Johnny Marr

by Richard Carman

  The album opened with a nod to The Stooges or the Stones. It ended on a note more out of Carry On than Raw Power. ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ is one of Morrissey’s most entertaining lyrics and one of Johnny’s most infectious riffs, knocked off one night while sat watching TV with friends. Constantly picking away at the fret board until the complex little gem was completed, the beautifully turned picking is one of Johnny’s most delightful pieces. Linked to Morrissey’s lyric (Morrissey told NME that “the fact that I’ve scuttled through twenty-six years of life without ever noticing that the contours of the body are different is an outrageous farce”) the song is a delight.

  * * *

  In July and October respectively, the fabulous singles ‘Panic’ and ‘Ask’ were released. ‘Panic’ – recorded in May, well after the sessions for The Queen Is Dead were over, remains one of the band’s most-loved records, a live favourite and the one most likely to encourage a sing-along. Glam-heavy, ‘Panic’ was one of the rare songs that Johnny wrote in response to a Morrissey lyric composed first, rather than other way round, or by the pair sitting and working together. “I’d been over to his house,” Marr recalls, “and I knew he had a new idea with a hook that was ‘Hang the DJ’. So I basically wrote ‘Metal Guru’!” The band even approached legendary Bolan producer Tony Visconti to record the track with them, but the plan never got off the ground, while film-maker Derek Jarman shot an entertaining, Smith-free video. The song – successful in reaching number eleven in the charts – has the same glorious, descending riff, the same heavy drumming, and the same rousing feel of a teenage night out with the boys – so ironic, given the content of the lyric.

  ‘Ask’ was a joyful, gentle song both musically and lyrically, with Steve Lillywhite’s wife Kirsty MacColl on backing vocals. Johnny’s perfect picking sounded as though he’d trip up, but of course he never does. In October it reached an almost satisfying number fourteen on the singles chart. Back in the UK, worn from the hugely successful US tour, Marr remained largely tight-lipped when news leaked out that – with only one album remaining due on their contract with Rough Trade – The Smiths were signing to EMI, the most major of the major labels. If this was, as reported, the beginning of the end for independent record labels, it didn’t stop Johnny’s work rate getting back up to speed. They did indeed sign with EMI in September 1986, with the leviathan record company admitting that there were ends for The Smiths to tie up with Rough Trade before their deal would kick in. While Rough Trade and EMI slugged it out in the music press, further dates were lined up around the UK through the autumn, taking in the faithful of Carlisle, Middlesbrough, Wolverhampton, Cornwall, Newport, Nottingham and Kilburn in London. At Brixton the band were supplemented by an extra drummer for two songs. The tour wound up with a quick rush – a sell-out at the London Palladium, a riotous gig in Preston, and a finale back in the home town at the end of October. The concert at the Free Trade Hall proved to be Craig Gannon’s last although his exit from the group was not announced officially until November. Marr has spoken since of not thinking Gannon would “fit in” with any new recordings and how Johnny’s writing partnership with Morrissey was essentially not added to by the now-former band-mate. The Smiths were a four-piece once more.

  Winding down towards the end of a hectic year, Johnny came closer to catastrophe than any of the recent rock ’n’ roll excess could have meted out when, in November, he was involved in a near-fatal car accident. Spinning out of control, the Manchester rain lifted Johnny’s tyres off the road, and within seconds he had endured and survived a serious crash, wrecking the car but walking away from the incident virtually unscathed. The following day he was fitted with a neck brace at a Manchester hospital, but thankfully there was no permanent damage, though the experience was a major wake-up call. The immediate result was that the band cancelled an imminent gig with The Fall at The Royal Albert Hall, re-scheduling it for later in December at Brixton Academy.

