1987 was another year of Thatcherite frustration for anyone in the UK with a social conscience. In an interview published the following year, but recorded before the dissolution of The Smiths, Johnny spoke of his anger at the increasing sense of hopelessness among the nation’s young. “My generation of school kids – they’re the ones who have been hit by it the most. It is literally as bleak as people imagine it to be. It has changed a lot of British society… social attitudes have changed remarkably. There’s no-one who can stand for working people in England any more – it’s a Conservative dream.” Musical distraction came from the shambling, rambling Pogues, whose ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’ featured their timeless duet with Kirsty MacColl, ‘Fairytale of New York.’ While disaffection continued to infect Britain’s cities, a new Manchester band was packing out the venues in their home town and finding themselves almost routinely ignored by the suits down south. 1987 was a good year for The Stone Roses, the local reputation of Ian Brown, John Squire et al building up a head of steam comparable to that of The Smiths in their early days.
But time was running out for Manchester’s finest, despite their remaining deep in the hearts of the record-buying public. In the Valentine’s Day Reader’s Poll for NME The Smiths once again walked off with the awards for ‘Best Group’, ‘Best Male Singer’, ‘Best Album’ for The Queen Is Dead and Morrissey was voted ‘Most Wonderful Human Being’. ‘Panic’ was not only voted ‘Best Single’ but also came in the top handful of songs voted ‘Best Dance Track’ – a long way from the disco-unfriendly early Smiths.
Sessions for the new single ‘Sheila Take A Bow’ were problematic, with rumours of studio no-shows and frequently tense atmospheres. The recordings were not altogether productive. Early in the New Year ‘Shoplifters Of The World Unite’ was released, a majestic blend of Morrissey and Marr magic that got to number twelve in the singles chart. Johnny’s parts were compared to Brian May, while the guitarist himself was more keen to credit the influence of Nils Lofgren on the track. The band got back to work, this time inviting Sandie Shaw back for another crack at ‘Sheila…’, only to eventually not use her contribution. Eventually John Porter had a final mix of the song, but even that was not used. The band re-recorded it at Tony Visconti’s studio, this time with Stephen Street at the desk. As history sorted these matters out for itself, John Porter was never to work with The Smiths again.
March brought the release of The World Won’t Listen, the band’s second compilation-cum-sampler album, that re-visited the format of Hatful Of Hollow. The album again came close to the number one slot but stalled at the last hurdle; like The Queen Is Dead, it made it to number two. For the fans on the other side of the Atlantic Rough Trade/Sire released the closely related compilation Louder Than Bombs. As Hatful Of Hollow gave everyone a taste of great things to come, so these two albums reminded everyone of just what a fantastic band The Smiths had become.
The band itself was concentrating on the future, though, not the past. The sessions at Visconti’s Good Earth studio also produced the next single, ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’. In effect this was also the start of sessions for the fourth and what would prove to be the final Smiths studio album. The Strangeways sessions were unusual, in that right up to the last moment, as Stephen Street remembered, even Johnny didn’t know exactly what Morrissey would bring to the studio in terms of lyrical input. “We were putting the backing tracks down totally blind,” he remembered. “Just making sure the key was okay with him.” Johnny was keen to clean up some of the working practices that had become de rigour for him in the studio. There were fewer guitar overdubs – in fact no guitar at all on the opening track – and in general his work is heavier, more concentrated. “I wanted to make sure my main guitar parts really counted and stayed on the record,” he told an interviewer much later. Not content with simplifying and re-assessing the process of putting the album together, Johnny also – for the first time on a Smiths record – included a traditional solo on ‘Paint A Vulgar Picture’, so momentous that he marched everyone out of the studio before committing it to tape.
When the sessions ended and the band celebrated with art coordinator Jo Slee and Geoff Travis, the latter sensed that there was an air of finality around everyone, as though something more than just the latest album was finished.
‘Sheila Take a Bow’ reached number ten in the singles chart, and thus became the equal-highest chart position of any Smiths single. Classic glam homage, the track reeked of the early Seventies pop charts, when the stomp of The Glitter Band would play next to the parading guitar pop of T. Rex on the radio. Both influences are evident in the recording, that was of course made at the studio of Tony Visconti, T. Rex’s own producer.
Then, in the summer, it was formally announced that Johnny Marr had left The Smiths.
* * *
Early in August, NME ran the headline ‘Smiths To Split’ to break the news to the world, announcing that the band was “likely to call it a day after the release of their next album.” While Morrissey denied the story, and famously threatened to spank with a wet plimsoll anyone who said the band had split, by the next issue of NME, Johnny confirmed that he had left. The article had appeared in NME while Johnny was in Los Angeles. “I don’t know where that story came from,” Grant Showbiz told film maker David Nolan. “The thing that pushed Johnny into leaving was that article.” Nobody quite knows who released the information to the magazine, and with what motive. “[Johnny] was that pissed off about it, and where it might have come from, that he said, ‘Right –I’ve had enough anyway – and I have left.’”
The final Smiths sessions had been a miserable affair. Johnny had already decided to leave the group, but had done the last session although perhaps he didn’t want to be there. Grant Showbiz – as almost the last gasp in his relationship with The Smiths as a coherent band – produced a version of Cilla Black’s ‘Work Is A Four Letter Word’, that Johnny always looked back on with disaffection, at his own Firehouse studios in Streatham. Along with ‘Keep Mine Hidden’ – their very last recorded track as a group – these songs were destined to be sent out to the world as a goodbye note on the B-side of ‘Girlfriend In A Coma.’ Those final few days in the studio were a strange affair.
Rourke and Joyce have both attested to the fact that Johnny was working far too hard, trying to better The Queen Is Dead with Strangeways. “[He] really needed to take a lot of time off,” said Andy, noting that when everyone else took time out Johnny had just kept on working. While it was Johnny himself who had suggested that everyone take a holiday, he couldn’t leave the job behind himself, and Johnny was clearly pushed over the edge in August 1997. The album, for Joyce, was “a white knuckle ride” and just because the music was so great didn’t mean that the pressures on Marr were any the less. Geoff Travis also felt that an extended break, after which everyone reconvened, might have been enough to rekindle Johnny’s enthusiasm for The Smiths. Maybe if Johnny had gone away for six months or so, they may have come back revitalised and ready for more. “Fame,” said John Peel, who knew a thing or to about it himself, “is such a bastard!”
So many people seem to think a split could have been avoided if the band members had just avoided one another for a while and taken a holiday. Grant Showbiz mentions the same thing, even now. He feels that the band stayed together as long as it did because of the bond of friendship between the group. Once that starts to break down, you’ve had it. “[If] you don’t have the backbone of good smart management – to just say ‘Go away, you don’t have to make another record!’” then Grant thinks you’re on the rocks. A good manager can stop the group and say, “Forget about records. Go away and think about it for six months, and don’t talk to one another!” Sadly, for Johnny and The Smiths, nobody was there to say this to them.
