Set the Boy Free

by Johnny Marr

  That was me out – cool. However, I didn’t know that when someone left the Co-Op the custom was that you went to the loading bay at the rear to face a firing squad made up of the entire staff, who were armed with a seemingly endless supply of eggs. It was a huge supermarket, so there was a hell of a lot of staff and a hell of a lot of eggs. As soon as I appeared, off they all went, no surrender, on and on, mercilessly, until I was completely covered with eggs. They waved their goodbyes and went back to work, laughing their heads off, and I had to get home. The buses still weren’t running, and I wouldn’t have been let on one anyway, so off I walked, a human omelette in the snow.

  A couple of miles from home I was so cold and uncomfortable I decided to go to my mate Danny Patton’s place, which was on the way. Danny’s family were great. Whenever you turned up at his house, his parents would greet you warmly and they were fun and would let you hang out. They were most amused when I turned up on their doorstep. I went straight to the shower and borrowed some clothes. After I got fixed up, Danny asked me, ‘Are we going to Gill’s party? There’ll be some girls there.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘we’re going.’

  I went to Gill’s house with three of my friends: Bobby the drummer, and the other two who were just pretending to be in a band. The party was a younger and straighter crowd than I was used to, and there was a bit of a fuss that we had turned up. The house was a buzz of teenage sexual frisson; alcohol was going down fast. Gill’s parents were away and she was concerned that things were about to get destroyed or stolen. There was also the usual threat of violence from some uglies who planned on killing me when they got drunk enough. I’d got used to that, so I always clocked the nearest escape route out of anywhere, just in case. I was once at a party where a guy I’d never seen before broke a bottle on the sink and came at me really slowly while I backed up the whole flight of stairs. I made it into a bedroom and had to climb out of the window. In those days, being known for being in a band occasionally had its drawbacks.

  The party was just getting into the swing of things. I wandered around for a few minutes before settling on a couch in the main room, where Blondie’s new LP, Parallel Lines, was playing. I sank down next to my drummer and in a few seconds something happened that was to be the most important moment of my life: across the room I noticed a girl standing side-on. I was stunned by how pretty she was, and just like a movie the rest of the room appeared to freeze and I saw a glow around her. All I could think was, ‘You have found her.’ It was a total knowing. I turned to Bobby and said, ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’

  It’s amazing how the course of your life can change within a few seconds. One moment things are as normal, and then a phone call, a meeting, destiny or fate, and everything is different from then on. I locked into that moment. I had to talk to her, and hoped she’d want to talk to me. I can’t remember what I said at first because I wasn’t hearing myself speak. I was fascinated by her. She was so beautiful and assured and so totally cool. I could tell she was younger than me, and after saying something I asked when her birthday was. She told me it was in October. ‘What date?’ I asked her.

  ‘Thirty-first, Halloween,’ she said.

  ‘What? We’re born on the same day.’

  I thought it was beyond a boy and a girl, it was soul to soul. I needed her to like me as quickly as possible, but I couldn’t let her see it because I would look an idiot. I found out later that she knew who I was and was into me in the same way. Angie just didn’t let on.

  For the next few weeks I would just happen to be wherever she was going. When she walked to school in the morning I would be at my window as she went by, wondering if she’d look over. She looked every time and we’d wave to each other. I made sure I was standing by her school gate when she came out at lunchtime to go to the shop. I’d have Andy with me so I didn’t appear completely desperate, but she knew I’d be there and I knew she was expecting me. A gang of us would all hang around together – some of her mates and me and Andy – and we all knew it was so me and Angie could spend forty minutes together. Then I’d kill time until three forty-five when I could walk home with her.

  This ritual went on for weeks. It didn’t matter that I was supposed to be in school myself, it wasn’t even a consideration. I’d taken to having longer and longer sabbaticals from St Augustine’s, and it didn’t seem to bother my school that their resident guitar hero was missing. If it was a nice day, Andy and I would look at each other and declare, ‘It’s too nice to go in today,’ and then go outside and walk around Wythenshawe Park. If it was raining, we’d turn to each other and say, ‘It’s a bit grim to go in today, isn’t it?’ and stay indoors instead.

