Johnny Marr

by Richard Carman

  The final Smiths sessions had been a miserable affair. Johnny had already decided to leave the group, but had done the last session although perhaps he didn’t want to be there. Grant Showbiz – as almost the last gasp in his relationship with The Smiths as a coherent band – produced a version of Cilla Black’s ‘Work Is A Four Letter Word’, that Johnny always looked back on with disaffection, at his own Firehouse studios in Streatham. Along with ‘Keep Mine Hidden’ – their very last recorded track as a group – these songs were destined to be sent out to the world as a goodbye note on the B-side of ‘Girlfriend In A Coma.’ Those final few days in the studio were a strange affair.

  Rourke and Joyce have both attested to the fact that Johnny was working far too hard, trying to better The Queen Is Dead with Strangeways. “[He] really needed to take a lot of time off,” said Andy, noting that when everyone else took time out Johnny had just kept on working. While it was Johnny himself who had suggested that everyone take a holiday, he couldn’t leave the job behind himself, and Johnny was clearly pushed over the edge in August 1997. The album, for Joyce, was “a white knuckle ride” and just because the music was so great didn’t mean that the pressures on Marr were any the less. Geoff Travis also felt that an extended break, after which everyone reconvened, might have been enough to rekindle Johnny’s enthusiasm for The Smiths. Maybe if Johnny had gone away for six months or so, they may have come back revitalised and ready for more. “Fame,” said John Peel, who knew a thing or to about it himself, “is such a bastard!”

  So many people seem to think a split could have been avoided if the band members had just avoided one another for a while and taken a holiday. Grant Showbiz mentions the same thing, even now. He feels that the band stayed together as long as it did because of the bond of friendship between the group. Once that starts to break down, you’ve had it. “[If] you don’t have the backbone of good smart management – to just say ‘Go away, you don’t have to make another record!’” then Grant thinks you’re on the rocks. A good manager can stop the group and say, “Forget about records. Go away and think about it for six months, and don’t talk to one another!” Sadly, for Johnny and The Smiths, nobody was there to say this to them.

  On the announcement of Johnny’s departure, the press, and fans, had a field day. To all intents and purposes, the end of The Smiths was presented as Johnny’s ‘fault.’ When Johnny and Morrissey had formed The Smiths, Marr was 19-years-old. By the time he left the band he was still only 23. But now he was a legend, a voice, a face, a songwriter and guitar player who had saved a generation, a lionized figure. As with John Lennon and The Beatles, both external pressures and internal strains confirmed that Marr had in fact outgrown both the band and his own personal need for it. One of the biggest problems had been the ongoing managerial issues, the business of the business of being The Smiths. “The practicalities faced by Morrissey and me when we had to try and run that kind of organisation really got me down” Johnny admitted later.

  Ironically, the rising level of success in America was a contributing factor. More tours, more albums, more press, more intrusion – it would have been too much. Morrissey and Johnny had both considered moving to America to live for a while, consolidating their success there, but with the constant expectations of the entire Smiths organisation that Johnny be there to sort things out, the idea became intolerable. While the band seemed to have everything they ever dreamed of, the stresses placed on Johnny and Morrissey to handle the financial end of this were enormous.

  On leaving the band, Johnny was able to start cleaning up his own issues, telling interviewers that he would never allow a band to put so much pressure on him, or upon the relationships that he had enjoyed with friends. One of these relationships was that with long-time friend Joe Moss, who still had an outstanding issue with the band that he had left years previously. Moss has kept a dignified near-silence on the subject over the years, but on his leaving the band there had been an outstanding debt incurred in the early days of The Smiths, when Joe had coughed up for a PA system for the band. One of Johnny’s first actions was to try and clear the air over this with his friend, manager and mentor. As Johnny explained to Johnny Rogan in an interview much later, he paid Moss the outstanding monies due out of his own money, and that matter, at least, was closed.