  Bootleg recordings of this gig reveal a band at the peak of its powers: aggressive, thrashy, perfect. From opener ‘The Queen Is Dead’ to the closing song ‘Bigmouth…’ the pace is frenetic and everyone completely on song. It was appropriate that it should be so, for, though nobody could have realised it at the time, this would be the last time Johnny Marr and The Smiths would play together live in the UK.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, as the summer of 1986 drifted into autumn, various pieces of work appeared that Johnny had worked on with Billy Bragg. Much of it was amongst Marr’s best work to date, and all of it demonstrated his incredible work rate and ability to hit the nail on the head in terms of song-writing, playing and production. The first was a beautiful version – where Johnny played acoustic guitar to Bragg’s spoken word voice-over – of the Four Tops’/ Left Banke’s ‘Walk Away Renee’, which appeared as the B-side to Billy’s own ‘Levi Stubbs Tears’.

  Bragg was working on his third album Talking With The Taxman About Poetry with John Porter producing. “What I had in common with The Smiths, was that I didn’t come through the big record company mainstream route. I hadn’t been ‘found’ and ‘groomed,’” explains Billy. Like The Smiths, Bragg had found early champions in John Peel and John Waters, and had had his first sessions for Radio One in 1983, as had The Smiths. John Porter had been the natural producer for Billy: “We didn’t really know any record producers. So in the end we worked with the producers – the only ones we’d ever been in the studio with, the ones on the Peel sessions. That was my experience,” says Bragg today. “John’s reputation of working with The Smiths had gone before him and was pretty good.” The influence of The Smiths on Billy’s work was subtle, more in terms of his career than in his own writing. He had, of course, toured with the band in the United States, and his career path followed a similar trajectory, albeit as a solo artist. Bragg compares his own experience of independent labels in the Eighties to that of The Smiths, noting that being on Go Discs was “a little bit like being on Rough Trade” but without ‘the baggage’ that came with it.

  Marr had come into the sessions via John Porter to add guitar to a number of tracks. “I was going up to Wood Green every day to make the record,” recalls Billy fondly. “While the engineer was miking up Johnny’s acoustic for the overdub on ‘Greetings To The New Brunette’, he was playing ‘Walk Away Renee’ on the guitar.” The purity and perfection of Johnny’s quiet picking struck Bragg immediately, and he spotted something special. “I said out of the corner of my mouth to Porter, ‘Roll the tape, roll the tape.’ So we taped him playing it.” On the tube journey home, Billy chewed over the performance he had witnessed of the classic song. It didn’t seem right to simply cover the track as such. “He was just sat there playing while they put mics around him… sat there in the way that he does, unself-consciously (sic) playing. It was just beautiful,” he remembers today. “I sort of went home on the tube that night, and on the way back in the morning wrote the lyric.” It was a spoken monologue inspired by Johnny’s rendition of ‘Walk Away Renee’ that Billy brought to the studio rooms, and therefore has a completely different identity to the original song. The concept struck Johnny too as worth pursuing. “When I explained what I was doing he did a proper take for me,” says Billy, “and put those nice opaque chords at the start. And off we went! It was just a wonderful backdrop to my monologue.”

  Billy Bragg’s experience of working with Johnny Marr is one of joy and of evident companionship. The pair worked really well together, and it is all too clearly heard in the work that the sessions produced. In terms of what Marr brings to the studio with him, Billy talks of Johnny’s ‘folk sensitivity.’ “That hadn’t really been heard since the early Sixties when people were coming out of folk music and forming bands like The Byrds,” he says. Quick to avoid linking Johnny’s playing style with that of Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, Billy explains further: “I don’t wish to make that comparison and say ‘he sounds all Byrds-y like’ – because it’s not the sound of what he was doing but more t
he style, the picking style. That’s what made it flow. He followed his intuition. That’s what made him so great.” For Marr, it was an equally productive friendship. “We were Manchester pot-smokers,” he told Uncut. “and talking to (ex-army man) Billy, it was a little bit like ‘Stand by your beds,’” but the relationship was clearly warm and long-lasting.

