everyone was dressed up in the new fashions. At the start of the night the room would be practically empty, as most people would be in the pub downstairs. Me and Claire would hang around upstairs waiting for the band to arrive, drinking fizz with our cousins Dennis and Ann while ‘The Israelites’ by Desmond Dekker and ‘Baby Come Back’ by The Equals played to the coloured lights.

  When the band arrived, I’d watch them carrying their instruments up the stairs and then set up their equipment on the stage, waiting for the big moment when the guitar player went over to his case and took out his Fiesta Red Stratocaster. It was the most valuable-looking thing I’d ever seen, beautiful and shiny and contoured – it was better than a car, better than a jukebox, better than anything. Watching the band getting ready to play was amazing to me. It seemed like quite a serious business getting everything working right, and because they were grown-ups it appeared to be a job, a profession – and if that was a profession, why would anyone ever want to do anything else?

  The band started their set when everyone was good and ready to start partying. It would all be uptempo for the first part of the night, a mixture of chart songs and some songs by the Irish club singers. I’d watch all of the band, but the guitar player was the one I really scrutinised as he flicked the switches and turned the knobs on his Strat.

  One time, when they finished the first set and the band took a break, I remember, as usual, I had one thing on my mind: I had to see that guitar up close. I loitered around, just watching the case, so I could be there when the guitarist came back to open it. When he approached the stage and saw me waiting, he asked me if I wanted to take a look. He snapped open the lock and lifted the lid and there it was, right in front of me: shiny, red and chrome, with its strings and switches in its lined case, a totally otherworldly treasure. I examined it for as long as I could. It was beautiful.

  My parents often went out to clubs in Manchester to see bands. The two main places were the Airdri and the Carousel, which were predominantly for the Irish community. In the 1960s, the club culture for the Irish in Manchester was still centred around showbands, which played a mixture of American rock ’n’ roll, country and western, and ballads. The main frontman would be someone like Joe Dolan or Johnny McEvoy, and the backing bands would be The Big 8 or The Mainliners. Me and Claire were used to our parents going out, it was part of their routine, and I loved seeing them getting ready and the smell of my mother’s perfume when she gave me a kiss on the way out of the door.

  I would stay up with my Aunt Josie until they got back, and then I’d hear all about the bands and the songs and my mother would say, ‘John, you would’ve loved the guitarist.’ Sometimes, if it was one of the more well-known acts, my mum would have taken her autograph book. Sh
e’d tell me about meeting the artists to get a signed photo, and the excitement of it all made it seem like going out to see a band was the best and most glamorous thing that could ever happen.

  As time went on, I was more aware that I came from the inner city. I had relatives who lived much further out of town, and when we took the long bus ride out to visit them it was a different world. Their lives were more about the hills and trees, and mine was streets and roads and walking around the city centre.

  All my family went back to Ireland quite a lot. We’d get the night train from Victoria station in Manchester to Holyhead in Wales, and then get on the boat to Dublin. I’d stand on deck in the middle of the night with my dad in the blustering wind and look out at the moon on the sea. My dad would have me and my sister inside his overcoat, and it felt like an amazing adventure.

  Kildare couldn’t have been more different from Ardwick. My relatives lived in little cottages spread out along country lanes, surrounded by green fields. You boiled the water from a well in a big pot over a fire, and there was a barrel in the back garden with rainwater that you washed your hair in. I cycled around the lanes with my Aunt Josie, and I saw a lot of nature for the first time and played by a river. I didn’t quite know what I was supposed to do in a field, but I came to like the calm of the country and the smell of the wood fires wafting across the fields in the evenings. It was nice to know my roots and see what life was like for the generation before me.

  Back home, I was playing on my own one day when two scooters stopped at the end of the street with three older boys on them, and they called me over. As I approached them, I noticed that they were all dressed alike, with short hair, and one of them was wearing a shiny suit. I had my football with me, and one of them asked me if I wanted to sit on his scooter. He lifted me on to the back, revved it up and showed me where the side panels had been taken off so you could see the engine. I liked the scooter, but the thing I really noticed was the boys’ clothes. One of them had a red rose sewn on to the pocket of his coat. I asked him what it was, and he said, ‘That’s the Lancashire Rose. See this?’ he went on, pulling his coat open to show me the red lining. ‘It’s a Crombie.’ Then he lifted up his shoe and said, ‘These are called Royals, and you have to have these laces.’ I looked at his red-and-black woven laces and saw that one of his friends was wearing the exact same type. When I noticed his black shirt with its button-down collars, the boy took off his suit jacket to show me the pleat that ran down the back and said, ‘This is a Black Brutus.’ I don’t know why, but it seemed important to them that I had the right information about all of this, and I felt like I’d been given some secret knowledge. I watched them ride off and I thought they looked fantastic.

  I ran to my house and shouted, ‘Dad … Dad … I want a Crombie … can I get a Crombie?’ My dad had no idea why his eight-year-old son was going mad about an overcoat. ‘A Crombie?’ he said. ‘A Crombie coat, you mean?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘you have to sew a rose on it.’ My dad was laughing and said, ‘You’re not getting a Crombie, that’s a man’s coat.’ He thought I was mad, and then I turned to my mum and said, ‘Mum … I have to get some Royals.’

