Johnny Marr

by Richard Carman

  ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’ had been a staple of the live Smiths since way back in December 1993, an astonishingly long time for such a track to have lain un-used [it was released as a limited promo disc in January, flagging up the ‘new’ sound of the band]. If heads were turned by the funk workout, anyone who knew Andy’s background or Johnny’s penchant for stomping disco should not have been surprised. Live, the song was often an extended wig-out for the band, and used to stamp an immediate authority as a set-opener on wild and expectant audiences.

  The album’s final, and most controversial track was ‘Meat Is Murder’ itself. This song defined Morrissey’s stance at the time: trenchant, passionate and uncompromising. The sound picture of Johnny’s reversed guitar and dubbed effects captured the spinning blades of the slaughterhouse and the plaintive cries of heavily-reverbed cattle introduced the slow, desolate pace of the song. As on ‘Suffer Little Children’, the death of the beautiful creatures of the song are hauntingly painted by Morrissey’s lyric and delivery in a musical landscape bleaker than anything else in The Smiths’ repertoire.

  The critics loved the album, finding a density and panache in Johnny’s writing and a new outward-looking Morrissey, less introspective and addressing issues broader in perspective than on The Smiths. Danny Kelly, writing for NME noted Johnny’s “unnervingly evocative and beautiful” playing, while Bill Black wrote of Johnny’s “aural heartburn,” “screeching, preaching guitar” and “raucous rockouts” (he also, wonderfully, called The Smiths “Rough Trade’s very own Red Cross parcel”). “Johnny Marr’s music and production embraces Sun-era rock ’n’ roll, quasi-HM, folk and psychedelia” wrote Matt Snow, while Paul du Noyer observed “major league greatness” in Johnny’s work. It was a triumph all round, an album on which Johnny shone brightly and was mirrored by the input of all the other band members. In particular Rourke’s bass contribution was fantastic. Morrissey’s performances, of course, were spectacular. A little over a fortnight after its release, Meat Is Murder became The Smiths’ first (and last) number one album. The Smiths had raised the stakes. By contrast, over time Johnny came to think of the album as the least successful Smiths album from an artistic point of view.

  Before the tour to promote the album, personal pressures again intruded on Johnny’s role within the band. Andy had dabbled with drugs since high school, but by the time of Meat Is Murder, Andy’s use had become a serious issue both for Johnny and for the rest of the band. With an anti-drugs profile high on The Smiths’ public agenda, the matter had been kept hidden even from people within the inner circle of the band. In later interviews, and still displaying a loyalty to his writing and business partner ten years on that was quite moving, Johnny admitted that, to a degree, he found himself protecting and helping not only Andy but Morrissey too. Not because of any drug use on the singer’s part, but because if Rourke’s problems were made public, in all likelihood it would have been Morrissey who would have had to face the press. Yet while the needs of the band were one thing, Andy was also Johnny’s oldest friend, and the troubles that he endured hurt Marr too. Engagingly, Marr told Johnny Rogan in 1992 that while his thoughts were with Andy he also was worried about the effect that any scandal would have on his family as the band were becoming more and more successful. “It was the first time the family had something to be proud of,” Johnny told Rogan. “[And] no-one wanted to screw that up for Andy.”

  As the pressures on Johnny increased, one of The Smith’s most successful tours got under way in March, a series of dates that cemented the band’s reputation across the UK and which remains for many fans the perfect memory of the band, and of Johnny – by now deeply into a Keith Richards look. Rock ’n’ roll is littered with front-men who adopt a persona behind which they can both keep themselves sane and also hide. Bowie was one perfect example, and the educated, articulate and well-spoken Mick Jagger of the early Sixties stood quite to one side of the arrogant, preening cockerel of the Rolling Stones. But with guitarists it’s perhaps less common and with Johnny quite subtle. “I was guilty of that,” he said later on. “What was happening to me made it easy to confuse the public persona and the private one.” In a modest way, Johnny was – perhaps inadvertently as so many pop stars do – protecting himself from the hurt and constant intrusion from the outside.

  Much of the hectic abandon of the previous year’s trawl around America seemed behind the band this time out. When they returned to Manchester’s elegant Palace Theatre in March, Rough Trade had released the new single ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, backed with ‘What She Said’ from the new album. The record only reached 26 in chart, a disappointment both for Johnny and Morrissey who both loved it. Morrissey called it “the record of my life”, while claiming that “Rough Trade had no faith in it whatsoever… they didn’t service it or market it in any way.” As far as Johnny was concerned, the song was a culmination of the aspirations he had at the time, and he claimed in Melody Maker that, on the evidence of this track alone, if Elvis had had Rourke and Joyce in his band he would have been “even bigger!”

  By early April, the tour wound to a halt at London’s Royal Albert Hall, a mighty venue for the increasingly gargantuan band. A few more dates preceded Johnny’s third trip to the United States with The Smiths, under the watchful gaze of a new manager. Matthew Sztumph, already managing Madness, took the reins and attempted to manage the increasing complexity that was The Smiths on tour. Including their first visit to Canada in the schedule, the band was fantastic on the Meat Is Murder tour of America, who took to The Smiths big time, turning out in droves for the big dates and selling out almost everywhere.

