1999 04 Electronic Uncut

GETTING AWAY WITH IT

When Manchester rock titans BERNARD SUMNER and JOHNNY MARR formed Electronic in 1990, they were determined that their new band would live up to the glories of New Order and The Smith, even if it killed them. Which it very nearly did.
By Stephen Dalton

AS LIVE DEBUTS GO, THIS IS TURNING OUT to be legendary. A legendary fuck-up, that is.

When the call came through five months ago. Electronic thought it would be a good idea to unveil their gleaming rock-disco roadshow in front of 60,000 hyped up Depeche Mode fans at LA's enormous Dodgers stadium. They only had three or four tunes ready but. what the hell, the two shows were five months away. But now that August has rolled around, they still haw only seven or eight numbers at a push. And most of them don't even have names.

More importantly, by this point Bernard Sumner barely remembers his own name. He has filled the dressing- room shower basin to the brim with fresh puke before hanging a hand-made sign around his neck declaring. “Don't Ask Me Any Questions". Johnny Marr tries to review his horizontal partner while their inexperienced tour manager is close to losing it, desperately trying to shovel Bernard's liquid form into a golf buggy to shuttle him over to the stage area. It is 10 minutes before showtime, and Electronic are dying on their feet.

In the backstage VIP enclosure, half of Manchester's rock royalty are in the area. Billy Duffy, a childhood friend of Marr's, is partying with Bez and several Happy Mondays. Mick Hucknall is playing the royal prick, and being ignored. Minor Hollywood stars catch their breath as Dave Gahan moves vacantly through the assembled celebs, heading for his own personal heart of darkness. Psychedelic refreshments are much in evidence. Meanwhile. the stadium DJ is giving Electronic a huge showbiz build up: “Bernard Sumner from New Order! Johnny Marr from The Smiths’! Plus - the Pet Shop Boys"!"

This is the acid test for Electronic, and they arc about to blow it. Nobody yet knows whether their sumptuous one-off hit. “Getting Away With It", will turn out to be a fluke of superstar chemistry or the beginning of a mighty new chapter in the lives of two alterna-rock titans. If Electronic arc going to fall on their faces - literally - they could hardly haw chosen a higher diving board. They said they wanted to be judged like a new band, but new bands don't play debut gigs in stadiums. They tried to have their cake and eat it, too, but they ended up soaked in vomit. And not even the metaphorical variety.

Onstage, the monitors are down. Bernard hangs himself from the mic stand like a wet dishrag, forgetting to announce the arrival of the Pet Shop Boys for "Getting Away With It". When Neil Tennant strolls over to Bernard, he is greeted with such a lethal look he scarpers back to Johnny in panic. The singer ends up sitting on the drum riser, head in hands. It's all over.

And yet somehow, by the seat of their pants and the healing power of disco. Electronic pull through. They realise that people arc cheering. Nobody has actually died. It is the high summer of Madchester. 1990. and the Eighties are officially over. The Smiths are finally laid to rest. New Order are but a distant memory, and something new has been born.

"It was the worst fucking moment of my life.” recalls Sumner, 'let’s just say we got carried away by the sense of occasion."

'He looked like he was dead." nods Marr. 'But we definitely launched Electronic as a real thing then. Because we had our own crew, our own mates around us. There were a lot of people there to see us. Not just New Order people, not just Smiths people. It was a new thing that kicked off."

For Johnny Marr, Electronic felt like a refuge from the pressures of being the most feted British guitar hero of the last 20 years. But much as he hoped to finally shrug off his mythic past by submerging himself in an upmarket disco duo, he was about to forge a whole new set of legends. From Morrissey to Noel. Keith Richards to Kraftwerk, Sly Stone to the Spice Girls, his epic journey through rock history had barely even begun.

The roots of Electronic go deeper than some celebrity marriage of convenience between two self-confessed “puking partners". The duo was born from the unique melting pot of cutting edge rock and underground dance music that Manchester has been for the past three decades. Perhaps more importantly, they provided the first real opportunity for Johnny Marr to indulge his wildly diverse musical appetites without bowing to fractious partners or narrow media labels. This is a story which began long before The Smiths. Indeed, you might even call it the secret history of The Smiths - from electro to Ecstasy, from Pernod to Prozac. From rock to disco and back again.

JOHN MARTIN MAHER WAS BORN ON OCTOBER 31, 1963. LIKE so many of England's greatest rock icons, from John Lennon to John I.ydon, from Morrissey to Noel Gallagher, he is second-generation Irish.

Growing up in the Seventies, with IRA bombing campaigns at their peak, he became accustomed to being branded an 'Irish pig" at school and on the terraced streets of his native Ardwick. But his extended Irish family also immersed him in music from an early age: pop. country, folk and classic rock. At family gatherings his father played harmonica while his uncle, a sharply dressed Beatles and Everly Brothers freak, played guitar. His mother, meanwhile, compiled her own personal singles chart every week.

“It was music, music, music” Marr says of his childhood. “Every Christmas I got a guitar and every birthday I got a football kit. In 1973, the Maher family were moved by the council from the crumbling Ardwick to the slightly more leafy but equally grim south Manchester suburb of Wythenshawe, a disruptive dislocation similar to that experienced by the young Bernard Sumner. “I thought I'd moved to Beverly Hills." Marr deadpans.

It was in Wythenshawe that Johnny first befriended his fellow Smith-in-waiting, Andy Rourke, as well as future Cult guitarist Billy Duffy. He embraced glam rock but was still too young to fully participate in punk. This helped shape the anti-punk attitude he later expressed during his Smiths heyday.

“The musical and political lines drawn by punk rock stayed in place for a long, long time," Johnny recalls. “And there's nothing worse when you're a kid than having to live by the laws of the generation above you. That has been lost by the generations since, so it’s a hard thing for them to understand.

“But I've got to say, looking back at my singles collection, anything that was any good from that period I've got. My main thing was the American stuff, people like Patti Smith, and that’s how I got into Phil Spcctor - and I got into the girl groups through The New York Dolls. That was my first ever vague, tenuous connection with Morrissey - that was the thing that intrigued me about him, because he was famously a New York Dolls fan, and the first time I ever really met him was fleetingly at a Patti Smith gig when 1 was about 14 or 15. I was just a little kid hanging around.” 

Aware of the potent Smiths mythology which stalks his every move, Johnny stresses that this was a mere passing encounter, not a real meeting. “There'll be a whole fucking book about that next," he groans.

The official birth of The Smiths is generally held to be Maher's fateful visit to Morrissey’s Stretford home in late 1982. The chemistry worked and the duo were soon churning out richly melodic, extraordinarily lyrical guitar songs. But Marr, as Johnny rechristened himself to avoid confusion with Buzzcocks drummer John Maher, boasted an exotic musical palate for a supposed indie princeling. One of his early bands was a funk outfit called Freaky Party, and even while The Smiths were gearing up for world domination he used to DJ at small Manchester clubs.

"Yeah, retro was new when I started it," he quips. “When I was getting The Smiths together I used to play a lot of what’s now known as classic rare groove records, and also a lot of James Brown, The Fatback Band. We just used to play at a couple of little clubs, me and a friend. We'd play things like Sly Stone, The Jackson Five, Sam And Dave, a load of Atlantic soul. I still listen to that stuff now, which is why I thought S'Express were the best group in the world when they were around because it was all pretty much based on Fatback and Sly Stone.”