  “Towards the end of The Smiths,” Marr told NME journalist Dave Haslam in 1989, “I realised that the records I was listening to with my friends were more exciting than the records I was listening to with the group.” Marr retained a cautious air in interviews immediately following the group’s disbandment, but this didn’t stop people from continuing to blame him for the break up of the band. “Some people are never going to forgive,” he told NME in 1989. “They didn’t know anything about the way things were. They’d have preferred me to have died rather than split the group up.”

  As well as the pressures of the business, it is clear that general musical issues were another reason for Johnny hanging up his guitar picks for a while. Although over the years he has wavered between citing Strangeways or The Queen Is Dead as his favourite Smiths album, despite the quality of the former, there were clear issues about where the band could possibly go next. They were, in his own words, a long way down a musical cul-de-sac where the expectations of the audience no longer met with the aspirations of the guitarist. A long time disco and soul fan, Johnny was listening more and more to types of music that – if he had decided to implement the influence in The Smiths’ own sound – would have brought about mass revolt amongst the fan base, many of whom felt technology and innovation weren’t allowed, so while the electronica of his future work with Bernard Sumner beckoned, to stay in The Smiths seemed to mean that jangly guitar was all that was expected of him.

  In short, the excitement, the joi de vivre, had gone from Johnny’s experience with the band. There is an irony in Johnny’s name that – translated into French – sums up his situation at this point nicely. There’s even been a hit record bearing the title. In 2003 there was a single named ‘J’En Ai Marre’, in French, by a singer called Alizee. J’en ai marre (pronounced almost exactly as is Johnny’s name), roughly translated into English, means ‘I’ve had enough,’ or ‘I am fed up.’

  Personally, while he continued to get on well with the group members, he had to escape the pressures that were affecting his health and his happiness. Professionally he felt the group had run its course if it could not meet the demands upon it that its audience maintained. Musically he had other fish to fry. As far as Marr was concerned, to continue, and to promote Strangeways via the inevitable world tour and all that it entailed would have served only to worsen the situation and completely destroy the relationships that he still enjoyed with Morrissey, Rourke and Joyce, and perhaps kill him too. Like a marriage doomed to failure from the start, he had enjoyed great times and was rightly proud of the band, but had never been completely happy as the hectic world around him worsened and worsened.

  Of course, Johnny received hate mail. For the bedsit lost and lonely, Marr had destroyed the dream that was The Smiths. Astonishingly, it appeared at first that The Smiths would try and continue without him. Various replacement guitarists were mooted – Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame and Ivor Perry from Easterhouse amongst them. There was even a recording session booked for a Morrissey, Rourke, Gannon and Perry line-up of The Smiths. It lasted two days, and produced two tracks – one of them a rudimentary version of ‘Bengali In Platforms’ that would appear on Morrisey’s Viva Hate. But without Johnny it simply wasn’t The Smiths. After two days the session foundered, and Ivor Perry no longer stood in for Johnny Marr.

  However much the image of the band had become more and more centred upon Morrissey’s role as spokesperson and front-man, if Johnny wasn’t there, this band was not The Smiths any more. Of course a replacement guitarist could learn Johnny’s parts for live shows, and undoubtedly could have contributed to the writing process (both Perry and Frame are without doubt exceptionally good players and
writers), but The Smiths music was the creative hub of two particular individuals – the loss of one meant the end of the band.

  There were, of course, the conspiracy theories blaming everybody. Morrissey disapproved of Johnny’s ‘freelancing’, Morrissey wouldn’t tour, Johnny wanted to tour the world and live the life of the rock ’n’ roll superstar etc, all rumour, nothing proven. It was said that manager Ken Friedman had deliberately driven a wedge between the two. Of course the truth was more simple than any of these… The Smiths had run their course. “It had nothing to do with how I feel about Morrissey, and how he feels about me,” Johnny told Dave Haslam. “We had a good time recording the last LP, and I was unhappy before that. And I was unhappy after that… If we had to go off on tour and try to promote the record with the bad atmosphere that was around, the situation would have got even more hideous.”