On the announcement of Johnny’s departure, the press, and fans, had a field day. To all intents and purposes, the end of The Smiths was presented as Johnny’s ‘fault.’ When Johnny and Morrissey had formed The Smiths, Marr was 19-years-old. By the time he left the band he was still only 23. But now he was a legend, a voice, a face, a songwriter and guitar player who had saved a generation, a lionized figure. As with John Lennon and The Beatles, both external pressures and internal strains confirmed that Marr had in fact outgrown both the band and his own personal need for it. One of the biggest problems had been the ongoing managerial issues, the business of the business of being The Smiths. “The practicalities faced by Morrissey and me when we had to try and run that kind of organisation really got me down” Johnny admitted later.
Ironically, the rising level of success in America was a contributing factor. More tours, more albums, more press, more intrusion – it would have been too much. Morrissey and Johnny had both considered moving to America to live for a while, consolidating their success there, but with the constant expectations of the entire Smiths organisation that Johnny be there to sort things out, the idea became intolerable. While the band seemed to have everything they ever dreamed of, the stresses placed on Johnny and Morrissey to handle the financial end of this were enormous.
On leaving the band, Johnny was able to start cleaning up his own issues, telling interviewers that he would never allow a band to put so much pressure on him, or upon the relationships that he had enjoyed with friends. One of these relationships was that with long-time friend Joe Moss, who still had an outstanding issue with the band that he had left years previously. Moss has kept a dignified near-silence on the subject over the years, but on his leaving the band there had been an outstanding debt incurred in the early days of The Smiths, when Joe had coughed up for a PA system for the band. One of Johnny’s first actions was to try and clear the air over this with his friend, manager and mentor. As Johnny explained to Johnny Rogan in an interview much later, he paid Moss the outstanding monies due out of his own money, and that matter, at least, was closed.
“Towards the end of The Smiths,” Marr told NME journalist Dave Haslam in 1989, “I realised that the records I was listening to with my friends were more exciting than the records I was listening to with the group.” Marr retained a cautious air in interviews immediately following the group’s disbandment, but this didn’t stop people from continuing to blame him for the break up of the band. “Some people are never going to forgive,” he told NME in 1989. “They didn’t know anything about the way things were. They’d have preferred me to have died rather than split the group up.”
As well as the pressures of the business, it is clear that general musical issues were another reason for Johnny hanging up his guitar picks for a while. Although over the years he has wavered between citing Strangeways or The Queen Is Dead as his favourite Smiths album, despite the quality of the former, there were clear issues about where the band could possibly go next. They were, in his own words, a long way down a musical cul-de-sac where the expectations of the audience no longer met with the aspirations of the guitarist. A long time disco and soul fan, Johnny was listening more and more to types of music that – if he had decided to implement the influence in The Smiths’ own sound – would have brought about mass revolt amongst the fan base, many of whom felt technology and innovation weren’t allowed, so while the electronica of his future work with Bernard Sumner beckoned, to stay in The Smiths seemed to mean that jangly guitar was all that was expected of him.
In short, the excitement, the joi de vivre, had gone from Johnny’s experience with the band. There is an irony in Johnny’s name that – translated into French – sums up his situation at this point nicely. There’s even been a hit record bearing the title. In 2003 there was a single named ‘J’En Ai Marre’, in French, by a singer called Alizee. J’en ai marre (pronounced almost exactly as is Johnny’s name), roughly translated into English, means ‘I’ve had enough,’ or ‘I am fed up.’
Personally, while he continued to get on well with the group members, he had to escape the pressures that were affecting his health and his happiness. Professionally he felt the group had run its course if it could not meet the demands upon it that its audience maintained. Musically he had other fish to fry. As far as Marr was concerned, to continue, and to promote Strangeways via the inevitable world tour and all that it entailed would have served only to worsen the situation and completely destroy the relationships that he still enjoyed with Morrissey, Rourke and Joyce, and perhaps kill him too. Like a marriage doomed to failure from the start, he had enjoyed great times and was rightly proud of the band, but had never been completely happy as the hectic world around him worsened and worsened.
Of course, Johnny received hate mail. For the bedsit lost and lonely, Marr had destroyed the dream that was The Smiths. Astonishingly, it appeared at first that The Smiths would try and continue without him. Various replacement guitarists were mooted – Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame and Ivor Perry from Easterhouse amongst them. There was even a recording session booked for a Morrissey, Rourke, Gannon and Perry line-up of The Smiths. It lasted two days, and produced two tracks – one of them a rudimentary version of ‘Bengali In Platforms’ that would appear on Morrisey’s Viva Hate. But without Johnny it simply wasn’t The Smiths. After two days the session foundered, and Ivor Perry no longer stood in for Johnny Marr.
However much the image of the band had become more and more centred upon Morrissey’s role as spokesperson and front-man, if Johnny wasn’t there, this band was not The Smiths any more. Of course a replacement guitarist could learn Johnny’s parts for live shows, and undoubtedly could have contributed to the writing process (both Perry and Frame are without doubt exceptionally good players and writers), but The Smiths music was the creative hub of two particular individuals – the loss of one meant the end of the band.
There were, of course, the conspiracy theories blaming everybody. Morrissey disapproved of Johnny’s ‘freelancing’, Morrissey wouldn’t tour, Johnny wanted to tour the world and live the life of the rock ’n’ roll superstar etc, all rumour, nothing proven. It was said that manager Ken Friedman had deliberately driven a wedge between the two. Of course the truth was more simple than any of these… The Smiths had run their course. “It had nothing to do with how I feel about Morrissey, and how he feels about me,” Johnny told Dave Haslam. “We had a good time recording the last LP, and I was unhappy before that. And I was unhappy after that… If we had to go off on tour and try to promote the record with the bad atmosphere that was around, the situation would have got even more hideous.”
The band was over long before the split actually came, and once the decision was made there was no going back. As Ziggy had exhausted Bowie both personally and creatively, and as The Beatles had been left behind by the Yoko-influenced new creativity of John Lennon by 1969, so Johnny had tired of being ‘a Smith.’ He was suffocating. It was time for pastures new.
Rather than dwell on the split, it was probably more remarkable that The Smiths lasted as long as they did. The band was born of two very diverse talents and a remarkably concise vision. That that partnership produced work of such quality and lasted for five full years was a major achievement in itself. They came, they saw and they conquered, and regardless of who was to blame for the split, when the job was done they went their separate ways. Johnny was then, and remains to this day proud of what The Smiths achieved. The love of the seven-inch single that fired him so fiercely as a child was still with him as an adult, and he is proud to have released such gems that remain as treasured objects in the hearts and minds of record buyers even now.
That ought to be that, but years after the split Johnny was still troubled by its manner. He represented the break up as the biggest failure of his life, as he revealed to author Martin Roach in The Right To Imagination And Madness: “We should have split when we did,” he reflected. “Simply because we had lost touch with basic emotional values which we all possessed.” He felt they were all “perverted by our egos,” which by then had turned the band into caricatures. “We were good people,” he says. “But we did the split wrong.”
