CHAPTER ONE

MANCHESTER

“My first memory of guitar playing was this uncle,” recalls Johnny Marr. “With big sideburns and Chelsea boots. He was well cool. He had a guitar, and did a little bit of playing. I thought he was really hip… I remember this red Stratocaster. I can recall the smell of the case and everything.”

Johnny Marr’s love of the guitar isn’t unique. Millions of us have fallen under its spell over the years. Millions of us have gone on to learn to play. While some went on to become professionals, a tiny percentage actually make it big. And some became the most important guitarists of their generation. Marr is simply that – one of the most important players of his generation. His passion for the instrument is written across almost every record he has made and in nearly every interview he has given. Throughout his career, whatever has been spinning around him, it has always been about the music and the guitar. “For better or worse,” Johnny has said, “it happened for me. I wanted to be known for what I did, not for what I said.”

Marr joined a tradition stretching back decades. Johnny himself has been keen to emphasise that tradition, and over the years has referenced many musicians and producers who have influenced his own playing. Just as Marr dug back through old records to find the best guitar players he could find, so subsequent generations will use Johnny as their own route to the past. To understand Johnny, it is worth tracking back through the history of the world’s sexiest instrument, to establish where Johnny Marr came from.

From the Thirties onwards, the guitar was the natural successor to the piano as the leading instrument in popular music. Rock ’n’ roll guitar as we know it is born out of the American country blues players of the early decades of the twentieth century. Faced with a choice between the piano or the more portable guitar, the itinerant players of the early years of the century chose the piano. While the guitar allowed a musician to carry his own instrument from dime bar to juke joint, the key thing about the piano was that – above a hot and sweaty Saturday night crowd – the latter could be heard. While playing one’s own guitar every night was preferable to turning up at a gig only to find that the venue’s piano was out of tune, missing strings, or half a block away from the bar, the very fact that the audience could actually hear you was more important.

However, throughout the Twenties and Thirties, various people experimented with amplification, and by the time the guitar could be wired up to a speaker and heard as loudly as a piano, the future of pop music was etched out. A guitar player could drift from venue to venue, from town to town, and carry his own instrument with him. Migration from the rural southern states to the cities of the industrial north meant that itinerant guitar players could play night after night to a different audience and refine their sound and their playing. The guitarist became the leader of the dance, the bringer of news, the bearer of joys and sorrows. Both the musician and his instrument became adaptable and personal. As the guitarist hugged his instrument close to his chest, he seemed to welcome the audience into his soul too.

Such was the genesis of the modern rock guitarist. The wandering bluesman trawling the bars of Chicago for work isn’t far from the modern rock star, globe-trotting around the world with a heap of flight cases in tow. Maybe the money’s better, but the culture and ethos is pretty much the same.

We need guitar bands.

Throughout the developing years up to and including the Second World War the guitar became established both as an orchestral instrument in the major jazz and dance bands of the era and as a solo instrument in itself. On both sides of the Atlantic, as Fifties pop became more sophisticated, guitarists such as Bert Weedon and Chet Atkins became celebrity instrumentalists in their own right. While early rock ’n’ rollers such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were pianists, it was Buddy Holly who really cemented the image of the guitar band and established its format for ever more. His clipped, rough-strummed songs were irresistible, his band The Crickets the perfect foil for Holly’s own delivery. In the UK, Buddy’s influence was picked up by the young Hank Marvin, and his group The Shadows became England’s premier guitar band, both in their own right and as backing for the young Cliff Richard. Guitar bands flourished throughout the country in their wake – influenced by Holly, The Shads, and the increasingly available imports of American country, blues, early R&B and soul records. Across the UK, the generation of players who would re-invigorate pop music as never before picked up the instrument and started to copy what they heard. Lonnie Donnegan and Hank Marvin learned from Buddy, and older blues players like Elmore James and Robert Johnson. Throughout the Fifties, Brian Jones, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, John Lennon, Keith Richards and George Harrison took these influences, copied their favourite American sounds on cheap guitars plugged into the family radiogram, and reinvented rock ’n’ roll.

It was Dick Rowe at Decca Records who famously turned down The Beatles in 1962 on the grounds that “guitar groups are dead.” By the time The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and the Yardbirds had proved him wrong, the guitar was established as the weapon of choice in pop and rock. Nearly all the bands and artists who established long-term careers in pop from the early Sixties onwards did so with the guitar as the leading sound in their band or backing. It was Jimi Hendrix who – when the major players were delving back into the rootsy blues past of the instrument – picked up the Fender Stratocaster and re-invented the guitar. No longer simply a tool with which great music was made, the guitar itself became as much the maker of the music as the players themselves. Hendrix gave the guitar a new language, offered musicians on every instrument a code by which they could investigate not only song-writing and music construction, but could explore the machine, the instrument itself. Hendrix took the guitar apart with both an actual and a metaphorical screwdriver, and gave the instrument its soul. From Jimi onwards, the guitar was a vehicle that would transport audiences to other worlds, a means by which future players would boldly go where no man had gone before.

Out of Hendrix came psychedelia, prog rock, heavy metal; likewise soul, blues and jazz were all enriched by his work. The guitar was re-established as the single most important musical instrument on the planet. Clapton, The Stones, Zappa, Free, The Grateful Dead all carried the guitar into the Seventies alive and well, prepared to excite us, enliven us, delight and move us. Through Ziggy and the glam rock phenomenon, Mick Ronson, Phil Manzanera and Dave Hill kept glitter-ball acts such as Bowie, Roxy and Slade deeply rooted in guitar-based rock. It was here that the schoolboy Johnny Marr would join the journey. Pop was exciting again; fun, silly, stylish, cool. Ronnie Wood’s barrel-house chops made The Faces one of the best guitar boogie bands. Status Quo kept it simple, with twelve bars kicked firmly to the floor. More articulate acoustic pickers like John Martyn incorporated technologies into their playing that offered new sounds and new landscapes for guitarists that still inform the sounds of U2 and Coldplay. King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp merged the heaviest of juggernaut guitar sounds with a shimmering tape-delay that is heard in chart bands well into the Twenty-First century too.

