Johnny Marr

by Richard Carman

  To mark the anniversary of her passing, an emotional concert was organised at London’s Royal Albert Hall in April of 1999. Paul appeared, of course, alongside Marianne Faithful, Tom Jones, Neil Finn, Elvis Costello and others. For Smiths fans, the appearance of Johnny getting back with Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders to sing ‘Meat Is Murder’ was a highlight of the show, and a natural synergy as Hynde had long ago joined Linda in the animal rights movement herself. It was moving to see Johnny put the past behind him to perform a Smiths song for a cause he felt truly noble. “There was a bigger principle at stake other than some silly sort of pop notions,” said Johnny, happy that the larger share of the proceeds from the event would go to the charity Animaline. Johnny also performed on the night with Marianne Faithful and – in a surprising coda to the performance of George Michael – added his weight to a performance of Michael’s ‘Faith’. How The Smiths fans of the Eighties must have smiled.

  “[It] was pretty incredible really,” said Johnny. “I felt kind of honoured to play there… very grateful to be asked. And I felt quite flattered to have known [Linda] because she was a very beautiful person.” The event was the first time that Johnny met up with Neil Finn, with whom he would work closely, though their conversation was short. For all concerned, the Linda McCartney tribute was a delight all round.

  In April, Johnny appeared on Top Of The Pops again, with Electronic, to promote the current single ‘Vivid’. Asked what the new album was going to be like, Marr and Sumner were in good form. “It’s not very good,” joked Barney. “It wasn’t worth making.” Marr denied having anything to do with it at all. “We’re not really on it,” he claimed on www.worldinmotion.net. “We got our friends to do it!” Twisted Tenderness was in fact a departure for Electronic, a rock album retaining their trademark sense of melody but this time heavy on guitar. In a sense, this was the first Electronic album proper, the first time that the band defined their own sound as a band. Bernard and Johnny were both keen to explain how much each had influenced the other’s work over the long period that they had been working together. “People don’t realise that we’ve lived in each other’s pockets for eight or nine years,” Johnny reflected. Despite being forever linked with Morrissey in people’s minds, Marr was proud of the relationship he now had with Bernard Sumner, saying that “this is the longest-running partnership I’ve been involved with.”

  Whereas Raise The Pressure had been the product of years of work, Twisted Tenderness was completed in only a few months. The difference was that the duo, reversing their usual writing/recording process of composing on keyboards and overdubbing, wrote the songs on guitar instead. Marr found the process exhilarating – perhaps having reached the end of a natural cycle of experimentation and wishing to get back to the basics of what he did best. The resulting creativity brought a number of songs out of Johnny that he felt needed a different context – songs that required a bunch of guys in a room playing as a traditional rock band. So began the process – though a number of these tracks ended up as Electronic songs – of composing tracks for what eventually became The Healers.

  The band for Electronic’s album was fleshed out again by adding Black Grape’s Ged Lynch on drums, Jimi Goodwin on bass and Astrid Williamson on backing vocals. It wasn’t only Johnny who played guitar. With a lot of what Marr called “coaxing and bullying”, he talked Bernard into including his own guitar lines on the final recordings too, just as he had encouraged Matt Johnson in the past.

  Twisted Tenderness was another labour of love. When Johnny spoke of there being a unique sound quality to his material that he could only achieve when he worked with Sumner, it recalled his absolute devotion to the songs he had done with Matt Johnson. Sumner’s lyrics – aided and abetted by Johnny, who “helped out” on the writing – had an increased weight to them, beyond much of what he had written elsewhere, and for the first time his lyrics were printed on the album’s sleeve. These were not jobbing workaday fancies for wealthy freelance musicians, but projects of great worth and meaning to Johnny. He seemed to care as much about the music of Twisted Tenderness as he had about The Smiths more than fifteen years earlier. “I’m very proud of this record,” he told the BBC, “and want to promote it as much as possible.” Interestingly, the album was only released in the USA nearly a year after its European and Japanese release, including a handful of extra tracks.