  Talking With The Taxman About Poetry contained two other tracks on which Johnny’s playing is evident – ‘The Passion’ and the resplendent ‘Greetings To The New Brunette.’ From the punched-out opening major chords on an acoustic guitar, via Kirsty MacColl backing vocals to die for, to the sustained outro on electric, the latter is one of Bragg’s best loved songs, and one of the most engaging singles in pop history. It is also quintessential Johnny Marr. As this book was being finished, Billy was writing his own treatise on the nature of ‘Englishness’, watching the World Cup with both the eyes of a football fan and a writer on nationalism: what better time to ask him about the song with the timeless lyric ‘how can you lie there and think of England/When you don’t even know who’s in the team?’? The song, he feels, reveals more about Johnny’s roots. “My experience of him is he must have been a folk music fan when he was growing up,” says Billy, “because he knows a lot about folk music.” Despite being the king of the Rickenbackers, outside of his own band Johnny clearly was happy to indulge his other musical interests and explore some of the music that had been so important to his own development.

  The B-side of ‘Greetings…’ included a cover of The Smiths’ ‘Jeane’, which of course Billy had fallen in love with, and played live several times to audiences who had come to see The Smiths in the first place. When re-released on Reaching To The Converted, Billy wrote that because The Smiths had stopped playing the song, “I picked it up and looked after it.”

  Talking To The Taxman About Poetry appeared in September, while ‘Greetings To The New Brunette’ was released as a single in early November, all set for the UK top five. Stunningly, it made it barely into the top fifty, spending a disappointing three weeks on the chart, despite being credited to ‘Billy Bragg with Johnny Marr and Kirsty MacColl’ – three of the hottest names around. A week after its release, in concert in Leeds, Billy introduced it as “a song which deals deftly and swiftly with the subjects of stealing cars, having sex and dyeing your hair. Three things linked only by the fact that they make your fingers smell funny afterwards.” Probably a good job that they didn’t enjoy repeated appearances on Top Of The Pops! Some years later the pair revisited the song for Reaching To The Converted, re-titling the song ‘Shirley’ “because that’s what everyone calls it anyway.”

  At the same time Johnny and Billy also worked together, albeit at a distance, on ‘The Boy Done Good’. “That had been stuff that had been knocking around, a tune that he’d given me the music to during Don’t Try This At Home, up at his house,” says Billy. “I finally wrote some lyrics to it. But it all happened too late to get on the album so we put it out as a single subsequently.” Billy explained the genesis of the song further on his website: “Johnny put this tune on a tape for me and I wrote the lyrics shortly after his beloved Manchester City were relegated from the Premiership.” The song was originally entitled ‘Big Mal’, after the legendary Malcolm Allison, former boss at Maine Road. Pulling all the various references around the song together, Smiths’ sound-man Grant Showbiz – still working with Billy today – nicknamed it ‘Big Mal Strikes Again’. While Billy decided against naming the song after the Smiths’ classic, he did keep the reference to ‘the sky blues’ when the song was released on the 1996 collection William Bloke.

  Meanwhile, the career of The Smiths nearing its end, the band kept close to their roots by recording, early in December, their last John Peel session. The four songs that were broadcast on December 17 were ‘Is It Really So Strange’, ‘London’, ‘Half a Person’ and ‘Sweet & Tender Hooligan.’

  It was another closing door.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE END OF A PERFECT DAY

  1987 was another year of Thatcherite frustration for anyone in the UK with a social conscience. In an interview published the following year, but recorded before the dissolution of The Smiths, Johnny spoke of his anger at the increasing sense of hopelessness among the nation’s young. “My generation of school kids – they’re the ones who have been hit by it the most. It is literally as bleak as people imagine it to be. It has changed a lot of British society… social attitudes have changed remarkably. There’s no-one who can stand for working people in England any more – it’s a Conservative dream.” Musical distraction came from the shambling, rambling Pogues, whose ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’ featured their timeless duet with Kirsty MacColl, ‘Fairytale of New York.’ While disaffection continued to infect Britain’s cities, a new Manchester band was packing out the venues in their home town and finding themselves almost routinely ignored by the suits down south. 1987 was a good year for The Stone Roses, the local reputation of Ian Brown, John Squire et al building up a head of steam comparable to that of The Smiths in their early days.