  On June 20, Johnny married the girl who had – the odd temporary separation notwithstanding – been at his side constantly throughout and before the momentous months since The Smiths broke big. While Angie was never ‘a Smith’ in the sense that Linda McCartney was ‘a Wing’, she had been amongst the band and there to support Johnny from the start. Several times over the years Johnny has implied that his experience of The Smiths was himself, Angie and Morrissey set against the world. Grant Showbiz agrees: “The key to Johnny is Angie,” he told me, remembering how the pair were inseparable. “Johnny had the dual power of Angie on one side and Morrissey on the other.” When things got tough for Johnny, he could lean either way and know that there was support: “Those two people, kind of saying ‘what you are doing is great, carry on,’ or ‘I know it’s hard, but you can do it.’” Like a three-sided pyramid, with Angie by his side, he ‘had the power.’ Showbiz is also quick to note that, should Morrissey ever become more distant in the relationship, Angie was always there, and so Johnny could cope because he always had somewhere to go.

  Marr clearly considered his partner as crucial a part of his make-up as a musician and a band member as he considered her a part of his life outside of music (although at the time it didn’t appear that Johnny actually had such a thing). He has said that had they been able, the pair would have married when they were sixteen, but it was at San Francisco’s Unitarian Church that – with Andy as a witness – they finally tied the knot, slotting the quiet ceremony between gigs in New York and Oakland.

  By the time the tour came to a close at the end of June, everyone agreed that it had been a rousing success. Logistically it had been an improvement on previous tours, but musically Johnny was already wondering whether his ‘one man orchestra’ style of guitar could continue to work in a live context: the more overdubs in the studio, the more gaps in the sound on stage. Johnny was beginning to think that a second guitarist was needed in the band, to allow him the freedom to play the way he increasingly wanted to.

  The eastern gigs of the US tour was supplemented by support from The Bard of Barking, Billy Bragg. “Johnny,” says Grant Showbiz, a friend of both men, “was very matey with Billy.” Their friendship was based upon “great chumminess.” Grant tells the entertaining story of how Billy came to join the travelling circus that was The Smiths on tour.

  “We had thi
s whole thing where we were using transvestites to open the show,” says Grant, who enjoys recounting the heady days of the early Eighties. “Although that was a really good idea in Morrissey’s head, actually when you get a transvestite lip-synching to Madonna, or whatever it is, and you’ve got a whole heap of American jocks who – for some unknown reason – really love The Smiths and don’t quite understand what’s going on within The Smiths… they’re just going to throw bottles at them. Thousands and thousands of people throwing bottles at the stage,” remembers Grant, turned out to be “a really bad thing! So we were like, ‘we’ve gotta get rid of the transvestite – who can we get?’”

  Billy Bragg was staying in America at the time, trying – as Grant puts it – “to hit a tour.” Billy would get on a tour and run with it until it finished, looking for another one to join immediately – simply putting himself about on American stages. He might hit a tour in New Orleans, and pick up another in Chicago. When The Smiths decided to ditch the transvestites, Billy was in the right place at the right time. As Grant Showbiz puts it, “the call went out… send over Billy.”

  Billy’s twelve performances were the perfect warm-up for the band – solo electric folk from a man with a mission, whose monologues and political songs blended with yearning love songs and set the audience up nicely for the careering headliners. They also confirmed to Bragg that his work could carry an American audience as well as a British one. It was here that a long-term friendship was formed between Billy and Johnny.

  “I didn’t know them,” explained Bragg to this author of the time leading up to the tour. “They were in Manchester and I was in London. I didn’t cross paths with them much except for GLC gigs and working with them in America. But I like to think I got on really well with Johnny when we were on tour.” Marr was equally taken with Bragg. “I used to like watching him from the side of the stage,” Johnny recalled in April 2006 for Uncut. “He would have most of them really cheering, a lot of them laughing, and some of them well-riled.” By the time The Smiths hit the stage, said Marr, the crowd was filled with exactly the right energy. “There was a palpable tension… so we could take it up a gear. It was a brilliant package.”

  While Billy was later to record and release the Morrissey/Marr song ‘Jeane’ himself, he also included it in his set from time to time while touring with the band. “‘Jeane’ was a great song,” says Billy today. “When they weren’t playing it on the American tour, I would stick it in.” For his own website, Billy also wrote that working with The Smiths had influenced him a great deal. “I felt that they were my comrades,” he wrote, “in a struggle to bring the focus of song-writing away from production and videos, and back to good tunes and great lyrics.” For Bragg and Marr there was a long relationship ahead, and many great records to be made.