Just as all this potential and variety threatened to crawl up its own backside in self-regard, punk purified the art even further. Gone were the pixie hats and the mystical visions of other worlds. Out came the guitar, the bass and the drums, and up went the volume. If ‘Anarchy In The UK’ recalled nothing more than The Who at their mid-Sixties best, it did remind everyone that the most exciting thing in the world was the sound of a sneering front man spitting new music out over a crunching guitar – only a step or two away from Buddy Holly and the early Stones in its simplicity and ferocity. For two or three years punk was driven by three-chord wonders that refreshed the entire music scene, much as Hendrix had done a decade before. If old heads rallied against the sounds of Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex and the Pistols, it was surely only because they subconsciously realised that they had themselves lost sight of what thirteen-year-old kids living on low income in a time of political paucity really wanted out of life.

By the early Eighties, style had overtaken content, and pop was in serious danger of collapsing as a medium. Bored by the simplicity of punk, some bands adopted a more edgy, creative role. Bands such as Talking Heads, XTC, Squeeze and Elvis Costello defined a new genre – ‘new wave.’

For big-selling chart pop however, make-up and glamour took over from energy and content in a sub-Warhol celebrity-driven world. Eighties pop became musically bland – Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Wham! and Duran Duran favoured new technologies and bad make-up, their songs superbly fashioned to appeal to the Lady Di-generation of Thatcherite wannabees. But music was so glossed with dazzling sheen that any decent content – if it was there – was invisible. Lyrically, pop could not have become more superficial. Synthesizers and sequencers took over from rocking electric guitars. At some point in the early Eighties someone was going to have to break this bubble of self-absorption and vapidity and get back to basics, or Dick Rowe’s prediction would have come true – albeit twenty years late. We needed guitar bands again.

And so, on a white charger from the depths of Greater Manchester, came the saviours. Enter… The Smiths.

* * *

Johnny Marr was born John Martin Maher in Chorlton on Medlock, Manchester, on October 31, 1963, a Halloween baby in the bleakest winter that the north-west of England had seen in decades. John’s birthplace was close to the centre of one of England’s toughest, most engaging cities. Victorian Prime Minister David Lloyd George was born in the area almost exactly one hundred years before Maher, while novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst both lived there. Buzzing around the nearby Manchester College of Art, LS Lowry and fashion designer Ossie Clarke would be regularly spotted in the area. Today the area still houses the BBC and Manchester University, St Mary’s Hospital and Manchester Museum. As it was at the time of John Maher’s birth, the area remains one of the main centres of activity on the fringes of the city centre.

Maher was born on Everton Road. Nicknamed ‘Little Ireland’, the area was awash with Irish immigrants recently settled in the area, and the Mahers was one such family. John’s father was part of the mass emigration from Eire in the years following the Second World War, when country people from all over Ireland fled to Dublin in search of work. As jobs in the Irish capital became increasingly hard to find, they crossed the Irish Sea. Settling in Manchester, John Snr married Frances Doyle in 1962, and John – who would become known as Johnny – was born the following autumn. His mum and dad were young – his father only twenty years old, his mother a mere seventeen. The family, who originated in Kildare, lived in Ardwick, a little further from the city centre than Johnny’s birthplace, a tough part of town with – like Harlem – its own nationally known theatre, The Apollo. Many of John Snr’s relatives had made the journey to Manchester at the same time. “Four families lived next door to each other,” says Johnny. “All Irish immigrants, all very young. There were parties every night.” In the next street there were some seven related families. It seemed as though the entire extended family had moved to Manchester together – all of them young and spending much of their leisure time together, many of them working as labourers around the north-west.

The Maher family – like so many émigré Irish – carried the tradition of Irish music with them to England, and Johnny’s father was an accomplished accordion player. While he described his father’s occupation as “digging holes in roads”, Johnny’s parents were actually soon to be involved in promoting country music themselves. “Because it was a big family,” recalls Johnny, “there were always christenings and weddings, and there was always what seemed like this same band playing at these functions.” John Snr taught his son to play the harmonica and the accordion, and before he hit his teens, Johnny was experimenting with the guitar. “My parents had Beatles records, but they were more into the Irish stuff, country music, which spilled over into the Everly Brothers – who were really popular in my household.” ‘Walk Right Back’, by The Everlys, is the first record that Johnny can remember being played around the house. Jim Reeves, and what Johnny came to refer to later as ‘bad country’ – the music of people like Hank Williams and Chet Atkins – was popular around the house too. Even the music Johnny didn’t like influenced him. He still claims not to enjoy country music, saying that “no matter how much you believe otherwise, your upbringing indelibly affects your development.” “It gives you your musical personality,” says Johnny, “and in some cases your entire musical vocabulary.” Even when he was ten or eleven years old and getting into glam rock, the influence was still there. Deliberately and unwittingly, Johnny’s family shaped his early musical aspirations, and though he still retains an aversion for country, “the influence remains.”

Johnny would spend long periods back in the home country, sometimes enjoying as much as four months of the year in Ireland. Alongside his immediate family in Manchester, Ireland itself influenced him strongly too – the atmosphere and the people. “The Irish connection is a big one,” he has said during a webchat on jmarr.com. “There is a sensibility that affects your life… passion, humour, irreverence.” Johnny was aware of the poetic nature of his Irish-ness, of its occasional surreality, and of the darkness in the Irish soul that is sometimes hard to ignore.