In the wake of the split, Mike and Andy went on to work with Sinead O’Connor. Mike joined his early heroes Buzzcocks for a while, and worked with both Julian Cope and PiL. Both Rourke and Joyce worked with Pete Wylie, while Rourke joined ex-Happy Mondays drummer Gaz Whelan in a band called Delicious, later coming together in the band Aziz. Most significantly, the pair continued with Morrissey for a short while in his solo capacity, later playing a remarkable concert in Wolverhampton that also included Craig Gannon in Morrissey’s band. The gig was both valediction and the beginning of a new era, and – if you wore a Smiths t-shirt, the first 1700 punters to arrive got in for free.
* * *
Released in early September 1987, Strangeways Here We Come gave a clear impression of the creative crossroads that The Smiths had reached as they shuddered to a halt. It was a fitting finale. Lyrically the album mined familiar seams yet musically searched for something new, a two-headed snake. It was a heavy-duty piece of work. Johnny has always been extremely fond of the album, periodically claiming it as his favourite Smiths release of all. While he struggled to find a new direction for the band, the stripped down atmosphere still appeals to him today. For Andy, the album did indeed point to a different future for the band had they stayed together, but Mike found it hard to listen to, even long after the band was done. “You don’t put that one on when you fancy some nice easy listening,” he observed dryly.
‘A Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours’ opens with Morrissey’s reverbed voice hauntingly ‘coming inside’ over jaunty piano chords. If Johnny was looking for pastures new musically for The Smiths, then he could have made no more radical statement of intent from his own point of view than to open the album with a track void of guitar. Instead, it is Johnny on vamping piano, clearly relishing the simplicity of the bouncing chords against Joyce’s military percussion.
‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’ was one of Strangeways’ best tracks, a glammed-up rocker that kicked off with a musical quote from Bolan’s ‘20th Century Boy’, big, expressive Keith Richards’ chords and a stomping drum track that wasn’t pretty but is a killer part of the song. The ‘horn section’ was another diversion for The Smiths, but on ‘Death Of A Disco Dancer’ there was a real treat, a rare instrumental outing for Morrissey, who had been playing the studio piano and who added his own solo contribution to the song. The descending B minor riff around which the song was based – like ‘Dear Prudence’ or ‘Tales Of Brave Ulysees’ – gradually fell into an open, grungy jam, some of the most visceral moments committed to tape by The Smiths. Whether Morrissey’s piano piece was rehearsed or not, he certainly played in key and included a number of jazz rolls that suggest there was a little more than mere happy accident. After the repeated descending chords, at the end Johnny plays a mini-Sergeant Pepper coda of rising chords to finish the song off.
This was definitely a new Smiths – no clipped, jangling siroccos of guitar, but mayhem, improvisation. If the songs to date had been surprising, ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ harked back to The Queen Is Dead, with Johnny’s half-beat acoustic guitar recalling ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’. This was one of Morrissey’s finest moments, at once absurd, hysterical, and deeply, deeply moving. If the attempt was to be as audacious as possible, then simply by the refrain of the title the song succeeded, but the clarity and honesty of Morrissey’s vocal is very moving. Set that against the cheeriness of Johnny’s guitar and Andy and Mike’s rhythm, and the song could not fail to bring a smile. With lyrics about a girl in a coma… The Smiths were at their devilish best and most contradictory.
‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’ was an instant classic: so much more sophisticated than the early records, this was a band at the height of their powers – Johnny’s trick of throwing cutlery at a heavily-reverbed guitar, the innocent-punk solo, and again Morrissey at his very best. ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ was one of Morrissey’s most dramatic – but not quite melodramatic – performances. The minor piano chords over the sound of chaotic crowd noises was reminiscent of ‘Meat Is Murder’, and it was two minutes before what might be called ‘the song’ proper came into the mix. The effect was of a movie soundtrack to an emotion about to break, and when Morrissey appeared, suddenly, it was stunning. Johnny’s arpeggios, the artificially concocted strings and mandolin… pure wonderful Smiths at their best.
‘Unhappy Birthday’ was an unusual song, a mixture of the jazz-inspired chords of ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ and the regular acoustic strumming of something like ‘Cemetry Gates’. At once it can be the least satisfying track on the album, and at the same time perhaps the one most interesting to stop and listen to for the musical track alone, with Johnny’s echoing solo notes that slide the song in and out. While it contained elements of the same kind of juxtaposition that invigorates ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’, it lacked the suggested irony of that song, yet retained something else irresistible and eminently The Smiths. ‘Paint A Vulgar Picture’ was another difficult track – Marr’s music is dense and circuitous, hitting changes off the beat, and Morrissey’s melody shifting at every turn.
By ‘Death At One’s Elbow’ the transformation of The Smiths was complete. Only two years ago this track would have been a pure pastiche of Sun Records rock ’n’ roll. By Strangeways however, the trick didn’t work any more, and the song is probably the weakest point on the album. Compare this song to ‘Last Night I Dreamt…’ or ‘Death Of A Disco Dancer’ – it’s a joke that isn’t funny any more, and these two songs show where The Smiths were heading by the time their day was run. ‘Death At One’s Elbow’ was a redundant piece of work. And, as an album band, their day was running out fast. The gentle, entrancing ‘I Won’t Share You’ – plucked on a studio autoharp, Johnny pressing down the keys to damp the strings into pre-defined chords – was the last song on the last Smiths album proper. And of course, its lyrical content is loaded with irony and metaphor and could be a dozen different things to a dozen different people, but the key element was that this intriguing new album ended on a note of almost adolescent adoration… something that The Smiths had spent five years defining.
The critics reaction was mixed. For some observers it was a dismal album, the sound of a band in disarray. For others it was better than The Queen Is Dead. I-D magazine described the album as “as good as The Queen Is Dead, but probably not better.” NME referenced Johnny’s “beatific melodies” as establishing The Smiths’ final greatness, and noted that – whoever Johnny and Morrissey chose to work with in the future – theirs was perhaps “a once-in-a-lifetime partnership.” Rolling Stone picked out some of Johnny’s “emotional highlights” from the album, observing that the band were right to pack up rather than continue without him, while among the negative reactions, for Suzan Cohen in Star Hits this was “not exactly the way I [want] to remember them.”
As the year came to an end, so The Smiths’ discography of original releases began to run out, as singles were released from Strangeways. In October ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish/Pretty Girls Make Graves’ reached a disappointing number twenty-three on the singles chart, while in December ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ coupled with the Elvis-inspired ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ just scraped into the singles chart at number thirty. For the ultimate singles band it was a disappointing climax to the year, cheered by Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show TV special on The Smiths, perhaps a more fitting farewell.
