Some twenty-five miles west of Manchester, literally on the River Mersey itself and in the shadow of Runcorn bridge, Spike Island saw a festival in the summer of 1990 that was headlined by The Stone Roses. It was a mini-Woodstock for the generation, when many of the bands who went on to enliven Nineties pop were congregated in one place. Electronic made their live debut in Los Angeles in August, playing to a huge crowd at the Dodger Stadium. The concert came about after they were invited by Depeche Mode to play with them. Johnny explained, “I thought it was completely impossible,” but it was an important date for the band in America. Neil Tennant – himself a pop junkie – told an amusing story about Johnny’s obsessive love of pop music. “We’re getting so used to this,” Johnny said to Neil, “that we’ll just be strolling across the stage soon chatting to each other about ancient pop music.” Neil described Johnny ‘strolling’ across the stage towards him the following night. “During the drum beat in ‘Getting Away With It’, Johnny Marr comes over, playing away at his guitar, and says, ‘What was Picketywitch’s first hit?’ It was dead funny.” As Grant Showbiz confirms, “that sounds very, very Johnny! Good for him…” Meanwhile, Electronic’s first UK gig was in January of the New Year when they appeared at The Hacienda, to celebrate the renewal of the club’s licence.
With northern-born singer Lisa Stansfield cruising the charts in the late Eighties and early Nineties, there was a penchant among the record-buying public for soulful, breezy vocal acts with a bit of attitude. Another of Johnny’s projects during 1990 was recording with Banderas, a duo who could have, but didn’t, make it big. Their album Ripe was to be released in March of 1991, featuring the likes of Jimmy Somerville and Bernard Sumner. Johnny appeared on the single, the distinctive album-opener ‘This Is Your Life’, which was released in February of 1991. It was an affirmative, Latin-style hustle, sung beautifully by one half of the Banderas duo, Caroline Buckley, with chugging ‘Shaft’ style funk guitar throughout. The project didn’t quite sink without trace, but while the name of the band and the album’s cover suggested a bunch of Spanish female skinheads, Banderas failed to hit the mark on either side of the Atlantic. It was a shame – ‘This Is Your Life’ had in spades the same kind of upbeat feel-good groove that had served Swing Out Sister and Stansfield so well in the previous few years.
By now though, Johnny had so many offers that he could afford to work with exactly who he chose and on what projects. One of the most productive was a more direct collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys. Almost a decade into their career, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s Behaviour was the band’s fifth studio album, and their perfect blend of distracted ironic pop lyrics and shimmering, faultless production values had rightly made them one of the world’s biggest-selling acts. Marr, Tennant and Lowe obviously already had a working friendship via the Boys appearance with Electronic, and it was a continuation of that natural synergy that brought Johnny into the recording studio to work on two tracks with the duo.
Like Johnny, the Pet Shop Boys had a major-league work ethic, but their creativity was often glossed over by the interpretation of their techno-heavy production. “A lot of people have this idea that Neil and Chris just sit around the studio with machines making the music, while they read Vogue,” Johnny was to say, reviewing the experience of working with PSB on jmarr.com, “which is very far from the truth.” Attracted to the project for personal reasons – Johnny has always claimed that any working relationship he has, has to have a sound personal relationship going on for him to get involved – he was impressed with both the work rate of the band, and their musical abilities. “They both work constantly,” he added, “and are never short of ideas.” Marr was also quick to credit the proficiency of Lowe and Tennant, reminding fans that the guys proved themselves great musicians as well as great writers.