  Having a lot of industrial buildings around gave me plenty of opportunity for exploration, and one night me and some boys were climbing on the roof of a car mechanics workshop. There was a block of three old brick garages, and the roofs were made of corrugated iron that sloped up and down beside each other like mountain peaks. It was late at night and I thought nobody was in the buildings, but when I heard someone start yelling at me from below I jumped from one roof on to another and went straight through it. I spun around in blackness and saw the skylight above me, and then I woke up on the floor with my mother and some workmen standing over me as I was being lifted into an ambulance. The ambulance raced through the traffic with the siren blaring, and I was in and out of consciousness. I’d fallen thirty feet and was saved by a mechanic who’d broken his hand when he’d tried to catch me. I’d landed in a five-feet gap between huge sheets of glass and a forklift truck, and if I’d fallen a couple of feet either side it would’ve all been over. When we got to the hospital we learned that the man who’d saved me had come off worse in terms of broken bones. He was standing in the hospital corridor in shock and kept saying, ‘He just came through the roof … he just came through the roof,’ while my mother was thanking him for saving me.

  Petrol Blues

  I’VE ALWAYS SAID that when my family moved from Ardwick to Wythenshawe, eight miles away, it was like we’d moved to Beverly Hills. I was eight years old when my parents announced that we would be leaving our house as part of the inner-city clearance scheme, and to me it felt like we were finding the new frontier. My mother also announced that I’d be getting a new baby brother or sister soon. It was all exciting and very mysterious. Wythenshawe was a working-class area in the suburbs of south Manchester, and was the biggest housing estate in Europe.

  It was Easter when we moved, which meant that the days were getting longer and the weather was good. My dad’s boss gave my mum and my sister and me a lift in his car while my dad hauled our furniture in an uncle’s van. Our new council house had three bedrooms upstairs and one main room downstairs, with a big window leading on to a garden at the back, and a small garden at the front. There was central heating, and best of all there was an inside toilet and a bathroom with a real bath, so we didn’t need to fill up the tin tub any more, like we’d done in the old place.

  All my relatives decided to move to new places that were closer to Ardwick, and although my gran and some of my other relatives would come to visit, the rest of the family started to go their own way. There were a number of other families from our street that had been relocated with us, and the new houses on our square made an instant community. Whereas in the old place I’d spent a lot of time on my own on our little street or in the house with the radio, there were now kids everywhere. I started playing all around the estate, which included lots of empty houses that the more intrepid of us were able to explore before the rest of the neighbourhood moved in. It felt like another beginning for us – new opportunities in a brand-new environment.

  Although the new community was just as diverse as the one we’d left behind, with British, Asian, Jamaican and Irish families all thrown in together, the early 1970s was a time of serious violence and racism in the UK, and was made all the worse for some Irish people with the media reports of bombings and terrorism on the mainland. I was in a friend’s house one afternoon when his mother started complaining very loudly about one of the families on the estate. Her tone became nastier, and when she finished her tirade with a scathing ‘Irish pigs’, I realised it was meant for me. I was shocked: it felt like a vicious attack on my family. My parents had no political affiliation with anyone and were well respected. Claire and I had been called ‘Irish pig’ before by kids, and I had brushed it off as ignorance, especially as I was born in England, but being called one by an adult was hard to take.

  My new primary school, the Sacred Heart, was a twenty-minute walk from our house. One of the benefits of my sister and me being so close in age was that it was slightly less of an ordeal being the new kids. As usual my sister fitted in quickly and got into the swing of things without too much fuss, whereas I felt like I’d migrated to the North Pole – my new environment seemed so bewildering. In the 1970s Wythenshawe had a reputation for being violent, but compared to Ardwick everyone seemed sophisticated and well mannered. It was nice, but also a bit strange. I was used to other kids being volatile and unpredictable; I wasn’t used to them being polite and taking a positive interest in me.

  Some of the Sacred Heart kids were a bit wary of us and acted like Claire and I were exotic curiosities because of the way we looked. Since we were little the two of us had been obsessed by clothes. We took note of what was in the shops and what everybody was wearing on the street, and our parents both had to work just to keep their kids from total meltdown should her platforms shoes not be hig
h enough or his jacket need wider lapels. When we turned up for the first day of school we didn’t realise we were supposed to be wearing a regular uniform. I was wearing a wool sweater with stars on that, believe it or not, was called a ‘star jumper’, and Claire had on a check jacket that looked like a shirt and was called … yes, a ‘shirt jacket’. We were more suited to a disco than the school playground, but we were up-to-date and it got me attention from girls, which I liked, and also from some of the teachers, which I didn’t.

  Going to school in the suburbs changed things for me. In Ardwick I’d been quiet and was sensitive to what was going on around me. It wasn’t always a good thing, and I often felt strangely uneasy without knowing why. Pop culture became all-consuming and more meaningful to me than anything else, and I related to it as if it were a portal to another dimension, one that made more sense to me than the world I actually lived in. My dream was that I would be able to escape there if I got good enough on the guitar. The move to Wythenshawe made me more confident, and I started to notice that I was around people who considered it a good thing that I took playing music so seriously.

  My new teacher was called Miss Cocane. She was a very modern woman in her late twenties who smoked cigarettes after school in the classroom and who, ironically, was as intense as her name suggested. She could be stern, but she took an interest in me and would often ask about how I was progressing on the guitar. She spotted a creative side in me that no one else had really noticed. One afternoon I was leaving class when she called me back to talk to her. I stood beside her desk, hoping I wasn’t in trouble, and listened attentively as she lit a cigarette and said, ‘You have something that you should be aware of. What do you think about being an artist?’ I listened to what she was saying and it sounded good. ‘You can go two ways,’ she continued, ‘you can get bored and get into trouble, or you can find something you like and be good at it, and be an artist.’ She sounded kind and concerned, and I knew she was serious. ‘But it’s not easy,’ she said. ‘You have to really work hard.’ What she was saying was a revelation, but it seemed logical. ‘You want to play the guitar, but we don’t teach that in this school,’ she said – which wasn’t a problem for me as I didn’t even know there was such a thing as guitar lessons – ‘but you can do something else, and if you show me that you’ve worked hard at it you can bring your guitar to school. What else do you like?’