Johnny Marr

I
wrote this book during a very difficult period for my wife, and dedicate it therefore to Linda, and to her mother Winifred Hopwood… there is, of course, a light that never goes out.

Immeasurable thanks again to my editor and friend Martin Roach, to Kaye Roach and the inestimable Alfie Blue. Thanks also, ‘in anticipation’, to Korda Ace.

Many people helped me along the way, and I am particularly grateful to the following for their support: Grant Showbiz; Billy Bragg; Jonathan Schofield; CP Lee; Shaun Lawlor; Paul Carrack; Steve Korta; David Byrne; Joanne Carroll; Chris Frantz; Jose Maldonado and Dave Collett from Sweet And Tender Hooligans, Martin from Stoke Underground, Sarah Hyde at Sincere Management. I’d also like to thank the handful of people who generously gave their time and memories but asked to remain outside of this acknowledgement. You know who you are! I also
plagued a few people endlessly for their contributions, without success… but thanks to all of you for your patience.

While they did not contribute to this book directly, if I failed to thank Johnny Marr, Morrissey, Andy Rourke, Mike Joyce for the music of a lifetime, I would be remiss. Thanks guys. Let sleeping beauties lie.

I
grew up in the Sixties. I was bathed in The Beatles’ music from the age of three. George was my favourite. I still get the shivers when I hear those fabulous intros on the first four Beatles albums. At the age of twelve I fell in love with Bolan, Bowie and Bryan Ferry, and life was never the same again. I was too old to be a punk, but Buzzcocks and The Sex Pistols were as exciting as it got in 1976 – or any other year. By the time I was twenty three and living in Manchester, I thought I’d heard it all.

Then came The Smiths.

Ever since I first heard them, they have been my favourite band. While I thought I had heard it all, it was evident that they
had
it all. And in Johnny Marr they had a new George Harrison, a man who could set the room alight within the first bar and a half. And of course, in Morrissey, The Smiths had perhaps the last great lyricist, the last great vocalist.

Over the years that followed, I heard many great records, from Billy Bragg, Kirsty MacColl, Talking Heads and Electronic. And I found in so many cases that Johnny played on these records too. What I liked, and still like, about Johnny Marr, was his refusal to play the role of guitar hero whilst being, evidently, the greatest guitar ‘hero’ of his age. While Carlos Santana pulled faces over his endless solos that made it look as though he was enduring an intrusive rectal examination while he played, and countless onanistic solos screamed egotistically from under the yard-long hair of a thousand so-called ‘geniuses’, Johnny remained solo-free, cool, distanced and locked into tighter grooves than were good for any of us. While he never took centre-stage until relatively recently with The Healers, he lit up virtually everything he played on. For Johnny Marr, it has always seemed that the
guitar
was the key thing, not Johnny himself. While other more visible guitarists over the years have used the instrument to tell us far more about themselves than we really need to know, Marr has resolutely continued to promote
guitar playing
as the end in itself.

The Smiths’ catalogue of recordings is much like any individual Smiths single: brief, concise, gorgeous, irresistible. Nearly every song is close to perfection, and theirs is a catalogue as near perfection as any band will get. For me in 1983, they were the best British band since The Beatles, and with hindsight they remain so. While any decent record collection should contain all The Beatles’ albums, so should it contain every record The Smiths ever released. A handful of albums that shook the world.

Since then, the boy Marr has ‘done tremendous.’ He is still working, still passionately involved in project after project, still exciting to hear, still the same guitar player who graced a hundred
thousand bedsits in the Eighties, still supporting his beloved Manchester City. His most famous band, and his be-quiffed former song-writing partner, have been the subject – or the victims – of many biographies, amongst which there have been some good ones. Dave Haslam, writing for
NME
in 1989, pertinently noted that “the Johnny Marr story will run and run,” but nobody has yet chosen to look at Johnny’s career exclusively. Since the last major biography of The Smiths, a generation of guitar players and lovers of great pop have discovered the band. This book is for them.

I have tried to tell the story of Johnny’s career in full. It’s the tale of a guy who picked the guitar up in his pre-teen years and went on to change the lives of millions of listeners. And whatever the world around him thought of it, he ‘kept on keeping on.’

