Johnny Marr

by Richard Carman

  As soon as as I could string a few chords together, I started putting them down on a cassette recorder. I was never really into being the typical guitar hero, I was always naturally into songs rather than all that. About 13, maybe earlier, I suppose, perhaps 11 or 12. I picked it up very quickly, it was only the physical discomfort of hurting my fingers that I struggled with.

  So you landed your ideal vocation very early on in life?

  Incredibly early. Coming from a punk mentality, Bernard thinks the whole ‘born with a guitar in your mouth’ story is really corny.

  You DJ-ed with Andrew Berry at the Exit club - did that have an affect on your development as a writer when you saw how people reacted to certain tracks?

  Not really in that respect. The most important thing about that whole period is that since then I have been able to look back and say to myself ‘Yes, my musical intuition was always correct for me’. I was playing James Brown in 1980, stuff that later went on to influence the baggy scene, Fatback, Sly Stone.

  That must have been unfashionable at that time?

  It was very unfashionable! [laughs] There was nobody dancing to it either so I couldn’t learn much from that!! [laughs] But it has held me in good stead since The Smiths split because if I had believed all the stuff about me being a musical megalomaniac I would have crumbled.

  So how did that background help then at that difficult later time?

  With the dance music I became involved in after I left The Smiths, it felt completely natural, because I was into all that well before The Smiths came along. I was listening to Chic in 1977, I have always had that schizophrenic attitude to music. But I think most people my age do, they are very open. If you’d talked to Shaun Ryder a few years ago he’d have been listening to Funkadelic and Rubber Soul as well. I think it is only the post-punk generation that understands that, because we have been left with a 30 year legacy of stuff that you can just take ideas from. You don’t have to be in any mind set or cult to appreciate it. My sister was always into dance music and she introduced me to 12” singles, so the whole DJ phase was just a natural part of what I do.

  Were you listening to these dance bands because you got nothing from punk?

  I didn’t get much from punk because of my age - I was too young to get into most clubs, although I did get to see Iggy Pop. I liked the American punk acts because they seemed to be more directly influenced by the British invasion of America, Patti Smith, The Stooges, New York Dolls, particularly The Dolls who were themselves interested in the girl groups whom I had already discovered. You see, what happened was that after glam rock I furiously back tracked because there was nothing around for me. I didn’t really get off on the records in the charts, I didn’t like Manfred Mann’s Band. The only records I liked were dance tracks at The Fair, all black music really. I used to go to The Fair to look at girls and clothes and listen to this stuff. In terms of material I could relate to as a writer, I had to go back even further which is when I got into Motown, and that led me onto Lieber & Stoller and Phil Spector and the Brill Building. Phil Spector was the second major influence on me behind Marc Bolan. That is why I got into American punk rather than British, because Patti Smith used to do Ronnettes numbers and the Dolls would do the girl group stuff.

  So how did Phil Spector influence your development?

  The overall musician. Not purely sonically, but you could hear in his records that he was completely obsessed. There were no spaces in his music, any harmonic suggestion was realised. It’s kind of a production thing. If you’ve got four or five musicians playing then you will get loads of natural harmonics and spaces in there between the instruments. Well, Phil Spector was someone who would hear all these tiny suggestions and then fill every one in. This big, big, dense apocalyptic sound which I definitely connected with.

  How does that relate to your role as a guitarist?

  Well, as I say, I have never related to the Jeff Beck’s of this world, so it was completely natural - I have never seen the guitar as a solo instrument. When I started to write songs I wanted my one guitar to sound like a whole record, so I consequently developed almost a one-man-band style. I don’t fit very well with another guitarist, other than Matt Johnson, whose work I can embellish and feel very comfortable with. In terms of my own songs I like to be able to hear the whole thing - I’ll play a new song and hear piano and strings and then I try and play all that on my one guitar.

  So who would you say is the closest to your own style?

  Um. [Thinks long]. Neil Young I suppose. His stuff is very fashionable again now, but his electric guitar playing is similar. I hear echoes of that in The Smiths. Or possibly Keith Richards and Brian Jones combined, ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown’ and all that.

  What aspects of those players do you see as similar?

  The rhythm and melody really. Even if I play what can technically be called a solo, I regard it as a break. I believe music should be approached as composition, not as a free-form jam, everything has to be structured for a reason. I could always relate to Phil Spector far more than anyone else as a guitar player. For me you’ve got Jimi Hendrix and the rest is crap. As a musician, if you are going to be some kind of virtuoso, unless you can do it with the same spirit and depth of soul as Hendrix, you should forget it. I am a white English musician, born in the sixties in the Provinces, and that is the way it sounds. Too many people fall into the trap of the whole ethos and mythic identity of the guitar hero, which is largely a complete anachronism, the fastest gun and all that crap.

  I am interested in where you draw the line with that – for example you are renowned for your use of pseudo-jazz chord progressions yet in its worst form jazz can be the ultimate in musical self-indulgence?

