1991 04 27 Johnny Marr NME

MARR'S ON LIFE

• Last week he broke his four-year silence on The Smiths; this week JOHNNY MARR takes us on a guided tour of the gap between his old band and ELECTRONIC, a rock’n’roll world that includes philosophy from Keith Richards, bouquets from David Bowie, a squatting Bryan Ferry and Marr’s own view on ‘Kill Uncle’.
Story: DANNY KELLY Pictures: KEVIN CUMMINS

A profoundly deep sigh, a luxuriant stretch of the limbs and a boyish beam that lights up the famous face; Johnny Marr’s ordeal-by-nosiness is all but over.

Three hours of taut interviewing has unpicked four years of silence and, to Marr’s huge and obvious relief, his version of The Smiths Story is, at long long last, on the record.

The mood has changed. A lighter-headed, jauntier Johnny Marr now guides us down the twisting trail he's followed from the sour twilight of The Smiths to the gleaming chrome dawn of Electronic...

“I was 23 when the band split. At that age it’s difficult to open music papers week after week and see yourself portrayed as the man who betrayed pop, as the man who betrayed the Prince of Pop! And none of my mates defended me - I was the bloke who’d taken the bread from their childrens’ mouths...”

Blamed for the demise of the group, Johnny Marr spent his first post-Smiths months sheltering from the shitstorm. The industrial strength vilification might’ve unhinged a normal 23-year-old, but Marr, unbeknownst to his snarling detractors, possessed a secret weapon, Wisdom. And the sage source of this priceless knowledge will add another chapter to the unfolding rock 'n' roll myth that Johnny Marr's life story has become. Come on down, Mr Common Sense, Mr Moderation, Mr Level Headed! Come on down Keith Richards!

That's what he said, though the notion of cadaverous Keith as a crisis counsellor seems about as likely as Saddam Hussein hosting Aspel.

"It's true,” he shrugs. “It’ll sound corny - ‘Johnny Spills The Keith Richards Beans', but... I first met him in London when he phoned me and asked if I had a certain guitar he wanted to play, and would I bring it over. Which I did.

“ I also met him in America just after The Smiths split. I know, people will say ‘typical Johnny - leaves the band then goes off to LA to hang out with The Rolling Stones’, but it was actually an enlightening experience. He's very bright, very intelligent and extremely engaging. Alive. In every way the opposite to what people expect him to be."

What? No narcotic buffet?

"He doesn't do drugs anymore. People still give them to him but he doesn't take them. He sits there with a great big joint burning away between his fingers, other stuff too, but he doesn't take them .. . he doesn’t offer them round either... I was shaking...

"Anyway, I was very surprised when he started telling me, ‘look, Johnny, the music business really isn’t worth knocking yourself out for. It's not worth killing yourself or stepping on other people. There's far more important things in life; like retaining your own perspective, and sense of reality, your own reality'

“He gave me the most down to earth attitude I’d heard in years and years. It was very strange that I should hear it from him, from Keith Richards.!'

Pick the bones out of that one, Axl you marshmallow. Johnny Marr’s been advised to slow down, to stop and smell the flowers, by Keith Richards! How rock ‘n’ roll can one man get?

MARR'S IMMEDIATE post-Smiths plan was to start a new band, perhaps with some members of A Certain Ratio. The continued backlash put a stop to all that, however, and the guitarist went to work (fully aware of the cystitis it would induce in former fans) with sedated clotheshorse Bryan Ferry, an old hero of his.

“It was great, actually. When I worked with him I forgot all about what a big fan I was ’cos he was such an easy going, down-to-earth bloke...’’

Who lives in a castle!

“When I was with him, he was bedding down in the basement of his in-laws in London. It was a great laugh, a really good time.

“But I also did it because I was feeling so contrary. I was thumbing me nose at everyone who was on my back."

And it was while backing Ferry that Marr came most frighteningly face-to-face with the full impact of The Smiths’ fallout, realised the impossibility of fronting another band in the forseeable future, and sussed that his was going to be a long haul back:

' “I’ll tell you why I decided I had to disappear, to go underground. I was in America, doing Saturday Night Live with Bryan. I went back - to the hotel and got a phone call in my room. It was the friend of some girl who was supposedly going to jump off a roof because she'd read about the Smiths split and had now confirmed that it was true. I thought to myself ‘whooah! I’m gonna have to rethink all this and put my idea for a group on ice.’

“As well as all that kind of nonsense, I didn't want the responsibility of forming a group that would’ve just been compared to The Smiths, that wouldn't have been given a chance. Plainly I was just fed up with the whole thing. I just wanted to be anonymous..

CONVINCED THAT he had to bide his time, to wait for the giant shadow cast by The Smiths to evaporate, Marr spent 1968 and '89 as “a session man - nothing wrong with that.’’ The phone never stopped. What were the best and worst offers you had?