Marr not only spun records but danced, too. “Too right. I bust a serious move, man. Yeah, dancing's fantastic. It should be on the school curriculum.” With bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce on board, The Smiths signed to London's Rough Trade label, becoming the acknowledged saviours of guitar music and the most critically praised band of their generation. But even before they released their eponymous debut album in February, 1984. Marr was moonlighting with Mike Pickering's Factory-signed funkateers, QuandoQuango. on their “Atom Rock” single.

Fatefully, the record was produced by Bernard Sumner, Marr's future partner in Electronic. It was a portent of his post-Smiths adventures as a session player and electro futurist - but also an early indication of Morrissey’s disapproval about his partner's eclectic musical agenda.

“Yeah, I snuck off," nods Johnny. ‘Bernard and Mike invited me, it was just a spur-of-the-moment thing; we used to bump into each other. It wasn't anything serious - now it seems serious because of the histories of all of us. At the time, it was just that Mike wanted me to play on his record.”

“I first met Johnny when he worked in a clothes shop called X Clothes in Manchester," recalls Pickering, a former Hacienda DJ who later found international fame with M People. “I knew Johnny because we used to have a hairdresser's in the basement of the Hacienda called Swing. Andrew Kerry was Johnny's best mate, and he used to do all The Smiths' haircuts. That was kind of a meeting place where everyone hung out.”

At the “Atom Rock" session, Sumner now claims that he didn't recognise Marr at first. “I said. ‘Are you Johnny Marr?' he said. 'Er. yeah, I am. I just do a bit of this when I'm not on tour with The Smiths. Don’t tell anyone, though.. ."

Marr insists that Sumner's ultra-dry Salford manner remains unchanged 15 years later.

“He was obviously someone who was from the city, because Manchester is in two halves and my childhood was, too." says Johnny. “The mentality between the two halves is quite different, and he was someone that I recognised as being from the area that I first grew up in - because of his humour, mostly. And also he was artistic. Punk afforded him the opportunity to do what he did, and he was very irreverent about the traditions of music - as a punk should be - but no matter what, why punk probably meant something to him was that it was a way for someone from his circumstances to be incredibly artistic." 

Marr was already a New Order fan. He had seen their first show at Comanche's in Manchester, loved their Power, Corruption And Lies album and still cherishes "In A Lonely Place” as one of his favourite songs. However, his secret disco leanings were kept largely under wraps.

“Johnny’s always said that he had to be a closet New Order fan because Morrissey wouldn't let anyone in the band openly like other bands," laughs Arthur Baker, longtime New Order associate and co-producer of the new Electronic LP,  Twisted Tenderness. “He told me that he couldn't go out and buy a New Order record because they could be competing with you in the charts and that might be the record that puts them higher than you."

The Smiths presented a united front and seemed unstoppable, topping the album charts with both Meat Is Murder in February, 1985 and hitting Number Two with The Queen Is Dead in June, 1986. But internal pressures were pulling them apart. Morrissey and Marr were gradually becoming estranged, legal disputes with former managers and road crew hampered their recording schedule. Meanwhile, Joyce and Rourke's exclusion from the contract with Rough Trade was a legal timebomb waiting to explode.

Critical adoration was unremitting, but ill-advised comments by Morrissey about his hatred of dance music and synthesisers fuelled his dissenters. The Smiths were held up as fey indie bookworms living out a sepia-tinted fantasy of classic white pop, a caricature which ignored Marr’s fiercely eclectic guitar style and unorthodox song structures.

“The whole jingle jangle, sub-Byrds view of The Smiths is definitely only one strand." agrees Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis. “'How Soon Is Now'" gives the lie to that, and 'Oscillate Wildly'. And we did a Francois Kevorkian remix of 'This Charming Man', one of the very first dance mixes, which they did actually pretend they hated, but I think Johnny probably liked. On principle, you couldn't like it. That was always one of Johnny's frustrations, allegedly, the straight and narrow of what you could and couldn't do musically. Morrissey wouldn't bend. Morrissey was the traditionalist, Johnny was more experimental."

Indeed. The Smiths were almost as modernist in approach as their fellow Manc innovators, New Order - the two most important bands of the Eighties, who often shared a stage and a road crew during The Smiths' brief but blazing prime.

“I don't think The Smiths were traditional at all, but it just took me a long while to get that," says Bernard now. “All guitar music at that time was considered traditional, so whoever had come along would have been called traditional. I always thought New Order were trying to do something forward-looking and, at the time, electronic music was the future. So this band suddenly came along that was just doing straight guitar rock, which 1 didn't get at first.. ."

Johnny nods: "We were doing bent guitar rock, for want of a better pun."

FOR ALL MORRISSEY'S STYLISED NOSTALGIA, HIS LYRICS WERE both brave and ground-breaking The Smiths made it cool to be sensitive and literate for the first time since Dylan, and Marr was a totally new breed of guitar hero. He incorporated both rhythm and lead roles into one grand, mellifluous whole. He shunned solos and blues chording, fluidly blending every style from folk to funk, rockabilly to hardcore. Even now, Johnny dismisses revisionist theories that The Smiths were four-square pop traditionalists.

“No way. we very rarely had anything called a bridge or a middle eight." he nods. “Musically, we weren't classicists, it was just because we came out with a classic-style line-up in the middle of all that Eighties post-modern stuff. People just meshed the music and the image together, because it was quite unusual to have a four-piece rock group with a lead singer. But the music tells a different story. I think we were a really modern group. I was, and still am, into what's going on now."

Which explains why, while Morrissey’s “Hang the DJ" chant in “Panic" was being widely misinterpreted as an attack on disco (its real target was the banality of daytime radio). Marr was immersing himself in underground club music. “I was already aware of Mantronix and people like that, fairly aware of Kraftwerk, very aware of electro," he insists. “I was aware of all that when The Smiths formed, and that was one of the things that gave me the impetus to form a guitar band. I knew what that music could do. I was listening to a lot of it because my mates were DJing at the Hacienda when it was completely empty, and we were listening to records that Bernard was listening to as well. Something I had to explain when Bernard and I got together is that one of the things that cemented us was my understanding of early Eighties electro music. For me, there's the same sort of emotion in [Shannon's] 'Let The Music Play' as there is in plenty of guitar music."

Mike Pickering confirms that Marr was a regular at the Hacienda during its early house and electro period. “He used to be down all the time on my Friday nights, because when it first started Andrew Berry partnered me DJing," says Pickering. “We played a very eclectic mix from Northern Soul through to hip hop. It was kind of the first ever Scally night for a club, and Johnny was there all the time. Even in the acid house days, I remember everyone was going mad to Ten City and he would come up and say, 'That singer's miles out! It's out of time!' I would say, 'Johnny, look at these people - do they give a shit that the guy's out of tune?"

IN 1986, MARR BEGAN DRINKING HEAVILY ON TOUR. MEANWHILE, Rourke’s drug problem almost saw him ousted from the band. With no fixed manager and an increasingly erratic frontman, The Smiths were cracking up.

“The thing about the hedonism is we were just regular Manchester guys, doing what regular Manchester guys do,” Marr shrugs. “In the early days, Morrissey probably enjoyed a gig and by the time he got home he'd had a bottle of wine, but that's all we had. It’s become this big idea that we were carrying on like Guns N’Roses, which we weren't."

Marr’s wake-up call was a tequila-fuelled, near-fatal car crash just yards from his Manchester home in late 1986. But even here he refuses to bow to rock'n'roll mythology.

“Yeah, there was a period where I did zone out and take it to the limit, but that was always part of what I was looking forward to as a kid. I was 21 or 22, living my dream, having just come offstage in Cleveland on a Sunday night with a bar full of Smiths fans, sat in a hotel room with a lot of money for a kid from where I come from, doing what I used to dream about at 11 or 12, I did what anyone where I come from does - I just partied. Wc weren't Aerosmith but wc weren't The Osmonds, either."

