2006 03 Q Classic Morrissey and The Story of Manchester - Part 9 - Johnny Marr

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Guitar genius Johnny Marr tells Andrew Male about pinching record sleeves as a kid, the shadow of the Moors Murders and the irresistible rise of Manchester’s late-’80s club culture.

ONE OF THE MOST important decisions The Smiths ever made was not signing to Factory Records. In 1983, with the Hacienda celebrating its first birthday and the release of New Order’s Blue Monday, Manchester’s musical identity was bound up in the stark, glacial aesthetic of this ambitious little empire operated by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus out of 86 Palatine Road, Didsbury.

The Smiths, between 1983 and their demise in 1987, created a new identity for Manchester - romantic, mordant, cinematic and, at times, blushingly celebratory. Yet, by the time of the split, Johnny Marr at least was caught up in an altogether more high-tech, hedonistic mood emerging in Manchester. He left The Smiths and, with Bernard Sumner, formed the dance-music supergroup Electronic. “I was only 23,” he explains down the phone from his Manchester home. “When Electronic formed there was a revolution in music, in club culture, in drugs, in fashion. And in spite of having made seven albums or six albums or whatever it was, I would have been an absolute idiot to miss it.”

Currently “trying to finish my next masterpiece” with deep guitar groovers The Healers (their second album is due out at the end of May), Marr is keen to look back on the musical history of the city that made him - from teenage Johnny Thunders wannabe to guitarist with the greatest British band of the ’80s... and beyond.

Growing up in Manchester, were you aware it was a town with a rich music heritage?

Well, my parents had come over from Ireland, and I was brought up to regard Manchester as a city of great excitement and opportunity. I used to live about five minutes from the city centre, which was kind of my local shop. I was in there pretty much every night after school, so my first memories of the city's culture was of scooter-boys and suedeheads, kids wearing Crombies and brogues, and Royals, and two-tones - very much connected with the football scene and the West Indian scene.

Coming from a family of Irish immigrants, we were also aware of the club scene as well. I came from a very young family, so my parents and aunties and uncles were going out most nights in all the Irish clubs. It was this very exciting but hard town, and there were a lot of bands playing, sort of show bands and cabaret bands. That’s what happened in the inner city, but I moved from there into the suburbs in 1973, when I was 12 or something, and that’s when I got into a different kind of groove.

How did that change you and your outlook?

It changed me massively because I moved to a place that... although it was the biggest housing estate in Europe, I thought I’d moved to Beverly Hills. More importantly, the kids out there in south Manchester were pretty clued up, and by about 1976 I started to hear about the first lot of punks, which is when I started to see a new Manchester music culture. My best friend at school had a brother who was the bass player in The Nosebleeds, and they were like the regular support group and poorer cousins of Slaughter & The Dogs. The suburb that I moved to was Wythenshawe in south Manchester. South Manchester had a fairly bohemian and artistic community, and there were a lot of people who were forming bands who were older than me. When punk rock broke, and because of the way it broke at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, the message and the rhetoric of punk was taken very much to heart by the people of Manchester. Obviously the fashion and the music were important, but the large part of what it meant to Mancunians was political dissatisfaction.

The punk message was reappropriated?

Yeah, exactly. The rhetoric was gospel in Manchester. The ethos was a DIY ethos, and it was actually created and put into action by Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, because the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch came out of Manchester and that was the touchpaper that punk was going to light. Spiral Scratch was actually quite shocking, because of the content, the sleeve, and because it could be done. It would have meant much less had it not been a great record. So that was the real super-event. Actually, I might be wrong, but as I remember it, it was available before Anarchy In The UK, so you were hearing all about this impending Sex Pistols release but in fact a bunch of lads in school had Spiral Scratch. [Anarchy In The UK was released first, but then withdrawn by EMI.]

I remember punk at our school. It felt quite illicit, like something you weren’t meant to be talking about...

Undoubtedly, and this sort of added to its attraction. Very quickly, I started going into town every Saturday, and occasionally on weeknights, to nick record covers. I used to stick them up my school jumper. On the street outside the Virgin Records store I saw some punks, and they looked incredible. They didn’t have mohicans or silly bondage trousers, they had Levi’s that had been turned into drainpipes.