Johnny Rogan wrote an article for Record Collector magazine suggesting that the joining together of Morrissey and Marr was “a unity of opposites.” It has become easy to distinguish between the articulate, witty, controversial front-man Morrissey and his musician partner. Johnny the Keef-clone party boy with a penchant for disco seems entirely at odds with his more literary partner. In fact, Morrissey and Johnny are much more alike than the media myth and polarised images suggest. To a degree there was a deliberate distancing of their roles in the band. Grant Showbiz worked with them almost constantly during the life of The Smiths. “In some respects they are much closer than people see them,” Grant confirmed to this author. He feels that they were easily and quickly characterised by the press, and as a result there was an easy role for each of them to fall into. Johnny too has indicated that it was the similarities, not the differences, that bonded the song-writing pair. “[When we met] he knew we were different in the way we expressed ourselves,” said Johnny recently. “But the most important thing to him was the most important thing to me spiritually. You can’t be that close with someone for that length of time… without having the ultimate connection.” Living up to the images that developed through interviews and under the public’s gaze, each seemed to fit the expected role as it made the band easier to ‘read.’ Showbiz sums the dichotomy up thus: “Morrissey’s like ‘I’ll be more elaborate and I’ll be more embroidered,’ and Johnny’s like ‘Well, I’ll be less elaborate [then], and less embroidered than you ever said I am.’”
Because Morrissey wrote the lyrics, it was his interest in literature, theatre and film that was profiled in the press, while Johnny’s most obvious asset is his practical, musical input. Oscar Wilde and Keith Richards. But it is vital not to forget that Johnny is a highly intelligent, literary-inclined man with an interest in esoteric literatures and cultures too. Over the years, his declared interest in Native American culture, the writings of Eastern mystics, his constant assimilation of cultural values and mores betrays a man as articulate in the languages of the higher arts as his partner. Similar misrepresentation have smudged the reality of dozens of bands over the years. Socialite Mick Jagger, cricket buff and friend of royalty, and Keith the heroin-addicted, Jack Daniels-quaffing survivor ignores Keith Richards’ highly articulate and well-spoken actual self. The image of acerbic John the wit, and Macca the thumbs-up tunesmith, ignores the fact that while Lennon was sat at home watching Meet The Wife and putting on weight, it was McCartney who was trawling the London theatres for inspiration, compiling tape loops and listening to Stockhausen. Morrissey and Marr was a successful creative partnership of equals because they were in so many ways very much alike. Both men are softly-spoken, articulate and intelligent book lovers, fans of inspiring pop, each with a fabulous sense of humour and fun. It was only in the media that their characters were drawn so differently. Anyone making the mistake of seeing The Smiths as the product of literary Morrissey and artisan craftsman Marr, beware. Johnny Marr is, as Grant Showbiz puts it, “a sharp cookie!”
Johnny Marr retained great memories of The Smiths, and like all four band members, remained very much a fan of the band that he had created. Asked what his fondest memories were, Johnny remembered the recording sessions, the first exciting thrill of success, and the never-diminishing humour that the band always enjoyed. While his own memories of the group were clouded by his reasons for leaving, Johnny has never had anything other than great things to say about the band itself or its output. It’s touching to note again that – despite all – the four biggest fans of The Smiths have always remained Johnny Marr, Morrissey, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce. They were truly a wonderful thing.
From bedsit strummer, to world-ranked superstar, Johnny Marr was free of The Smiths, and ready to go out and engage the world on his own. The whole world seemed to want him.
* * *
Constantly asked to look over his shoulder, Johnny threw himself immediately forwards into his work as a jobbing guitar player. Distracting attention away from Strangeways, September had also seen the first fruits of Johnny’s work on Bryan Ferry’s album Bete Noir when the single ‘The Right Stuff’ was released. Based on the Smiths instrumental, ‘Money Changes Everything’, it was born of studio trickery when Johnny re-learned a riff played backwards on his four-track cassette recorder. With Ferry’s lyrics added to create a totally new song, the repeated influence of Bo Diddley in Johnny’s work is heard again.
“Someone at Warners thought it would be a good idea for me to work with Johnny,” said Ferry. “[They] sent me a cassette of some of his music, and I liked it very much.” Ferry liked Marr very much too. “When I met him we got on very well,” said Bryan. From the north of England himself, albeit the other side of the Pennines, Ferry found Johnny lively and genuine. “There’s a kind of Northern honesty about the cut of his jib, which I liked very much,” he said.
“That song is very much phonetic and rhythmic,” Johnny reflects. “The fact that Bryan didn’t write anything radical didn’t worry me because phonetically he got it right, and with those really high backing vocals it sounded perfect.” With Andy Newmark, late of Sly Stone’s band on drums, Ferry’s band nailed the track to Johnny’s eternal delight. The album was a critical and commercial success on its release in November. Melody Maker’s Chris Roberts chastised Ferry for roping in “some dickhead indie guitarist” as a cynical move to endear himself to a younger audience than his traditional one, but the comment was entirely in keeping with the tongue-in-cheek article that in fact praised the album highly as “the sophistry of old-style ‘romantic bluff.’” Despite Johnny’s typically in-and-out, job-done role, the album was actually a year and a half in the making, though of course Johnny’s contribution lasted nowhere near as long. Typically enthused by whatever he has worked on since The Smiths, Johnny thoroughly enjoyed the experience and the vibe of being in Ferry’s band, which he joined in the USA for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. As with Marr’s work with Talking Heads, yet to be released, the guitarist had been brought in to add something new to a project that Ferry was carrying around the studios of the world as he tried to refine new ideas and develop new moods for his own work.
If the jingle-jangle moaning of The Smiths was to be put to bed, then there was – as always – more work to be done. Fulfilling what might have been a lifelong ambition – he had loved the early guitar sound of James Honeyman-Scott and had used their guitar lines as warm-up routines for years – Johnny Marr joined The Pretenders. Gun-slinging band-hopping is nothing new – Mick Ronson’s joining Mott The Hoople and Robert Smith’s temporary membership of Siouxsie And The Banshees are just two examples of guitarists filling a necessary slot in an established band when needs must. Both Johnny and The Pretenders were at the time managed by Ken Friedman, and joining Chrissie Hynde’s band gave Marr a professional continuity, and while his presence helped the Pretenders out on tour it also gave him an immediate working relationship with a profoundly talented performer and writer in Hynde herself, who became a life-long friend. Better working than not – better a US tour with a top band than moping around South Manchester bemoaning the demise of his own.
Johnny looked back on his relationship with Chrissie Hynde years later. “One of the things that people don’t know…” he said of his time in the band, “[was] that my part in The Pretenders is ten per cent about the band and ninety per cent about my relationship to that woman.” Battered by the press and by the experience of leaving The Smiths, Johnny was brought down to earth with a bump when he opened up to Chrissie. “I’m going ‘Oh things are tough… Oh I left my band,’ and her vibe was ‘Well, two of my fucking band died… and I don’t even really know who your band are. Let’s go see some life.’” It was exactly what Johnny needed to help him get back out in the world.