The last ever Smiths show on British soil, rescheduled after Johnny's car crash, was an Artists Against Apartheid benefit at London’s Brixton Academy on December 12, 1986. Witnessed by this writer, it showcased the band at the height of their powers after a rocky year of internal friction. Subsequent accounts of the band's heyday has painted their concerts as carnivals of mass misery, which completely distorts the huge celebratory rush of even an average Smiths show.

“Those gigs were like huge celebrations of loveliness." says eternally optimistic ex-Smiths drummer Mike Joyce. “I've been to hundreds and hundreds of rock shows and I've never seen anything like it. Maybe the miserablists were there, but they were all at the back." Geoff Travis agrees: "All those people who go on about the miserablism never understood The Smiths."

“People are obsessed with taking cultural snapshots." shrugs Johnny Marr. “You know, the Sixties were the World Cup Final, George Best and all that. But it wasn’t like that at all, and nor was the Eighties. A Smiths gig was like a football match or something, where the home side were winning five-nil. But that’s OK because, for some incredibly naive reason, I believe that the truth always comes out."

The innovation of Marr's work with The Smiths reached its summit on their 1987 swansong album. Strangeways Here We Come. Diverse in style and expansive in sound. Man's favourite Smiths album could almost be seen as the precursor to Electronic's modernist soundscapes.

"The very first track on the last Smiths album doesn’t have one guitar on it." says Marr. "There's a clue for you. But you would never know, it still sounds like me. There’s electric pianos on it, samples, some strings and some noises I was making in the studio with whatever was hanging about."

It’s tempting to speculate whether, if The Smiths had continued, they might now sound like Electronic.

"Ha!" laughs Johnny. "No, we’d sound like The Prodigy. But with Kenneth Williams on the cover of the album."

But The Smiths died, of course, in August. 1987. Desperate for a holiday and frazzled by internal tensions. Marr dramatically quit the group he had founded five years before. The remaining three members struggled on together for a further few weeks, even recording some demos with Easterhouse guitarist Ivor Perry, but the dream was over. The indie Beatles were no more.

Of a Marr-free Smiths, Johnny now says, "it didn't seem like a very realistic proposition." Of Morrissey’s proposed Christmas farewell show, he snorts with laughter. "I probably would have been kidnapped. Have you seen the film, The Collector... ?"

The Smiths myth has been under attack ever since, even more so since Johnny Rogan's exhaustive 1992 biography, Morrissey And Marr: The Severed Alliance revealed Rourke and Joyce's contractual exclusion from the band. Even January's BBC2 documentary, Young Guns Go For It, in which Marr featured heavily, dwelled more on the hand's post split lawsuits than their awesome musical legacy.

"There has been a complete industry grown up around the negative aspects of the break-up of the group," says Marr wearily. “I just think journalists should basically get out to the clubs and little venues around the country and start writing something positive about what’s actually going on instead of writing about the break-up of a band from 1987. It's just tittle tattle and misinformation that is third and fourth-hand. I’m sure people expect me to say that, because I’m passionate about it, but from my experience most people who are fans of British music feel the same way. I was bored with this in 1988. It should have been sorted out then."

These days, Marr doesn’t listen to Smiths records.

“I’ve only listened to the last album once, about a year ago, and that’s the first time I've ever put a Smiths record on since the split. I remembered every note of it. I didn't really need to hear it. You hear stuff on the radio or whatever, but there aren't enough hours in the day to play the stuff I like now."

A healthy attitude, although tinged with sadness. Maybe one day, Johnny will dust off some old Smiths albums and play them to his grandchildren.

“What, if they’re too happy, you mean...?'

THE DEMISE OF THE SMITHS BROUGHT JOHNNY MARR TO A potentially ruinous career crossroads. Unfairly burdened with most of the blame for wrecking the most celebrated UK band since The Beatles, he felt like an exile in his own country. Faced with the choice between becoming a globe-trotting guitar for hire or embracing the emergent wave of drug-fuelled dance music seeping into Britain from urban America, this 23-year-old elder statesman initially seemed to embrace the softer option.

In reality, of course, he did both. But this would only become clear in due course. In the immediate post Smiths confusion, Marr retreated to America and sought out his guitar heroes. He spent many nights in dusk to dawn jam sessions with Keith Richards and co-wrote some sketchy songs with David Crosby, formerly of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, in LA.

"He was just getting over his prison sentence and drug addictions." Johnny recalls. "I met him and we clicked straight away. He took me back to his house, and what was really sweet was that we were in his bedroom with two guitars - it was like two kids who had bunked off school, because when his wife came in he was under a strict regime to behave himself. Not that I was any threat to that, but it was just like, what’s this little scruff from Wythenshawe doing in David Crosby’s bedroom? We started playing a couple of tunes, and from what 1 remember they were really good. But it was just that one meeting."

Marr considered forming a band with Charlie Drayton and Keith Jordan, with whom he co-wrote some "wicked, dark, instrumental music" for Dennis Hopper’s 1988 gang movie, Colors, before "Herbie Hancock came in and naffed it all up". Drayton and Jordan, ironically, went on to work with Keith Richards. Marr then seemed to settle for becoming the most famous session musician on the planet. In 1988, he surfaced on Bryan Ferry’s album, Bete Noir, and the final Talking Heads opus, Naked. He called Ferry a "really good, down-to-earth bloke" but admitted. “I also did it because I was feeling so contrary. I was thumbing my nose at everyone who was on my back." 

Critics pondered whether the former guitar god had compromised his legendary sense of cool, but it is significant that he turned down both Midge Ure's all-star band for 1998’s Mandela birthday bash at Wembley and David Bowie's wretched Glass Spider tour. “I would have had to climb out of a glass spider at Maine Road!" says Johnny, a die-hard Man City fan. "If he’d asked me 10 years earlier I’d have been there like a shot, but I think by his own admission he wasn't on top form in those days." Bowie’s axeman post was eventually filled - by Peter Frampton.

Marr's next move was equally intriguing. He spent a year with post-punk titans The Pretenders, touring and playing on their 1989 album, Windows On The World.

"Hanging out with Chrissie Hynde for a year when I did was far more significant than just playing onstage." Johnny says now. "The reality was that Chrissie and I were very close for a year and she’s an incredible person in private. 1 couldn't have been involved with a better person for that time, and I learned a hell of a lot. I kind of was a permanent member of The Pretenders, but there wasn't really a group there because she'd been touring for a long time and was going through a period of transition. What she wanted to do personally was just retreat. And that was fine, but after the year had gone by I was missing going out on tour and making records."

Once more on the look-out for musicians he could relate to, Marr began jamming with ex-ABC drummer David Palmer and former Julian Cope bassist James Eller. Matt Johnson was also looking to regroup his The The project at the same time, incorporating this ready-made trio as his new backing band. Johnson, who Marr knew from his pre-Smiths days, had already written most of 1989‘s Mind Bomb album, which did not help Johnny’s public image as an apparently directionless hired hand.

"Matt was someone 1 would have been in a band with in 1981, and who I kept in touch with and really admired his work." Marr says, testily. "I don’t begrudge anybody this, but it’s become obvious that nobody is terribly interested in what came out of my work with The The. The impression that both Matt and I get from the way it’s been documented was that I nipped out of my limousine, nipped in to see Matt, played a few sparse guitar licks and some harmonica, then went back up to my palace in Manchester. Which is absolutely untrue - I was in that band for three and-a-half years, 24 hours a day. And making those albums: Mind Bomb could have been better, but it was an amazing experience, but Dusk is something I'm really, really proud of. I felt a very big part of that, beyond playing guitar and harmonica."