“The worst is no problem. That was from Midge Ure. He had the audacity to invite me to play in his so-called ’all star' group for the Mandela gig. And he publicised the fact that I'd be playing before he'd even asked me." An unfamiliar note of real contempt invades his voice. “We're talking about a guy who slagged The Smiths off rotten ..

There was, too, a David Bowie interlude, wasn't there?

“Yeah,” he giggles, “I blew that one. I was contacted by David Bowie's people when he was setting up The Serious Nosebleed Tour, or whatever he called it... The Glass Spider Tour, that’s it. I got back to my hotel room to find it full of flowers and then I got this phone call. It's like ‘Hi, Johnny, David here - I’m ringing from the Big T. Where’s that, I’m wondering, Telford? Turns out he’s ringing from Toronto...

“Peter Frampton pipped me for the job,” he sniggers sarcastically. “There was no way I was gonna climb out of a glass spider - especially not at Maine Road - I’ve seen Spinal Tap! I’m a big Bowie fan - well, I used to be - but I just couldn't see myself in the platforms and the Suzi Quatro haircut either...”

Then came your sojourn with everybody's favourite comedy skiffle group The The.

He must have caught a hint of something in my voice: “You don’t have to be polite. Yesterday someone said to me ‘what are you doing in The The? People f—ing hate you being in that band!' But I defend The The and my involvement with The The totally. I've total faith.”

We should be thankful for small mercies. Suddenly Marr’s telling me that The Smiths nearly never happened at all!

“I've known Matt for ages.The first time I went to London to try and get a deal for The Smiths, Matt let me stay on his floor. I’d met him before I’d formed The Smiths arid we got on really well; it was something good. Had he lived in Manchester, or me in London, then I would've been a member of The The since 1981 or ’82!"

The horror, the horror...

“Matt might not be popular in the press," he ploughs on, “but he's popular. I reckon we’re the biggest cult group in the world."

But not as big as the group with which Marr has chosen to make his return to the harsh centre stage spotlight. That glare, and the crackle of anticipation that Electronic have generated, has come as a shock.

“It's been a consuming passion with me and Barney for over two years now, but I must admit I was surprised by all the fuss caused by ‘Getting Away With It' and the Los Angeles show. It wasn't till I 'd read the press that I realised how important people reckoned it was."

A thought - a scarey thought - occurs. The three people with whom Marr has committed himself make an astonishing list. Morrissey, Matt Johnson and Barney Sumner ... hardly the Marx Brothers, are they? How would you compare this trinity of miserable gits?

A diplomatic titter follows: “It would be disrespectful to try and compare them; they're all really different and unique ...’’

Crawler!

"But they do have something in common. I can only work with people who are obsessed with what they do, and they all are.."

It was inevitable, I guess, that we'd arrive back with the frail carcass of Morrissey. Marr's attitude to his old spar is neither bitter nor twisted. It's something sadder than that really, a kind of amused indifference. The pair of them live about 400 yards apart yet they haven’t spoken for four years, and Marr's knowledge of the Moz solo canon is strictly limited.

"I thought 'Viva Hate' was very good," he begins, before damning it with the rest of the sentence: “I listened to it once in its entirety and I haven’t heard it since. No, I haven’t heard his new one at all. I only ever hear his records on the radio, so if s possible I’ve even missed a couple of his singles altogether.”

Hasn’t the great man's decline and his ever more bizarre search for collaborators (The Polecats, I ask you! Who’s next? Showaddywaddy?) caused you even the slightest pang?

“Not really... I know his problem... He's still got a very strong talent but the people around him are really boring and ordinary. Until he sorts that out he's not gonna get what he wants.”

In recent interviews Morrissey has taken to attacking not Marr but Barney Sumner (“no talent whatsoever”) and Electronic (“‘Getting Away With It' was the worst record I heard last year”). There is the unmistakeable smack of thwarted love about these pronouncements, a sort of “if-I-can’t-have-him-then-nobody-can” pathos, like the 'best friend' mind-games kids weave in playgrounds.

Johnny Marr is not impressed with any of this. With a sad shrug he responds to the darts aimed at Barney: “I know it’s an old hat phrase now, but in Morrissey’s case it really does still have some meaning.. he really should get a life..."

JOHNNY MARR has a life. Already fine, it's about to get better. Next week (while Moz is negotiating his first live dates in two-and-a-half years) 'Get The Message’ will scorch to Number One in the singles chart, there to stay for 12 weeks. Or something. Even if it’s only Number One for ten weeks it’ll still suffice as a classy, if not quite perfect, harbinger for Electronic's imminent and often marvellous debut LP.

And with all this, Johnny Marr’s long battle with a history that sought to bend him beneath its weight will be won. It's a victory for his quiet, dignified way of going about things; it’s a vindication of a blazing, undiminished talent; and it’s a proof positive that, even in the nasty old sewer of pop, the glittering prizes do sometimes go to the good guys. To the decent Johnnys.