The only published fruit of Johnny’s time with The Pretenders is his appearance on their single ‘Windows Of The World’, released in April of 1989. With Hynde’s vocal as characteristic as any in rock, and the ‘Pretenders sound’ certainly as distinctive as The Smiths’, it’s no surprise that the track sounds far more ‘Pretenders’ than ‘Johnny,’ but beautifully arranged and as emotionally compelling as can be.
* * *
As the dust settled on his independent status in 1988, Morrissey was quickly out of the traps with his first solo single ‘Suedehead’. With fellow Mancunian Vinni Reilly on board, and Stephen Street back in the fold, the disc was a triumph, with ‘Hairdresser On Fire’ soon established as a firm fan favourite too. Ironically, given the Smiths’ reputation as a singles band, the track confidently sauntered into the UK top five, and Morrissey’s status as a solo artist was established in a trice. Viva Hate, his first solo album, received similarly gushing plaudits. “Still the bees knees,” said NME, while for Melody Maker it was a great album by “our last star.” Nearly twenty years on, with Ringleader Of The Tormentors, Morrissey was still being referenced as such.
Johnny was by no means adrift himself. He exited The Smiths a better guitar player than when he started the band. After learning the ropes from John Porter, Johnny’s experience as a producer was extensive and his understanding of studio and recording techniques equally so. Regularly listed in the end of year polls as ‘Best Composer’ Johnny’s reputation as a writer was second to none, and with an increasing CV of contributions to other people’s records under his belt, there was a list of people with whom he was either going to work, had worked already, or was rumoured to be working with. His name would open any studio door in the world.
On a personal level, Marr had the mettle to take advantage of these strengths. With his background hustling around the Manchester clothing scene, he had clearly learned a tough business sense that put him in good stead when it came to managing anything. Still married to Angela, he had the stability of a long-term relationship to fall back on, and the support of someone who had known him from the days before his name was famous. He had managed all this, helped friends through addiction and sorted himself out of a potentially worrying situation with alcohol too. The Johnny Marr who kicked off 1988 with a contribution to the Dennis Hopper movie Colours [although he wasn’t happy with the way it had worked out], had one hell of a career behind him already, and he was still only twenty-five-years old.
Marr’s first full year as an ex-Smith allowed him the freedom to work in any field he chose to wander, yet the shadow of his erstwhile band continued to fall across his working life. For a while, Johnny considered moving to Los Angeles or New York to escape the pressure of people in Manchester continuing to harass him for leaving The Smiths, but decided to move back to his home town permanently, where true friends and family were only minutes away. As well as personal connections, when Johnny looked around the world for the most happening place in terms of music, it was Manchester that stood head and shoulders above the rest.
Away from the day-to-day grind of co-managing the business of The Smiths, Marr also soon found he enjoyed a greater sense of security in working as a contributor on other people’s projects. If The Smiths had been ‘a matter of life and death’ then better to concentrate on the former. “I’m happier,” he said, with typical understated modesty, “now that I know where the rent is coming from.”
Manchester itself was – largely down to the shadow that The Smiths had cast over the city – continuing its rebirth as the UK’s premier rock city. Coming home, this was another reason for Johnny to get involved again in Manchester life. From a distance it seemed to Johnny that – wherever he looked in the world – the best music, the most inspirational stuff, was once again coming from Manchester. The city was alive again, without his band having to shine all the lights at once. Shaun Ryder’s Happy Mondays’ debut LP Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) had been released in 1987, and their follow-up EP Madchester Rave On established not only the city’s profile in blending rock and dance rhythms but also gave a name to the Madchester phenomenon. Factory Records released Bummed, their critically acclaimed second album in 1988, and by their third – Pills And Thrills And Bellyaches – Madchester was a firmly established cultural concept. Alongside The Mondays came The Stone Roses, whose first Silvertone album was released in 1988. An overnight success – that typically took five years to happen – The Roses had formed around the same time as The Smiths, but although they had a near-guitar-legend of their own in John Squire, it took them much longer to establish a public face. In comparison with The Smiths, these two Manchester bands were notorious: Ryder’s much-publicised drug intake made for a public profile based more upon his ability to make headlines than his undoubted ability to make great records, while The Roses’ various tiffs with record companies meant that there were six long years between the releases of their first and second albums.
Through the summer, Johnny made occasional trips to join New Order in the studio as they were recording their album Technique, cementing the friendship with Bernard Sumner that would evolve into Electronic. Ironically, it was through the Madchester scene that the true revolution in the singles chart that The Smiths had wanted to bring about actually happened. What Morrissey and Marr had wanted to do – to completely revitalise the world of the seven-inch single – came about as the phenomenon of house music seeped into clubs like The Hacienda. While the music of Detroit and Chicago slowly gained credence, and while DJ-ing became as much a celebrity activity as being in a group, it was the guitar bands like The Mondays and Roses who dipped into the cultural meld and charged their more traditional rock with an immediate and contemporary dance consciousness. When house morphed into acid house, it became a national phenomenon, and the E-scene was emblazoned across the front pages of the tabloids.
Madchester and ‘baggy’ deflected attention away from the legend of The Smiths and towards a new hierarchy of Manchester bands, albeit most of them heavily influenced by them. Marr was able to begin rediscovering himself, finding out what made ‘Johnny Marr’ happy instead of having to keep the fan-base of his former band content. Within the band Johnny had often been uncomfortable in the role of ‘talking head’. As Johnny’s sense of dislocation increased, he had felt able to give interviews only when he felt ‘up’ and it had become harder and harder to find opportunities where he felt he could actually be himself. Now, with the attention of the world focused on other Mancunian mega-stars, Johnny could quietly rebuild his sense of his own self.
One brief project was to provide the riff that acted as theme tune to the short-lived TV music show APB. To great critical reviews, in March the fruits of Johnny’s work with Talking Heads was released. The Heads were one of the first American immediate post-punk, CBGB bands to develop a world-wide profile, due largely to their sparse instrumentation and the lyrical intrigue of nervy front man David Byrne, whose performance was an art form in itself. Enlivened by the input of Brian Eno, Talking Heads had been one of the most influential bands in the world for a decade, but as Byrne became more involved in extra-curricular work outside of the band, the sands were running out for the group. Naked proved to be their last studio album, and though he thoroughly enjoyed the sessions, Marr himself felt that the atmosphere within the band was “slightly odd,” and perhaps their closing moments as a recording unit were hard for an outsider to penetrate.
‘The Heads’ themselves were delighted with Johnny’s input to the album. He was brought onto the project by the album’s producer Steve Lillywhite, initially to augment ‘Ruby Dear’, the Bo Diddley rhythm of which cried out for Johnny Marr. Johnny’s input was, in fact, included on four of the released tracks. The album was one of the later-Heads’ strongest, augmented by anything up to three or four extra musicians at any given time. To get away from New York, the band decamped to Paris, where day-long sessions at Studio Davout were devoted to each individual track, with melodies and lyrics to be added in New York once the tracks were down.