Marr’s second The The album, 1993's Dusk, was more of a fully-fledged collaboration. In the interim he also found time to record with Billy Bragg, Kirsty MacColl, Stex, Banderas and his old hairdresser pal, Andrew Berry - plus, more significantly, the Pet Shop Boys and Electronic. Johnny's post Smiths superstar sidekick period was over, but he never regretted it.

"The reason I did it was that there was no other way of me making records other than to form a group that would have been completely trampled on no matter what we’d done," he shrugs. "Plus, I hadn't found musicians that I could relate to in that way. That was the only opportunity to do it, plus the people who asked me to play on their records I had respect for - and got along with personally. Of course, I was aware of disdainful attitudes about it, but what was 1 expected to do? I can still listen to some of those records and they're top. But I'm not into doing sessions any more."

THE GAP BETWEEN THE SMITHS AND ELECTRONIC may have been Marr's most orthodox guitar hero period, but again there is an unwritten history here. It began when, in the immediate post Smiths aftermath, Johnny dropped his first Ecstasy tablet: "I took it in Rome in 1987, then went for a walk outside the Colosseum and Trevi fountain," he recalls. "Then I just got in a taxi and found the driver to be the most pleasant taxi driver I'd ever come across in my life. Ha, ha, ha!' Significantly. Johnny also gave up his west London flat in 1987 and moved back to Manchester on a permanent basis with his wife, Angie (Marr's childhood sweetheart, who he had married on The Smiths' 1985 tour of America). Although still convinced that his musical future lay outside Britain, it was actually taking shape on his doorstep.

“Directly after The Smiths, I was seriously considering getting out of England and working in New York, because I knew some cool musicians there. But I realised that where I was hearing all the best music - and this goes back to Sly Stone and Dylan and all the stuff that Shaun and Bez were listening to - was back at my house in Manchester. I made a conscious move back to Manchester, not because it's my roots or anything but just because my house is where I was hearing all the best music. 

“Basically, The Smiths breaking up left some space there for a different, groovier attitude - for everyone to get some Es down their neck and got into dancing again. A lot of positive stuff came out of E because there were a lot of people in Manchester using hard drugs, and it got them off that.

“To be honest, I was never into necking an E and going to stand in a field with my shirt off. But it affected the atmosphere of the entire city. You'd be walking down the road and everybody looked different. Everyone had this vague code going down: you'd either taken E or you hadn't. I suppose it's similar to what happened in the hippie movement, and it was good because all the clubs were playing the same banging music for the first time. And it went on longer than people imagined: it wasn’t just '88. it went on until about '91."

Around this time. “Madchester" threw up a new generation of groove' driven, chemically-boosted rock stars. Many were regulars at Marr's house and, tellingly, the likes of Ian Brown and Shaun Ryder were actually older than Johnny. "They were older than me when we were kids so I’m assuming they're still older than me now," he nods, drily. These were the bands who finally dethroned The Smiths as generational icons, and yet they were partying with the head Smith himself.

“It was definitely a much-needed reaction to the supremacy . . . wrong word, the sound of The Smiths." says Marr, carefully. "I'm not saying it started at my house, but my scene did. People would have you believe that there were all these little pockets involved, and there wasn't, really. One thing about Manchester, and it's still the same now, is that it's got that village mentality. You can't help but bump into people all the time, which is definitely a good thing creatively. I felt part of it in a very real sense in that there were some interesting records being listened to at my house at four o’clock in the morning, and some quite interesting scenes...

“And that’s where the first Electronic album was recorded.”

WHILE JOHNNY WAS SEEKING REFUGE FROM HIS MYTHIC PAST, Bernard Sumner was simultaneously engaged on a parallel mission. Frustrated with the democratic constrictions and internal frictions of New Order, he began formulating a solo offshoot project as far back as 1985. By 1987, he was sneaking into New Order’s inner-city rehearsal space on Sundays, working long into the night, sleeping on the floor and then joining scheduled band rehearsals on Mondays.

Eventually, this lonely habit proved intolerable, partly because he had nobody to bounce ideas off, but also because it was no fun spending one night a week in an empty warehouse adjoining a graveyard. He began seeking collaborators for what was initially planned as a Sumner solo record. It was inevitable, in the “village” called Manchester, that his path would eventually collide with Johnny Marr's.

Ironically, it was as far from Manchester as Earthly travellers can venture that the Electronic blueprint was first officially mooted - in San Francisco, at the climax of New Order’s 1987 tour with Echo And The Bunnymen. Sumner invited Marr out to discuss forming a band. Johnny agreed. Soon afterwards, Peter Hook invited the guitar maestro to join his own nascent side project. Marr explained to the disgruntled bass monster that he was too late.

Johnny claims his friendship with Bernard would have remained merely social if they hadn’t clicked creatively straight away.

“When we got together, we both found we had things in common which were more surprising than we realised,” says Johnny. “One was that I understood the confines of a four-piece group where you are close friends so you don’t have to explain everything. I was surprised that Bernard’s rock touchstones were actually things that made sense to me: The Kinks, certain Rolling Stones records, Ennio Morricone. And similarly I think Bernard was not so aware that I understood and owned a lot of electro stuff and knew about 'Planet Rock’ and Mantronix. The two of us also knew how far you do yourself in to make dark, emotive, deep music.”

“And we’re both circumcised,” adds Bernard, helpfully.

The duo wrote a song on their first day of working together - “Reality”.

“The reason we were able to work together was we were both into making music that’s emotive,” Marr insists. “Even if it’s got a beat behind it, it’s got to have something emotional and passionate behind it.”

Thus Electronic became a serious item, and began seeking out creative partners. They recruited Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe to craft their opulent debut single, “Getting Away With It”. Marr returned the favour by playing on the PSB album, Behaviour. But both Johnny and Bernard had other commitments - Marr to The Pretenders and The The, Sumner to New Order’s Technique and the Monsters Of Alternative Rock tour across the US. It was during this fateful jaunt that Johnny received a crucial phone call from his Electronic partner in Chicago.

“I said, 'Hi, Bernard, how’s the tour going?”’ Marr recalls. “'Not too well, actually. It was all right until yesterday . . .’ 'Where are you?’ 'Erm, I’m upside down in a hospital. I’m in this traction thing. I’ve got a bad stomach.”’ Bernard had burnt out his stomach lining with booze and chemicals, chiefly Pernod. He had also burned his bridges with his band cohorts. The Eighties were ending. New Order were disintegrating. It was time for a fresh start. Just as the decade died, “Getting Away With It” hit Number 12, selling 275,000 copies. In America, it made Number 38. Electronic had arrived.

But they had also blown it - or at least they had blown their initial plan to remain a low-key, white-label act. Their fantasy that Factory would allow them to develop as an underground phenomenon was shattered by the high-profile success of the single. 

“When we started out, we had to counteract all that supergroup stuff,” says Johnny. “It seemed like it was either come out as some amazing supergoup project or put out little white labels which nobody knew was me and Bernard.. If that was the choice, that’s what we would have done.”

“Whatever we do we’re battling our pasts," sighs Bernard. “Our past doesn’t do us any favours. To us, Electronic was a fresh start, but not to other people. We both had our history and our history stuck, and I think that’s where the white label thing came from. But it was wishful thinking.”

AS 1990 DAWNED, MARR AND SUMNER SETTLED INTO A SERIOUS regime of 14-day working shifts punctuated by one-and-a-half day rest periods. Electronic barely had a handful of half-formed compositions when Depeche Mode invited the duo to support them in LA after The Jesus And Mary Chain pulled out, but they were already clearly a genuine band - albeit one which Sumner calls a “new type” of band.