As a kid though, most of Johnny’s earliest influences were most certainly poetic and occasionally surreal, but rarely dark. His first musical heroes were amongst the most incandescent of all. One of the first was Marc Bolan, and T. Rex was one of his earliest and most abiding influences. Bolan epitomised all that was fine about post-Beatles pop, his guitar playing ballsy and rooted in the electric blues of Howlin’ Wolf, his image glamorous and elusive. “If it hadn’t been for Marc Bolan, Roxy Music and David Bowie,” Marr recalled in Designer magazine in 2001, “kids of my generation would have been completely screwed.” Glam gave access to pop that more sophisticated acts such as Little Feat denied the ten-year-old Maher. Sparks was another of the bands that turned Johnny on, at a time when the Bay City Rollers were perhaps the ghastly, inevitable alternative. At the same time, Keith Richards was one of Johnny’s earliest icons. For the young Johnny Maher, pop music soon became a major preoccupation and took a complete hold on his imagination. It was the perfect time to be growing up in pop, and to be heavily influenced by the music of the early Seventies was to be introduced to a thousand different sounds, such was the diversity of the material around: The Beatles, Stones, Neil Young, Motown, blues, rock and soul – the wealth and the breadth of Sixties and early Seventies pop was astonishing. Throughout these years, Johnny soaked it all up, his appetite for the next cool band enormous. As it was for so many born in the early Sixties, it was a route outside of the formal education system via which we learned about the world. “I didn’t really think the world made very much sense,” Johnny has said, “until I discovered pop music. Music made me understand.”

Like so many children whose imaginations were taken over by pop in the early Seventies, Maher would obsess over certain bands or albums for a while, and hungrily lap up every new influence as it came along. His music-crazy parents gave him a role model; “I learned the art of playing the same seven-inch twenty-seven times in succession from my mother,” said Johnny. His love of music was intuitive and instinctive, and Johnny has always preferred that to any academic route into music. “It seems to me there are two ways you can go, and neither would include musical school,” said Johnny when asked by author Martin Roach, in The Right To Imagination And Madness, whether a formal musical education would have helped his own development. “You can either come from the genetic thing, like I did, or you come from a completely non-musical situation… I don’t know anyone who’s had success from music school.” Tuition in a formal sense, was the last thing the young Johnny Maher needed, preferring to rely on an understanding of music “on a spiritual level… a purely spiritual connection” for his impetus. “I would play records at really deafening volume at eight o’clock in the morning, just playing the same song over and over again,” he admitted to one interviewer. Patti Smith, Television, The Stones, Rory Gallagher – they all came under his learning gaze and were gathered together one by one to appear by degrees in his playing as he matured.

From the age of ten, Johnny’s future was almost pre-ordained. “I had always had guitars, for as long as I could remember,” he recalls. “I thought once that maybe my parents were pushing me into it, but I soon realised that I was obsessed.” One of the earliest influences on John were what he later called “crappy Elvis movies.” The Beatles movies Help and Hard Day’s Night were regularly on the television, and US Beatles cartoons were often repeated. Late night radio – John Peel in particular – had a huge influence. For Maher, pop music took him outside the ordinary life of school, family and friends, outside of the real world of rainy old Manchester.

* * *

Manchester is a tough town. It raises its musical children almost without kindness. In the early Sixties, the city’s mills were indeed dark and satanic, its huge, brick-built warehouses foreboding and claustrophobic. Compared to its limestone cousin along the East Lancs Road, Manchester was sooty and dotted with Second World War bomb sites, while Liverpool was shiny and romantic: an Atlantic city, not a northern town. From the early Sixties and the rise of Beatlemania, it seemed that when something happened, it happened in Liverpool first. Liverpool was on TV every time you switched it on. The Beatles, Jimmy Tarbuck or Cilla, for example, as well as being professional entertainers were professional Liverpudlians and celebrity scousers.

But by the time Johnny Maher was entering his teenage years, Manchester’s inherent delights had become obvious to all. For the kids of the north-west in the early Seventies, it was often in Manchester that they saw their first gigs, in Manchester where they bought their first records, posters and books. Manchester was the harder town, but it was cool: it might have lacked a famous and iconic bronze parrot on the town hall roof, but it worked hard, got its jobs done, then went down the pub and rocked. It had the best record shops, the best bookshops, the best venues for gigs.

In fact, the Manchester music scene had already shone brightly, both nationally and internationally. Though often eclipsed by the city some forty miles to the west, Manchester’s innate competitive relationship with Liverpool meant that some of Britain’s finest bands emerged from its environs over the years. In both Manchester and Liverpool, a huge influence came from the American airmen who flooded the region during the Forties, Fifties and Sixties. During the Second World War, nearly 75,000 aircraft that were used in the Allied campaign entered Europe through Liverpool’s docks, and nearly a million-and-a-half US servicemen joined the war effort in the same way. Young people looking for the latest jazz, skiffle, R&B and rock ’n’ roll music tuned into the American Forces Network, a radio station for the tens of thousands of Yanks away from home – at a time when the BBC’s output catered for rather dainty minds in rather middle-class homes. In the north-west of England, the influence of the Americans was felt perhaps more keenly than anywhere else in the UK, and consequently the influence of the music the Yanks brought with them was fired there like nowhere else. Over the years, much of the correspondence between troops and civilians was centred around the huge US airbase at Burtonwood, halfway between Liverpool and Manchester. It was a phenomenal place, and until the Seventies its storage facilities – designed for aircraft and tanks – was the biggest single-span building space in the world. In the Eighties, it was rumoured that more nuclear armament was stored there than anywhere else in Britain, while gossip of unnamed ‘goods’ being secretly removed in removal vans were rife.

The local love affair with imported American pop music started during the war years. It was jazz and swing for starters, rock ’n’ roll and blues later on. After the war it was this romance with imported pop that led to the birth of great music in the region. While the short-trousered Harrison, Lennon, McCartney and Starr were picking up early Elvis and Buddy Holly records in Liverpool, at the other end of the Manchester Ship Canal the influence was equally keenly felt. Both cities had a burgeoning black market trade as sailors and airmen brought discs over from The States and sold them locally at mighty profits. With a vibrant immigrant community – Irish, Afro-Caribbean and Eastern Europeans in particular – and as a major inland port in its own right, Manchester was as likely as Liverpool or London to burst into cultural prominence.

