Johnny Marr

by Richard Carman

  Johnny’s contribution to Naked was brief but meaningful, his work on the four tracks that made the finished album considerable. David Byrne told this author the experience was very fruitful and enjoyable. “It was one or two days at most,” he recalled. “He was so fast in the studio.” Frantz remembered Johnny’s cool demeanour and appearance. “At the time Johnny was wearing a little Greek fisherman’s cap and loads of jewellery, certainly more than (Heads’ bassist and Frantz’s wife) Tina. He was cute and very chipper.” Adaptable, musically articulate, understanding what was required and providing it with the minimum of fuss – Johnny’s brief standing as a Talking Head was enjoyable all round. “It was a blur,” remembers Byrne. “A good blur!”

  Morrissey’s classic summer single ‘Every Day Is Like Sunday’ was culled from Viva Hate, a fabulous record that painted a romantic picture of a lost northern seaside town against an orchestrally-weighted band that continued to establish his solo work. In the meantime, Steve Lillywhite and Kirsty MacColl came to feature large over the next few months in Johnny’s life. While Kirsty had of course featured on ‘Ask’, and Lillywhite been brought in by Morrissey to work on that track, she and Marr had become good friends since the sessions with Billy Bragg. Kirsty’s CV stretched back way before The Smiths. Famously the daughter of folk legend Ewan MacColl, who had left the family home before she was born, Kirsty’s career owed as much to Beach Boys and Kinks influences as to the earthen tones of her Salford-born father. In fact, MacColl was almost a mini-Smiths herself. Her clear love of harmony, her succinct, intelligent and crafted lyrics laced with pathos and humour, musical tracks unadorned by musical diarrhoea but, like her lyrics, to the point and punchy, her work had much in common with Johnny’s already. Writing her own songs since the age of seventeen, Kirsty’s credits went back to late Seventies punk bands like The Addix (“I was just the token boiler on backing vocals,” she said in 1981, with her typical, ironic, charming modesty). In 1981 she skirted the dangerous waters of one-hit-wonderdom with ‘There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis’, and released her debut album Desperate Characters, returning with a hit for Tracey Ullman on ‘They Don’t Know’, on which Kirsty’s backing vocals were the clearest sound on the single. By 1988 she was working on singles and tracks that would lead to Kite, her first solo album for seven years, which was released the following year. “I didn’t write anything for a couple of years when I was having kids,” she said in 1989. “It took a long time to start up again.” Increasingly free of what she admitted was writer’s block, Kirsty produced a fantastic batch of songs for the assembled troupe of musicians to work upon. Typically generous, describing Johnny as “very energetic, a very ‘up’ person to be around,” Kirsty was happy to name-check Johnny as one of the main reasons why she came out of her writer’s block and got back into the studio. “He suggested ‘You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby’… saying ‘Why aren’t you doing anything? Get off your arse!’”

  It was a sparkling album, comprising Kirsty’s best, succinct song-writing, crisp production from Steve Lillywhite and extensive contributions from Johnny, who co-wrote two of the songs, ‘The End Of A Perfect Day’ and ‘You And Me Baby’. The process brought out of Johnny what he describes as his “romantic melodic” thing, that of absolute love that engulfs the writing of certain songs. “When Kirsty asked me to write for her,” he remembers, “she said ‘I want one of those songs that make you feel happy and sad at the same time’… it can be almost upsetting when I make records [like that], that mixture of melancholia and vibrancy.” Kirsty was asked by the press about her ‘replacing’ Morrissey as Johnny’s wordsmith. “I don’t think I have,” she told Melody Maker in 1989. Citing Morrissey as her favourite lyricist since Ray Davies, she added “I think it would be terribly pretentious of me to think that.” She did however, reference The Smiths’ influence on a regular basis. “In my songs,” she told Cut magazine in 1989, “I try to put things succinctly and make them not too depressing. Wit is very important… what seems like the end of the world today might not be so tomorrow.” As an interviewee, Kirsty MacColl had few equals.