“M
y first memory of guitar playing was this uncle,” recalls Johnny Marr. “With big sideburns and Chelsea boots. He was well cool. He had a guitar, and did a little bit of playing. I thought he was really hip… I remember this red Stratocaster. I can recall the smell of the case and everything.”

Johnny Marr’s love of the guitar isn’t unique. Millions of us have fallen under its spell over the years. Millions of us have gone on to learn to play. While some went on to become professionals, a tiny percentage actually make it big. And some became the most important guitarists of their generation. Marr is simply that – one of the most important players of his generation. His passion for the instrument is written across almost every record he has made and in nearly every interview he has given. Throughout his career, whatever has been spinning around him, it has always been about the music and the guitar. “For better or worse,” Johnny has said,
“it
happened
for me. I wanted to be known for what I did, not for what I said.”

Marr joined a tradition stretching back decades. Johnny himself has been keen to emphasise that tradition, and over the years has referenced many musicians and producers who have influenced his own playing. Just as Marr dug back through old records to find the best guitar players he could find, so subsequent generations will use Johnny as their own route to the past. To understand Johnny, it is worth tracking back through the history of the world’s sexiest instrument, to establish where Johnny Marr came from.

From the Thirties onwards, the guitar was the natural successor to the piano as the leading instrument in popular music. Rock ’n’ roll guitar as we know it is born out of the American country blues players of the early decades of the twentieth century. Faced with a choice between the piano or the more portable guitar, the itinerant players of the early years of the century chose the piano. While the guitar allowed a musician to carry his own instrument from dime bar to juke joint, the key thing about the piano was that – above a hot and sweaty Saturday night crowd – the latter could be
heard
. While playing one’s own guitar every night was preferable to turning up at a gig only to find that the venue’s piano was out of tune, missing strings, or half a block away from the bar, the very fact that the audience could actually hear you was more important.

However, throughout the Twenties and Thirties, various people experimented with amplification, and by the time the guitar could be wired up to a speaker and heard as loudly as a piano, the future of pop music was etched out. A guitar player could drift from venue to venue, from town to town, and carry his own instrument with him. Migration from the rural southern states to the cities of
the industrial north meant that itinerant guitar players could play night after night to a different audience and refine their sound and their playing. The guitarist became the leader of the dance, the bringer of news, the bearer of joys and sorrows. Both the musician and his instrument became adaptable and personal. As the guitarist hugged his instrument close to his chest, he seemed to welcome the audience into his soul too.

Such was the genesis of the modern rock guitarist. The wandering bluesman trawling the bars of Chicago for work isn’t far from the modern rock star, globe-trotting around the world with a heap of flight cases in tow. Maybe the money’s better, but the culture and ethos is pretty much the same.

We
need
guitar bands.

Throughout the developing years up to and including the Second World War the guitar became established both as an orchestral instrument in the major jazz and dance bands of the era and as a solo instrument in itself. On both sides of the Atlantic, as Fifties pop became more sophisticated, guitarists such as Bert Weedon and Chet Atkins became celebrity instrumentalists in their own right. While early rock ’n’ rollers such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were pianists, it was Buddy Holly who really cemented the image of the guitar band and established its format for ever more. His clipped, rough-strummed songs were irresistible, his band The Crickets the perfect foil for Holly’s own delivery. In the UK, Buddy’s influence was picked up by the young Hank Marvin, and his group The Shadows became England’s premier guitar band, both in their own right and as backing for the young Cliff Richard. Guitar bands flourished throughout the country in their wake – influenced by Holly, The Shads, and the increasingly available
imports of American country, blues, early R&B and soul records. Across the UK, the generation of players who would re-invigorate pop music as never before picked up the instrument and started to copy what they heard. Lonnie Donnegan and Hank Marvin learned from Buddy, and older blues players like Elmore James and Robert Johnson. Throughout the Fifties, Brian Jones, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, John Lennon, Keith Richards and George Harrison took these influences, copied their favourite American sounds on cheap guitars plugged into the family radiogram, and reinvented rock ’n’ roll.