  ‘Make It Happen’ and ‘Haze’ featured Johnny on vocals; ‘Vivid’ was one of the songs that Johnny had written and demoed initially with Zak Starkey and that Bernard jumped on for Electronic; ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ was the first cover version that Bernard had ever recorded, an ironic selection in itself. At the birth of Electronic, Neil Tennant had glibly called the band ‘the Blind Faith of the Nineties’, referencing the Sixties supergroup that combined Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood. So many years on, it was apposite that the group’s first cover should be one of Blind Faith’s best-known songs. Johnny was particularly proud of ‘Prodigal Son’, another song originally demoed with Starkey. On the album’s release, the band toured as a group proper, the first time that Johnny felt comfortable doing so with Electronic, which – in essence – was effectively a duo.

  While Johnny openly admitted that Electronic’s mandate included commercial success alongside artistic honesty, it was felt that the release was under-promoted. Yet despite Johnny’s misgivings, the album made it to the top ten, eventually stalling at number nine. As it was, Twisted Tenderness proved to be – at least until now – the last album release from Electronic. A cycle of ten years had come to an end for Bernard and Johnny, during which time their work rate had been prodigious and the quality of their output – like everything else Marr has worked on – impeccable. As always – because partners such as Sumner, Bragg or Johnson were friends before they were working colleagues – Johnny would not write off the chances of Electronic convening again in the future.

  For now though, Twisted Tenderness marked the end of an era. “I am really proud that we still [have] a friendship that is really strong,” Johnny said of his ongoing relationship with Sumner. “As I do with Matt Johnson and Chrissie Hynde, and pretty much everyone I’ve worked with.” The relationship with Bernard was perhaps closer than with any former collaborator. “When we took a break… we would get on a boat and go sailing together. I have never been closer to anyone.”

  There were always distractions however, and not always welcome ones for Johnny. The year of Twisted Tenderness was also the year of Manchester United’s treble victory in the FA Cup, Premiership and in Europe – a momentous night for Manchester’s ‘other team’, but not one savoured by supporters of the blue side of the city. Marr and Sumner joked that while Bernard was becoming increasingly smug at Utd’s success, Johnny was becoming more and more ‘twisted’ in his perverse desire to see The Reds stuffed. With City’s form getting worse, Bernard would tease Marr that Man City “would be playing Salford Grammar School next.”

  Electronic had run its course, but Johnny and Bernard remained close friends. “It’s one of the rare examples of a band that split up with no acrimony whatsoever,” said Johnny, and his friendship with Sumner – who he describes as “a real punk” – remains intact.

  One of Johnny’s least-expected moves in the late Nineties took him back twenty years and more. Looking back to their early encounters around the Manchester scene in the early Eighties, Mike Joyce remembers how his future band-mate always stood out from the crowd, because, he claimed, Marr was “always his own little fashion industry.” In 1999 his life-long interest in matters fashionable led him to team up with one of Manchester’s coolest designers, and set up their own fashion label.

  Marr had started out in ‘the fashion trade’ – as mentioned, before The Smiths he had worked in X Clothes and hung out at Joe Moss’s Crazy Face boutiques in central Manchester. Noted by everyone who remembers him back then for his sartorial elegance, Johnny had run back and forth to London fetching biker boots and berets ba
ck to put around town. An unlikely fashion leader for the new millennium perhaps, but the entire indie scene, Oasis and The Stone Roses all had a genetic link back to the look of Johnny Marr about them. Johnny had always been interested in cool.