“What was rather amusing to us,” remembers Heads’ drummer Chris Frantz “was that Johnny came with a giant flight case of guitars, and a famous guitar tech that we had met before at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas when he was working with The Rolling Stones. This guitar tech was an old pro who regaled us with stories about ‘Keith’ and ‘Eric’, ‘Jimmy’ and ‘Pete.’ Clearly Johnny had reached the big time.” Chris recalls.
The first track on which Marr worked was ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’, knocked off at lightening speed while waiting for the band to settle down for the recording of the second track ‘Ruby Dear’. Johnny’s twelve-string is evident throughout the middle section of the song, as well as in the distinctive introduction. ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ typified much of the collection, and Chris Frantz remembers that twelve-string contribution as his favourite piece of Johnny’s. The track was a softer song from a band very much looking for more earthen textures than the earlier, clipped industrial sound of their previous albums. As mentioned, ‘Ruby Dear’ was a Bo Diddley-based track on which Johnny’s trademark guitar is evident throughout the song. On ‘Mommy Daddy You and I’ Marr provided ‘Twang Bar Guitar’, giving the song a unique, antique flavour that matched the nostalgic lyric. As well as Johnny, Talking Heads had also invited Kirsty MacColl onto the album, which was produced by her husband Steve Lillywhite, and on ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ Marr and MacColl appeared together again. ‘Cool Water’, Johnny’s fourth and final contribution to the album, is a sombre, atmospheric number, driven again by riffing guitars but bearing an Eastern European flavour and more than a hint of Eighties-era King Crimson in its minor key urgency. Byrne encouraged Johnny’s detuned drone that characterises the song, played without traditional fingering or notation, a truly experimental bit of improvisation.
Johnny’s contribution to Naked was brief but meaningful, his work on the four tracks that made the finished album considerable. David Byrne told this author the experience was very fruitful and enjoyable. “It was one or two days at most,” he recalled. “He was so fast in the studio.” Frantz remembered Johnny’s cool demeanour and appearance. “At the time Johnny was wearing a little Greek fisherman’s cap and loads of jewellery, certainly more than (Heads’ bassist and Frantz’s wife) Tina. He was cute and very chipper.” Adaptable, musically articulate, understanding what was required and providing it with the minimum of fuss – Johnny’s brief standing as a Talking Head was enjoyable all round. “It was a blur,” remembers Byrne. “A good blur!”
Morrissey’s classic summer single ‘Every Day Is Like Sunday’ was culled from Viva Hate, a fabulous record that painted a romantic picture of a lost northern seaside town against an orchestrally-weighted band that continued to establish his solo work. In the meantime, Steve Lillywhite and Kirsty MacColl came to feature large over the next few months in Johnny’s life. While Kirsty had of course featured on ‘Ask’, and Lillywhite been brought in by Morrissey to work on that track, she and Marr had become good friends since the sessions with Billy Bragg. Kirsty’s CV stretched back way before The Smiths. Famously the daughter of folk legend Ewan MacColl, who had left the family home before she was born, Kirsty’s career owed as much to Beach Boys and Kinks influences as to the earthen tones of her Salford-born father. In fact, MacColl was almost a mini-Smiths herself. Her clear love of harmony, her succinct, intelligent and crafted lyrics laced with pathos and humour, musical tracks unadorned by musical diarrhoea but, like her lyrics, to the point and punchy, her work had much in common with Johnny’s already. Writing her own songs since the age of seventeen, Kirsty’s credits went back to late Seventies punk bands like The Addix (“I was just the token boiler on backing vocals,” she said in 1981, with her typical, ironic, charming modesty). In 1981 she skirted the dangerous waters of one-hit-wonderdom with ‘There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis’, and released her debut album Desperate Characters, returning with a hit for Tracey Ullman on ‘They Don’t Know’, on which Kirsty’s backing vocals were the clearest sound on the single. By 1988 she was working on singles and tracks that would lead to Kite, her first solo album for seven years, which was released the following year. “I didn’t write anything for a couple of years when I was having kids,” she said in 1989. “It took a long time to start up again.” Increasingly free of what she admitted was writer’s block, Kirsty produced a fantastic batch of songs for the assembled troupe of musicians to work upon. Typically generous, describing Johnny as “very energetic, a very ‘up’ person to be around,” Kirsty was happy to name-check Johnny as one of the main reasons why she came out of her writer’s block and got back into the studio. “He suggested ‘You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby’… saying ‘Why aren’t you doing anything? Get off your arse!’”
It was a sparkling album, comprising Kirsty’s best, succinct song-writing, crisp production from Steve Lillywhite and extensive contributions from Johnny, who co-wrote two of the songs, ‘The End Of A Perfect Day’ and ‘You And Me Baby’. The process brought out of Johnny what he describes as his “romantic melodic” thing, that of absolute love that engulfs the writing of certain songs. “When Kirsty asked me to write for her,” he remembers, “she said ‘I want one of those songs that make you feel happy and sad at the same time’… it can be almost upsetting when I make records [like that], that mixture of melancholia and vibrancy.” Kirsty was asked by the press about her ‘replacing’ Morrissey as Johnny’s wordsmith. “I don’t think I have,” she told Melody Maker in 1989. Citing Morrissey as her favourite lyricist since Ray Davies, she added “I think it would be terribly pretentious of me to think that.” She did however, reference The Smiths’ influence on a regular basis. “In my songs,” she told Cut magazine in 1989, “I try to put things succinctly and make them not too depressing. Wit is very important… what seems like the end of the world today might not be so tomorrow.” As an interviewee, Kirsty MacColl had few equals.
Inspired by her recent success with The Pogues over the Christmas of 1987 on the timeless ‘Fairy Tale Of New York’, the album also saw Pretenders/Average White Band guitarist Robbie McIntosh, Simple Mind’s Mel Gaynor and The The drummer David Palmer on board alongside Johnny. They were, in Kirsty’s own words, “people whose work I’ve always admired… The people I chose I’d either worked with before or knew the work they’d done for others.” Fresh as a daisy, the album is led, of course, by Kirsty’s impeccable vocal, but is essentially a guitar, bass and drums album, acoustic and discretely electric in its guitar sound. Sessions jumped between Townhouse and Ealing studios, and when the musical tracks were completed, Kirsty added finished vocals later. On ‘Mother’s Ruin’, Johnny’s triplets, trademark arpeggios and expanded chords lend an emotional weight to a touching song, the chorus of which could have come from Morrissey as much as MacColl. On the lovely cover of The Kinks’ ‘Days’, which took Kirsty back into the UK Top Twenty singles chart, Johnny is equally in evidence, colouring the chord changes with articulate picking and strumming throughout. ‘No Victims’ and ‘Tread Lightly’ had more of a Smiths feel, particular the latter, and Johnny’s guitar annotations keep the rockabilly pace of the song up-tempo beneath MacColl’s multi-tracked vocals. ‘What Do Pretty Girls Do?’ sounded like a Morrissey song too, at least in its title, but melodically, harmonically and lyrically the song is pure Kirsty.