  Over the summer, all matters ‘pop’ were focussed on Live Aid, the first rock festival since Woodstock to really engage the world’s imagination. The Smiths were not involved, as they had not been with the previous Yuletide’s Band Aid single. Morrissey was typically scathing on the subject of Live Aid and the yawning gap between the egotistical rock star and the needs of the average African child. Instead, The Smiths released their next single, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Any More’, which continued the band’s frustrating stumblings in the singles chart, reaching a lowly forty-nine. Johnny was disappointed with the result, particularly singling out Morrissey’s contribution as “brilliant.” For the time being, The Smiths continued to release ‘proper singles,’ in other words songs not simply taken from the current album, but too many times the records failed to deliver in terms of chart placings and sales, though the band were selling out dates in both the UK and the USA and would ultimately reach the number one album slot. Johnny has noted that perhaps the band – while so patently a singles-orientated group for much of their career – were too divorced from the needs of the radio playlisters. Great records to own, but not necessarily great for radio play. It seems bizarre to say this in hindsight, but such great tracks as are detailed in The Smiths’ chart listings did not shift millions of singles.

  During July, the band were booked onto the then high-profile Wogan TV chat show, a major bandstand for anyone from the latest celebrity chef to the saddest, ‘movie-star’ fitness video/salesman. An appearance on Wogan guaranteed an audience of millions, but while Johnny sat in the studio with Andy and Mike, waiting for Morrissey to arrive, there was no warning at all of the fact that the singer would not appear. The band never appeared on Wogan, and we’ll never know whether its comfortable, middle-class, knee-touching format was the wrong environment for the band or whether Morrissey and Marr would have charmed the grannies of the nation as they had charmed its youth. This was in many ways typical of a band lacking long-term management, and came on top of a history of changing live schedules and cancelled gigs. Rough Trade and the rest of the band were philosophical about the Wogan incident, but it cast a light upon a general air around The Smiths. While bands such as U2 enjoyed the support of one manager throughout their career, what might The Smiths have achieved had they had their own version of Paul McGuinness? But then they simply may never have been The Smiths that we all fell in love with, and might have become stadium-plodding complacents rather than the dangerous, fun and exciting band they always were.

  Grant Showbiz believes that on the one hand they could have been a huge band if they’d had long-term management, but agrees that, at the same time, what defined The Smiths as great was something that would have possibly been lost in the process. “Joe just stayed with them long enough to set up a way [that] things were done,” he says today. That gave the band a blueprint from which to work after Moss left. “We were either doing it the way Joe used to do it, or we were doing it the way Joe didn’t do it – but there was something to react to. But when I think of how we stumbled through…!”

  Looking at their near contemporaries, such as U2, Grant has mixed feelings that the band never quite got the album/tour/ merchandise mix right and missed commercial opportunities that could have made them immensely rich. “In some respects you would wish it upon them that they would have had that,” he says, “but at the same time it means that they [remained] unique.” Indeed, as testified to throughout Johnny’s career, what they wrote, played and sang came first, before anything, and that too was a defining feature of The Smiths’ career, whoever was at the helm. Put quite simply, the music was the most important thing. “I imagined,” says Grant, “that there would be some sort of corporate meetings going on. But it seemed like they were just hanging out with one another. [It was] the best way, these things always are… it just happened.” While The Smiths were rapidly becoming a wild horse that needed reining in before it disappeared over the horizon altogether, it seemed this arrangement at least kept them hungry and creative.

  Rumours abounded that Rough Trade were about to ‘lose’ The Smiths. Apparently dissatisfied with the level of promotion they were receiving, and burying themselves in the studio for a few weeks the band laid low while Rough Trade countered the rumours. The group set about recording ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ at Manchester’s Drone Studios, where they had recorded their first, ill-fated demo for EMI. The song was polished up at London’s RAK studios, sans producer, as the band took the production credit themselves.

  Similarly, the sessions for the new album which began at RAK in mid-summer were also ‘produced by Morrissey and Marr’ and engineered by Stephen Street. The first track for the album committed to tape was ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, a behemoth of a track and one that consistently justifies Marr’s reputation as the best guitarist/one-of-the-best-producers of his generation. As the sessions progressed, it was clear that both Johnny and Morrissey were struggling, trying to work through studio sessions and record track after track while at the same time dealing with the minutae of the band’s growing business empire. Matthew Sztumph had moved out of the revolving door of The Smiths’ management and the business of being The Smiths was be
coming increasingly intolerable for Johnny, as more and more of it fell once again on his and Morrissey’s shoulders. The continuing irony was that the camaraderie between the four members of the band was still good and Johnny’s relationship with Morrissey unharmed despite the pressure, but it seems obvious in retrospect that if The Smiths had retained a long-term manager they might have enjoyed more longevity.

  Like a prodigious child, too bright for its own good, The Smiths were hard to handle. Back in the Sixties, the death of Brian Epstein left the Beatles’ ship rudderless and the band began to dissolve almost immediately. For The Smiths, it was almost as though Epstein had died on them before they even got going.

  Out of the studio by the late summer, Marr et al headed off on a short tour of Scotland, while ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ was released at the same time. Musically it was one of the band’s more exuberant recent single releases, Johnny’s bright acoustic strumming gently coloured by electric overdubs. Increasingly, as tour followed album, and singles that should have been top ten failed to make the top twenty, the Ultimate Singles Band-elect appeared to be turning into a traditional album/tour/ album outfit, against all the odds.