  I’m not into jazz that much but what you said undoubtedly applies to bad jazz - however, the greats like Coltrane, and Miles Davies are the furthest I have been down that road. I don’t dislike jazz because of indulgence, I just dislike indulgence of any kind. For example, there’s a lot of indulgence in post-punk stuff, in fact some indie music has the worst kinds of indulgence. When that stuff is bad, it’s the worst.

  Okay, moving on to the actual mechanics of song writing, what are they for you and are there any patterns?

  Yes. There’s a pattern whereby I start to get a feeling, an uneasy feeling for a day or two and I try to harness that. I try not to party, I keep myself really straight and sober, which I guess is the opposite of what people might expect. I get up early and stay up late, sleep as little as possible and harness that disconcerting uneasiness. I feel a little bit uncensored and feel almost like a storm is coming and I know that something is going to happen.

  Has that always been the case?

  Well, no, The Smiths was a completely and utterly different situation. We spent so much time together and we were incredibly pragmatic in approach. We were really into singles and we’d do batches of three songs at a time. We would sit down and say ‘Let’s write a song’. For my part it was the discipline of Lieber & Stoller which was at the core of The Smiths. It was like ‘this is what we do, we write songs and we can write thousands’. We recorded seventy songs in four and a half years. Morrissey would come round to my house and we’d do three songs just like that, then he would go away and do the lyrics and three days later he’d be in the studio recording it. When you have a partner who is so prolific and has that physical and emotional necessity to write, it makes things very easy for you, and in that way we propelled each other towards this endless supply of songs. I don’t want that to sound too clinical and demystify the process though, because as well as being pragmatic it was incredibly romantic. The songwriting process and the songs we produced were sacred, and still are to me now. One of the things about making records is that for it to work you have to be totally and utterly in love with it for those three minutes and you have to be able to hear that love in the tracks. That might be a particular idiosyncrasy of mine, because I guess some of my more distinctive songs have that romant
ic melodic content. When Kirsty MacColl asked me to write for her she said ‘I want one of those songs that make you feel happy and sad at the same time’. That is very much where I am at, I feel like that, it can almost be upsetting when I make records, that mixture of melancholia and vibrancy. I don’t like to hear bone-head records, I look for poignancy. Those are the feelings that I harbour for a couple of days when I get that uneasy feeling.

  If you can’t release that feeling does that make you feel ill?

  Absolutely, really ill. To avoid that heartache I sort a lot of stuff out in my mind first. Generally the best ideas are those that completely click in my head straight away and it’s like ‘Let’s go let’s go!!’ I will pick up a guitar and play it and it’s written really quickly. The songs that are crafted, I like less, although it can work well that way. An example of that is ‘Get The Message’ by Electronic, one of my favourite songs that I have written. It has this fragile element and could be from any time, and that was fairly well crafted. I knew I had a really great verse and a potentially great chorus, but I really had to rack me brains to nail it. I had to really concentrate to get the middle eight.

  Have you got an example of a song that by contrast came really quickly?

  ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ by The Smiths, a simple song that just came out. That song perhaps more than any other has a great deal of my musical background in it - I think it sounds like a Del Shannon song.

  When that happens, when a song suddenly arrives, how much do you feel that you are primarily a receiver for all these songs that are already out there?

  I would go along with that school of the muse. When I write and I stay up late, my creative faculties are down and I think you are more open to receiving all that. That’s when drugs can help. They can also hinder enormously, you can get on completely on the wrong track. But in whatever way, if you let your creative faculties down you can get more stuff written.

  But surely if you over-do that and you’re tired, won’t you be less motivated and energetic to pursue those ideas?

  No, because I prefer playing the guitar to sleeping. I hate getting up and that’s why Aphex Twin has it made. I wish I could do that! [laughs]. There is no way that I am going to get out of bed, no matter how good the idea is, not even to write a hit!! [Laughs loudly]

  How often does that uneasy feeling come?

  Well, it depends. Take this week. I am working on the next Electronic album and I want to get into more technical stuff, maybe guitar sounds, and I don’t feel like writing anything. The feeling hasn’t been there.

  What if that feeling suddenly arrives when you are in the middle of some production?

  I would just go into another room and get it down. One of the other techniques you can work with is when you write a few songs, and think ‘Great, they’re pretty good’ and because you are relaxed you carry on noodling and that way write another good track immediately afterwards. The songs after the initial batch can be just as good. For example, ‘Idiot Country’ by Electronic was written like that, when I had completed three songs and I carried on playing for the fun of it. Loads of Smiths’ songs were written like that aswell, such as ‘How Soon Is Now’. I had written ‘William It Was Really Nothing, ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ and ‘Nowhere Fast’ all very quickly, and I was left to my own devices in my flat and that way I wrote ‘How Soon Is Now’. Another example was after a Radio 1 session. I was on the train home and I got loads of ideas that turned into ‘Reel Around The Fountain’, ‘Still Ill’ and then ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’, which I recorded as soon as I got home in twenty minutes on a two track recorder. Fortunately I’ve got a good music memory for ideas I have when I am away from a recording environment. A lot of ideas come when I am about to go to sleep though, which I know is common and maybe a psychic or biological phenomena because of which I have since started to keep a notebook by my bed.