The lilting, Beatle-like swagger of ‘The End Of A Perfect Day’ has trademark Johnny Marr fingerprints all over it: driven almost exclusively by fat, repeated guitar lines that carry the verses through punching accents from the cymbals, the lack of a clear chorus but the inevitable swirl around to a repeated vocal motif makes it a fine piece. At the end of a perfect album, Johnny’s second co-write is beautifully arranged around his understated, cyclical chord structure, the guitar chorused and the vocals perfectly intimate and open-voiced. For the song, ‘You And Me Baby’, Kirsty layered a choir of her own vocal behind a melody that sits exquisitely on the top line of Marr’s picking, while Fiachra Trench’s string arrangement sets the whole piece alight in its closing bars. The song had been written at Johnny’s home, crouched on his knees in the hallway, trying at once to both nail the song and not wake his new baby. “I was feeling kind of sad,” he remembers, “and [Kirsty] captured the spirit of that very closely.” Of the same song, Kirsty spoke of wanting to grace the track with lots of space and gaps using real strings to beautiful effect. The piece was a divine ending to a beautiful and perennially popular album, loved nearly twenty years later by Kirsty MacColl fans old and new.
Lillywhite’s production values echoed Johnny’s in many ways, often multi-layering guitars across a track, and building up Kirsty’s harmonised vocal to the same degree that the Smiths’ guitarist had developed with his own sound. Johnny would work on Kirsty’s follow-up album Electric Landlady, but Kite remains probably her most perfect work. Across her all-too short career she rarely recorded a bad track. She wrote beautifully, sang even more so, and did the whole thing – interviews included – with an intelligence, grace and humour that is increasingly rare in post-Kirsty pop singers. Of all the rock ’n’ roll deaths over the years – some tragic, some preposterous, some pathetic – Kirsty’s pointless death in the winter of 2000 robbed the world of a beautiful and creative woman. RIP Kirsty.
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The Smiths returned in September when Rough Trade put out their last ‘original’ Smiths album, the live release Rank. The collection was another number two in the charts, confirming the affection still held for the band a year after its demise. Rank was a live album taped at the National Ballroom in Kilburn in the autumn of 1986, a concert which captured the dual-guitar version of the band with Craig Gannon on stage with Marr. Johnny approved the album’s release, which included a live version of Johnny’s instrumental ‘The Draize Train’. A month later the Strange Fruit label issued The Peel Sessions, while before Christmas twelve-inch versions of ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’ and ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ completed another chapter in the release schedule of the band.
Johnny might have appeared to be getting free of his past, but The Smiths still haunted him. “I felt hollow at that time,” recalls Johnny. “The ugly situation with The Smiths split meant that trying to produce work after that was really difficult, almost unbearable.” “I had to grow up a little bit, and develop a really thick skin,” said Marr. While the hollowness prevailed, not only did Johnny find that writing was difficult, but he began to lose interest in even listening to music – a much more serious symptom. “What was scary was that I didn’t want to listen to records, and to be robbed of that is much, much worse than being robbed of the impulse to write,” said Marr.
Rumours began to circulate that Johnny was putting together a new band. Heat – almost a precursor of Marr’s future band The Healers – would involve former Julian Cope bass player James Eller and ABC drummer Dave Palmer. In fact, it turned out to be a ‘nearly’ band. It was a natural progression for Johnny however, that in the autumn he became part of another project, and stayed within its confines for as long as he had been associated with The Smiths.
The The, however, was a very different concept. For starters, there was no band as such. While teenage founder Matt Johnson had started The The off as a band concept, by the time of his debut album The The was in essence only Johnson plus guests. The format of The The that Johnny was involved with was, however, the most traditional band line-up that the band enjoyed, touring and recording as a working unit.
The relationship between Johnson and Marr went back to that drizzly October night in 1981 when the pair were introduced, and the two had remained close friends still. From day one they had harboured a desire to work together. As mentioned, in 1983 the pair had been together while Johnson was writing and preparing the album Soul Mining in his flat near Arsenal’s football stadium in Highbury, London. By the time Johnny came to work with him properly he was aware of Matt’s writing methods and recording processes, his use of guesting artists, and his working methods with studio staff and producers. This was not a traditional band experience, as Johnny had always known it – more of a research process based upon superb song-writing: Johnson would write everything, play much of the instrumentation, handle a lot of the relevant programming and engineering, and bring in collaborators where needed. There were parallels with The Smiths to some degree – the work to date had been a mixture of the melancholic and the exuberant, often with those two emotions mixed within one song. But The The’s output to date had been a more varied affair, at times punching with soul, at other glacial and distracted. It was a refined concept, one of the most critically acclaimed ‘bands’ of the era.
Mind Bomb would be released the following year as the result of their first official collaboration, though collaboration only to a degree. By the time Johnny was involved – the pair were by now sharing management, and there was a professional as well as personal logic to their working together – much of the song-writing had been completed. The album developed as a blend of finished pieces and demos that Matt wanted to develop within a group context, and this was largely how the piece progressed. With issues in his personal life defining the trajectory that the album would take – the break-up and re-building of a close relationship coloured Johnson’s spiritual search at the time – the album became a roaring indictment of organised religion. By his own confession, Johnson was “pretty whacked out” and “into some very interesting states of mind” at the time. He was fasting, or living on very proscribing diets, drinking copious quantities of magic mushroom tea and meditating extensively. Matt was ready for Marr’s input. “I wouldn’t eat for days,” said Johnson. “And then I’d do loads of magic mushrooms. I tried all sorts of things which I don’t need to detail… I was putting myself through so much I lost it and began to hear voices.”
The initial impetus to move away from the material on the hugely successful and previous The The album Infected came from the ubiquitous Billy Bragg, whom Johnson had met in Australia. Billy encouraged Matt to join in the activities of the Red Wedge campaign, and Johnson enjoyed the resulting shows to such a degree that he decided that the next The The album would be made by a more traditionally-structured band.
Johnny and Matt met up in Johnson’s recently acquired East London home and studio, part of a converted department store. “We sat up talking till the sun came up,” Johnson said in conversation with Johnny in 2002, “[and] lost all sense of time.” Without even being aware of the existing friendship between the three, once Matt had Johnny on board he called James Eller and Dave Palmer, and they joined the band for the album that was to follow. Johnny was still working with Chrissie Hynde, and so an insane routine was established where he would work with Chrissie until the early hours of the morning and then load all his gear into the car and drive across London to Matt’s studio. “I’d get there,” Johnny remembered, “and we’d take loads of mushrooms and ecstasy. It was the most intense psychological and philosophical experiment.”