The album was produced by ex-Gorgio Moroder keyboardist and future Grammy-winner Harold Faltermeyer, who found a rich and warm strain in the songs that Johnny was able to flesh out. In fact, the two tracks to which Johnny contributed were the most guitar-driven pieces in the Pet Shop Boys’ catalogue to date. ‘October Symphony’ mirrored the more reflective tone that Behaviour signalled in the Pet Shop Boys’ career. The track is a faultless, beautifully arranged piece, linking haunting strings and Johnny’s Cry Baby wah-wah guitar with Tennant’s beautifully delivered vocal, his tone less sardonic than on previous releases. As with Banderas, Johnny could not have been further away from The Smiths in terms of the work he was engaged in, but on the reflective ‘This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave’ the tone is more Smiths-like. Marr thoroughly enjoyed the experience of working with Tennant and Lowe, recalling “great memories” from the process. “I still really like those songs,” he said later. “Especially ‘This Must Be The Place’…”
Liverpool’s The La’s blended perfectly-produced guitar-based pop melody with a nostalgic slice of Sixties retro. ‘There She Goes’ drew a direct line in the sand back to The Smiths, and Johnny was a big fan, going on to work with that band’s Lee Mavers on unreleased demos. Although the fruits of their labours have never seen the light of day, the pair spent several days playing together at Johnny’s home studio, hanging out and jamming, each very much a fan of the other’s music. What might have come out of a longer-term working relationship between the authors of ‘There She Goes’ and ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ is mouth-watering.
At the same time Morrissey delivered his own Hatful Of Hollow-style collection of hits and B-sides, Bona Drag, neatly encapsulating his post-Smiths work. 1991 was in many ways the year of Massive Attack [aside, of course, from the approaching grunge juggernaut, heralded by Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’], when dance music got serious, and the burgeoning Bristol-based trip hop scene provided the soundtrack to the next couple of years-worth of pop. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines became one of the UK’s best-loved and most-played albums for decades, while Nellee Hooper, Neneh Cherry and Tricky coloured the first half of the decade with some superb and innovative singles. Some of the movement appealed to Marr, and he stayed closer to his traditional roots over the coming year – soul, folk and the continuing work-in-progress that was Electronic.
The first release of his continuing work was an appearance on the Stex single ‘Still Feel The Rain’, with Johnny included on various different format releases of the A-side. The Banderas album was released to a fairly indifferent world, while Morrissey continued his solo schedule with the critically acclaimed Kill Uncle. April saw the release of the new Electronic single ‘Get The Message/Free Will’, the A-side one of Marr’s favourite Electronic tracks of all. Rather than Johnny’s usual speed of light composition, ‘Get The Message’ was a ‘crafted’ song, over which he spent many, many hours of searching before he was happy with the result. Sumner’s vocal take was perfect too, a stream of consciousness piece expanded in one take to complete the song. “I knew I had a really great verse, and a potentially great chorus,” Johnny told Martin Roach of the ardour of the song’s composition. “I had to really rack my brains to nail it… had to really concentrate to get [that] middle eight.” Accordingly, the rhythm track alone occupied Johnny for five days solid.
In July 1991, Billy Bragg released another of his pristine, beautifully-judged collaborations with Johnny as a single. For Marr fans it was another glorious outing for the pair, and everything Johnny did on the track worked perfectly alongside Bragg’s lyric. The song ‘Sexuality’ was in fact a joint composition. “Thank God it was a co-write,” says Billy of the song that was born of the newly-renewed partnership. The former Smiths soundman Grant Showbiz, a long-time working partner with Bragg too, was producing Billy’s album Don’t Try This At Home, and the pair presented Johnny with a number of tracks to elicit his input. “I was in the studio labouring with ‘Sexuality’ which originally sounded a lot more like ‘Louis Louis’ than the track we know and love,” says Billy. “Johnny came down and just kind of got hold of it and played those glittering chords over it, an
d changed it completely.” Marr took the track back to his attic-based studio at home in Manchester. To what he described as “a three-chord change [that was] kind of reggae-ish,” Johnny added his own backing tracks, backing vocals, and completely re-worked the song for Bragg, who was stunned by the piece that he heard. “[He] gave us back this beautiful shining pop song,” remembers Billy. “And me and Grant looked at one another and thought ‘Christ – now what are we going to do? We’re going to have to make an album that sounds like this.’”
Inspired, the pair made one of Bragg’s best-loved albums. “That’s how that album became a big pop album. We were trying to work up to the level of Johnny’s production on ‘Sexuality’ – he did an incredible job. A really, really incredible job. He has a great melodic ear.”
As well as the single – which enjoyed five weeks on the chart – Johnny also played on the lovely ‘Cindy Of A Thousand Lives’. “‘Cindy’ was another one of the tracks he took when he took ‘Sexuality’,” recalls Billy. “He took that and ‘Accident Waiting To Happen’. He did spooky, scary things with them.” Bragg travelled up to Manchester to join Johnny in the process, and watched him at work. “I went up and stayed with him and watched him do it, but how he did it I have no idea” says Billy, mystified. Buried away in Johnny’s attic, his song came to life once again. “‘Cindy…’ has a great feel,” Bragg recalls fondly. “And it’s got Kirsty all over it too, singing away.”
