Johnny Marr

by Richard Carman

  As a pure pop group, like The Beatles, The Smiths had something for everyone: if you didn’t fancy Paul, you could always go for George. CP Lee noted the band’s sartorial elegance early in their career. “Morrissey and Johnny Marr are both incredibly stylish men, but with their own absolute agenda,” says Lee. “It’s not quite James Dean… the leather jackets and jeans and stuff. When they first started out – the quiffs – I think Johnny was Britpop before Britpop.” As Morrissey quickly became the band’s front man in terms of interviews, so his charming features established his own appeal. Drawing his own personal style from the cool waters of James Dean and Oscar Wilde, Morrissey looked like no other pop star before or since. The hearing aid and the flowers were to come soon enough to complete the look. Too many interviewers and reviewers over the years have speculated about Morrissey’s sexuality, but in an age of effeminate, dolled-up pop stars, Morrissey was actually visually very masculine. His confident jaw would be held thrust out at the audience, his bushy eyebrows gloriously unplucked. At the same time Morrissey’s visual accoutrements – the hearing aid, the flowers, the collars tucked inside his shirt – undermined that apparent masculine confidence, and made him irresistible, intriguing.

  Alongside him, Johnny was the epitome of a new kind of retro cool – the blackest shades, the coolest haircut, a red Rickenbacker slung around his neck like a weapon, and his slender frame as rock ’n’ roll hip as Keith or Brian Jones ever were. For Morrissey, being ‘handsome’ was absolutely crucial to The Smiths, and he playfully demanded “a handsome audience” to go with the band’s own aesthetic. For Johnny “it just [finished] the package off nicely!”

  1982 ended with everything in place for an assault on the music-listening public. 1983 would see the band established as perhaps the most important band in the UK. For a short while, Johnny moved into digs, and had a significant local figure as his landlady. Shelley Rohde was a journalist and TV presenter on Granada TV, Manchester’s local independent station. She was also a well-respected author, the biographer of LS Lowry, her book being the standard work of reference on the Salford painter’s life. As a result, Johnny even found his way on to a couple of Granada TV debate shows. While his stay chez Rohde was not long – he moved out in early 1983 – Rohde was another of Johnny’s contacts who brought him closer to the centre of the Manchester scene. Even at this early point in his career, Johnny was connecting with some influential local people. Amongst the friends and acquaintances he had made over the last couple of years, several were talented enough to make it independently as successful musicians – Matt Johnson and Billy Duffy being amongst the most notable. Even at the age of eleven, he had found in Andy Rourke not only a lifelong friend but a man with the talent and the tenacity to survive being a Smith, and in Morrissey he had instinctively linked up with one of the era’s biggest talents. Even former band members such as Kevin Williams were destined to stardom, despite their musical torches not burning for long. Johnny was attracted to talent – he instinctively knew which people were right for him to be around. There is no suggestion of any Machiavellian manoeuvring, but it is clear that Johnny’s ambitions were fired by the quality of the people amongst whom he found himself.

  The new year 1983 started with Joe Moss officially installed as The Smith’s manager. Joe’s friendship with Maher was firmly established, and was to be as long lasting as any within the band itself. Not only did Joe become manager to The Smiths, but at the same time he became Johnny’s landlord. Johnny moved out of Shelley Rohde’s house early in the New Year and into digs at Joe’s house in Marple, a sedate suburb of Stockport on the fringes of the Peak District, only a few miles east of Manchester itself. By the end of the year, Johnny had moved back out of Marple and into another house owned by Joe in Heaton Moor, again closer to Stockport than to Manchester city centre. Johnny wrote the music for many of the early Smiths songs here, and his home became a focal point for band members and friends to congregate until Johnny moved to London on a more permanent basis.