  The band was over long before the split actually came, and once the decision was made there was no going back. As Ziggy had exhausted Bowie both personally and creatively, and as The Beatles had been left behind by the Yoko-influenced new creativity of John Lennon by 1969, so Johnny had tired of being ‘a Smith.’ He was suffocating. It was time for pastures new.

  Rather than dwell on the split, it was probably more remarkable that The Smiths lasted as long as they did. The band was born of two very diverse talents and a remarkably concise vision. That that partnership produced work of such quality and lasted for five full years was a major achievement in itself. They came, they saw and they conquered, and regardless of who was to blame for the split, when the job was done they went their separate ways. Johnny was then, and remains to this day proud of what The Smiths achieved. The love of the seven-inch single that fired him so fiercely as a child was still with him as an adult, and he is proud to have released such gems that remain as treasured objects in the hearts and minds of record buyers even now.

  That ought to be that, but years after the split Johnny was still troubled by its manner. He represented the break up as the biggest failure of his life, as he revealed to author Martin Roach in The Right To Imagination And Madness: “We should have split when we did,” he reflected. “Simply because we had lost touch with basic emotional values which we all possessed.” He felt they were all “perverted by our egos,” which by then had turned the band into caricatures. “We were good people,” he says. “But we did the split wrong.”

  In the wake of the split, Mike and Andy went on to work with Sinead O’Connor. Mike joined his early heroes Buzzcocks for a while, and worked with both Julian Cope and PiL. Both Rourke and Joyce worked with Pete Wylie, while Rourke joined ex-Happy Mondays drummer Gaz Whelan in a band called Delicious, later coming together in the band Aziz. Most significantly, the pair continued with Morrissey for a short while in his solo capacity, later playing a remarkable concert in Wolverhampton that also included Craig Gannon in Morrissey’s band. The gig was both valediction and the beginning of a new era, and – if you wore a Smiths t-shirt, the first 1700 punters to arrive got in for free.

  * * *

  Released in early September 1987, Strangeways Here We Come gave a clear impression of the creative crossroads that The Smiths had reached as they shuddered to a halt. It was a fitting finale. Lyrically the album mined familiar seams yet musically searched for something new, a two-headed snake. It was a heavy-duty piece of work. Johnny has always been extremely fond of the album, periodically claiming it as his favourite Smiths release of all. While he struggled to find a new direction for the band, the stripped down atmosphere still appeals to him today. For Andy, the album did indeed point to a different future for the band had they stayed together, but Mike found it hard to listen to, even long after the band was done. “You don’t put that one on when you fancy some nice easy listening,” he observed dryly.

  ‘A Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours’ opens with Morrissey’s reverbed voice hauntingly ‘coming inside’ over jaunty piano chords. If Johnny was looking for pastures new musically for The Smiths, then he could have made no more radical statement of intent from his own point of view than to open the album with a track void of guitar. Instead, it is Johnny on vamping piano, clearly relishing the simplicity of the bouncing chords against Joyce’s military percussion.

  ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’ was one of Strangeways’ best tracks, a glammed-up rocker that kicked off with a musical quote from Bolan’s ‘20th Century Boy’, big, expressive Keith Richards’ chords and a stomping drum track that wasn’t pretty but is a killer part of the song. The ‘horn section’ was another diversion for The Smiths, but on ‘Death Of A Disco Dancer’ there was a real treat, a rare instrumental outing for Morrissey, who had been playing the studio piano and who added his own solo contribution to the song. The descending B minor riff around which the song was based – like ‘Dear Prudence’ or ‘Tales Of Brave Ulysees’ – gradually fell into an open, grungy jam, some of the most visceral moments committed to tape by The Smiths. Whether Morrissey’s piano piece was rehearsed or not, he certainly played in key and included a number of jazz rolls that suggest there was a little more than mere happy accident. After the repeated descending chords, at the end Johnny plays a mini-Sergeant Pepper coda of rising chords to finish the song off.