While the melodic ear of Marr helped set fire to Bragg’s writing, his work with Kirsty MacColl also continued to progress, and Johnny co-wrote one of her most moving and exciting songs to date. ‘Walking Down Madison’ was a groove-led departure for Kirsty and a perfect snapshot of Johnny’s creative flavour at the time, all loops and heavy dance riffs set against a lightness of melody and touching modulation, a track completed by Johnny and presented to Kirsty intact, much as he had in the past with Morrissey.
June saw the long-awaited release of Electronic, and the debut album did not disappoint. For those not knowing quite what to expect, the overall flavour was more New Order than Smiths, but Johnny’s fingerprints were all over the album and his guitar high in the mix. Marr had clearly shed his former band both emotionally and musically. Electronic declared a future with no past, an opportunity for Marr to graze new pastures and for Sumner to indulge his time outside of New Order. The band exercised Marr one hundred per cent. The first track, ‘Idiot Country’, featured a cool Mancunian rap from Bernard, Johnny’s guitar as funky as it had ever appeared on record to date as the synthesized harmonies drifted over the complex rhythm track. The majority of the album was tight funk grooves, dance tracks with attitude, but often suffused with strong melody and a sense of claustrophobia too. ‘Reality’ was based on a synth riff, with Johnny’s tight guitar filling the spaces in the drum track. While the rhythms are very ‘up’, Sumner’s vocal is sparse and emotionally distracted. If this was dance music it would appeal lyrically to Smiths fans. Outside of the musical context, Bernard’s lyric and delivery could easily have been that of a New Order or Joy Division song.
‘Tighten Up’ featured Johnny’s strumming high in the mix, adding a warmth to the synth riff that started the song. ‘Patience Of A Saint’ was based upon Bernard’s drum beat and a handful of chords dropped onto it by Chris Lowe. Johnny added the bass line, and the whole song – a pure Pet Shop Boys/Electronic collaboration – was completed very quickly. Tennant’s vocal contrasted superbly well with Bernard’s; although Electronic were always a duo, the contrast of the two voices over the course of an album was fascinating.
‘Getting Away With It’ featured the drums of David Palmer, the sticksman with whom Johnny had probably worked more than any other. Bernard’s plaintive vocal again harmonized perfectly with Neil’s – the song is another perfect happy/sad concoction, so typical of much of the work that Johnny has been involved with over the years. After ‘Gangster’ and ‘Soviet’ came the single ‘Get The Message’, featuring Primal Scream’s Denise Johnson on vocals, one of the highlights of the album.
Electronic later went on to claim that their music was dance music for people who don’t go to dance clubs. As more time passes and the band’s first album becomes more of an archaeological relic of the early Nineties, the synth bass lines and metronomic beats that defined the dance grooves of the time give way to Sumner’s vocals. There is a timelessness to Bernard’s delivery, halfway between tender and dead-pan, that works on so many levels. This is particularly evident on ‘Some Distant Memory’, which has the plangent wistfulness of The Blue Nile, but on an E-fuelled night out in Manchester rather than wandering the wet streets of late night Glasgow. Johnny’s glissando acoustic guitar is a real treat on the track too. The closer, ‘Feel Every Beat’ opens with some of Johnny’s backwards guitar, swelling until the opening riff rocks more than anywhere else on the album. Palmer’s drumming is supplemented by Donald Johnson. The album vamps into the distance with Johnny’s harmonica pumping away…
Electronic made it to the number two slot in the UK album charts – like so many of Johnny’s albums over the years, not quite getting to number one. It was, as Johnny might have said at the time, a fantastic piece of vinyl.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TRUE HAPPINESS THIS WAY LIES
Sessions and demos for the next The The album had begun as far back as summer of the previous year, but through 1992 they increased in intensity and gradually the album Dusk began to take shape. The record was to prove at odds with what was happening elsewhere in music. As the tide of influence wavered between the UK and America, attention turned to an American band called Nirvana. 1992 was the year that Nirvana took off, their album Nevermind released in the autumn. With the attendant so-called grunge movement introducing bands such as Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins to UK audiences, the gap left by the under-employed Stone Roses was filled. Nirvana – and indeed Pearl Jam and the Pumpkins – were worthwhile bands, but much of the grunge phenomenon was dire. There was clearly a gap in the market, and – quietly – the phenomenon that came to be known as Britpop gradually crept from the net-curtained bedrooms of London and elsewhere to take over from Nirvana after the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994.
