Johnny Marr (28 page)

“The music came first,” said Johnny. “The fact that
Messenger
is a solo record came second.” The songs developed as demos at such a rate that it never occurred to Marr that they could be for Modest Mouse, The Cribs or even The Healers. “[I] didn’t want to have anyone else collaborate on them, as they were pretty much fully realised,” he added. Several of the songs came about “lyric first”, an unusual process for someone whose career has mainly been about writing music to jigsaw into someone else’s words. “I had a bunch of lyrics that needed to be turned into songs,” Marr explained. “I turned to [the Jarman brothers] and said, ‘I think I wanna write thirty songs.’ And in my experience, anyone who says that – you don’t get in their way!”

Johnny assembled a band of friends, including production cohort James Doviak on keyboards and backing vocals. Doviak had been in and out of Marr’s music on guitar and keyboards since the early noughties and had played with The Healers. He brought in bass player Max James, while on drums Marr called Jack Mitchell, late of Haven, who had the unusual claim to fame of having replaced Noel Gallagher on drums in the band Tailgunner. Scattered across the album were Johnny’s now-adult son and daughter, Sonny and Nile (named for one of Marr’s early heroes and latter-day stage companions, Nile Rodgers). As a unit they are tight as a snare skin, heavy when required, and sniper-accurate across all the tracks.

The Messenger
was released in February 2013. Recorded mainly in Manchester, with occasional visits to Berlin, the album comes out of its corner with its gloves up, punching first and hitting hard. ‘The Right Thing Right’ sounds like a lost, great Teardrop Explodes single – Johnny Marr at his best. Marr’s voice is confident, powerful, and more convincing than on
Boomslang
. His head is “in the south”, but his heart is in the north. Lyrically, it’s a dense start, but a proclamation in pure pop: Johnny Marr is back writing catchy three-and-a-bit minute wonders. ‘I Want The Heartbeat’ maintains the intensity, buzzsaw guitar lines strewn at a frenetic pace. It’s ambitious, personal, distinctive, and again, tailor-made for a heaving summer festival crowd. For listeners looking for Smiths’ references, there’s a whisper of ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ in the acoustic strumming of ‘European Me’, heavy on reverb and long, sustained chords that fill the room. Dispassionately looking out across a vista of bleak European migration, of souls searching for a better life but ever moving on, the highlight track features Johnny’s daughter Sonny on backing vocals and son Nile on guitar respectively.

‘Upstarts’, with its urgent, chiming opening, could have been released in 1978, while ‘Lockdown’ imagines ‘a cold Wednesday night in November’ in one of Britain’s worn-down seaside towns, a distant cousin of Morrissey’s ‘Every Day Is Like Sunday’, perhaps. ‘The Messenger’, the first track to slow the pace down, recalls Nile Rodgers’ lines for Bowie’s ‘China Girl’ and REM’s ‘The One I Love’, trippy indie swathes of guitar against a disco-boom bass.

‘Say Demesne’ hits a darker, minor key, its lyrics obtuse and repeating. Bearing some of the influence of Marr’s film work, the song is cryptic from start to finish, crawling through images of drunkenness, prostitution, love and friendship. It’s a stand-out track on the album, breaking its pace and opening a window on scenes from some of the city’s darker streets. ‘Sun And Moon’ lifts the blind and returns to the Manchester of the late seventies and eighties, long raincoats, Joy Division gigs and meeting Nico on the upper deck of the bus to Didsbury village. ‘New Town Velocity’, featuring Sonny and Nile Marr, is another track with Smithsian echoes, with an acoustic lightness of touch reminiscent of ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, but a generation on.

Critics, in the main, liked the album a lot. For
The Guardian
Michael Hann saw it as a mish-mash, albeit a good one, of Marr’s styles over the years. “The thing most people will want from a Johnny Marr album,” he wrote, “is that it sounds like Johnny Marr. And
The Messenger
certainly does that.” Writing for the same paper, Dave Simpson, while missing Morrissey’s emotional “wallop”, noted the collection consisted of “enjoyably spiky tunes.” Mark Beaumont, writing for
NME
, found the album not just “a summary of everything worthwhile in contemporary rock
music,” but “an insightful and informed dissection of life in 2013 and all the futile iOS updates, cyberstalking conglomerates and financial travesties that clog up the spaces between us.” For
Uncut
, Gary Mulholland also found it hard to give the album his full blessing, but actually had to admit it had a distinct merit: “There is one thing above all that makes
The Messenger
worth 45 minutes of anyone’s time,” he wrote. “It features the guitarist from The Smiths playing guitar like the guitarist from The Smiths. And that remains one of the very best noises on earth.”