"The original concept of Joy Division... " he begins, before checking himself. “The original concept of Electronic was a nucleus of me and Johnny, and then we would introduce different guest artists. We were sick of the group format where you have the same people in the same group for years and years. The idea was to come up with a new type of group with two members who stayed the same and two or one member who changed, so you get a different chemistry with each album."

One potential floating member who fell by the wayside was the deadpan king of glum himself. Terry Hall.

"He came down to the studio around the time of ‘Get The Message'," Marr recalls. "He was looking to do some collaboration, but for some reason it never worked out. We just never got it together. But he's done a lot of good stuff and I like what he does. I like his voice and his attitude."

"Get The Message", Electronic’s second single, climbed to Number 8 in April, 1991 and showcased Marr's stately guitars over the duo’s disco leanings. It prompted the NME to declare: "New Order can now split up." Melody Maker took a slightly different line: "Like watching a pony chew on a carrot for half an hour," it mused, approvingly.

The video for "Get The Message" was shot in The Philippines by “this crazy German photographer who'd been in the outback for 15 years taking these amazing surreal photos." The fact that he had never made a video before was no deterrent to Marr and Sumner - but had they known the Apocalypse Now ordeal they were heading into, they might have stayed in Manchester.

By the time they touched down in Manila, Johnny was hysterical with the fear of flying which he had "caught off Morrissey" while Bernard's stomach virus had resurfaced. They had expected Third World poverty and machine gun toting guards, but they hadn’t bargained on the heroic welcome they received in return for pouring money into this military dictatorship’s ailing economy A ceremonial band and limousine greeted them on the tarmac, whisking them through customs and around the corner to a rickety runway for their internal flight into the jungle.

"We had to actually help the pilot push the plane out," grimaces Marr. "For me, it was like building my own gallows."

Johnny’s frayed nerves were not helped by a turbulent three-hour flight inland to a huge, deserted airport. He and Bernard were then installed in an equally huge, equally deserted hotel miles from civilisation. It had been built by former Filipino dictator Marcos to attract Hong Kong gambling custom - but the president was ousted from power and the tourists never came.

"It was like The Shining," says Bernard. "The hotel had been closed down for years, but they opened it up for us. We had these rooms that hadn't been slept in since the Seventies, which Johnny quite liked. We had two security guys with big, chrome-plated pump action shotguns stood outside the rooms, and we were getting freaked out by this time. Johnny couldn't find the remote control for his TV set so he phones down and this Filipino guy comes up with the remote control for the whole hotel! A 500 room hotel with one remote control! So he turns over his channel and then goes back downstairs...“

Further surrealism awaited the duo after they hooked up with the video crew in a seaside village. The locals had prepared a celebratory feast for their visiting celebrities - and Johnny and Bernard were the guests of honour.

“Unfortunately, this meal consisted of a whole goat," groans Bernard. "He’s a famous vegetarian and I was incredibly ill, but I had to cut the first slice off it. I had to go and cut the goat's arse off and eat it. even though I'd just been throwing up for an hour and a half."

Later, during the video shoot, Bernard saved Johnny from leaping into a smouldering volcano when the director’s helicopter blinded Marr with dust and ash.

“The director didn't realise and kept saying, 'Closer to the edge!" Johnny recalls. “He was a real Dan Dare, hanging out of the helicopter to take pictures. And I ran over the edge but Bernard grabbed the back of my shirt..."

Bernard grins. “I saved your life, don’t you ever forget that!"

“Yeah, and I've got you out of some scrapes in the Groucho club." Johnny fires back.

“Oh. yeah," nods Bernard, sheepishly. "And I’d like 17 other offences to be taken into account..."

RELEASED IN MAY, 1991, ELECTRONICS EPONYMOUS DEBUT LP WAS hailed as a masterpiece. MM called it "one of the greatest albums ever made" while the NME opted for "a large and full barrel of dancing monkeys". Although shot through with clipped funk and sleek house beats. it also contained the magisterial Pet Shop Boys collaboration, “Patience Of A Saint". The LP was book-ended by Bernard's distinctive “rapping" on "Idiot Country" and "Feel Every Beat", both sour attacks on the criminalisation of rave culture.

A pristine pinnacle of post-techno pop, Electronic was actually recorded in “completely fucked up" all night sessions at Marr's home studio while it was still one of the party hubs of "Madchcster". For all its crisp contours, this was the record which pushed Sumner’s legendary chemical excesses to the limit. Bernard had tried Ecstasy as long ago as 1981 in Texas, where New Order would take delivery of “special ambulances" loaded with pharmaceuticals. But 10 years later, at the height of E culture, his drug intake almost killed him.

"Me and Owen Morris, who engineered our first album and now does Oasis, were both waking up in the middle of the night having heart palpitations," Bernard remembers. “Because we were beasting it so much, we were missing heartbeats, which is very disconcerting. You lie there and you feel your heart stop beating for a bit, and I must admit that scared me. It's an erratic rhythm, and it scares the shit out of you."

Electronic became a landmark album, wiping away all the supergroup sneers and finally launching the Marr/Sumner axis as serious Nineties contenders. But it also brought home the chilling truth of Keith Richards’ advice to Johnny four years earlier: that, however great it might seem, rock'n’roll isn't worth dying for.

It was time, quite literally, for a change of gear.

ELECTRONICS HANDFUL OF UK DATES IN 1991 RECEIVED MIXED reviews, but they scored another Number Six smash in 1992 with the one off single, "Disappointed", featuring Neil Tennant on vocals. This effectively closed the band's first chapter, freeing Johnny to work on The The’s Dusk and Bernard to reactivate New Order for 1993's Republic. Electronic’s partnership with the Pet Shop Boys was dissolved, though Johnny insists that Neil and Chris remain semi-detached members to this day.

“Me and Neil went down to see Bernard when he was making Republic,' he nods. "We still have close ties with Neil and Chris - we got them to do the gigs with us around the time of the second album. Even with the new LP, one of the first things we did was run it by Neil and Chris. They're still involved. When they were finishing our second album, I worked with them on their next album, Bilingual, so there's always been a thread."

But it was not just musical commitments which dictated the five-year gap between Electronic and its sequel, Raise The Pressure. Both Bernard and Johnny became fathers during this period, and began pursuing a healthier lifestyle. The collapse of Factory at the end of 1992 not only left Electronic and New Order homeless, but saddled Bernard with extra financial responsibilities towards the Hacienda, which was forced to close several times due to spiralling gang violence. “Madchester" became “Gunchester". The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays both disintegrated.

Meanwhile, in May, 1993, Johnny happened upon an early show by five cocky Mancunian candidates called Oasis. He liked what he saw, recognising some of his own Manc-Irish scally mentality in Noel Gallagher, and ended up loaning him one of his precious guitars.

"It was just before they got signed by Creation and there were about nine people there," Marr recalls. "They took so long between songs because he was tuning up. I said. 'Have you not got a spare guitar anywhere?' And he said. 'No, I’m on the dole'. And I just liked him so the intention was to loan him this guitar, but he fell in love with it so I let him have it."

Johnny also recommended Gallagher’s gang to Marcus Russell of Ignition management, who has handled both Marr's and Electronic's careers for the last decade. The deal was fortuitous for both sides, as Oasis swiftly went champagne supernova while Russell became arguably the nation's most famous rock manager. It’s a testament to Marr's unerring ear for great rock'n'roll that he casually helped launch the biggest British rock group of the Nineties - on one of his days off.