  If one of us had a crisis of conscience, it would be alleviated by the other until he came to his senses. As long as I turned up at the school registrar’s office every now and then with a handwritten note saying ‘Dear Sir, Johnny had conjunctivitis’ and sign it with some unreadable signature, then everything was fine. When Andy needed a note, I would write one for him. After it became obvious what we were both doing, I wrote, ‘Dear Sir, Andy was with Johnny Marr because he had conjunctivitis,’ and once I wrote a letter that simply said, ‘Andy had conjunctivitis too,’ just to see if we could get away with it and because it was funny.

  Angie and I started to see more of each other, although Andy was never too far away. He was easy-going as always, and it gave him plenty of opportunities to acquaint himself with a number of Angie’s friends, who were interested in their own hormonal activity. He was well happy and kept busy.

  The early days of finding each other were magic for me and Angie. One day we snuck off and sat on a wall on the estate with the spring sky behind us, and I laid out the plan for our future: ‘We’ll get away and get out. I’ll put together a band and make records. We’ll go to London, and then go around the world. I’m a guitar player and you’re a guitar player’s girlfriend. That’s what we’re doing.’ She didn’t doubt me, and that was amazing and validating. There was no other option for me anyway, and now that I had her it was even more necessary because she needed it too. I believed I could do it. She made me brave.

  The policy of my folks towards having friends at my house was very much ‘persona non fat chance’, but it was open house for Angie. All of my family loved her. They treated her like she was one of us, and approved of her more than they did me. I was all right with that as it meant that she could stay over any time she wanted, which meant all the time, which was perfect, obviously.

  Angie’s family’s attitude towards me was a different matter. Her parents didn’t know she had a boyfriend and wouldn’t have been pleased about her having one who smoked cigarettes and was about to drop out of school to play guitar full-time. Angie was fourteen and they saw her as a conventional schoolgirl with a sensible future ahead of her, not the girlfriend of a maverick tearaway who was living the life of one of The Rolling Stones – if the Stones lived on a council estate in south Manchester – and was planning on escaping by whatever means he could.

  Angie lived with her mum and dad and her older brother, Pete, and not surprisingly they had started to notice that she had taken to dying her hair jet-black, had become very pale, and appeared to have lost all interest in homework and also food. Within about six weeks of us getting together she looked exactly like a teenage Siouxsie Sioux on the arm of a teenage Johnny Thunders, and wherever we went people would look and look again. We listened to New York Dolls, Psychedelic Furs and The Cramps, and her absolute favourite was Iggy Pop. Although I didn’t actually introduce her to cigarettes, I did introduce her to other things like guitars and record covers and gigs, and that was all right – Angie wanted an adventure and she supported all my ideas and curiosities. There were a lot of them.

  At Andy’s house we would find more and more adventurous ways to smoke pot, with ever more ridiculous results. There was a football pitch behind the back garden, and when the two teams lined up, we would dress up the dog, who was called Dan,
in a replica of the home team’s kit, complete with a hole in the shorts for his tail, and send him out to play with them. We would wait until a particularly tense moment in the match and then watch Dan go straight for the ball and race around in his kit as the players would try in vain to catch him. All of us would be watching from inside the house and be rolling about in fits of laughter. They’d have to wait until Dan got bored of the game and ran off. What made it all the funnier was that we would do it again the next week. Once, when Dan followed me all the way back to my house late at night, I flagged down a black cab and put him in the back of it. I gave the driver six quid and sent him home, and when the taxi pulled up the dog got out. I had no money left for the week, but it was funny.

  One thing that Andy’s younger brother John devised was pouring buckets of water on the road when it was freezing cold so it would turn to ice. Then he would hide behind the curtains, peep through the window and watch the cars skidding around the corner. It was a weird prank for a little kid to come up with, and we never considered the seriousness of it, but it was wickedly funny, especially when the obnoxious next-door neighbour came off his bicycle.