  Inspired by her recent success with The Pogues over the Christmas of 1987 on the timeless ‘Fairy Tale Of New York’, the album also saw Pretenders/Average White Band guitarist Robbie McIntosh, Simple Mind’s Mel Gaynor and The The drummer David Palmer on board alongside Johnny. They were, in Kirsty’s own words, “people whose work I’ve always admired… The people I chose I’d either worked with before or knew the work they’d done for others.” Fresh as a daisy, the album is led, of course, by Kirsty’s impeccable vocal, but is essentially a guitar, bass and drums album, acoustic and discretely electric in its guitar sound. Sessions jumped between Townhouse and Ealing studios, and when the musical tracks were completed, Kirsty added finished vocals later. On ‘Mother’s Ruin’, Johnny’s triplets, trademark arpeggios and expanded chords lend an emotional weight to a touching song, the chorus of which could have come from Morrissey as much as MacColl. On the lovely cover of The Kinks’ ‘Days’, which took Kirsty back into the UK Top Twenty singles chart, Johnny is equally in evidence, colouring the chord changes with articulate picking and strumming throughout. ‘No Victims’ and ‘Tread Lightly’ had more of a Smiths feel, particular the latter, and Johnny’s guitar annotations keep the rockabilly pace of the song up-tempo beneath MacColl’s multi-tracked vocals. ‘What Do Pretty Girls Do?’ sounded like a Morrissey song too, at least in its title, but melodically, harmonically and lyrically the song is pure Kirsty.

  The lilting, Beatle-like swagger of ‘The End Of A Perfect Day’ has trademark Johnny Marr fingerprints all over it: driven almost exclusively by fat, repeated guitar lines that carry the verses through punching accents from the cymbals, the lack of a clear chorus but the inevitable swirl around to a repeated vocal motif makes it a fine piece. At the end of a perfect album, Johnny’s second co-write is beautifully arranged around his understated, cyclical chord structure, the guitar chorused and the vocals perfectly intimate and open-voiced. For the song, ‘You And Me Baby’, Kirsty layered a choir of her own vocal behind a melody that sits exquisitely on the top line of Marr’s picking, while Fiachra Trench’s string arrangement sets the whole piece alight in its closing bars. The song had been written at Johnny’s home, crouched on his knees in the hallway, trying at once to both nail the song and not wake his new baby. “I was feeling kind of sad,” he remembers, “and [Kirsty] captured the spirit of that very closely.” Of the same song, Kirsty spoke of wanting to grace the track with lots of space and gaps using real strings to beautiful effect. The piece was a divine ending to a beautiful and perennially popular album, loved nearly twenty years later by Kirsty MacColl fans old and new.

  Lillywhite’s production values echoed Johnny’s in many ways, often multi-layering guitars across a track, and building up Kirsty’s harmonised vocal to the same degree that the Smiths’ guitarist had developed with his own sound. Johnny would work on Kirsty’s follow-up album Electric Landlady, but Kite remains probably her most perfect work. Across her all-too short career she rarely recorded a bad track. She wrote beautifully, sang even more so, and did the whole thing – interviews included – with an intelligence, grace and humour that is increasingly rare in post-Kirsty pop singers. Of all the rock ’n’ roll deaths over the years – some tragic, some preposterous, some pathetic – Kirsty’s pointless death in the winter of 2000 robbed the world of a beautiful and creative woman. RIP Kirsty.

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  The Smiths returned in September when Rough Trade put out their last ‘original’ Smiths album, the live release Rank. The collection was another number two in the charts, confirming the affection still held for the band a year after its demise. Rank was a live album taped at the National Ballroom in Kilburn in the autumn of 1986, a concert which captured the dual-guitar version of the band with Craig Gannon on stage with Marr. Johnny approved the album’s release, which included a live version of Johnny’s instrumental ‘The
Draize Train’. A month later the Strange Fruit label issued The Peel Sessions, while before Christmas twelve-inch versions of ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’ and ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ completed another chapter in the release schedule of the band.

  Johnny might have appeared to be getting free of his past, but The Smiths still haunted him. “I felt hollow at that time,” recalls Johnny. “The ugly situation with The Smiths split meant that trying to produce work after that was really difficult, almost unbearable.” “I had to grow up a little bit, and develop a really thick skin,” said Marr. While the hollowness prevailed, not only did Johnny find that writing was difficult, but he began to lose interest in even listening to music – a much more serious symptom. “What was scary was that I didn’t want to listen to records, and to be robbed of that is much, much worse than being robbed of the impulse to write,” said Marr.