  Moss was the band’s manager, although a lot of the issues relating to the band continued to be decided upon by Morrissey and Johnny. Financially, Morrissey took the wheel. “His motto was ‘What we make we put in our pockets and pay everybody else from our pocket,’” is how Johnny described Morrissey’s attitude from day one, speaking to Record Collector. This was never going to be a band led by a frontman with no involvement behind the scenes. In charge of more immediate matters, Joe’s first actions were practical, securing the band rehearsal space above his Portland Street premises, where the band could really hone their live skills and develop musically around Morrissey’s vocals. In early January, the band played their second official gig, this time with the Marr/Morrisey/Joyce/Rourke line-up that would remain largely settled through the rest of their career. James Maker graced the stage a second and last time, and with an audience of a few hundred packed into Manchester’s Manhattan Sound, the band expanded upon their original four-song set. In February, i-D magazine was the first to run a feature on the group, interestingly featuring Dale Hibbert as the bassist, indicating that the interview was conducted before the turn of the year. The band talked of how, in the wake of Joy Division, Manchester bands ran the risk of being patronised by the media, but at the same time admitted that the Manchester scene had helped them develop quickly.

  “Bands need to be more positive, and stop limiting themselves” said Johnny. “If people don’t like us [it’ll be] because we’re The Smiths, and not because of what we wear.” Before Morrissey began to proclaim on ‘big’ subjects such as vegetarianism, The Smiths were very anti-image in their projection. Their concerns were voiced in this very first interview; that bands should be open and positive, and shouldn’t limit their work according to received patterns of predetermined behaviour, that fashion had nothing to do with music but that music was the ‘major influence on life.’ Interestingly, on the subject of their sound as a band, Maher noted that too many bands were trying to innovate, and that in the wake of the work of Brian Eno and David Byrne (whose hugely influential My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was released in 1981) people should give up trying to be original and should get back to the basics of simply making great music.

  As media interest in the band began to ferment, so their live schedule began to pick up speed. Their first Hacienda gig took place in early February, the stage strewn with flowers in an attempt to – as Morrissey was later to explain – re-introduce ‘human gestures’ into stage performance. By now the band had a full set, and most of the songs that were to grace their first album were integrated into the show. Later in the month, at Manchester’s Rafters they supported ex-Television and Voidoid legend Richard Hell, a major event for the band so influenced by both Richard himself and fellow New Yorker Patti Smith. In March, Joe Moss provided the couple of hundred quid needed for the band to enter Stockport’s Strawberry Studios, a famed enterprise owned by 10cc, to record their first single. ‘Hand In Glove’ was the result of the session, the lyrics to the song recently penned by Morrissey to a track provided by Johnny. Marr was to explain that he came up with the riff on “a crappy old guitar.” “We [Angie and he] were visiting my parents… Then I got the idea for the riff, but because I had moved out there was nothing to record it on.” Angie borrowed her parents’ VW Beetle, “and drove this live riff over to Morrissey’s house,” says Johnny. “On the way, she said ‘Make it sound more like Iggy.’ And bang! ‘Hand In Glove’!” Although three versions of the song were recorded over the coming months (not including the later version with Sandy Shaw on vocals) it was actually a remix of this recording that made its way onto the band’s first album.

  Fired up, the foursome travelled down to London later in March to play their first gig in the capital, accompanied by a coterie of friends and fans from the north-west, who supported the band at The Rock Garden in Covent Garden. Within days, Johnny took control of the band’s future, travelling back to London to present a cassette of ‘Hand In Glove’ into the han
ds of the man who would secure their future. The Smiths were getting nearer

  CHAPTER THREE

  NOT ROUGH, BUT TRADING

  Rough Trade began life as a record store in 1977, soon becoming one of the UK’s most influential independent record labels. Independence was not a new thing in the record business – right back to the early Sun releases in the USA, rock music had relied upon selective independents to find and represent some of the most influential and interesting of bands. At the end of the Seventies, recording companies were beginning the drift towards conglomeration that meant perhaps half a dozen or so labels ran almost the entire business. The fact that The Sex Pistols had courted EMI and A&M so fiercely, illustrated the fact that the so-called independence of punk was in fact often merely an attempt to extricate as big an advance as possible from one of the majors. Punk’s self-help ethic, however, was instrumental in people like Geoff Travis forming Rough Trade, and the company consistently maintained extremely high aesthetic standards. The bands that joined the young label – and indeed went on be a part of its future – were almost without exception interesting and entertaining. Aztec Camera, Stiff Little Fingers, Cabaret Voltaire, Scritti Politti and The Fall were typical examples of bands moving from very small or self-run labels into the Rough Trade stable, where they could attract the attention of the media and develop a consistent fan base, and that the latter were on Rough Trade attracted Morrissey and Maher. As the music revolution that was MTV began to take a grip on the industry, it was harder and harder for bands that didn’t have the pop sheen and lip-gloss look to find a home that would give them a major profile: Rough Trade was ideal for The Smiths.