  It was around this time that I realised my band needed to get more serious if we were going to get anywhere. We played a couple of shows in local youth clubs, but I knew we had to be more dedicated to get as good as I thought we needed to be. One idea was to get Andy to play bass. It seemed obvious to me, as he was totally brilliant whenever he picked up Kev’s bass and his approach to the instrument was like no one else. He was reluctant at first, but he became a master bass player within a matter of weeks.

  Rob Allman had formed a couple of bands after Four Way Street split up, and he knew that I was serious about what I was doing. He came to one of our rehearsals, and after hearing a couple of my songs he proposed that we start a new group with Andy on bass and Bobby on drums and me and him on guitars and vocals. I wanted to work with Rob because he was so good, and Kev didn’t mind not joining as he was getting into acting and would eventually join the cast of Coronation Street. We started rehearsing in the back room at Andy’s house, and Rob named the band White Dice. I didn’t like the name, but it was good to be rehearsing regularly and writing our own songs. Rob brought in his friend Paul Whittle to play keyboards, and the band got very good at arranging vocals and harmonies. Rob was a great musician and I learned a lot about songwriting, but he was a few years older than my band and he would sometimes treat us like we were his subordinates and try to tell everybody what to play. This didn’t sit well with me, and he and I would often clash.

  One day I walked in from school and the phone rang. I picked it up and someone with a London accent said, ‘Is that Johnny Marr? This is Jake Riviera, Elvis Costello’s manager.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I said, assuming it was Bobby on a prank call.

  ‘Is that Johnny Marr?’ repeated the caller more assertively. ‘This is Jake Riviera, Elvis Costello’s manager. I was sent this tape of your band and I think it’s really good. I want you to come into the studio.’

  I was just about to say ‘Fuck off, Bobby Riviera’ when I had the realisation that the call might actually be genuine. Here I was in my school uniform, fifteen years old, and I was talking to Elvis Costello’s manager. I stood up straight and said, ‘Oh, OK, cool.’

  The band had recorded a song on to a cassette months before and Rob had sent it to a record company. Jake Riviera had heard it and liked it enough to send us train tickets to London and put us in the studio for a day. The prospect of going into a real recording studio was bewildering, especially as it was at Nick Lowe’s house. It was hard to believe it was real, and I had no idea what might happen.

  We went to London and made our way to the studio. After waiting for an eternity outside an anonymous-looking house, the door opened and we were greeted by a very sleepy Carlene Carter, who was Nick Lowe’s wife and the step-daughter of Johnny Cash. Unaccustomed to being greeted by a beautiful rock goddess in a negligee, we made our introductions and walked through to where the studio was set up for the session. The whole day was surreal and almost too much to process. I was in the recording studio, with classic guitars and amplifiers everywhere, in Nick Lowe’s house. The session went by in a blur. We played six songs to the producer, and he decided we should try to complete four. I got to play Elvis Costello’s Rickenbacker, which had been left in the hallway, and at ten o’clock we dashed to Euston station to catch the last train back to Manchester and wait for a call to say that Mr Riviera wanted to be our manager. The call never came, but I wasn’t disappointed. I didn’t expect anything and loved the whole experience.

  The band continued for a while and we tried rehearsing in a few different places around Manchester. One place was called T. J. Davidson’s Rehearsal Rooms, and in the room above us was Joy Division, who I’d occasionally see loading their gear in and out of the building. They looked very weird and completely different from any other bands around at the time: they appeared to be wearing old men’s clothes and their haircuts looked like something from the 1930s. They were dedicated though, and always seemed to be busy gigging and rehearsing.

  We continued to practise and tried to find some gigs, but not a lot seemed to be happening. One problem was that the older guys in the band seemed to want to just sit in the pub and talk about doing things, whereas I wanted to get out and do it. I got us a gig at a students’ union event, but the night was a disaster. Rob got very drunk, to the point of sabotage, and I knew then that I was going to have to find something else. I was disappointed and sad about it, but we’d been working too hard and the music was too important to me to let it be fucked up. It was a chance to find my own music for my own generation. In my next band I would be the leader, I would play the guitar and write the music, and I would look for a singer to front it.