In the meantime, Dusk was Johnny’s second extended work-out with The The and Matt Johnson. While elements of the writing process had started during the Mind Bomb tour, the album was recorded live in Johnson’s own home studio in East London; the Mind Bomb four-piece band reconvened and recorded live, while the process was captured by film-maker Tim Pope. Writing on tour helped Johnson pare down the values that he engaged with the songs – cleaner, clearer. “I became more sensitive to the idea of dynamics,” he told one interviewer at the time and the songs written for Dusk became more and more concise. Still reeling from the death of his brother, Johnson found the entire process difficult, sometimes losing the studio control that he had managed so clearly on previous albums. The influence of darker blues powers such as Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf were immediately to hand, and Matt described the entire process of making the album as “intensely personal.” That isn’t to say that the album itself lacked control: in fact Dusk’s reigning-in of personal nightmares and visions has made it one of The The’s most loved and affecting albums. The leap from the universal themes of Mind Bomb to the diary-like pages of Dusk was not a sales-orientated calculation, but the appeal to the audience was reflected in the fact that the collection of songs ultimately made it to number two in the album charts.
Much of the album was composed on acoustic guitar, with a drum machine fleshing out the basic demos. The massed ranks of contributors that enlightened Mind Bomb was reduced to a more stable central core of players – and the album has a much more rootsy, R&B feel to it – there was still room for a brass section on some tracks and guest artists such as Danny Thompson were brought in again where required. Musically the project was less of a ‘band’ than on Mind Bomb, the songs more finished as they came to the studio, but the sessions themselves were s
till intense, with blood red projections and incense burning around the basement studio. The band nicknamed it the ‘psychic sauna,’ the heat in the studio deliberately intense. Johnson arranged huge heaters, turned up full, to raise the studio temperature, and this was easily matched by the emotional heat. Johnny – established as the most contributing member of the band besides Johnson himself – remembered turning up at the sessions bright and breezy in his new open-topped Italian sports car, only to step down into the cellars and join the almost religious intensity of the recording studio.
The atmosphere appealed to Johnny immensely, the studio vibe creating a weird but very creative atmosphere. “He got these very intense, interesting dynamics, that captured your attention completely,” says Johnny. “Too many bands are just record collectors, and four guys in a room with a big record collection each doesn’t mean you can come up with the goods.” But while the atmosphere was intense, it wasn’t glum. “I can’t work if I am down” says Johnny. “I get things done by being genuinely positive – and using that [kind of] energy.”
Generous to a fault, Johnny also encouraged Johnson to play and develop more of his own guitar parts, and Johnson spoke of how one of Johnny’s greatest contributions to the album was the encouragement he gave. “He understands what I am trying to do and he believes in it,” Matt told Michael Leonard, adding neatly that his own role remained rather one of a “benevolent dictator.”
Engaged in the success of these The The sessions, Johnny turned down the opportunity of producing one of the best-selling albums of the era. A Smiths-like frenzy had whipped up around Irish band The Cranberries following the release of their first EP in 1991, and by the following year they had signed to Island for a six-album deal. Sessions for the first album had foundered, and Johnny remembers being asked if he was interested. In fact, Stephen Street took the band to Windmill Studios in Dublin and produced the phenomenally successful Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? It took a while for the album to take off, but there was a neat symmetry to the route that the record took before it hit the top of the album charts. Snubbed by the fickle UK market, the band took off on a six-week tour of the USA in support of another British band in the summer of 1993, and found a rabid audience on the US college circuit. The Cranberries picked up plaudits everywhere and the album began to sell and sell, finally reaching the number one slot in the UK more than a year after its release. The band who gave their Stateside support slot to The Cranberries in the summer of 1993 was The The… without Johnny Marr.
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