  Johnny travelled to London and introduced himself to Travis with immense charm and unlimited enthusiasm for the featureless little cassette tape containing such a gem. “I remember Johnny glowing with pride, saying ‘This is it! Just listen to this,’” Travis recalled of their meeting in the Rough Trade canteen, when speaking to The Face. “I knew inside me that no-one had ever heard music like this before,” says Johnny. During the trip, Johnny kipped with Matt Johnson, and this was the period for The The when Johnson was writing Soul Mining. The whole trip was enlightening for Maher – a glimpse into Matt Johnson’s creative work cementing the friendship that was already well-established, and an inherent knowledge that the time had come for his own band too.

  For Travis’ part, unlike many label bosses in a similar situation, the Rough Trade supremo gave the tape an unbiased listen. “I was helplessly won over,” he glowed afterwards. Deciding to release ‘Hand In Glove’ as a single, the label boss made one of the most important decisions on behalf of Rough Trade that he could have made. “I listened to it all weekend,” he told Q in 1994, “and absolutely loved it.” Travis called Johnny on the Monday, and – according to his account of 1994 – the band were in the Rough Trade offices on the Tuesday.

  For Morrissey, the decision to take The Smiths on board was the label’s “best-ever deal.” Ultimately achieving the status as Rough Trade’s most successful band, future income from The Smiths allowed Travis to invest in more bands that would otherwise perhaps have been outside of the label’s grasp, such as Pere Ubu, Woodentops and Easterhouse. The label gained experience in charting successful singles bands and promoting major acts as well as minority ones, and enabled the company to expand into the US market with record stores and distribution deals. For The Smiths themselves, signing to Rough Trade was a blessing and, as would transpire later, a deep complication.

  The blessing was that, from the very beginning, Johnny and Morrissey had wanted to control as much of their own business as possible. While rumours that the band would sign with Manchester’s Factory Records abounded, and other labels were reported to be interested, Rough Trade offered them the opportunity to retain a much larger share of their record deal than might otherwise have been possible, and left the success or failure of the band more than partially in the hands of the artists themselves. In short, although the advance paid to the band was considerable in Rough Trade’s own terms, it was significantly less than might have been gleaned from a deal with, for instance, EMI. Instead, the deal with Rough Trade would be a profit-sharing offer whereby the company and the band split the income from The Smiths fifty-fifty. If the band were hugely successful, their income would be considerably higher than if they were signed on a lower percentage/royalty deal. “We like Rough Trade as people,” Morrissey told Melody Maker in the autumn. “And they like us. That has to be the most important thing. And if people want to buy the records, Rough Trade will supply them.” Such implicit confidence in such a simple process was endearing. Both Johnny and Morrissey trusted that the route to immense success was inevitable. People would hear The Smiths. People would like The Smiths. People would buy their records. Nothing could be more simple for a duo who had etched out the steps to success from day one. “I want to be heard and I want to be seen by as many people as possible,” explained the singer. How he would be proven right, time after time.

  The complication of the contract was that – while they waited until the early summer to formalise the deal – only Morrissey and Maher appeared as signatories on it, and this would come back to haunt them and many of the people around the band in the future. Although Rourke and Joyce were reportedly present at the signing, their names did not appear on The Smiths’ contract with Rough Trade, and so – contractually at least – they were not officially, technically ‘Smiths’. The situation was, much later, to cause Morrissey, Maher, Rourke and Joyce great problems and lead to one of the most acrimonious court cases in rock history, as well as to public vilification at the hands of the ever-considerate British tabloid press who had waited decades to dig their teeth into the band.