With Elvis and movies such as Rock Around The Clock everywhere across the region, the first major post-war teenage cultural development was the appearance in Manchester of the coffee bar. A juke box and a coffee machine were all the teenagers of the city needed to develop their own cool hang-outs. The youth of Manchester started to drag the city out of its post-war austerity and into the modern world. The city centre boasted a plethora of such bars, and they were plentiful in the suburbs too. In the early Sixties, while clubs such as The Cavern flourished in Liverpool, in Manchester it was venues such as The Twisted Wheel, The Forty Thieves and The Oasis – labelled ‘the north’s top teenage rendezvous’ – that attracted the kids of Ardwick, Chorlton, or Wythenshaw into the city centre. By 1965 there some 250 such clubs in central Manchester alone. They were largely alcohol-free affairs, open late into the night, as teenagers listened to the R&B and skiffle sounds that predated English pop proper. As Jonathan Schofield, guru of all things Mancunian, has pointed out on the website www.virtualmanchester.com/music/features, the Mersey river itself is actually born in Greater Manchester. If the Mersey bands claimed Liverpool as their spiritual home, then throughout the Sixties, Manchester answered back with a raft of Beat groups of its own. The Hollies – from whence Graham Nash went on to revolutionise Californian pop – Herman’s Hermits, The Bee Gees, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and Freddie Garretty all hailed from the Manchester suburbs, and all had enormous success both at home and abroad. The oft-derided Herman’s Hermits clocked up sales of over sixty million records worldwide, while Freddie and the Dreamers and The Mindbenders both reached the number one singles slot in the USA. Manchester was exporting big-selling pop long before The Smiths or Oasis got in on the act.

By 1967, the number of Beat clubs in Manchester had been reduced – by legal intervention – from 250 to just three. The clubs were described in a police officer’s report as “dirty and crudely decorated, with a minimum of furniture.” The beatniks, mods and rockers came under the critical eye of the law too. Professor CP Lee of Salford University, and formerly vocalist with popular Manchester outfit Albertos Y Los Trios Paranoias, has researched this blitzkrieg of the Manchester scene extensively, and notes that in the wake of the demise of the smaller venues, larger clubs and discos flourished. The Ritz, run by DJ Jimmy Savile was one of the biggest, while audiences of up to 4,000 would attend similar nights at The Plaza and Belle Vue Ballroom. Yorkshire-born Savile was one of pop’s first local impresarios to break nationally and a local myth claims that the enigmatic and later-to-be-knighted Sir Jim boosted his clubs’ attendances by offering free polio jabs to punters. Other characters built popular and enduring venues around the city. When the BBC launched its premier pop TV show, Top Of The Pops, it did so from a converted chapel in the south Manchester suburbs, cementing Manchester at the heart of Britain’s pop culture. For all the acts that appeared on the show, it was to Manchester that they travelled to make their reputations.

John Mayall was another Mancunian with a huge influence on British pop. One of the prime movers in the introduction of traditional American blues into Sixties Britain, his band The Bluesbreakers was a cradle for Eric Clapton, John McVie, Mick Taylor, Peter Green, and many other influential rock artists of the following decade. 10cc were one of the most popular Mancunian bands of the Seventies. Graham Gouldman, formerly of The Mockingbirds, had written hits for The Hollies, The Yardbirds and Herman’s Hermits. Eric Stewart was an ex-Mindbender. With Kevin Godley and Lawrence Crème they developed into one of the most articulate, witty, accomplished songwriting and performing outfits of their time, described by one journalist as “the UK’s Steely Dan.” Rusholme’s Roy Harper established his own musical voice internationally, helped along by his associations with Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and his sensitive, romantic and woefully underrated work continues to influence to this day. Sad Café’s album Fanx Ta Ra helped establish them as one of Manchester’s most successful mid-Seventies bands, while Salford’s Elaine Bookbinder, under the moniker Elkie Brooks, hit pay dirt in the late Seventies with ‘Pearl’s A Singer’ and a run of other hit singles after a stint in Vinegar Joe, a band that also featured Robert Palmer. Thus while he was taking his first, rudimentary steps in guitar craft, the young John Maher had a healthy local culture on which to build his castle.

* * *

In the early Seventies the Maher family was to move to Baguley, Wythenshaw, a bus ride to the south from the city centre and one of Manchester’s most significant urban sprawls. At the time, the area was the biggest council housing estate in Europe, a major part of the south Manchester conurbation. It was by no means a poor and down-and-out place however. Maher has said that the area was middle-class in comparison with the streets of his upbringing, “like Beverly Hills,” compared to the tougher streets of his earliest years. Much of the area was ‘village-ised’ – the great urban sprawl divided up into smaller units with their own facilities and services, encouraging a village mentality among the residents. While it wasn’t the haven of crime that many similar developments would become, the area was nevertheless a breeding ground for petty crime and thieving. Set as it was only a mile or so from the wealthy suburbs of Hale, Halebarns and Bowdon, the temptation to wander across the great divide was always there. It was said at the time that there were more millionaires per square mile in these areas than anywhere else in the UK.

Wythenshaw, says Johnny felt “like nirvana” in comparison to his former home. Initially placed at the Sacred Heart Primary School, Johnny earned a place at St Augustine’s Grammar School, a traditional Catholic institution for boys where the staff wore traditional mortar boards and gowns. Children were expected to enter the school with an 11+ pass and to leave with nine or ten O-levels and the prospect of a university education. By the mid-Seventies, St Augustine’s had, like the majority of grammar schools, joined the movement towards comprehensive education. It was renamed St John Pleasington, and, with a much broader net bringing in a greater variety of pupils, loosened up seriously. Johnny was happy at the school, excelling in English, Art and Music, but claims that by his fourth year there he was losing interest in academia and found himself increasingly poring over music rather than school books.

If the education system lost a potentially very able scholar in Johnny Maher, the youngster did get something out of school, even if it wasn’t marked in percentages and grades. “I think the most useful thing about school for me,” he told a webcast many years later, “was that I learned to suss out different types of people, and they crop up later in life sometimes… especially loudmouths!” Johnny did go on to enrol at Wythenshaw College, but his real education was taking place elsewhere.