  ‘Elk’ was a partnership with designer Nigel Lawson – no relation to the English Tory MP famed for his weight loss plan and notorious offspring. Lawson grew up in Hazel Grove, one of Stockport’s more affluent suburbs only a few miles from Manchester city centre. In the late Eighties he had opened a store called Quad in Manchester’s collective retail warehouse Affleck’s Palace, the place in Manchester to buy your second-hand duds, joss sticks and groovy clothes from young, yet-to-be-established fashion designers. Quad supplied, amongst other things, Henri Lloyd jackets – snapped up by Manchester’s fashion-conscious football fans, among them a young Mr L Gallagher. After Quad closed, Nigel took time travelling before a meeting with Johnny led them to found their own fashion label. The look was, according to Johnny, “a weird mix of native American, outdoor wear, Mod and other bits.” Marr spoke of how the enterprise was as much ideological as business-orientated, though the gear was certainly visible in exclusive circles, and in the UK it could be found at Selfridge’s, at Manchester’s Geese and Dr Jives in Glasgow, while Johnny had established outlets in Boston, San Fransisco, and New York. Bernard Sumner and various members of Oasis could be spotted in the self-styled ‘desert and forest clothing’ over the next year or so, in particular in leather cagoules ‘built in Manchester.’ “It’s like a band,” Marr said. “If you keep the ideas pure and the enthusiasm up, then people can realise it’s not a corporate thing.” Elk hung up its horns after a couple of years. But for a while Johnny was not just a fashion leader, but a fashion entrepreneur.

  In the summer of 1999 another new friend entered Johnny’s life via a casual meeting in the USA, and led to a beautiful track with which Johnny was closely involved. Norfolk-born UK singer Beth Orton’s debut album Trailer Park was a splendid, folky debut from a singer-songwriter who immediately turned heads and ears with her mellow, trippy songs. The follow-up, Central Reservation showed Orton very much on a journey both musical and spiritual. In 1999, Orton was appearing in the Lillith Fair, the women-only travelling festival founded by Sarah McLachlan. Backstage after one of her shows, she came off stage to find a friend in deep conversation with someone she didn’t recognise.

  “I was just chatting to the two of them,” said Orton. The conversation lasted half an hour before Beth eventually asked the ‘other guy’ what his job was. “And he was like, ‘Oh, I play guitar.’ And I said, ‘Oh, is that right? Anyone I’ve heard of?’” Johnny introduced himself modestly as the guitar player in The Smiths. “I was like, ‘Oh no, you’re Johnny Marr!’” said Orton. While she might have been showered in embarrassment, she needn’t have worried. Johnny was cool. “He’s such a sweetheart,” said Beth. “We just carried on.”

  “She knew who I was,” agreed Johnny, “but she didn’t know it was me.” The pair hit it off immediately. Discovering that they were staying in the same hotel, Johnny and Beth would sit into the small hours on the balcony with the requisite guitars and promises that they would work together again. Orton had songs unfinished, and one caught Johnny’s ear in particular. “He got very excited about one song in particular,” says Orton, “and started adding these chords underneath. And then sort of… ‘What about this idea for the bridge?’”

  “I wrestled the guitar out of her hands when I thought she’d got to a bit that was wrong,” laughed Johnny. “That’s how it happens… If I’ve got something in common with someone it is very likely that I’m going to like what they’re doing in the studio.” Johnny kept adding bits here and there, fixing up the chorus. “He got all these chords out of the cupboard,” said Beth. “And he was putting in all these little things… he just added this other dimension.”

  The result – ‘Concrete Sky’ – is a beautiful track on a beautiful album. By the time Beth Orton got around to recording Daybreaker, Johnny was on tour with Neil Finn, and not available for the sessions. Although he had sung the gorgeous harmony on the demo, Beth roped in Ryan Adams, and the resulting track is the peak of an album that was itself one of the highlights of 2002.

  While Johnny was in the States, he was also introduced to current wunderkind Beck Hansen, who he visited in the studio during the making of the latter’s album Midnight Vultures. The pair got on immediately, and Johnny added some guitar parts to a couple of tracks, most notably ‘Milk And Honey’. Beck’s articulate writing and lush, rich arrangements suited Johnny perfectly, and the lengthy, cinematic track was a highlight of a landmark album. Beck reminded Johnny of David Byrne, his wicked sense of humour and sense of the absurd combined with a truly unique creative gift. “He’s not afraid to go down some necessary side roads rather than just take the main road,” said Johnny. “He’ll be discussed in the same way as Neil Young… and David Bowie.”