These guys were essentially friends of rent boys in town; they had side-parted wedges and were like more aggressive casuals, Perry Boys. They had V-neck jumpers and drainpipes and pointed shoes or baseball boots - the Adidas version of what are now Converse - and they were looking like what’s now the New York look: sort of side-parting with a fringe. Everybody else had flares and 70s footballer haircuts and army jackets, looking very dour; these guys looked like dandies and quite dangerous. And, as always with street cultures, you describe the clothes as you describe the drugs.

What was your first attempt to look punk?

I didn’t really jump in and follow punk. I was in a slightly different sort of pack to some of my school friends as I’d already started writing songs, and had been turned on to Patti Smith by Billy Duffy. When punk first hit I was too young, but over the period of about a year I appropriated the things I liked from the New York scene. Like a lot of my older mates, I started looking like Johnny Thunders, and that kind of suited me because the music that was being very quickly appropriated for my generation and sold to my generation I felt was pretty crap, and I felt I was doing something quite interesting by myself. I was quite cocky about that. I thought that me and my would-be group were better than The Lurkers. I started followed The Only Ones around and I was really hung up on Patti Smith, Raw Power and, obviously, the New York Dolls.

So when did you first hear about this man Steven Morrissey?

A couple of mates had bumped into him in Virgin Records on Market Street, which was the place to hang out. These friends of mine were keen readers of the music press, and Morrissey was getting a bit of a name for himself for writing pestering letters about the New York Dolls. This guy that we knew, Phil Fletcher, was kind of on the same trip, although he wasn’t a musician. So he had approached Morrissey in the Virgin shop and hooked him up with our mates, one of which was Billy [Duffy] . I was hanging out with Billy and they were trying to get a band together. Billy would tell me how the [Nosebleeds] rehearsals were going, so I got to understand that this was someone that was quite serious about singing and quite serious about writing words.

It’s weird that in the past Morrissey has been so reluctant to say that he was in a band before The Smiths. Do you think that was because The Smiths were so important to both of you - that’s where it all began and everything before then is irrelevant?

Yeah, I guess so. That’s the way I feel about it. But we both served our apprenticeships. So often people who wanted to sing were people who were just going to have a go for a year or so, whereas we knew we were in it for the long haul. So people who took themselves seriously as singers were kind of a rarity.

I used to float around those fringes, and a big night for me was when everyone went to see The Heartbreakers at The Ranch in, I think, 78. They wouldn’t let me in because I was too young, so I waited around outside. And I made a pact with myself to do something when the timing was right and my own generation would rise up [laughs] , and that was quite symbolic for me because it sort of set me apart.

Then, very quickly, I watched the dissolve of punk in Manchester, and new things started to come along. I started to see punk not so much as the letter A in the alphabet but as the letter Z in the old one. A lot of punk was just regurgitated pub rock and, hand on heart, a lot of the Dolls sound like that to me. The Stooges didn’t, but the Dolls - a lot of it is just fucking pub rock.

The first band that moved on was Joy Division, because you couldn’t pinpoint any one sort of strain of influence, and you still can’t. There seemed to be a kind of dark art at work.

They weren't trying to be The Rolling Stones or The Who. A lot of punk groups, except for maybe Wire and Subway Sect, were working on archetypes, whereas Joy Division didn’t do that.

There is a famous interview that Martin Hannet did where he explained why Joy Division sounded like Manchester. Could you hear that in their sound?

Yeah. I think there is a sense of wilderness, and there’s obviously an industrial sound. The moors were never that far away, you know, if you grew up in Manchester. And particularly because of the times and the Moors Murders, if you grew up in the late '60s and early 70s then you became very aware that the moors... encroached.

Plus, very pertinent to the Mancunian postpunk scene was German music, Eno, Iggy and the Velvets. Those influences have always been there for as long as I have been aware of it. Our London friends don’t have it so much as a touchstone, but Lou Reed and David Bowie were the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in Manchester. The Smiths is a different thing because we reacted against that really. I was trying to find my own pocket and my own space. Factory Records was important to The Smiths, because it gave us something to react against.

But there was never a decision that The Smiths would be on Factory?