It was Dick Rowe at Decca Records who famously turned down The Beatles in 1962 on the grounds that “guitar groups are dead.” By the time The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and the Yardbirds had proved him wrong, the guitar was established as
the
weapon of choice in pop and rock. Nearly all the bands and artists who established long-term careers in pop from the early Sixties onwards did so with the guitar as the leading sound in their band or backing. It was Jimi Hendrix who – when the major players were delving back into the rootsy blues past of the instrument – picked up the Fender Stratocaster and re-invented the guitar. No longer simply a tool with which great music was made, the guitar itself became as much the maker of the music as the players themselves. Hendrix gave the guitar a new language, offered musicians on every instrument a code by which they could investigate not only song-writing and music construction, but could explore the machine, the instrument itself. Hendrix took the guitar apart with both an actual and a metaphorical screwdriver, and gave the instrument its soul. From Jimi onwards, the guitar was a vehicle that would transport audiences to other
worlds, a means by which future players would boldly go where no man had gone before.

Out of Hendrix came psychedelia, prog rock, heavy metal; likewise soul, blues and jazz were all enriched by his work. The guitar was re-established as the single most important musical instrument on the planet. Clapton, The Stones, Zappa, Free, The Grateful Dead all carried the guitar into the Seventies alive and well, prepared to excite us, enliven us, delight and move us. Through Ziggy and the glam rock phenomenon, Mick Ronson, Phil Manzanera and Dave Hill kept glitter-ball acts such as Bowie, Roxy and Slade deeply rooted in guitar-based rock. It was here that the schoolboy Johnny Marr would join the journey. Pop was exciting again; fun, silly, stylish, cool. Ronnie Wood’s barrel-house chops made The Faces one of the best guitar boogie bands. Status Quo kept it simple, with twelve bars kicked firmly to the floor. More articulate acoustic pickers like John Martyn incorporated technologies into their playing that offered new sounds and new landscapes for guitarists that still inform the sounds of U2 and Coldplay. King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp merged the heaviest of juggernaut guitar sounds with a shimmering tape-delay that is heard in chart bands well into the Twenty-First century too.

Just as all this potential and variety threatened to crawl up its own backside in self-regard, punk purified the art even further. Gone were the pixie hats and the mystical visions of other worlds. Out came the guitar, the bass and the drums, and up went the volume. If ‘Anarchy In The UK’ recalled nothing more than The Who at their mid-Sixties best, it did remind everyone that the most exciting thing in the world was the sound of a sneering front man spitting new music out over a crunching guitar – only
a step or two away from Buddy Holly and the early Stones in its simplicity and ferocity. For two or three years punk was driven by three-chord wonders that refreshed the entire music scene, much as Hendrix had done a decade before. If old heads rallied against the sounds of Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex and the Pistols, it was surely only because they subconsciously realised that they had themselves lost sight of what thirteen-year-old kids living on low income in a time of political paucity really wanted out of life.

By the early Eighties, style had overtaken content, and pop was in serious danger of collapsing as a medium. Bored by the simplicity of punk, some bands adopted a more edgy, creative role. Bands such as Talking Heads, XTC, Squeeze and Elvis Costello defined a new genre – ‘new wave.’

For big-selling chart pop however, make-up and glamour took over from energy and content in a sub-Warhol celebrity-driven world. Eighties pop became musically bland – Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Wham! and Duran Duran favoured new technologies and bad make-up, their songs superbly fashioned to appeal to the Lady Di-generation of Thatcherite wannabees. But music was so glossed with dazzling sheen that any decent content – if it was there – was invisible. Lyrically, pop could not have become more superficial. Synthesizers and sequencers took over from rocking electric guitars. At some point in the early Eighties someone was going to have to break this bubble of self-absorption and vapidity and get back to basics, or Dick Rowe’s prediction would have come true – albeit twenty years late. We needed guitar bands again.

And so, on a white charger from the depths of Greater Manchester, came the saviours. Enter… The Smiths.

Johnny Marr was born John Martin Maher in Chorlton on Medlock, Manchester, on October 31, 1963, a Halloween baby in the bleakest winter that the north-west of England had seen in decades. John’s birthplace was close to the centre of one of England’s toughest, most engaging cities. Victorian Prime Minister David Lloyd George was born in the area almost exactly one hundred years before Maher, while novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst both lived there. Buzzing around the nearby Manchester College of Art, LS Lowry and fashion designer Ossie Clarke would be regularly spotted in the area. Today the area still houses the BBC and Manchester University, St Mary’s Hospital and Manchester Museum. As it was at the time of John Maher’s birth, the area remains one of the main centres of activity on the fringes of the city centre.