  But time was running out for Manchester’s finest, despite their remaining deep in the hearts of the record-buying public. In the Valentine’s Day Reader’s Poll for NME The Smiths once again walked off with the awards for ‘Best Group’, ‘Best Male Singer’, ‘Best Album’ for The Queen Is Dead and Morrissey was voted ‘Most Wonderful Human Being’. ‘Panic’ was not only voted ‘Best Single’ but also came in the top handful of songs voted ‘Best Dance Track’ – a long way from the disco-unfriendly early Smiths.

  Sessions for the new single ‘Sheila Take A Bow’ were problematic, with rumours of studio no-shows and frequently tense atmospheres. The recordings were not altogether productive. Early in the New Year ‘Shoplifters Of The World Unite’ was released, a majestic blend of Morrissey and Marr magic that got to number twelve in the singles chart. Johnny’s parts were compared to Brian May, while the guitarist himself was more keen to credit the influence of Nils Lofgren on the track. The band got back to work, this time inviting Sandie Shaw back for another crack at ‘Sheila…’, only to eventually not use her contribution. Eventually John Porter had a final mix of the song, but even that was not used. The band re-recorded it at Tony Visconti’s studio, this time with Stephen Street at the desk. As history sorted these matters out for itself, John Porter was never to work with The Smiths again.

  March brought the release of The World Won’t Listen, the band’s second compilation-cum-sampler album, that re-visited the format of Hatful Of Hollow. The album again came close to the number one slot but stalled at the last hurdle; like The Queen Is Dead, it made it to number two. For the fans on the other side of the Atlantic Rough Trade/Sire released the closely related compilation Louder Than Bombs. As Hatful Of Hollow gave everyone a taste of great things to come, so these two albums reminded everyone of just what a fantastic band The Smiths had become.

  The band itself was concentrating on the future, though, not the past. The sessions at Visconti’s Good Earth studio also produced the next single, ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’. In effect this was also the start of sessions for the fourth and what would prove to be the final Smiths studio album. The Strangeways sessions were unusual, in that right up to the last moment, as Stephen Street remembered, even Johnny didn’t know exactly what Morrissey would bring to the studio in terms of lyrical input. “We were putting the backing tracks down totally blind,” he remembered. “Just making sure the key was okay with him.” Johnny was keen to clean up some of the working practices that had become de rigour for him in the studio. There were fewer guitar overdubs – in fact no guitar at all on the opening track – and in general his work is heavier, more concentrated. “I wanted to make sure my main guitar parts really counted and stayed on the record,” he told an interviewer much later. Not content with simplifying and re-assessing the process of putting the album together, Johnny also – for the first time on a Smiths record – included a traditional solo
on ‘Paint A Vulgar Picture’, so momentous that he marched everyone out of the studio before committing it to tape.

  When the sessions ended and the band celebrated with art coordinator Jo Slee and Geoff Travis, the latter sensed that there was an air of finality around everyone, as though something more than just the latest album was finished.

  ‘Sheila Take a Bow’ reached number ten in the singles chart, and thus became the equal-highest chart position of any Smiths single. Classic glam homage, the track reeked of the early Seventies pop charts, when the stomp of The Glitter Band would play next to the parading guitar pop of T. Rex on the radio. Both influences are evident in the recording, that was of course made at the studio of Tony Visconti, T. Rex’s own producer.

  Then, in the summer, it was formally announced that Johnny Marr had left The Smiths.

  * * *

  Early in August, NME ran the headline ‘Smiths To Split’ to break the news to the world, announcing that the band was “likely to call it a day after the release of their next album.” While Morrissey denied the story, and famously threatened to spank with a wet plimsoll anyone who said the band had split, by the next issue of NME, Johnny confirmed that he had left. The article had appeared in NME while Johnny was in Los Angeles. “I don’t know where that story came from,” Grant Showbiz told film maker David Nolan. “The thing that pushed Johnny into leaving was that article.” Nobody quite knows who released the information to the magazine, and with what motive. “[Johnny] was that pissed off about it, and where it might have come from, that he said, ‘Right –I’ve had enough anyway – and I have left.’”