When we first started, when it was just the two of us, I remember Morrissey going over to meet with Tony Wilson. I don’t quite know what went on at that meeting, but when he came back he was fairly galvanised to go and sign to Rough Trade, so that’s all that I know. I was working at a clothes shop in Manchester at the time, and Tony Wilson must have heard that I was a fair guitar player, because he came in and offered me a job with Section 25. And I knew Jez Kerr from A Certain Ratio. Jez was one of the top people really in Manchester - just his look and his aesthetics. He was very typical of what was going on there, you know.

So my mates were coming down to my shop, and I knew Mike Pickering pretty well, and Andrew Berry was very important. Andrew was DJ-ing at the Hacienda, and he and I lived together - in the flat we were literally listening to the actual records that were being played at Hacienda, so a lot of that was basically 50 per cent new white music like ACR or - this is early ’80s now - James Chance, or The Birthday Party, J Walter Negro, Loose Joints and Lovebug Starski and all of that kind of stuff, and the stuff on the Z label.

I’m a guitar player and I’m forming a band, so I’m not going to form a band that sounds like any of those records. I was 17... 18, I’d moved out of my parents', I had a job and I’d hooked up with a songwriting partner who was as desperate and as driven as myself. I felt like - it’s a cliche - the city was my playground. Who was going to stop me? I worked in town, all my friends were hairdressers, there was a ton of second-hand shops... So it was affordable clothing, affordable records and affordable instruments, and it really did feel like Year Zero.

It was that weird thing. The Smiths sounded completely fresh, but, to my ears, you still sounded like a Manchester band...

Well, it was more to do with the references. There was a feeling we had that, no matter what, there was something in the music. It didn’t take a sleeve design for us to have an aspect of that fucked-up late-'60s beehive northern grimness about us. There’s a lot made about our differences, but the things that Morrissey and I had in common were very specific and pertinent to us. And partly it was how we were affected by our upbringings in poor Irish families in the ’60s. That’s in there, and our intrigue with and observations of that lifestyle.

Do you think being based in Manchester was also part of the undoing of The Smiths?

No, I don’t think so. For me it’s been a preservation, even for the three years that I wasn't living here, because there’s a sensibility here that is downright fucking cool, and I will live here because it’s my roots. I live here because it has a creative sensibility about it and plenty of good judgement calls. I always heard the best music when I was living in Manchester, and I still do.

What was the reason behind working with Bernard on Electronic? The desire to work with a Manchester hero?

No, it was more personal than that, really. Both of us needed to work with someone on a personal level who understood the trip that both of us had been through with our groups. We were two musicians who wanted to get away from the suffocating politics of the group . At the same time it was OK for duos and DJs and nongroups to make records, and that really appealed to Bernard and me. We saw ourselves more in the tradition of Byrne and Eno with a lot of technotronics and FX, so the times were perfect because we wanted to get away from the personal politics of the four-headed beast of the band. But at the same time, it was all right to make records with machines and not have to be four guys stood up against a wall.

So was the actual set-up of The Smiths, the very nature of it, its undoing in the end?

Yeah, that was one part that put pressure on us. I was only 23. When Electronic formed the music was intriguing and potentially more relevant than what had come before, and I wanted my band to be involved with that. It was evident that that couldn't be the case with The Smiths. I mean, I wanted us to be part of that. That isn’t to say that suddenly we were going to start wearing day-glo T-shirts, but it would have been handy to kind of lose the Cilla Black records for a while...

So how was it playing Smiths songs at the Manchester v Cancer gig?

It was interesting. It wasn’t some shambolic Manchester rave-up by any means. It was obviously good to see Doves, and New Order’s Joy Division set was really quite intense, but for me to play those songs... it was good because we sounded good doing it and everybody went for it. I didn’t get too teary or anything; I’ll save that for another time.

Do you now have a standard response when people ask the inevitable question?

I’ve been trying to answer that question for however many years, and I don't have any sort of pat answer really.

Do you think the door is closed on the question of a Smiths reunion then?

There’s been... so much bad stuff going under the bridge, which is not one of my most eloquent quotes. I’m fine to let bygones be bygones, but bygones keep coming by unfortunately, and you wonder what the hell is going on. There were just too many agendas going around. I’m an easy-going feller, so God knows. I’m not in any rush... No, I'll stop being coy. I'm not at all into it. I wouldn’t want to get together and play those songs with those guys again. But good luck to them. ■