But in July, 1994, during an infamous ruck at Newcastle's Riverside venue. Noel smashed Marr’s guitar to splinters. He phoned Johnny to apologise. The next morning, a taxi arrived from Manchester containing yet another Marr guitar - this time a sturdier model. The two later went guitar shopping together, while Gallagher namecheckcd Marr in interviews: "When The Smiths came on Top Of The Pops for the first time, that was it for me," he declared. "From that day on, I wanted to be Johnny Marr."

Although Noel can now afford more guitars than he can eat, Johnny has yet to request the return of his axe. “No, but it's about time he bought me a house," he deadpans. "Or a guitar shop."

Raise The Pressure took two painstaking years to create in Marr's former home, which was now his studio - he had moved his family a mile down the road because "it was easier than moving the studio". The long delay between Electronic albums gave rise to some interesting rumours about the quixotic guitar anti-hero: that he had been asked to join the post-Squire Roses ("I never heard that one”) and that he was drying out in rehab: "No way, I’m too mean," he says now.

The truth was quite the contrary. Both Johnny and Bernard took up running. Bernard even forced himself to give up clubbing because “I invariably bump into some of my old amigos and, erm, that's a problem. I’ve got no willpower at all."

The watchwords for Raise The Pressure were apparently "health and daylight", even though it was recorded in a windowless basement. Bernard remembers: ‘I’d basically not made an album straight since 1977, and I wanted to break the habit of no substances equal no music. I fell that was dependency and I wanted to be able to write music without depending on external stuff. I wanted to write music straight, which I'd done at the start of Joy Divison and the music was pretty good.

“I still run about 20 minutes a day, which is about two miles. I guess that's my new drug. It’s an old boring fucking cliches but it just makes you feel great. Like I said, I've got no self-discipline, so it's kind of exercise not for my legs but for my willpower."

Following Bernard's example. Johnny began running and working out, but gave up when his biceps grew too big.

"That was just a really un-rock'n'roll thing to do and, like most things in my life, it was something I hadn't yet tried." says Johnny. "I did it as kind of an experiment. Then I saw a photograph of myself playing with Black Grape and that soon stopped it. It looked like I was playing a banjo. I was all muscly and guitarists aren't allowed to look like that.’

One drug Sumner did allow himself during the recording of Raise The Pressure was Prozac. He agreed to try writing lyrics on the anti-depressant for a BBC2 experiment, then submitted himself to a psychoanalyst, who told Bernard he had "hyper critical voices’ in his head. At the time, Bernard told this writer that Prozac should be pumped into the water supply. With hindsight, he is less keen, pointing out that he only wrote one lyric on the controversial happy pill. All the same, he did experience one interesting side effect: a rock-hard.“diamond cutter’ erection.

"It's not supposed to do that, but it did me, yeah. I don't think that's the general rule for everyone. I actually found Prozac hindered my lyric writing, which was the whole point of that programme. If the guy making it had stuck to his original principle, he'd have come out with a very interesting result. But, looking back, I found it very difficult to write on it."

Not to be outdone, Johnny tried Prozac, too. but “got bored when the side effects wore off".

Marr and Sumner, both Chic fans, initially considered inviting Nile Rodgers to work on Raise The Pressure, but a single phone call to the disco king was enough to put Johnny off. Instead, their chief collaborator became Kraftwerk escapee Karl Bartos, recommended by a mutual friend in Berlin. A long-time hero of Bernard's from Joy Division days, Bartos spent a year commuting to Manchester and co-wrote six of the album's 13 tracks. Marr and Sumner were expecting Bartos to be "a robot in a white coat and clipboard". Instead, he arrived at the studio, threw a blanket over their computer and announced, ’We won’t be needing this." He then "picked up an acoustic guitar and started playing bluegrass".

"He was joking," explains Bernard. “But Karl was a bit disillusioned because Kraftwerk had got so hung up on using the latest technology and doing something new that they became constipated, in his words. So he was almost anti-technology to work with; he'd seen the light. He said we shouldn't get bogged down by technology."

Bernard and Johnny relaxed their self-imposed curfew by taking Bartos out to the Hacienda's full-on gay night, Flesh. But their album sessions proved painstakingly slow.

"1 really like Karl as a person but musically we didn’t gcll very well,’ says Bernard. "My background is punk rock. Karl's is a symphony orchestra and he's very correct about doing things. He used to say to me all the time, ’You can't do that.' But my attitude is you do it, and if you don't like it you throw it away. He’s a great guy, but my way of doing things is pretty goddamn loose and Karl's is very strict."

Released in May, 1996, Raise The Pressure received generally lukewarm reviews. Unfairly so, as it remains probably the truest reflection yet of Electronic's eclectic agenda, albeit a trifle over polished. “Forbidden City". "For You" and "Out Of My League" contained Marr's lushest guitar melodics since The Smiths, while "Second Nature" and "If You've Got I.ove" perfected Sumner's obsession with euphoric Eurodisco.

"It came out at the wrong time." shrugs Bernard. “The first LP came out at the time of 'baggy' - I say it in quotes because no one in Manchester ever called it fucking baggy - and then the second album came out just as Britpop was reaching its peak. People also didn't see us as a real band: they thought we had a lack of commitment, and they held that against us."

The NME described Raise The Pressure as “an album for footloose mums and dads who still live for Saturday night clubbing“. While mixing the record in London, Johnny and Bernard played it to George Michael following a drunken night out with Neil Tennant at Heaven. George loved it, and demanded to hear it again. In its entirety. Immediately.

And thus, these two former youth culture icons, one just past 30 and the other on the cusp of 40, finally joined the premier league of adult-friendly pop superstars. They had cleaned up their lives and their sound. They had both become fathers and father figures.

But maybe, just maybe, some of their credibility had fallen by the wayside on the journey from New Lad to New Dad.

THE THIRD ELECTRONIC ALBUM, TW1STED TENDERNESS, ARRIVES next month. Unlike its predecessors, it took less than a year from start to finish and relies heavily on guitars over computers. With a live rhythm section borrowed from the defunct Black Grape, Johnny Marr has turned full circle to his roots with a four-piece rock band. 

"Electronic's just evolved that way," says Johnny. "It wasn't like any particular considered decision or game plan. The wheel kind of turned around a little bit for me as a writer. Maybe I've moved backwards in order to move on, but I don’t see it as a step backwards. I just wrote more songs on guitar from the ground up. I always saw the sequencer, and I still do, as a very compliant set of musicians - who, unfortunately, have no personality".

Recorded at Peter Gabriel's Real World studio near Bath, Twisted Tenderness was co-produced by longtime New Order cohort Arthur Baker. 

"This is probably the first album Bernard's ever made without lots of narcotics." says Baker. "There weren't any drugs involved in making this record. We were up all night drinking when we were at Real World - not to say that we were going through cases of wine, but there was more of a wine vibe."

The album features guest appearances by Scottish siren Astrid Williams and techno noodlers Fridge but, unlike its predecessors, no major collaborators. However, the last track, “Flicker”, was partly inspired by both Neil Tennant and Karl Bartos.

‘“Flicker’ is about watching the news,” says Bernard. “I remembered something Neil said to me once, he was talking about some group and he said their lyrics all sounded like they’d read it in the newspaper the day before. And Karl said that Kraftwerk used to take negative comments that people made about them and write songs about them. He said they once read a review which said they looked like showroom dummies onstage, so they wrote ‘Showroom Dummies’. And Ralf or Florian was coming onto a girl once and she said, ‘Who do think you are? You’re treating me like a sex object’ And so they wrote ‘Sex Object’. So I thought: why don’t we combine the two things?”