  Stagewear for the Street

  TO MY MIND, my schooldays were finally over. I was still fifteen and officially had another year left to go, but I took off for the last time one summer’s morning and told Angie that I wasn’t going back. She and I walked around town feeling like anything was possible, and I reaffirmed my plans for our future: playing music and going places. I was determined to have a decent group and I knew it had to happen. There was a punk hangover in Manchester. The older generation of musicians acted like they’d won the war, and it was impossible to go out to a gig or a record shop without hearing tales of glory days from some of the people who were hanging around on the scene. I thought some of the punks were hypocrites: they seemed to want the same lifestyle and status as the rock stars they were supposedly out to dethrone. I was bored of what had become of guitar culture too. I had respect for the guitar players who had been pioneers in the sixties, but rock music had become very macho and was desperately out of date to me. I wanted something for my own times, and I was very aware of being young and from a different generation with different values.

  My parents weren’t going to subsidise me, so I needed to find a job of some sort to get by. Claire was going her own way too and hanging out more with her own circle of friends.

  As 1979 went on, Britain began to feel the effect of the new Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher. Nicknamed ‘The Iron Lady’, she abolished free milk for schoolchildren and was a woman so contemptuous you really had to wonder if the nation hadn’t lost its collective minds in electing her leader of the country. In the short time she had been in power there was already a change in the community I grew up in, as families suffered unemployment and a sense of real apprehension took hold. She had a colossal ego, and her philosophy relied on the very worst aspects of human nature. She knew that if you put people under enough hardship, they would turn away from each other in order to protect their own interests. Her vision, like that of all Conservative governments, was truly cynical in that it relied on fear, greed and indifference towards others – like someone choosing their new two-car garage over the needs of the unemployed father of three next door – and the terrible consequen
ces of her vision would affect British people for a very long time.

  I started working on Saturdays in a clothes shop called Stolen From Ivor, whose clientele were mostly soul boys. We sold straight-leg jeans and button-down shirts and did a nice line in pastel-coloured sweaters that were popular with the Perry boys, who wanted to look like Bryan Ferry. I didn’t wear the clothes in the shop, but I did procure a black leather box jacket which I was able to get with a bit of discount and after I’d hidden it so a customer wouldn’t buy it first.

  I wasn’t going to make enough money working one day a week, so I enrolled temporarily at Wythenshawe College in order to be eligible for a grant of £200, which I gave to Angie to save. I needed to study three subjects, so I chose English, Art and Sociology, but then switched Sociology for Drama as the tutor was cool, and from her I learned some interesting things about writing and staging. My career as a student didn’t last very long. The most useful thing I did was spend time around the students’ union, and I attended a couple of union conferences in different towns. I liked the politics and I was impressed by the idealism in action of some of the people involved. I became friends with a guy called Tony O’Connor, who gave me a copy of Tony Benn’s Arguments for Socialism. It was an inspiration. Up until then my political views were instinctive and entirely subjective, based on my upbringing and what I’d observed in my environment. It seemed to me that working-class people weren’t supposed to question why their lives were the way they were, and I wondered why there was still a ruling class. Tony Benn’s book really enlightened me and set me on the right path. I wanted to find out more.

  I was in the shop one Saturday when a girl from a few doors away ran in, in a state, saying that there was a gang of rioters coming our way. For days before there had been battles on the streets of nearby Moss Side, and racial tension in the area was high after reports of excessive force by police. Around a thousand people had attacked the police station and a policeman had been shot with a crossbow. We could hear windows being smashed outside the shop, and as I ran to pull the shutters down alarms were starting to go off. Out front there was chaos everywhere as people ran around, throwing refuse bins at shop windows. My boss grabbed the money from the cash register in a panic, and we locked ourselves in until the police came to get us out.