  For now though, the deal enabled Johnny to take the band into the studio and start work on the much-discussed, much-anticipated debut album. There were gigs to play, now with the knowledge that the future of The Smiths was in part secured, and it was a heady and exciting time for Maher. Dave McCullough, writing for Sounds a month or so after the contract was sealed, wondered whether Rough Trade were in a position to really do justice to the inevitable potential that the band had. One of the first journalists to try and get to grips with what the band were really about, McCullough noted their confidence – “they KNOW the talent that The Smiths possess.” Morrissey, for his part was confident in the deal. “Obviously we wouldn’t say no to Warners, but Rough Trade can do it too,” he told the journalist. Johnny was keen to stress that one of the reasons that they had not signed to Factory was that they might forever be tagged a ‘Manchester band.’ “What we’re thinking of isn’t even in terms of national success. It’s more like worldwide!” Super-confident they may have seemed but, over the year to come, interviews with all the band members would demonstrate one thing – whether it be Johnny, Andy, or whoever, the thing that was important to all of them was The Smiths, and what The Smiths could achieve, almost as though they were the unwitting owners of a patent on a remarkable product that could not fail to succeed in a barren marketplace.

  Smiths’ sound engineer Grant Showbiz confirms that the example of The Fall was key to The Smiths’ choosing to join Rough Trade. Grant himself got to know the band very soon after they joined the label, and was with them effectively the whole time, from their fifth gig to the end. “I did the sound for a hippy band called Here And Now,” recalls Grant. “We lived in a bus and we played free concerts, which at the end of the gig we would ask for a collection for food and petrol for the next gig.” Manchester was one of Here And Now’s biggest gigs, a valuable contribution to the hippy funding. “Andy and Johnny came to one of those gigs, and I guess probably saw me cavorting!” Self-described as “a fairly loud and shouty sort of person,” Showbiz’s careering back and forth was noticed by the pair of Smiths.

  Showbiz’s second link to The Smiths came via Mark E Smith’s band. “I was working for The Fall at Rough Trade,” Grant remembers, “And Morrissey knew of The Fall, so I
think from Morrissey’s end he knew my name and liked what The Fall were doing, in that they were slightly sort of angular and different to what was going on then.” So when Rough Trade found themselves with The Smiths on their hands, they also found they had someone who they felt could handle this odd bunch of lads from up north. Morrissey, Andy and Johnny all knew of Grant, and he soon became one of the most ‘inside’ of The Smiths’ insiders.

  “The third thing,” Grant told me, as he looks back on how he came to know the band so well, “was that Geoff or Scott Piering at Rough Trade knew me and could see [that The Smiths were] a young band from Manchester. At that point they did seem a little bit like aliens from another planet.” Scott Piering was another member of the team to be on the inside from early in The Smiths’ story. Piering was Travis’ natural choice to promote The Smiths, with a history of working with some of the less mainstream acts that came his way. “Scott had been many things, but he was ‘indie man,’” recalls Showbiz. “He was a promo who was up against other plugging companies.” As a result, Piering often found himself working with ‘interesting bands’ in the early days of their career when – as Grant Showbiz puts it – “they couldn’t afford a ‘proper’ plugger.” But a ‘proper plugger’ Piering certainly was, as he proved over his time pushing The Smiths.

  “My own feeling was that people like Scott and Geoff [Travis] realised that they could talk to me – and I made sense,” said Grant. “I wasn’t a lunatic, and I could get on with weird bands from Manchester,” he laughs. Showbiz, Piering and The Smiths were put together by Rough Trade, and it was a long and lasting relationship. Indeed, Showbiz continued to work with Johnny outside of the band, when the pair both worked with Billy Bragg much later. For now though, Showbiz’s input was first employed to clean up the live sound of the band. The sound that they produced was often rough-cut at best, recalls Grant. “I started on their fifth gig, and they had echo on Morrissey’s voice.” To illustrate, Grant does a fantastic impression of Morrissey’s voice with too much echo on it which does not transmit to print. But the point is made clearly enough – overloaded echo “wasn’t what you wanted with a band like The Smiths.”