  Rumours began to circulate that Johnny was putting together a new band. Heat – almost a precursor of Marr’s future band The Healers – would involve former Julian Cope bass player James Eller and ABC drummer Dave Palmer. In fact, it turned out to be a ‘nearly’ band. It was a natural progression for Johnny however, that in the autumn he became part of another project, and stayed within its confines for as long as he had been associated with The Smiths.

  The The, however, was a very different concept. For starters, there was no band as such. While teenage founder Matt Johnson had started The The off as a band concept, by the time of his debut album The The was in essence only Johnson plus guests. The format of The The that Johnny was involved with was, however, the most traditional band line-up that the band enjoyed, touring and recording as a working unit.

  The relationship between Johnson and Marr went back to that drizzly October night in 1981 when the pair were introduced, and the two had remained close friends still. From day one they had harboured a desire to work together. As mentioned, in 1983 the pair had been together while Johnson was writing and preparing the album Soul Mining in his flat near Arsenal’s football stadium in Highbury, London. By the time Johnny came to work with him properly he was aware of Matt’s writing methods and recording processes, his use of guesting artists, and his working methods with studio staff and producers. This was not a traditional band experience, as Johnny had always known it – more of a research process based upon superb song-writing: Johnson would write everything, play much of the instrumentation, handle a lot of the relevant programming and engineering, and bring in collaborators where needed. There were parallels with The Smiths to some degree – the work to date had been a mixture of the melancholic and the exuberant, often with those two emotions mixed within one song. But The The’s output to date had been a more varied affair, at times punching with soul, at other glacial and distracted. It was a refined concept, one of the most critically acclaimed ‘bands’ of the era.

  Mind Bomb would be released the following year as the result of their first official collaboration, though collaboration only to a degree. By the time Johnny was involved – the pair were by now sharing management, and there was a professional as well as personal logic to their working together – much of the song-writing had been completed. The album developed as a blend of finished pieces and demos that Matt wanted to develop within a group context, and this was largely how the piece progressed. With issues in his personal life defining the trajectory that the album would take – the break-up and re-building of a close relationship coloured Johnson’s spiritual search at the time – the album became a roaring indictment of organised religion. By his own confession, Johnson was “pretty whacked out” and “into some very interesting states of mind” at the time. He was fasting, or living on very proscribing diets, drinking copious quantities of magic mushroom tea and meditating extensively. Matt was ready for Marr’s input. “I wouldn’t eat for days,” said Johnson. “And then I’d do loads of magic mushrooms. I tried all sorts of things which I don’t need to detail… I was putting myself through so much I lost it and began to hear voices.”

  The initial impetus to move away from the material on the hugely successful and previous The The album Infected came from the ubiquitous Billy Bragg, whom Johnson had met in Australia. Billy encouraged Matt to join in the activities of the Red Wedge campaign, and Johnson enjoyed the resulting shows to such a degree that he decided that the next The The album would be made by a more traditionally-structured band.

  Johnny and Matt met up in Johnson’s recently acquired East London home and studio, part of a converted department store. “We sat up talking till the sun came up,” Johnson said in conversation with Johnny in 2002, “[and] lost all sense of time.” Without even being aware of the existing friendship between the three, once Matt had Johnny on board he called James Eller and Dave Palmer, and they joined the band for the album that was to follow. Johnny was still working with Chrissie Hynde, and so an insane routine was established where he would work with Chrissie until the early hours of the morning and then load all his gear into the car and drive across London to Matt’s studio. “I’d get there,” Johnny remembered, “and we’d take loads of mushrooms and ecstasy. It was the most intense psychological and philosophical experiment.”