Johnny made friends easily, and one of the lads he teamed up with early in his secondary education was Andy Rourke, a kid from Ashton. Rourke was one of four brothers, whose parents had recently split up, and the two became firm friends, inspired by music, truancy and clothes. While they initially disliked one another – a keen sense of competition between long-haired rock fans – they got together because Johnny was wearing a Neil Young Tonight’s The Night badge. Within days they were friends for life, and Andy the better guitar player of the two. The boys led a mildly wild lifestyle – nothing too heavy, but there were soft drugs around the scene as there were in most teenage environments.

By the age of fourteen, Johnny had moved out of the family home and moved in with Andy and his dad chez Rourke. It was a short-term separation from parents whom Johnny would remain extremely close to, and who had always supported his musical endeavours. While John and Frances Maher willingly helped Johnny out by buying him his first guitars and letting him practise around the house undisturbed, by the time their rebel son was hanging out with older kids and taking his music very seriously, they were naturally concerned that the lifestyle of the musician was too advanced for their young son. For Johnny though, his commitment was already absolute, and there was no going back. “They could see disaster looming,” Johnny was to say towards the end of The Smiths’ career, but by then, of course, it was too late.

Pop music – in the early-Seventies world before PlayStations and video games – was the means to another world, a world of style and individuality, of achievement and of standing out from the crowd. Pop was the badge you wore, the currency you carried with you. Soul boys. Quo freaks. Metal heads. Prog rockers. Folk fans. The breadth of pop in the post-Beatles climate was exhilerating, and exciting, and every week on Top Of The Pops or John Peel’s Radio One show there was something new to admire, dissect, reference in class or follow slavishly.

“The first record I ever bought,” Johnny remembers, “was ‘Jeepster.’ But it wasn’t until ‘Metal Guru’ got to number one that I really made the connection for the first time.” Marr remembers riding his bike around the local streets and singing the song over and over. “It was a feeling that I’ll never forget,” says Johnny. “A new sensation. I got on my bike and rode and rode, singing this song… one of the best moments of my life.” Johnny remembers stealing ‘loads of glitter’, putting it on his face, and emulating his favourite bands. “From then on my formative years were totally and utterly dedicated to music.”

Maher, Rourke et al would get together at local youth clubs, meet in town or at one anothers’ houses to compare notes, practice the guitar or simply hang out. “What I was doing was more interesting than what other kids were doing,” he told one interviewer. “When I left school I had jobs and all that – but they were only a means to playing loads of records and tapes, and getting paid for it.” A promising footballer – he tried out for Manchester City and was apparently pursued by Nottingham Forest – and potentially academically very capable, Johnny soon began to neglect both his sport and his homework for music and for the nights out with the boys.

* * *

Well before Margaret Thatcher entered Downing as Britain’s first female Prime Minister in 1979, Britain’s inner cities had become dirty, dishevelled and run-down centres of disaffection and unrest. From the summer of 1976, punk was a response to the culture in which flippant DJs and pompous, high-earning bands had taken the fun from the music business just as successive governments had taken the job prospects away from millions of school-leavers. If we’d ‘never had it so good’ in the late Fifties and early Sixties, by the time the Sex Pistols were launched upon an unsuspecting London public via their now legendary early gigs and TV shock tactics, the youth of Britain was ready for a chance to shout and scream. Just as the mods, rockers and beatniks had done before them, they really caused a stir. In Manchester, this was reflected in the famed summer of 1976 gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, when local scenesters Peter McNeish and Howard Trafford organised the first appearance of the Pistols in the city [the definitive account is David Nolan’s I Swear I Was There – The Gig That Changed The World]. By the time the band returned in July, Peter and Howard’s band Buzzcocks had the support slot, and Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto (as they came to be known and loved by millions) were the leading lights of Manchester’s nascent punk scene. Buzzcocks went on – even after Devoto’s defection to form Magazine in 1977 – to be a long-standing favourite for many who remember that summer as one of the most exciting in pop music’s history. Their singles ‘Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have)?’, ‘Orgasm Addict’ and ‘What Do I Get?’ define all that was great about not just punk, but pop music in general. Tense, stylish and fun, witty and heartbreakingly sincere, with a wash of punk insouciance glazed over the top of lovelorn pop. Thirty years on, Buzzcocks are compared to The Ramones and The Velvet Underground, among the most influential bands of all. Buzzcocks remain one of Manchester’s finest exports.

And then there was The Fall. There was Warsaw – soon to become Joy Division. Slaughter And The Dogs. The Nosebleeds. The Worst. The Blue Orchids. The Frantic Elevators. The Albertos. Manchester was responsible for some fine bands, and some pretty ropey ones. Alongside the first punk explosion sat John Cooper Clarke, the ‘behind-the-shades’ punk poet whose appearance owed more to hip Dylan as to Johnny Rotten. Joy Division and The Fall emerged as the two bands ‘most likely to.’ In Mark E Smith and Ian Curtis, they both had enigmatic, uncompromising front-men with clear agendas and a lot to say. The death of Curtis at once put an end to the potential of Joy Division and launched New Order upon the world. The influence of both bands is prime to this day.

The influence of Shelley and Devoto’s early punk enthusiasm is not just felt in the sounds that Buzzcocks created however. In bringing the Sex Pistols into Manchester, they drew a crowd from which were born bands that would be amongst the most important in Manchester’s musical heritage and would enliven immediate rock history. Mick Hucknall, Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, Tony Wilson and Mike Pickering were all allegedly present to see the Sex Pistols at that feted Lesser Free Trade Hall show. New Order and Joy Division, Factory Records, Simply Red, The Hacienda club, M People – all were born in some sense out of these cathartic musical events. Pickering, one of the brains behind M People and Quando Quango, was the man to book The Smiths into their first public gig, and would later work with Johnny on at least two occasions.

But at the Sex Pistols gig was another kid looking for a reason to believe. A young man by the name of Steven.