But even while Twisted Tenderness was evolving, Marr the Great Collaborator lent his guitar skills to another Pet Shop Boys album, Bilingual, and renewed his Mike Pickering association by playing on M People’s 1997 album, Fresco. He also became involved in his own leisurewear label, Elk.

“They’re great clothes,” says Mike Pickering. “Scally stuff, but really beautiful. I’m always trying to blag them. But they never come on time...”

Marr also claims to have had a stake in Echo And The Bunnymen’s 1997 comeback. As revealed in last month’s Uncut, Johnny and Ian McCulloch worked together on a Mac solo album which apparently went missing from a delivery van between Manchester and Liverpool.

“I started writing songs for an album for Ian that went all horribly wrong,” Johnny recalls. “We had nine really great songs with great singing and then things got really strange. I sent the master tapes to Ian's house in a van that was carrying liquid oxygen to the airport, and when the driver went into a building to make delivery the van was ripped off. Obviously, people didn’t know what they had in the van. The police were involved. They’ve never been found, but I’m not too arsed.”

As he told Uncut, Mac isn’t convinced this is the full story. There seems to be disagreement between Marr and Mac about how their collaborations were eventually used.

“The songs were really good and they started to see the light of day on a couple of Electrafixion singles, and then the first Bunnymen comeback single was a song that I co-wrote . . .” Marr continues, referring to the mighty “Nothing Lasts Forever” from 1997. “But I gave the credit away because I didn’t want to be churlish and to be seen standing in the way of their releases. The next thing I knew was one of our songs, a beautiful ballad, had been turned into the World Cup single, and I wasn’t happy about the way that came out. The first I heard of it was after the video came out and the record was already pressed, so it did go horribly wrong.”

Intriguingly, McCulloch’s publicists emphatically deny both that Johnny co-wrote “Nothing Lasts Forever" and that “Top Of The World” was released without his permission.

MEANWHILE, JUST AS TWISTED TENDERNESS WAS BEING finished, Johnny received an unlikely endorsement from another of his past cohorts In May, 1998, Morrissey collected his Ivor Novello award for Outstanding Musical Contribution, pointedly dedicating it to "John Maher of Wythenshawe". Clearly, relations had thawed since the early days of Electronic when Marr would refer to the flamboyant ex Smiths frontman as "Dorrissey" and publicly advise him to "get a life". Having been reunited by the 1996 court case brought by ex Smith Mike Joyce, fresh speculation abounded that Morrissey and Marr were bosom buddies once more.

"I don't bear anyone any malice, that's all I’m saving.” Johnny nods. "But we don’t go to the football together, put it like that. Why would I be in constant contact with him? I don't see enough of the people I'm involved with now."

But Johnny dismisses questions about ever working with his former Smiths partner again. "How the fuck do I know?" he groans. "Right now it would be a ridiculous idea, but for it to happen in the future, I don't know how life pans out - God knows what might happen when I'm 65. Maybe we'll make a cassette together on the top of a mountain in Nepal. In fact, that's the only way I’d do it!"

After Twisted Tenderness, Electronic will lie fallow once more as Sumner works on the next New Order album. It's unthinkable that someone as prolific as Marr will sit idle during this period. He refuses to be drawn on future collaborations. although rumours from Manchester suggest he is assembling another rock band with refugees from Black Grape. Also, Arthur Baker hopes to involve Johnny in his current all star album project alongside Mani, Mogwai and Fridge.

But whatever he does in the next post Electronic lull, what keeps Johnny Marr relevant is that he is clearly still a music fan. He might rave about Blue Note and psychedelia, but he is equally enthused by left-field novices Badly Drawn Boy, Gomes and The Beta Band. For all the rock and techno credibility he has amassed during two decades in music, he remains faithful to the pop cause.

"It's all pop music to me." shrugs the most revered British guitarist of the past 20 years. "People are obsessed with this genre or that genre - I thought we’d got rid of all that when Britpop came and went. I've been everything - I've been indie, I've been jingle jangle, I've been rock. But I'm just a guy making pop records with whatever's about."

Twisted Tenderness is released by Parlophone on April 12

======================

WHEN JOHNNY MET KEEF...

SOMETIME in 1986, at the height of Smithsmania, Johnny Marr is hanging out at his Shepherd's Bush flat. Around four am, the phone rings. It’s Kirsty MacColl. She is with a friend who needs a favour. A voice comes on the line, gravelly and deep. “Hey. Johnny, hi, kid, I need a guitar. Have you got one?"

It's Keith Richards.

"I was over there quicker than you can say ’Their Satanic Majesties Request','' grins Johnny. ‘People expect a hand to come out with a skull ring on it, grab you by the neck, drag you in, pull you down and inject you full of heroin. And I was quite disappointed that didn't happen, hahaha!"

In fact, Johnny discovered an "incredibly vibrant, effusive" Keef and they proceeded to jam through the night on a pair of acoustic guitars. It was tho start of a pan-generational friendship between two guitar legends that soon developed into regular all-night sessions all across the globe.

"He was aware of The Smiths, but I don't think he'd taped the John Peel sessions," quips Johnny. "I said to him at one point that ’Bigmouth Strikes Again' was my 'Jumping Jack Flash', and being a great guy he didn't call security and have me ejected from the building..."

After The Smiths disintegrated, Keef invited Johnny to “do the hang" again in LA.

"The atmosphere between us was one of two guitar players licking our wounds because we had both recently gone through serious shit with our partners. It took me a while to realise that, because I would never assume that he would ever relate to me in that way. So I had the honour of being given some incredibly philosophical and personal advice, reassurance and encouragement.

"At one stage, there was just me and him, and he said, 'Come on, then, 'fess up - what did you want to be when you were a kid?' And I sat there thinking. ’How do I answer this question?' So I said. 'You'. And he said, 'Well, I'm telling you that you’re all right as you are. You’re a good player and a good person, so don't go killing yourself for rock'n’roll because it ain't worth it'...

"I felt Ike one lucky cat. It was an incredible experience for a shitkicker from Wythenshawe."

=======================

FRETTING AWAY WITH IT

Johnny Marr on today's other guitar heroes

NOEL GALLAGHER, OASIS

"Noel does what he wants to do very well, but I always think of him more in terms of a really great songwriter who plays guitar in order to write his songs. His songwriting has always overshadowed his guitar playing to me."

BERNARD BUTLER

"Bernard lives it. When I first heard Bernard I connected with something in his guitar playing. It was obviously passion, and he's been very generous in giving me recognition for influencing him, which is rare among guitarists. You know the joke: how many guitarists does it take to change a light bulb? Ten - one to change it and nine to say they could do it better."

NICK McCABE, THE VERVE

"I saw Nick play when they were just starting out. and he was really good. But I preferred them by miles when they were called Verve. Unfortunately for them, they sound better in a small place."

GRAHAM COXON, BLUR

"He’s really inventive and again he's done a good job at something difficult, which is having your own distinctive style - particularly as I've covered most of them! Haha! The end of 'Beetlebum' is one of the best things I’ve heard for years."

JONNY GREENWOOD, RADIONEAD

"He's someone who understands that there is more than just him onstage. He's obviously into the overall sound of the band. That’s where I'm coming from, too."

JOHN SQUIRE, STONE ROSES/ SEAHORSES

"John's obviously really good at what he does. The kind of guitar playing he excels at can be very exciting, but it's different to what I do."

DOMINIC CHAD, MANSUN

"I saw them live and he was rocking, he got right into it and he was exciting. He plays with heart and that’s crucial, because some guitar players can be very calculated."

