Cuttings

GET THE MESSAGE 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,...

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 ...

THE BEST IS FRET TO COME • It’s time the tale were told. . .At last - four years after the Smiths split shocked the world - JOHNNY MARR steels himself to tell his side of the hitherto untold story of the band that illuminated ’80s Britpop. DANNY KELLY helps him lay the ghost to rest in a no-holds-Marred two-part interview, continuing next week with Johnny’s life after The Smiths. All pictures by KEVIN CUMMINS "Journalists who lie/Are stealing their money." Morrissey, February 1991 "There are more good things to talk about than bad things but, inevitably, people will find the bad things more interesting." Johnny Marr, April 1991 This is it. The breaking of an awful silence; the removal of a particularly impenetrable pair of dark glasses; the lancing of a persistent boil. Something like that. This is it! Johnny Marr and me and the story of The Smiths. Let me explain. Marr and I are passing acquaintances, ships that have passed in the rock n‘ roll night. Our respecti...

WHAT IS JOHNNY MARR PLAYING AT? Since THE SMITHS split in 1987, MORRISSEY has gone on to bigger if not necessarily better things, while JOHNNY MARR has been living the ‘have guitar will travel’ lifestyle, playing with everyone from TALKING HEADS to KIRSTY MacCOLL. Now with his ‘official’ membership of THE THE it looks like the guitar hero of the ’80s is back. But has he left it too late and are all those Smiths fans really still waiting? LEN BROWN sifts through the evidence. IT WAS two years ago last Friday (May 19) since The Smiths first cracked. On almost exactly the sixth anniversary of their first encounter (May 18, 1981) - when Johnny Marr rang Morrissey’s bell - the most original and most prolific songwriting partnership since Lennon & McCartney last saw each other. Since then, Morrissey’s lyrical output has hardly diminished; from ‘Suedehead’ and the rapidly created ‘Viva Hate’ through to ‘The Last Of The Famous International Playboys’ and ‘Interesting Drug’, the Mozzer’s ra...

The Thoughts of Chairman Marr THE SMITHS have just conquered the Yanks and now go into hibernation to write and record their follow-up album to the chart-topping “Meat Is Murder”. JOHNNY MARR tells a perspiring Barry Mcllheney that it will be a return to rhythm and blues and the music of John Lee Hooker and Elvis Presley. He also talks about Morrissey, Bryan Ferry, Keith Richards and Barry Grant but he only likes two of them. Chairman Marr and guitar snapped by a curious Tom Sheehan THE house that Johnny bought just after Christmas sits some six miles out of Manchester city centre. Up the M56, past the signs for Rusholme and Whalley Range, down a few leafy avenues and suddenly you're there. Smiths drummer Mike Joyce is acting courier for the day and he gets out to open up the gates. Nothing too ostentatious, you understand, but a nice enough place and a million miles away in property values from the Marr family home just 10 minutes up t' road. A few of the local schoolgirls sto...