  The first session was particularly memorable. Due to arrive at noon, Johnny had spent the previous night on ecstasy, and – after what he called “a real psychedelic night” – he turned up two hours late “looking like one of the Thunderbirds with his strings cut.” Johnny picked up on Johnson’s own tenseness as they started work on ‘The Beat(en) Generation’, but it just wasn’t happening. “I turned to Matt,” Marr recalls, “and said ‘Look – I’ll be honest with you: I took a load of E for the last three nights and I’m feeling a bit wobbly.” Honesty has never been one of Johnny’s problems… While such an admission might have finished a Smiths session there and then, Johnson’s response was to encourage the potential of the situation rather than act against it. “Matt looked at me,” says Johnny, “and with great production acumen said ‘Well, we’d better get some more then hadn’t we!’” So the pair wore out their engineers and produced their masterwork against the odds.

  Mind Bomb’s was a perfect line-up, completing the traditional four-piece and co-incidentally bringing together the band that might have become Heat. Johnny was to describe this incarnation of The The “as much of a band as any band I’ve ever been in”, and the entire process of putting the album together was both relaxing and intense. The band itself was a perfectly formed group, under Johnson’s directing eye. Nor were the foursome alone in the recording process; some seventeen performers appeared on the album in addition to a choir and the Astarti string section. Included in the cast were bass supremo Danny Thompson and Sinead O’Connor, who sang beautifully on ‘Kingdom of Rain’.

  ‘Good Morning Beautiful’ was one of the band’s favourite pieces, based upon field recordings of Islamic voices in Indonesia brought to the project by Johnson’s girlfriend. With a glance towards David Bowie’s Station To Station in its opening, the piece uses samples in quite a different way to Byrne and Eno’s use of similar sounds on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Where they used samples as the central tenet of the song, The The use them as colourings, illustrations to the musical tracks, and the effect is very pleasing. Directing the piece to the band, Johnson instructed Johnny to make his contribution sound “like Jesus meeting the Devil.” “I was thinking… ‘Right – that’s a new one!’” said Johnny afterwards.

  ‘Armageddon Days’ had one of the strongest lyrics on the album, a brave piece augmented by a full choir, inspired by the current worsening issues between the Islamic world and the West. “People have forgotten how serious that whole situation was,” Johnson was to comment later in reference to the Salman Rushdie affair that also went off over the coming months. “‘Armageddon’ started to pick up radio play, and at least one station got a phone call from someone… basically, ‘don’t play this, or else.’” Had it been released as a single, the opening few bars would have been familiar to anyone who r
emembered Sweet, the glam rock band whose ‘Ballroom Blitz’ was a huge hit in the early Seventies. It was clear however, that the wrath of Matt was levelled not at God but at organised religion per se – divinity is fine, but how we use it for our own means is the most divisive flaw in mankind’s make-up. Track three, ‘The Violence Of Truth’, featured Mark Feltham on harmonica (though the harmonica on ‘Beyond Love’ was Johnny), a faux-glam riff from Johnny electrifying the track that demonstrated Marr’s continuous search for a feel or vibe. “The only way I could get that sound,” says Johnny, “was to pick the most horrible guitar I had, tape up the top four strings and just whack the bottom ones. It turned out almost like glam sax!”

  ‘Kingdom Of Rain’ contains the images of blood and rain that appear throughout the album, and Sinead’s duet with Johnson as passionate as one would expect. Although O’Connor had had hits already, it was to be another nine months before she moved the whole world with own version of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’.

  ‘The Beat(en) Generation’ was named after a painting by Johnson’s brother Andy, a warning shot fired across the bows of a generation of youngsters so hip that they had lost the connection with the real issues of their lives. Matt described it as a message for people who were living “all icing and no cake.” The song has an engaging immediacy, reflecting the fact that Johnson wrote it from start to finish in two hours. The jaunty, country feel of Johnny’s 12-string Stratocaster and Mark Feltham’s irresistible harmonica drew a lot of listeners to the album, and was Johnson’s first, deliberate attempt to do just that – to bring an audience into an album via a hit single. “I realised that I had been making life difficult for myself,” Matt told Alternative Press. “Commercially, I’d always made the wrong moves for all the right reasons… In retrospect I couldn’t have done it any other way.” If the newly-found singles audience was expecting an album filled with rockabilly Marr, then they had not listened closely to the lyric – deeper waters awaited the listener to Mind Bomb in the politically-charged world order.