  This was definitely a new Smiths – no clipped, jangling siroccos of guitar, but mayhem, improvisation. If the songs to date had been surprising, ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ harked back to The Queen Is Dead, with Johnny’s half-beat acoustic guitar recalling ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’. This was one of Morrissey’s finest moments, at once absurd, hysterical, and deeply, deeply moving. If the attempt was to be as audacious as possible, then simply by the refrain of the title the song succeeded, but the clarity and honesty of Morrissey’s vocal is very moving. Set that against the cheeriness of Johnny’s guitar and Andy and Mike’s rhythm, and the song could not fail to bring a smile. With lyrics about a girl in a coma… The Smiths were at their devilish best and most contradictory.

  ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’ was an instant classic: so much more sophisticated than the early records, this was a band at the height of their powers – Johnny’s trick of throwing cutlery at a heavily-reverbed guitar, the innocent-punk solo, and again Morrissey at his very best. ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ was one of Morrissey’s most dramatic – but not quite melodramatic – performances. The minor piano chords over the sound of chaotic crowd noises was reminiscent of ‘Meat Is Murder’, and it was two minutes before what might be called ‘the song’ proper came into the mix. The effect was of a movie soundtrack to an emotion about to break, and when Morrissey appeared, suddenly, it was stunning. Johnny’s arpeggios, the artificially concocted strings and mandolin… pure wonderful Smiths at their best.

  ‘Unhappy Birthday’ was an unusual song, a mixture of the jazz-inspired chords of ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ and the regular acoustic strumming of something like ‘Cemetry Gates’. At once it can be the least satisfying track on the album, and at the same time perhaps the one most interesting to stop and listen to for the musical track alone, with Johnny’s echoing solo notes that slide the song in and out. While it contained elements of the same kind of juxtaposition that invigorates ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’, it lacked the suggested irony of that song, yet retained something else irresistible and eminently The Smiths. ‘Paint A Vulgar Picture’ was another difficult track – Marr’s music is dense and circuitous, hitting changes off the beat, and Morrissey’s melody shifting at every turn.

  By ‘Death At One’s Elbow’ the transformation of The Smiths was complete. Only two years ago this track would have been a pure pastiche of Sun Records rock ’n’ roll. By Strangeways however, the trick didn’t work any more, and the song is probably the weakest point on the album. Compare this song to ‘Last Night I Dreamt…’ or ‘Death Of A Disco Dancer’ – it’s a joke that isn’t funny any more, and these two songs show where The Smiths were heading by the time their day was run. ‘Death At One’s El
bow’ was a redundant piece of work. And, as an album band, their day was running out fast. The gentle, entrancing ‘I Won’t Share You’ – plucked on a studio autoharp, Johnny pressing down the keys to damp the strings into pre-defined chords – was the last song on the last Smiths album proper. And of course, its lyrical content is loaded with irony and metaphor and could be a dozen different things to a dozen different people, but the key element was that this intriguing new album ended on a note of almost adolescent adoration… something that The Smiths had spent five years defining.

  The critics reaction was mixed. For some observers it was a dismal album, the sound of a band in disarray. For others it was better than The Queen Is Dead. I-D magazine described the album as “as good as The Queen Is Dead, but probably not better.” NME referenced Johnny’s “beatific melodies” as establishing The Smiths’ final greatness, and noted that – whoever Johnny and Morrissey chose to work with in the future – theirs was perhaps “a once-in-a-lifetime partnership.” Rolling Stone picked out some of Johnny’s “emotional highlights” from the album, observing that the band were right to pack up rather than continue without him, while among the negative reactions, for Suzan Cohen in Star Hits this was “not exactly the way I [want] to remember them.”

  As the year came to an end, so The Smiths’ discography of original releases began to run out, as singles were released from Strangeways. In October ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish/Pretty Girls Make Graves’ reached a disappointing number twenty-three on the singles chart, while in December ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ coupled with the Elvis-inspired ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ just scraped into the singles chart at number thirty. For the ultimate singles band it was a disappointing climax to the year, cheered by Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show TV special on The Smiths, perhaps a more fitting farewell.