The first session was particularly memorable. Due to arrive at noon, Johnny had spent the previous night on ecstasy, and – after what he called “a real psychedelic night” – he turned up two hours late “looking like one of the Thunderbirds with his strings cut.” Johnny picked up on Johnson’s own tenseness as they started work on ‘The Beat(en) Generation’, but it just wasn’t happening. “I turned to Matt,” Marr recalls, “and said ‘Look – I’ll be honest with you: I took a load of E for the last three nights and I’m feeling a bit wobbly.” Honesty has never been one of Johnny’s problems… While such an admission might have finished a Smiths session there and then, Johnson’s response was to encourage the potential of the situation rather than act against it. “Matt looked at me,” says Johnny, “and with great production acumen said ‘Well, we’d better get some more then hadn’t we!’” So the pair wore out their engineers and produced their masterwork against the odds.
Mind Bomb’s was a perfect line-up, completing the traditional four-piece and co-incidentally bringing together the band that might have become Heat. Johnny was to describe this incarnation of The The “as much of a band as any band I’ve ever been in”, and the entire process of putting the album together was both relaxing and intense. The band itself was a perfectly formed group, under Johnson’s directing eye. Nor were the foursome alone in the recording process; some seventeen performers appeared on the album in addition to a choir and the Astarti string section. Included in the cast were bass supremo Danny Thompson and Sinead O’Connor, who sang beautifully on ‘Kingdom of Rain’.
‘Good Morning Beautiful’ was one of the band’s favourite pieces, based upon field recordings of Islamic voices in Indonesia brought to the project by Johnson’s girlfriend. With a glance towards David Bowie’s Station To Station in its opening, the piece uses samples in quite a different way to Byrne and Eno’s use of similar sounds on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Where they used samples as the central tenet of the song, The The use them as colourings, illustrations to the musical tracks, and the effect is very pleasing. Directing the piece to the band, Johnson instructed Johnny to make his contribution sound “like Jesus meeting the Devil.” “I was thinking… ‘Right – that’s a new one!’” said Johnny afterwards.
‘Armageddon Days’ had one of the strongest lyrics on the album, a brave piece augmented by a full choir, inspired by the current worsening issues between the Islamic world and the West. “People have forgotten how serious that whole situation was,” Johnson was to comment later in reference to the Salman Rushdie affair that also went off over the coming months. “‘Armageddon’ started to pick up radio play, and at least one station got a phone call from someone… basically, ‘don’t play this, or else.’” Had it been released as a single, the opening few bars would have been familiar to anyone who remembered Sweet, the glam rock band whose ‘Ballroom Blitz’ was a huge hit in the early Seventies. It was clear however, that the wrath of Matt was levelled not at God but at organised religion per se – divinity is fine, but how we use it for our own means is the most divisive flaw in mankind’s make-up. Track three, ‘The Violence Of Truth’, featured Mark Feltham on harmonica (though the harmonica on ‘Beyond Love’ was Johnny), a faux-glam riff from Johnny electrifying the track that demonstrated Marr’s continuous search for a feel or vibe. “The only way I could get that sound,” says Johnny, “was to pick the most horrible guitar I had, tape up the top four strings and just whack the bottom ones. It turned out almost like glam sax!”
‘Kingdom Of Rain’ contains the images of blood and rain that appear throughout the album, and Sinead’s duet with Johnson as passionate as one would expect. Although O’Connor had had hits already, it was to be another nine months before she moved the whole world with own version of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’.
‘The Beat(en) Generation’ was named after a painting by Johnson’s brother Andy, a warning shot fired across the bows of a generation of youngsters so hip that they had lost the connection with the real issues of their lives. Matt described it as a message for people who were living “all icing and no cake.” The song has an engaging immediacy, reflecting the fact that Johnson wrote it from start to finish in two hours. The jaunty, country feel of Johnny’s 12-string Stratocaster and Mark Feltham’s irresistible harmonica drew a lot of listeners to the album, and was Johnson’s first, deliberate attempt to do just that – to bring an audience into an album via a hit single. “I realised that I had been making life difficult for myself,” Matt told Alternative Press. “Commercially, I’d always made the wrong moves for all the right reasons… In retrospect I couldn’t have done it any other way.” If the newly-found singles audience was expecting an album filled with rockabilly Marr, then they had not listened closely to the lyric – deeper waters awaited the listener to Mind Bomb in the politically-charged world order.
‘August & September’ was lifted wholesale from Johnson’s personal diary, written on an island in the Mediterranean, a passionate love song of break-up and despair. ‘Gravitate To Me’, another single off the album, was the penultimate track, with more bluesy harmonica, this time set above Johnny’s Chic-style guitar. ‘‘Beyond Love’ was Johnson’s personal favourite from the album. “It has some of the strongest lyrics I’ve written,” Matt was to tell Martin Roach, also in The Right To Imagination And Madness, and the images of drops of blood and semen struck a haunting chord with many listeners too.
In The The, Johnny found a new soul-mate. While he was not necessarily looking for replacements for Morrissey, Rourke and Joyce, he clearly needed some grounded process to work on, and in Johnson he found not only a friend but a polished and articulate song-writer, who was also a guitar player and whose work suited his own playing, like jigsaw pieces fitting together. At the end of the sessions, Johnny – ever generous with his guitars – presented his sunburst 12-string Strat to Matt as a present.
Johnson was the only player who Johnny could consider working with at the time, noting cryptically that “I don’t fit well with other guitarists.” Mind Bomb was work that he felt he could “embellish and feel very comfortable with,” and when the album was finally mixed at Air Studios off Oxford Street, there was a palpable feeling that The The had produced something unique and brave, a charged album that addressed some heavy and unpopular issues. Consequently the critical response was mixed. As it has been often for Billy Bragg, commentators who don’t like his overtly political stance choose to ignore the searing and heart-wrenching love songs that he has produced, and so with Mind Bomb – reviewers took against its political and religious content and failed to record some of the warmer songs on an album that Johnny was very proud of. Both Marr and Johnson felt that there was a critical backlash because of who they were, not because of the content of the album. “A lot of people had it in for [Johnny],” Matt told Heather Bell, “and [for] me – for getting a bit cocky. So we just battened down the hatches.”
In fact, Mind Bomb has aged particularly well, and remains a remarkably warm, melodic, passionate and eloquent piece of work. Musically it is varied, beautifully arranged and played with a precision and care only evident in works that are labours of love. Lyrically it is articulate and fervent, and delivered with evident passion. One reviewer likened it to TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. Johnson himself looked back on the album with mixed feelings. “I was obviously taking myself too seriously, and probably got what was coming to me,” he says. “But in my defence I was trying to bring something new to the songs with the angle I took on religion.” The album was, Matt admitted, ahead of its time. “If it had been Ice T doing that in 1991 everyone would have considered it a revelation,” he said, concluding that – probably encapsulating the response to both him and Johnny – “Britain loves its people to be as humble as possible!”