  Have you got an example of a song which was written with the help of drugs?

  [Laughs loudly] Have you got three hours to spare? Well, for a start you can pretty much include the entire Smiths back-catalogue. ‘Disappointed’ by Electronic was a total ecstasy song after a long night doing E. Funnily enough, I find that booze is not very good for creativity and I think you can hear the effect of drink in the tracks, too morbid, too dark. I have to say the best stuff I have written though, has been when I have been sober and on a natural high, through pure exuberance. The Smiths was a very exuberant time. I pretty much lived my life for twenty years like that. And then I just plummeted!!! Still, that’s cool, you learn a lot about yourself with things like that. Joining The The was like going from Charlie Bubbles to Apocalypse Now.

  Matt Johnson said about ‘Mind Bomb’ that he deliberately exposed himself to drugs for that project?

  Yes. I don’t want this to turn into some kind of Aerosmith drugs interview, but there are some really interesting stories behind that. I was working with Chrissie Hynde at the time, which was a fantastic period of great learning and being with a good friend. Working with her didn’t quite work out but just being around somebody so insightful and perceptive was brilliant. We came into the studio to write an album, although she wasn’t really ready for that. Then Matt phones me up and asks if I want to work with The The. So what I would do was work with Chrissie until 2 in the morning and then load all my gear into the car and drive across town to the other studio and start work with Matt. I’d get there and we’d take loads of mushrooms and ecstasy. It was the most intense psychological and philosophical experiment. That is one of the bonds between Matt and I, that psychological intrigue. When I first heard that he wanted me to work with him I was well pleased, and the night before the first session I took loads of ecstasy and had a real psychedelic night. I was supposed to be at that first session for noon but uncharacteristically I didn’t get there until 2pm. I walked in and I looked like one of the Thunderbirds with his strings cut. I glanced around and Matt was sitting there, looking incredibly intense, and the producer was the same, the atmosphere was unbelievably tense and dark, a really horrible vibe. The producer was staring at his hands and that was the day it transpired he had a nervous breakdown - Matt will do that to you. So we started ‘The Beat(en) Generation’ and I tried the harmonica and it just wasn’t happening. The feeling just wasn’t locked. The line I had to play was great and it should have been okay, but I just couldn’t work with all this bad atmosphere around. It was going nowhere so I turned to Matt 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’. Matt looked at me and with great production acumen said ‘Well we’d better get some more then hadn’t we.’ So off goes the drummer and comes back with all this stuff and we just cocooned ourselves in the studio for five days and the results were amazing. Matt is intense. He’d be tripping and saying ‘I want it to be like Jesus meets the devil’ and I’d be like [Shrugs shoulders and smiles] ‘Sure, okay, I get you’ and it worked!!!

  Are you disciplined?

  There are many privileges that you inherit as a musician, so if I am not writing I will work in the studio on something else, even if it’s just refining a guitar sound or learning a new piece of technology. The point is that if you are sitting in the pub you are not going to write a song. I like to work in the studio because at least then I am in an environment where a song could come out.

  Do you write to an imaginary listener?

  Well, it’s different for me because I write for a specific partner. For example, at the moment I am in the mode of writing for Bernard although I don’t want that to sound too clinical, because there are many sounds I could produce that would suit him. He has such good musical tastes so I am very open to what I can write. When I am working with somebody we become very, very close and naturally from there I write stuff that works for them.

  How do the projects you have been involved in compare from a songwriting point of view?

  I regard the
m all as very natural stages of my life. It is almost like a chicken and egg situation. The sort of person I was in The Smiths needed to write the songs that I did for that group, very disciplined, yet exuberant and still feeling new to have a partner. With The The it was home for me, I wanted to find my feet as a writer and still make records. That is why I did so many sessions early on because I wanted to make records but not form a band - if I had started a band soon after The Smiths split I would have been expected to play with three young guys with quiffs and glasses and the spotlight on those three would have been unbearable. So when Matt called and said he wanted me to expand the sonic picture of his band and get into sound effects it was exactly what I wanted to do at that time. You see, the problem with The Smiths was that towards the end it was very restrictive. I was the only melodic factor in the band. We didn’t use keyboards, sequencers or even backing vocals, so I was playing constantly and that became a bit tiresome for me really. So The The was very much expanding my musical consciousness and vocabulary. Electronic was very much a representation of a particular scene and lifestyle that Bernard and I both shared and found ourselves at the forefront of really, particularly Bernard because it was right on his doorstep at the Hacienda, the Manchester scene. That whole scene was a lot more complex than a lot of people wearing flares, it was very complex, there was a lot of violence around, and guns - yes, people were swallowing ecstasy and all that but there were also gangsters around and violence. Extremes.