* * *

Punk was an immediate call to arms for teenagers everywhere. Not since an army of Bowie clones had peopled a hundred high streets in the early Seventies was there such an immediate rush among across the nation’s youth to join the movement. Punk was the excuse everyone had needed to dress up, get out and get into trouble. Have fun and cause offence. Of course, the movement was about much more than just music. The music attracted a crowd with a certain fashion sense, it didn’t create it. A link between fashion and music features in the punk story and in Johnny Maher’s. The Pistols were born of Malcolm McClaren’s King’s Road boutique, Sex. In London in particular, punk was a fashion statement as much as a musical force, but by the time it had hit the provinces the two had become almost inextricably linked.

The most tangible evidence that punk had hit town was that kids went out and formed bands of their own. The Sex Pistols were at one and the same time both so good and so bad, that everyone recognised in them something that they could get off their backsides for and do themselves, at a time when nobody else in society seemed interested in them. Punk was the first truly DIY ethic in pop music since skiffle, when a guitar and a washboard were all a band needed to get started. In its earliest days, pop songs were written by professional song-writers, who would present finished songs to artists to perform under studio direction. Via Buddy and The Beatles, artists soon performed their own material. By the end of the Sixties, artists were not only writing and performing their own material, but the biggest owned their own labels too, like Apple and Beggars Banquet. But in order to be successful, even the most self-managing bands still had to be accomplished as musicians or singers. Punk demonstrated to everyone that if they had something to say they could simply go out and say it, and do all of the above, regardless of how well they could do so. And they could have it done by tomorrow. And in Manchester – as everywhere else – they said it loudly and proudly.

For Johnny Maher punk was a sword with two edges. The Smiths were never a punk group, but they had its influence scrawled all over their attitude to the record industry, their love of the three-minute single, their rhythm section, and their uncompromising belief in their own selves. At the time, Johnny watched the movement from a slight distance. He kicked against it largely because of his current interest in English folk music, derided by the hard-line punk movement. At the same time, he was too young to get in on punk’s earliest flourish, those first, influential Manchester gigs. Only twelve years old when the Pistols first came to the city, the first gig that Johnny attended was The Faces. But punk was more than just suburban thrash from south London, if you had the ears to hear it. The American bands embraced by the movement appealed to Johnny much more. Early on, he managed to see Iggy Pop, and it was the related bands such as Television, Patti Smith and The Stooges who joined Bolan and Sparks in Johnny’s pantheon of rock gods. Johnny also recalls seeing Rory Gallagher live at around the first time, and the Irish guitarist became an influence that Johnny still recognises today. “He scared the life out of me,” Johnny said. “He was so intense – I couldn’t believe it. I can remember staying off school for a few days… trying to play along with his records.”

Johnny remembers that, after endless attempts, the day after seeing Rory live he finally cracked the Gallagher code and turned a corner in his own playing. “I sussed it out,” said Johnny. “And the penny just dropped… ‘I can play!’” Rod Stewart and his careering guitarist Ronnie Wood became major influences. The one thing that Johnny did that really expanded his knowledge of music and developed his own fluency and playing was to go out and source the people who had influenced these bands in the first place. The influence of Bo Diddley is heard throughout Johnny’s career. He first heard it in the disco funk of Hamilton Bohannon, whose ‘Disco Stomp’ was a firm favourite, but traced the influence back to its original source. Television’s Richard Hell had a clear effect on Johnny, but at the same time he was helplessly drawn to melodic old hats like Simon and Garfunkel.

Simultaneously, there was a huge cross-cultural process in progress. The Beatles had taken American pop music and sold it back to the States in a different guise. By the early Seventies, American bands were coming over to the UK to find their market. Most British kids had Americana about them at every turn. Bolan and Bowie were very ‘English’ in their original concepts, but washed with American input, so that while Ziggy stood heroically on the rain-washed streets off the back of London’s Regent Street, by the time of Aladdin Sane, Bowie was dissecting New York and Hollywood too. Bolan dipped into the American Riff Songbook on regular occasions to colour his psychedelic boogie. Gary Glitter could only have been born of a generation raised on holidays at Butlins or Pontins, but US bands like Sparks came over to the UK and found their most receptive markets.

In the mid-Seventies you could choose to take the ideological line, or accept that everything was there for you. While Maher didn’t follow everything that appeared on Top Of The Pops he was not prepared to discard Motown, Phil Spector and The Ronettes – his next love – for the sake of The Clash. “I felt [punk] was definitely for the generation before me,” Johnny was to say many years later in a published conversation with Matt Johnson on The The’s website. “One of the things about punk in the UK was that, as I remember, it was very political… as if lines were drawn.” If you were on the right side of the ideological line then you were in, but waver across that line at your peril. “To me that seemed to hang over our generation like an albatross,” said Marr. If joining the club meant ignoring so many other great artists and bands, then Johnny was not interested.

* * *

Of all the kids whose interest turned to playing music rather than just listening to it, Maher was quickest among his peer group to learn the practical elements of guitar. Chord structures and progressions, picking techniques and fingering came easily to him, naturally, almost as though there was a predetermined route for him to follow. “By the time I was ten or eleven,” he told Guitar Player in 1990, “I started to buy T. Rex records.” ‘Jeepster’’s Howlin’ Wolf riff was the first Johnny had learned, later back-tracking (as he put it) into Motown. “I’d try to cover the strings, piano and everything with my right hand, trying to play the whole record on six strings.” This orchestral approach to the guitar mirrored that of impeccable Canadian guitarist Joni Mitchell, who herself has spoken at length of trying to cover an entire orchestra’s sound across the six simple strings of the basic guitar. “That’s one reason why I am so chordally oriented,” Johnny went on to explain. “Why key changes and the strategy of arrangement are really important to me.”