Johnny had every reason to be proud of
The Messenger
. And for Marr fans, it was exactly the record that most of them wanted to hear.

The tour that promoted the album was a mighty affair. It kicked off, as all great things do, in Manchester in February, with further warm-ups within driving distance of home for Marr. After London, Liverpool and other UK dates Johnny headed for the US and Canada. Support was generally provided by Massachusetts-born Meredith Sheldon, either as herself, as Alamar (her side project with bassist Jen Turner), or with Johnny’s son Nile. The tour snaked back across the Atlantic, and ran to the end of the year. Once or twice Johnny joined New Order on stage, he played with Nile Rodgers at Manchester’s Ritz, and at Finsbury Park in June The Stone Roses were his host.

In December Johnny rejoined The Cribs on stage in Leeds for their final Christmas gig at the Academy. Introduced as a special guest, “because it’s Christmas,” they played ‘We Were Aborted’
and ‘We Share The Same Skies’, his first appearance with the near-local boys since 2010. Throughout the tour Johnny played songs from his back catalogue, from The Smiths and Electronic in particular, but best of all was that he could play more or less the whole album live, every night, and get a fantastic reaction from the audiences. As he has so often said, these were songs written for people who wanted to hear Johnny Marr playing great Johnny Marr songs.

As if putting together a new album and tour wasn’t enough, Johnny had the distinction in early 2013 of becoming “godlike”. Awarded
NME
’s “Godlike Genius” award, he joined a list of rock heroes and heroines including fellow-Mancs Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown, New Order, Mark E. Smith and Shaun Ryder, as well as the likes of “outsiders” John Peel and Michael Eavis. “I guess it means that some things are alright with the world,” was Marr’s response. The Cribs wryly observed that it was hard to accept someone as Godlike, once you’d seen them in their pyjamas. “All hail Johnny Marr,” said
NME
editor Mike Williams. “Never has anyone been so utterly deserving of the title.”

The
Messenger
tour invigorated Johnny’s writing as much as it fed his hunger for live performance. As ever, before the tour was even finished he was writing material for a second solo album. Some demo tracks from the tour bus made it into the finished mixes on
Playland
, but the majority of the songs were written on the road and demoed between gigs. If Johnny Marr has a muse, she doesn’t get much downtime! The album picked up on the energy of a band on tour and a writer keen to keep the ideas coming. Haven bassist Iwan Gronow replaced James for the sessions that were recorded mainly in London, with vocal tracks added in Manchester.

The album was resolutely upbeat, tambourine-driven, bang on the beat, despite its edgy themes of consumerism, urban tension and contemporary anxieties. ‘Easy Money’, separated at birth from Modest Mouse’s ‘Dashboard’, received extensive airplay on BBC radio, and became one of the most memorable, ear-worm singles of the year. But its theme is the continuous, debilitating chasing of filthy lucre. Amazing for a track on which the guitar bass and keyboard parts were all recorded at 2am on the band tour bus. Album opener ‘Back In The Box’ takes an askance look at freeing a madness, letting the demons within loose into the world. ‘Dynamo’ – written during the first week of the
Messenger
tour – is a love song, but with the object of love being a building, London’s Gherkin or Manchester’s CIS or Beetham Tower maybe. There’s plenty here for those with a backward glance to earlier Marr songs. ‘The Trap’ has an air of Electronic about it, ‘Boys Get Straight’ has that lovely reminder of Smiths’ riffs that occasionally crop up in Johnny’s work, while ‘Playland’ has a glam seventies stomp throughout.

