Johnny Marr (9 page)

While The Smiths’ production sound was fantastic – they were a dream waiting to come true in a hundred thousand bedsits – Frankie Goes To Hollywood had a sheen and gloss that made their material irresistible. While The Smiths were the next big singles band who were going to break internationally and be huge, in the course of the year the Frankies broke all records with their three number one hits ‘Relax’, ‘Two Tribes’ and ‘The Power Of Love’. Commercially at least, they did in twelve months what The Smiths failed to do in five years. The key was that The Smiths rallied against the increasing importance of the pop video in the age of MTV. Frankie Goes To Hollywood grasped the nettle of publicity firmly, and their videos were superb advertisements for their material. The first British act to hit the number one slot with their first three singles since Gerry and The Pacemakers, their success was secured with stunning promotion from Manchester journalist Paul Morley and, with ‘Two Tribes’, a video directed by Godley and Crème, formerly of 10cc. If Liverpool won three-nil against The Smiths, it was ironically with Manchester’s help.

Undeterred, Johnny and the band soldiered on, and 1984 was in many ways the year of The Smiths too. February saw the release of the eponymous debut,
The Smiths
. The band’s first album opens at stately pace. ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ is a graceful, haunting piece, introduced not by Marr’s guitar or Morrissey’s memorable croon, but with Mike Joyce’s metronomic snare and hi-hat. Lyrically, the song opens on a dialogue between writer, audience and band apparently already half-run. Although this was a brand new band with a brand new album, the listener is invited into a myth all ready to be unravelled. Johnny’s guitar plays courtly arpeggios around a cyclical central motif based upon traditional folk structures.
While the lyric speaks of tale-telling, the folk tradition is extant in Johnny’s chord structure that mirrors the Scottish standard ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ You can easily sing the Scottish melody over Marr’s A, E, F-sharp minor, D routine, and Johnny imposes a melancholy into this traditionally rousing, major key format. Notably, Johnny adds a series of major seventh and sixth notes into the phrasing – accents which were to become a trademark of his playing. The central lyrical and thematic motif of the song measures the movement from major to minor perfectly. If the tone rather than the content recalled Joy Division, Marr has also linked the song’s development to James Taylor’s gentle acoustic sing-along ‘Handy Man’ – a far cry from the rented rooms in Whalley Range, the childhood victims of Ian Brady and the pretty girls making graves found elsewhere on the album.

‘Reel Around The Fountain’ is one of the greatest debut album openers in rock history. When the first complete rhyme of the song – ‘told/old’ – falls onto the first minor third it is a wonderful moment. The lyric’s theme of a childhood debased drops suddenly onto this most telling note, suggesting much about the music that was to come from Marr and The Smiths over the years to come. Paul Carrack’s gentle, enigmatic contribution underpins the guitar phrasing subtly and perfectly too. Traditional structures are enlivened by delicate touches of harmonic and melodic detail, as closely fused to the lyrical content as is possible. The Smiths’ sound was born.

The second track, ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’ runs at a nervy, bass-led punk pace, with Morrissey’s phrasing desperately trying to pull the pace of the song back, but instead – as the band hit the choruses – the track takes on a perfect beat as Johnny’s tumbling
riffs quickly establish another trademark. ‘Miserable Lie’, despite its mournful opening, soon kicks into a savagery and energy that caught the flavour of the early live Smiths perfectly. On ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’, the song’s circuitous minor chord sequence is set firmly against Johnny’s jaunty, acoustic strumming on the half-notes and Rourke’s walking bass. The jangling electric picking is typical of what would become synonymous with Smiths’ music, the feel of the song would reappear later in songs such as ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’, but the dichotomy between the mournfulness of Morrissey’s vocal and the optimism of the electric guitar, between the jolly strumming and the minor key is perfect Smiths, the ability to maintain two or more concepts at one moment within the same song.

Similar phrasing is picked up early in the next track and reflected throughout the sinuous course of ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’, which Simon Goddard cleverly notes throws a nod to Patti Smith’s ‘Kimberly’. ‘Still Ill’ is one of Marr’s most effective riffs, ‘Paperback Writer’-like and as fresh as the day. One of the great things about Johnny’s work – especially on early songs like ‘Still Ill’ – is that, rather than simply defining an introduction, shatteringly good riffs run throughout, and define the entire song.