He picked up from everywhere and everybody. Johnny found he learned more, and enjoyed the life more, if he hung out with the older boys from around Wythenshaw. He stored every lick and chord that he could find. Johnny’s wealth of musical knowledge gradually became immense, a trait that he has continued to display over the years since. His enthusiasm for music, his ability to remember everything he hears and maybe one day use it somewhere in his own music, is legendary. Smiths soundman Grant Showbiz remembers visiting Johnny at home many, many times over the years, and testifies to the fact that music was always there. “Whenever I went to Johnny’s house,” recalls Grant, “which was an awful lot of the time in those days, Radio One was on absolutely permanently. And I can remember it being the same ten years later.” Showbiz can only think of one other musician with the same kind of all-inclusive referencing, and the same enthusiasm to share the process of listening to music with anybody. “Peter Buck (of REM) has an absolutely encyclopaedic knowledge of music, and so has Johnny. And he’ll just say, ‘This B-side by The Dells – listen to the middle eight, listen to what the organ’s doing’ or whatever it is. And suddenly, it’s eight hours later!” Such was the process of assimilating a myriad of musical influences for the young Johnny, as it remains today for the adult; hang out, listen to music, talk about music, play music.

Future Cult hero Billy Duffy was one of the older kids who showed Johnny new chords. Marr remembers how “I met guys who were only thirteen or fourteen, but took themselves so seriously as musicians, they were already legends in their own minds.” As well as picking up guitar tips, Johnny was also open to the record collections of everyone he met. In addition to the bluesy rock of Rory Gallagher, Johnny breathed in the soulful West Coast folk of Neil Young, the articulate British picking of Martin Carthy, Davey Graham and Bert Jansch (to whom Johnny was introduced by Duffy). Along with Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention, Johnny also fell for Thin Lizzy, the pristine manufactured pop of Motown and the romantic, Byrds-influenced guitar jangling of Tom Petty. Like his friends, Johnny soon came to consider himself a musician, not just a music fan.

“When I got into Nils Lofgren,” Johnny explained to Martin Roach in The Right To Imagination And Madness, “there was no turning back.” Increasingly, and throughout his teenage years, Johnny was to be seen around the streets of Wythenshaw with a guitar case and a bagful of attitude and confidence. “It was just to let everybody know that my whole identity was as a guitar player,” he continued. “I was very cocky…” Besotted by New York New Wave, intrigued by the old waves of acoustic British folk, Johnny’s boundless enthusiasm made up for his inescapable youth. “I could pick like Bert Jansch, but I wanted to look like Ivan Kral from the Patti Smith Group,” he said.

At the same time, Johnny began to realise that there was only so far that he could get by playing other people’s riffs. He needed people to play with and he needed to write. Maher was starting to write songs for himself, and he needed people around him off whom he could bounce ideas and share the playing more formally. “As soon as I could string a few chords together, I started putting them down on a cassette recorder,” Johnny recalls. What was important to him was the guitar. The idea of being the next Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton was anathema to him: Johnny Maher never wanted to be a guitar hero. For Johnny it was always the guitar and the songs that were important. As it gradually dawned on him that he needed some kind of context in which to play and write, so he needed a band to play with.

The names of Johnny Marr’s first bands have gone into the legend of pre-Smiths history. For one interviewer in the USA, Johnny claimed his first band was simply called ‘Johnny Maher.’ The Paris Valentinos was the first example of John Maher actually formalising an arrangement amongst his friends to form ‘a group.’ The Valentinos comprised Kevin Williams on vocals and bass guitar, Bobby Durkin on drums and Andy Rourke on second guitar. One half of The Smiths was almost in place at this very early stage in Maher’s career, when the teenage lads would hang out and plan their route to fame and fortune. “We had more names than we did songs,” Johnny was to say later. One day they were a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young outfit, and the next they were Television. Those early gigs were heard in the echoing chambers of local church halls and at Sunday mass. Gradually it became apparent that Williams – older than Johnny by two years – had other fish to fry. While he handed the bass role in the band over to Andy, he pursued his other creative love, that of acting. A member of Manchester Youth Theatre since the age of thirteen, Williams enrolled in Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre. While he appeared as a ‘helper’ on the irrepressible Cheggars Plays Pop, under the name Kevin Kennedy he then played the role of the inimitable Curly Watts in Coronation Street for some twenty years, one of UK TV’s best-loved soap characters of all time. By 2006 Kennedy was appearing as ‘The Child Catcher’ in Manchester Palace Theatre’s production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It’s interesting to note that Johnny repeatedly found himself in the company of other talented people who would go on to achieve fame in other spheres, or who had already done so. Williams himself described his own period of working with Maher as a privilege. “To see that germ of genius in Johnny’s bedroom,” he told film maker David Nolan, made it clear that “…this guy (was) going to be brilliant.”

It was the summer of 1977 that saw Johnny and Andy’s first ever gig in front of a willing public on the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Day. The band played Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It On Home To Me’, covered a decade or so before by The Animals. Before the song was complete, the performance was halted when the singer was dragged puking from the stage – Johnny’s first experience of rock ’n’ roll excess! With only one other proper gig to their name, which was at The Squat, a venue near Manchester University, The Paris Valentinos came to a withering halt. Johnny’s next gig, on his stripped-down Telecaster copy, a la Rory Gallagher, came as replacement guitarist with Manchester’s Velvet Underground-inspired Sister Ray. It was a stop-gap appointment with a band that was going nowhere. With Sister Ray, Maher supported Manchester’s nearly-men The Freshies.

The Freshies later reached the UK charts with their single ‘I’m In Love With The Girl On The Checkout Desk Of A Certain Manchester Megastore.’ The Freshies were the brain-child of Mancunian performer Chris Sievey, who also created the TV comic-book Mancunian Frank Sidebottom – he of the large papier-mâché head. Frank was, of course, The Freshies’ biggest fan, and in a wonderfully ironic turnaround, achieved far more mainstream success than The Freshies ever did themselves.

Sister Ray was a brief diversion for Maher, but one of The Freshies’ former keyboard players, Paul Whittall, became part of Johnny’s next, more important, career move. Whittall was working with one of Wythenshaw’s more achieving musicians, Rob Allman. Allman was a friend of Billy Duffy, the Wythenshaw kid who already had great ambition as a guitarist and had joined Manchester’s punk legends The Nosebleeds. Fate spiralled the future Smiths closer together, as Steven Morrissey had joined The Nosebleeds as vocalist to replace the legendary milkman/singer Ed Banger. In the meantime Allman and Whittall began working with Maher, Rourke and ex-Paris Valentino drummer Bobby Durkin, under the name White Dice.