THROB, PRIMAL SCREAM

"The last time I saw them play, Throb was doing a good job of standing up, but he made a good racket. The problem is, on the records, I don't know what's Innes and what's Throb. But Primal Scream are a good band."

KEVIN SHIELDS, MY BLOODY VALENTINE

"Really good. Emotive. He knows what counts. That second album is great. As long as, in the process of abusing your guitar, you make an emotive sound then great, it’s not just pseudo art bullshit."

BERNARD SUMNER, NEW ORDER/ELECTRONIC

"The onty person I can compare his guitar playing to would be Neil Young, and I'm sure Bernard Butler would agree. The guitar playing on Joy Division, particularly the live stuff on the box set, is so intense. It's like the way Bernard is as a person: why use 30 words where three will suffice? It’s to the point and completely instinctive. It’s amazing, but he just can't be arsed to practise."

==============================================

BE MY GUEST

10 momentous collaborators

MORRISSEY

From 1982 to 1987, Morrissey and Marr were the post-punk Lennon and McCartney. "He brought something original to pop music which will never happen again,' said Johnny recently. ‘There's something I had with him that II never have with anyone else.'

BRYAN FERRY

Immediately after The Smiths, Marr adapted instrumental B-side ‘Money Changes Everything' into Ferry's single 'The Right Stuff' and played on his 1988 album, Bete Noir. Johnny: ‘Bryan collects guitar players like most people collect guitars.'

DAYID BYRNE 

Marr added voluptuous, ripping guitar to four tracks on the final Talking Heads album, Naked, in 1988. The single 'Nothing But Flowers' contains a sparkling African high-life riff strongly reminiscent of “This Charming Man*.

DAYID CROSBY

A post-Smiths jam session with one of Mam's childhood gutar gods produced two half-songs which were never finished. Johnny: "What's this little scruff from Wythenshawe doing in David Crosby’s bedroom?"

CHRISSIE HYNDE

Marr played on the 1989 Pretenders album, Windows On The World, played six dates with the band and co-wrote several tracks with Hynde. "It was like love at first sight between us," she said. ‘It didn't come to anything because of bad timing.*

MATT JOHNSON

A pre-Smiths partnership rekindled, Marr played on The The's 1989 album, Mind Bomb, and co-wrote 1993's Dusk with Johnson. Johnny: ‘Again, we became very, very close. All my collaborations - Morrissey, Matt Johnson and Bernard - they've been very close because all of us are intense."

KIRSTY MacCOLL

MacColl sang backing vocals on several Smiths singles. Marr returned the favour on her 1989 album, Kite, and 1991’s Electric Landlady. Johnny described her songwriting as ‘very close to Morrissey... really funny and really tortured."

BILLY BRAGG

A recurring relationship spanning both the Smiths and Electronic years. Marr played on Bragg's 1986 album, Talking To The Taxman About Poetry, plus 1991's Don't Try This At Home and 1995's William Bloke.

IAN McCULLOCH

Marr and Mac wrote an album together in 1993 which mysteriously vanished from a courier van between Manchester and Liverpool. Mac: “The music was great, but whatever happened was right because it wasn't my path and it wasn't Johnny's."

MIKE PICKERING

M People founder and godfather of Manchester house scene. Recruited Marr for his Quando Quango single "Atom Rock’ in 1984 and again on M People's 1997 album, Fresco. “He's the best guitarist around," says Pickering. ‘He's so versatile. He can listen to a track and come up with 30 variations and styles to put on it. He's almost like a human sampler.'

==============================================

TWIN PEAKS

Electronic rate the greatest techno-pop duos of all time

SUICIDE seminal Noo Yawk electro-sleaze punks

Bernard: “Joy Division played a gig with Suicide. We were great and they were great as well. Also, they were kind of underground, and what I find missing these days is there’s not much underground music. A couple of times me and Johnny have said, 'Let’s do a track like Suicide’.’’

Johnny: “Yeah - it’s always at four in the morning and the next day it always sounds rubbish.”

SOFT CELL perfumed whores of the techno-pop boudoir.

Bernard: “I liked 'Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’. I was jealous of a couple of songs they wrote, and Dave Ball was a great keyboard player.”

Johnny: “Cannon and Ball, there's another one.”

PET SHOP BOYS arch keyboard romantics and sometime Electronic members.

Bernard: “New Order used to play their first album every day at breakfast when we were making Brotherhood. We made it in London and Dublin and we were all living together like The Beatles in Help! Hooky made the toast.”

Johnny: “The Smiths were the Pet Shop Boys you could sit down to.”

CABARET VOLTAIRE Sheffield pioneers on a proto-techno tip.

Bernard: “At the very start of New Order we recorded some material with Cabaret Voltaire, just after Ian [Curtis] died. They were very kind to us, helped us out. I’ve got very fond thoughts about Cabaret Voltaire.”

YELLO The Swiss Pet Shop Boys, complete with comedy moustaches and inch-thick irony.

Johnny: “There was a time when they were all right. A bit over-produced, a bit contrived, but clever.”

JESUS AND MARY CHAIN battling brothers of howling metallic noisecore.

Johnny: “I saw one of their early gigs in Tottenham Court Road and it was good, but it should have been longer. I know that was kind of the point, but they were really interesting - they had loads of guts. And then, because I'd seen them live, I always found their records to be surprisingly corporate, which is a shame.”

DAF early Eighties Diisseldorf duo whose homoerotic, totalitarian techno resembled New Order in lederhosen.

Bernard: “I’m not familiar with them.”

Johnny: “What was that great 12-inch they did? 'Do The Mussolini’? Oh yeah, it wasn’t that great, was it?”

THE KLF cash-torching, tank-driving, art-trashing, wildlife-loving disco situationists.

Bernard: “Fucking scousers.”

Johnny: “But hang on, they gave money away, didn’t they? So they can't have been real scousers.,.”

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SOME DISTANT MEMORIES

The Electronic albums

ELECTRONIC (Factory, 1991)

Hard-wired techno-pop meets gliding electro balladry. Stand-out moments include the punishing stormtrooper disco of “Feel Every Beat" and Bernard swapping dry put-downs with Neil Tennant on mournful lament "The Patience Of A Saint": "Why should I care/l'd rather watch drying paint," Remastered and licensed to Parlophone in 1994. with the added bonus of debut single “Getting Away With It". Ideal soundtrack for doomed, bittersweet love affairs.

RAISE THE PRESSURE (Parlophone. 1996)

Widescreen Italo-house meets lush guitar pastures, all sprinkled with a new mood of Prozac-tinged optimism. Stand-out moments include Johnny's Bacharach-esque melody and Bernard's Dean Martin-style crooning on "Out Of My League", plus symphonic disco epic "Second Nature”. A trifle too leisurely and polished, but absurdly underrated. Johnny: "We were a bit too painstaking over the second album, to the detriment of some good songs." Includes Sumner’s bizarre Situationist rant on inner sleeve re: the state of the nation. Ideal soundtrack for driving across Denmark.

TWISTED TENDERNESS (Parlophone, 1999)

Chunky riffs and frazzled chemical beats heavily outnumber jaunty synthesizer ditties. Stand-out moments include the harmonica-driven melodrama of imminent single ’Vivid' and the woozily magnificent title track, possibly the finest Electronic tune yet. Johnny: “My focus in the studio was far less samples, basslines and drum beats, and far more what I was doing as a guitar player. Technology still excites me, I just realised that I'm more excited - and possibly more exciting - when I play guitar." Ideal soundtrack for a post-Tarantino heist thriller.