Johnny spoke of being inspired to write “Candidate”, about the strong women who have coloured his life, by walking through Times Square and looking up at one of the huge screens there. Daughter Sonny and friend/support act Meredith Sheldon both appear on the track, and – as on
The Messenger
– Sonny and Nile’s contributions are heard across the album. ‘25 Hours’ is perhaps the most autobiographical song on either album, looking back at the young Johnny’s early relationship with the guitar, when, as he put it, “I saw that the guitar, and culture, and TV and films and books would be my main companion.” ‘Speak Out, Reach Out’ snapshots the irony of the complacent and the wealthy living back-to-back
with the disadvantaged and the invisible. ‘Little King’ is about the raping and pillaging of culture and environment in the name of business, government and profit, as direct in the message as on Johnny’s guitar.

Reviewers recognised that
Playland
, released in October 2014, was cut from the same cloth as
The Messenger
. On the whole it was well received, but there was a general feeling that it was rather too like its predecessor, a point that Marr himself addressed, pointing out that he had really
liked The Messenger
, and actively felt he did not want to stray too far from that path at present. He didn’t stay off the road long either, as dates through October, November and early December picked up again in the spring, and through the summer of 2015 the band played alongside The Who and Paul Weller in London’s Hyde Park, as well as returning to Australia and New Zealand, Singapore and Japan. The tour ran well into the autumn, the momentum never stopping, the songs still coming, the guitars still ringing out.

While his former colleagues in The Smiths continue to prosper, with Morrissey – despite ill health – releasing some of the best music of his career in recent years and finding success as a writer of books as well as of songs, Johnny Marr never looks back. Except that, when asked, he seems to really enjoy looking back. He’s happy with his legacy of The Smiths but while that band lasted a handful of years, he has spent nearly 30 years fielding questions about whether they will reform. When one interviewer pointed out how much Abba had been offered to get back together for a
series of shows, Johnny archly suggested it might be better for him to join Abba then, and forget about The Smiths.

He continues to live in the wealthy suburbs of southern Manchester, on the edge of the Cheshire countryside. It’s an area of trendy wine bars and footballers’ wives, a hop and a skip from Manchester Airport. But one would imagine that Johnny will be listening to music or tinkering with a guitar. Grant Showbiz looks back on his years working with Johnny with great affection. He remembers a time when the pair would simply sit and listen to records, in exactly the way that Marr did with his friends in the years before The Smiths. And Showbiz also recalls the warmth and companionship of the man. A pleasure simply to be with – “Johnny is one of the nicest people to sit and just play records with,” he says. “He has that wonderful ability to just compress time.” The former Smiths’ sound engineer sees parallels between Johnny and another
wunderkind
guitar player from another era. “I’ve been vaguely seeing comparisons between him and Jeff Beck recently,” says Showbiz. Especially in the way Beck went from being the hottest gun in town to a point where he could pursue his own projects and itinerary at his own speed. “He has kind of avoided all that ‘fashionable’ stuff really, and just
carried on
.” Grant compares the two in terms of character as well, and finds more similarities – “[Beck] is an interesting, quiet man – a nice guy to hang out with too.” He imagines the Jeff Beck of today may be slightly less obsessed with music than he supposes Johnny is. When interviewed for this book, Grant summed up Johnny’s passion: “I assume that Johnny [will be] listening to music as we speak.”

Indeed, it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about him. Marr appears to be universally popular with everyone he has
ever worked with. Even at the break up of The Smiths or at the 1996 court trial, no one dissed Johnny on a personal level. Even the High Court Judge summoned up all his charity and described him as “engaging”. For Noel Gallagher Johnny is “euphoric – an ‘up’ kind of guy.” He can walk into any studio in the world and enhance whatever is going down. At the same time he’s modest – he knows just how good he is, because he has studied what he does for more than forty years, yet he remains a self-effacing man.

Every interviewer seems to trot out the same questions about whether or not he will ever work with Morrissey again, and only rarely does Johnny’s patience crack. His answer is always simple: he won’t. Or maybe he will. Who cares? He did in fact confirm at one point that The Smiths
would
reform – if Prime Minister David Cameron dissolved the current UK Government – but there remains no sign of that happening. Johnny certainly has enough work, and will receive enough offers of work, to last him another decade or two at least. As long as one of The Beatles is still alive there will always be rumours of a reunion, and it seems The Smiths will suffer the same fate. But it would be just as interesting to know if he has any plans to work with Billy Bragg again, or David Byrne, Modest Mouse or The Cribs. Morrissey, too, seems happy to let sleeping Smiths lie, with his first novel,
List of the Lost
, due to hit the streets as this book goes to press.