Like The Cure, Japan and hundreds of bands before them, White Dice responded to a talent-scouting ad in the music press, spotting a chance of putting themselves before some of the real decision-makers in London pop. The cassette demo that the band sent to F-Beat Records boss Jake Riviera – the brains behind Stiff Records and the early careers of Elvis Costello, Madness, Dr Feelgood and The Damned – won them an audition in London slated for April 1980. The band threw themselves into rehearsals at Andy’s house, with Rob and Johnny sharing writing credits on new material. It was Maher’s first experience of a song-writing partnership, and it was mainly their own material that they played at Nick Lowe’s home studio between Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, where the session took place. Paul Carrack, who spent a lot of time in Lowe’s studio, remembers it as “a converted front room.” The band was as impressed with their meeting Lowe’s then-wife, Carlene Carter, as they were with the process of making the demo, but Riviera was disappointed with the results. A phone call confirmed their worst fears a few days later – and in the meltdown that followed their initial enthusiasm, Bobby Durkin left the band. There was a handful of summer gigs, writing sessions and rehearsals, with Johnny occasionally taking the lead vocalist role, but White Dice weren’t to last.

Early 1981 saw Maher and Andy Rourke looking for pastures new musically. The next band, Freak Party, shook off the failures of White Dice, and – with drummer Simon Woolstencroft in tow – started earnest rehearsals. The band took a harder, more funk-driven line than White Dice had, with Andy a firm fan of heavy, driven funk bass lines. Numerous singers were rehearsed and discarded, but Freaky Party were destined, as Paris Valentinos and White Dice had done before them – to go nowhere fast. Johnny was often to be seen around some of the Manchester clubs at this time, in particular The Exit, or Berlin, behind Kendall Milne’s department store. One of the DJs was Andrew Berry, who at various times lived and recorded with Johnny. Occasionally Johnny would take control of the decks himself, mixing classic Sixties tracks with current dance hits. Early fan and Hacienda regular Joanne Carroll remembers how she would often go and sit with the DJs, as she knew Andrew Berry well, and recalls how more often than not Johnny would have a spliff on the go while he was spinning records.

For Maher this was a formative period, his months before the dawn of The Smiths when a number of important elements in his life came together. Musically, something needed to happen. It was clear that a new direction would have to be taken. At the same time as this became ever-more clear, three people entered Johnny’s world who would go on to have a profound influence upon his life.

The first of these was his girlfriend. Two years younger than Johnny, although they shared the same birthday, Angie Brown was firmly established as his constant companion. Angie and Johnny would later marry and raise a family together.

On a professional level, the second was Manchester businessman Joe Moss. Moss had started a clothing business in Manchester in the late Sixties, and by the early Eighties had a string of shops in Manchester and Stockport that traded under the name of Crazy Face. Maher had got himself what he describes as “a job of sorts” at the shop next door. X Clothes was a boutique in Chapel Walks just off one of the city’s main thoroughfares, an early Eighties honeypot for Manchester’s most-stylish, a must-visit outlet for DJs and musicians. Among its customers was Mike Joyce, who was very much aware of Johnny in the store, but was still unknown to him personally. On other occasions, many of the guys who would get The Hacienda moving would come in –Tony Wilson, Mike Pickering and Peter Saville were all regulars. Maher’s role was largely to hang around the shop looking cool, compiling music cassettes to play over the PA, and to generally enhance the place by bringing ‘hip’ people into the store.

Crucially, it was the fact that the two shops were adjacent that meant that Johnny Maher got to know Joe Moss. “He came up to me in the shop,” Joe told David Cavanagh for Q magazine in 1994, “and introduced himself as a frustrated musician.” Moss was a music lover, and kept a guitar in the corner of his office, which Johnny would regularly pick up and play while he hung about the older man’s gaff. Ten years older than Johnny, Moss was a keen amateur player himself, interested in blues and R&B, and took naturally to the enthusiastic kid from Wythenshaw who seemed to have what it took to become a professional. The two traded skills – a little from Joe here, a little in return from Maher.

As with so many of his lasting relationships, Johnny was to get to know Joe by hanging around, chatting and playing guitars. Moss could see that all the young man needed was guidance, the right people around him, and some funding. Joe would provide elements of all three to the burgeoning Johnny Maher over time. Joe Moss was another in a long line of ‘shopkeepers’ who brought their retail savvy to the completely unrelated world of managing a rock group, a list that includes the revolutionary Brian Epstein and the iconoclastic Malcolm McClaren. Like his relationship with Angie, Johnny’s friendship with Joe was long and lasting.

While settled in a relationship with Angie and developing his contacts around the happening Manchester scene, Maher met a third character who would go on to have an influential part in his story.

It was the winter of 1981. A friend of Johnny had recently been down to London. Wandering Soho, he had fallen into conversation with a musician he met on the street: Matt Johnson, the son of a publican, had grown up over a pub in Stratford, surrounded by East London’s finest hoodlums and gangsters. Like Maher, Johnson’s early imagination had been coloured by the likes of Sparks, Bolan and Bowie, and he was a confirmed John Lennon addict. The casually-established friendship brought Johnson to Manchester for a visit, and it was at the home of the mutual friend that Johnny and Matt met. Matt played Johnny stuff from his album Blue Burning Soul. Months before he would play the same song to Morrissey, Johnny offered up the song that would later become ‘Suffer Little Children.’ A life-long friendship and future professional relationship was born.

Apart from their immediately taking to one another personally, and the fact that they made a clear decision to remain in touch, Johnson’s professional development stunned Johnny. Although he was only a little older, Johnson had already released a number of records, and was a bona fide recording artist. Among Johnny’s friends, no-one had got this far this fast. As the pair sat and passed Maher’s guitar back and forth, it became obvious that the unthinkable could happen. Matt Johnson was about to start on his second album, Soul Mining. Johnny Maher could do this too. As Billy Duffy had himself recently packed in his job to pursue music full time, so did Johnny. While Freak Party floundered, Johnny put X Clothes behind him, and wandered off to create the best British band since The Beatles.