‘Hand In Glove’ and ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ sit together on the album as if the last ten years of pop music had been waiting for this moment alone – two pieces of such perfect pop, crafted and presented with a devastating confidence and bravado that belies the youthfulness of the band. Then ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’, with Johnny’s Burt Bacharach-like stabs and jazzy linking chords works perfectly to slow the album down before its big finish. ‘Suffer Little Children’ was dropped from the band’s
live sets quite early in their career. The version immortalised as the closing track on
The Smiths
was one of the few songs on the album with which Marr was happy in retrospect, but outside the band the response to the song was phenomenal and routinely sensational. Rarely has a song snuck into the back end of a relatively unknown act’s debut album caused so much fuss: Morrissey was laughably virtually branded an associate of the Moors Murderers himself in the hysterical UK tabloids, as the crimes of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were raked over by newspapers happy to make headlines out of misrepresenting an artistic statement. For Smiths fans overseas, the track may have meant less, but for anyone growing up in the North West of England in the mid-Sixties, the story remained one of the most affecting of that decade.

While the press tried desperately to kick up a fuss, Morrissey retained a dignity in his own responses to the furore. To informed, intelligent listeners, the song was a desperately moving collection of images, literate and haunting, indeed infinitely less offensive than many of the books and articles already written on the subject. The entire piece is like a movie, plot unfolding, character developing, drama ensuing. Marr’s guitar modulates between A and D major seventh chords for much of the track – a fragile and graceful tone, the same structure as Erik Satie’s delicate piano piece
Gymnopedie No 1
. Johnny’s arpeggio’d chords recall a similar delicate and elegant tone. As Morrissey’s vocal becomes more and more haunting, Johnny’s sense of drama and mood drops quickly into a minor key as the voice of Brady’s accomplice takes the stage. The disarming laugh of Myra Hindley was provided by Morrissey’s friend Annalisa Jablonska.

The Smiths
is like one of those grainy kitchen sink movies so
beloved of Morrissey,
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
on vinyl. Its tone is conversational, earthen, but its themes are elevated and troublesome. Musically it is articulate and sensitive but at the same time kick-arse rollicking good fun. It remains one of the best debut albums of all, and – if it wasn’t perfect – it was better than anything else around at the time by a long way.

The album’s cover ‘starred’ Warhol cohort Joe Dallesandro, and caused almost as much concern for some of the band members as it caused excitement with reviewers. Designed by Morrissey and Caryn Gough, the artwork set the standard for Smiths releases to come: a very careful selection of images that portrayed both the concept behind the band and some of the artistic influence and ethos behind the conception of the album itself. Here, of course, the cropping of the original still from Warhol’s movie
Flesh
masked some of the homo-eroticism of the image, but implied enough to encourage speculation regarding the band’s sexual stance.

Looking back on the album a couple of years later, Marr told
Melody Maker
that he was “not as madly keen on it” as he had been. He felt that the attack and ‘fire’ was missing from the record, and reflected the feeling of many of the fans that perhaps the later
Hatful Of Hollow
captured this early Smiths sound better. Morrissey was also said to be not entirely happy with the production, although he too recognised that it was better than anything else around. Although the album had now been recorded twice, with two different producers, bizarrely rumours circulated that there were moves afoot to re-do it again. Idealism was one thing however, and having reportedly cost Rough Trade £60,000 – a sizeable sum for an independent label – the chances of The Smiths’ debut album being re-recorded or re-mixed yet again were probably nil.

Johnny proudly called The Smiths music “rock from a housing estate”, and indeed they categorically made fundamental pop music. They spliced liberally from the music that influenced them, juiced it up with lashings of their own flavouring, and passed the unique result on to a new generation. The key trick was that they never allowed those influences to drown their own musical voice. In the same way, The Beatles had blended Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins influences with Motown and skiffle to come up with ‘Beatles’ music. CP Lee calls this process “pop lore” and likens it to the folk tradition of passing traditional songs and formats through the generations. The process applies equally to all pop formats, however, and not just traditional folk. “It just refers to popular formats or popular music, whether it’s folk music or pop music,” says Lee. “Or blues music. But you can see [how Marr] dips into and carries on a tradition, by amending it.” While those influences remain submerged within the musical phrasing, and the lyrical concerns, the music is nevertheless new. As much as Morrissey continued a tradition of Northern writers and performers from George Formby and Gracie Fields to Shelagh Delaney and Alan Bennett, so Johnny’s music had mixed up the glam of T. Rex with the finger-picking folk of Bert Jansch and Davey Graham, the raunch of the New York Dolls with the pristine production ethics of Sixties girl groups, yet the music of
The Smiths
was unassailably Smiths’ music, unique and new.