Maher was born on Everton Road. Nicknamed ‘Little Ireland’, the area was awash with Irish immigrants recently settled in the area, and the Mahers was one such family. John’s father was part of the mass emigration from Eire in the years following the Second World War, when country people from all over Ireland fled to Dublin in search of work. As jobs in the Irish capital became increasingly hard to find, they crossed the Irish Sea. Settling in Manchester, John Snr married Frances Doyle in 1962, and John – who would become known as Johnny – was born the following autumn. His mum and dad were young – his father only twenty years old, his mother a mere seventeen. The family, who originated in Kildare, lived in Ardwick, a little further from the city centre
than Johnny’s birthplace, a tough part of town with – like Harlem – its own nationally known theatre, The Apollo. Many of John Snr’s relatives had made the journey to Manchester at the same time. “Four families lived next door to each other,” says Johnny. “All Irish immigrants, all very young. There were parties every night.” In the next street there were some seven related families. It seemed as though the entire extended family had moved to Manchester together – all of them young and spending much of their leisure time together, many of them working as labourers around the north-west.

The Maher family – like so many émigré Irish – carried the tradition of Irish music with them to England, and Johnny’s father was an accomplished accordion player. While he described his father’s occupation as “digging holes in roads”, Johnny’s parents were actually soon to be involved in promoting country music themselves. “Because it was a big family,” recalls Johnny, “there were always christenings and weddings, and there was always what seemed like this same band playing at these functions.” John Snr taught his son to play the harmonica and the accordion, and before he hit his teens, Johnny was experimenting with the guitar. “My parents had Beatles records, but they were more into the Irish stuff, country music, which spilled over into the Everly Brothers – who were really popular in my household.” ‘Walk Right Back’, by The Everlys, is the first record that Johnny can remember being played around the house. Jim Reeves, and what Johnny came to refer to later as ‘bad country’ – the music of people like Hank Williams and Chet Atkins – was popular around the house too. Even the music Johnny didn’t like influenced him. He still claims not to enjoy country music, saying that “no matter how much you believe
otherwise, your upbringing indelibly affects your development.” “It gives you your musical personality,” says Johnny, “and in some cases your entire musical vocabulary.” Even when he was ten or eleven years old and getting into glam rock, the influence was still there. Deliberately and unwittingly, Johnny’s family shaped his early musical aspirations, and though he still retains an aversion for country, “the influence remains.”

Johnny would spend long periods back in the home country, sometimes enjoying as much as four months of the year in Ireland. Alongside his immediate family in Manchester, Ireland itself influenced him strongly too – the atmosphere and the people. “The Irish connection is a big one,” he has said during a webchat on jmarr.com. “There is a sensibility that affects your life… passion, humour, irreverence.” Johnny was aware of the poetic nature of his Irish-ness, of its occasional surreality, and of the darkness in the Irish soul that is sometimes hard to ignore.

As a kid though, most of Johnny’s earliest influences were most certainly poetic and occasionally surreal, but rarely dark. His first musical heroes were amongst the most incandescent of all. One of the first was Marc Bolan, and T. Rex was one of his earliest and most abiding influences. Bolan epitomised all that was fine about post-Beatles pop, his guitar playing ballsy and rooted in the electric blues of Howlin’ Wolf, his image glamorous and elusive. “If it hadn’t been for Marc Bolan, Roxy Music and David Bowie,” Marr recalled in
Designer
magazine in 2001, “kids of my generation would have been completely screwed.” Glam gave access to pop that more sophisticated acts such as Little Feat denied the ten-year-old Maher. Sparks was another of the bands that turned Johnny on, at a time when the Bay City Rollers were perhaps the ghastly,
inevitable alternative. At the same time, Keith Richards was one of Johnny’s earliest icons. For the young Johnny Maher, pop music soon became a major preoccupation and took a complete hold on his imagination. It was the perfect time to be growing up in pop, and to be heavily influenced by the music of the early Seventies was to be introduced to a thousand different sounds, such was the diversity of the material around: The Beatles, Stones, Neil Young, Motown, blues, rock and soul – the wealth and the breadth of Sixties and early Seventies pop was astonishing. Throughout these years, Johnny soaked it all up, his appetite for the next cool band enormous. As it was for so many born in the early Sixties, it was a route outside of the formal education system via which we learned about the world. “I didn’t really think the world made very much sense,” Johnny has said, “until I discovered pop music. Music made me understand.”