  Johnny’s thoughts continued to turn to solo material, and he was keen to formulate a more coherent solo project. To a degree, Marr’s success as a ‘solo’ performer to date had been his undoing. Given that almost every project he had worked on had been very successful, commercially as much as artistically, it was increasingly difficult to find the space to really identify what he considered his ‘own’ work, to distinguish exactly which creation was his and and which that of his partner. As a writer, that was one problem. As a producer, Johnny noted also that there was no distinction between what was his input and how much directly came from the artists themselves. Increasingly frustrated – collaboration with other artists having been the mainstay of Marr’s career – Johnny was becoming more and more keen to put the shared responsibilities of Electronic and The The to bed and to work on his own material. “When I’ve worked with other artists,” Johnny told an interviewer for www.worldinmotion.net early in 1999, “my first thought in the morning is fretting about the production… If I’m going to do that then I might as well do it for myself.” While Electronic had been his priority, he would use the other priorities of his partner to excuse himself from the project as soon as possible. “When Bernard does his stuff with New Order, I’m going to kick that [solo stuff] off. I’ll be singing and getting a band together.”

  * * *

  Into the new millennium, Johnny continued to be involved in a number of projects with friends, new acquaintances, and – most notably – more formative work on his solo ambitions. Friends had been encouraging Johnny to develop his own material, and to get a solo album together for years. Matt Johnson was one of the ‘encouragers’, himself having been on the receiving end of Marr’s own enthusiasm in the development of The The. “I think the world of Johnny,” he told one interviewer in 1999. “I’ve been telling him to do a solo record ever since I’ve known him. I’ve been kicking him up the arse… and he’s finally doing it.” Chrissie Hynde was another advocate. While Johnny’s material was developing, almost in a mirror of his teenage years, he realised that he needed a band to front the songs that he was writing.

  Inspired by a slew of bands like Santana and Jefferson Airplane (instead of Leiber and Stoller!) he began to formulise a band structure that would have at its core a fundamental looseness, a ‘tribal band’ with many members. Early in 2000, Marr met bass player Alonza Bevan, late of retro-rockers Kula Shaker, and with Zak Starkey on board he already had the nucleus of the band. Appropriately, Kula Shaker had been a band that could recreate in a modern context the hazy, pot-fuelled years of the first wave of Britpop in the mid- and late-Sixties. Under the heavy influence of The Beatles, Small Faces and Traffic, the group achieved considerable success in the singles and the album charts, and with Crispian Mills on vocals had ready-made headlines as Mills was the son of actress Hayley and the grandson of actor Sir John Mills. From 1996, the band enjoyed a couple of years in the sun, but then the music press turned on them, and by the end of the decade – despite claiming that by then they would be the biggest band on the planet –
Mills had left and the band was in tatters.

  With two high-profile members of his band in place, Johnny might have been accused of cherry-picking celebrity members. But he had met Starkey and liked the guy before he had any idea of who he was; further, while Johnny had seen Kula Shaker live a couple of times and been impressed by their performances, it was another mutual friend who’d introduced the pair. “I was fully aware of his reputation as a musician,” said Marr, “[but] the crucial thing was that a mutual friend said we’d get along as people. And that is really what counts for me. We need to have that friendship.”

  The comment once again illustrates Johnny’s fundamental working ethic: friendship first, work to follow. Of all the people that Marr has worked with over the years, he cites only three examples where the idea of working with a third party came before knowing them well. Beck, Talking Heads and Bryan Ferry are the three instances where he was so intrigued that he went ahead with the work before really knowing his partners.

  During the year, Johnny also worked with one of his childhood heroes, appearing – alongside Bernard Butler – on Bert Jansch’s twenty-first album Crimson Moon. Jansch had inspired a generation and more of guitar pickers, his idiosyncratic but wonderfully compelling playing being an inspiration for anyone who sought out his work. For Johnny it was a dream come true – a dream he first had way back when he was learning to play as a young boy. Dreamweaver, the accompanying TV documentary on Jansch, also featured Johnny and Bernard, while the following year saw Johnny present Bert with a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.