A tour to support the album took in Sheffield University, North Staffs Poly, Coventry and Loughborough, but came to a grinding halt when Morrissey developed throat problems. Gigs were cancelled in advance, but a series of TV and media appearances kept the Smiths flame alive. Speaking to
NME
, Johnny spoke of
the differences between himself and Morrissey as personalities, and clearly flagged his happiness that Morrissey remained the spokesman for the band while he generally kept out of the public eye. A second appearance on
Top Of The Pops
promoted ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ – shown again later in the month as the single made its way up the charts. Then more TV, more radio, more magazines. With the tour back on track, the void left by the departed Joe Moss was finally filled after a fashion, albeit a somewhat confusing fashion.

Ruth Polski, late of the New York Danceteria gig, re-appeared on the scene in the UK claiming to be the band’s manager, and a disagreement with Scott Piering, who said he was in charge, ensued. “I don’t think she ever was ‘the manager’,” recalls Grant Showbiz “She was one of a number of people who may or may not have had a conversation at four in the morning, and woke up imagining she
was
the manager.” She wasn’t the first to do that – in the business as a whole – and, according to Grant “not the last.”

Ruth Polski returned to the USA, and was tragically killed in a car accident some time later. As far as The Smiths’ sound-man was concerned, she never caused any hassle. “She was just a kind of funloving creature,” he recalls. But issues of money and organisation continued to rear their ugly heads as the tour proceeded, while the pressures on Johnny and Morrissey increased. To whatever extent Polski and Scott Piering did argue, it was Piering who took the upper hand in the management issues at stake. Nobody really filled Joe Moss’s role like-for-like. “No-one ever said to me, ‘Joe’s gone –
he’s
looking after us,’ or ‘He’s gone –
they’re
looking after us,’” Grant told me. Rather, Piering was one of a whole group of people who, over time, contributed. “Everyone at that point – they
were just going ‘Fucking hell – this band is going to be massive,” says Showbiz.

Grant Showbiz remembers the late Scott Piering fondly, and knows that his management of the band was always well-intentioned. “Close up he could see the disarray because he was travelling with us,” Grant notes today. “He thought ‘[These people have] had a go. Why don’t I step in and see what happens?’” What happened of course was that the Smiths continued to be too hot to handle. “It was great,” says Grant, “watching Scott trying to be a bit more corporate and a bit more organised.” But corporate and organised was not what The Smiths were about.

The band charged through all corners of the UK before coming to earth in London in mid-March. At the Hammersmith Palais, Sandie Shaw became the only other singer to front The Smiths besides Morrissey, previewing her own version of ‘Hand In Glove.’

Shaw’s version of the song was recorded at Matrix studios in London, in February 1984. The band included ‘Jeane’ and ‘I Don’t Owe You Anything’ in the same sessions. Although the single only scraped into the Top Thirty on its spring release, Sandie was of course no stranger to the higher reaches of the UK charts. Over the course of the Sixties, she established herself as both the coolest woman in British pop and the first of the UK’s occasional winners of the Eurovision song contest, in an era when participation in that event was not seen to be quite as naff as it is today. Sandie’s high cheekbones and long, dark fringe made her as much a visual icon of the time as a musical one, and her trademark barefooted TV appearances guaranteed her column inches in the press too. Her chart debut, ‘(There’s)
Always Something There To Remind Me’ was an iconic snapshot of 1964 power pop; her stylish follow-up ‘Girl Don’t Come’ was exactly the kind of melancholic-yet-breezy tune to appeal to both Morrissey and Marr. By 1984 Sandie was a long way away from being a chart regular, but while it may have been fifteen years since her last lowly chart placing, she was only thirty seven – hardly a pop star dragged from her pensionable years! She was the perfect partner for Morrissey and Marr.