By early 1995 Raise The Pressure, the new Electronic album, was well under way. It was a more ambitious work than Electronic – the tracks that emerged included more dance music than Johnny’s trademark guitar, but ‘Forbidden City’, which Marr cited as one of his favourite Electronic tracks, and ‘For You’ featured his guitar more. The emotional ‘Out Of My League’ was another of Johnny’s favourites. At the same time, Oasis released ‘Some Might Say’, their first number one single in the summer, and when NME set the band up head to head against Blur with its ‘British Heavyweight Championship’ front cover, they were guaranteed headlines in both the music and the general press; indeed, the story of who would get the coveted number one single slot when the two bands released their singles on the same day became an item on the prime BBC news show that evening.
Meanwhile, Morrissey’s career took a turn for the worse on the release of Southpaw Grammar, of which one reviewer unkindly noted that there was no reason why anyone who already owned something by Morrissey “should ever want to hear this record.” For Morrissey and Johnny, however, there was far worse ahead, as the former members of The Smiths prepared with their respective lawyers for a court case that would bring them all back into the headlines.
1996 proved a miserable year for the four members of ‘the best British band since The Beatles’ as Mike Joyce’s claim over royalties came to court. The case consisted of the fact that – while song-writing royalties to Morrissey and Johnny were not in question – he had received an unfair percentage of the band’s performance royalties. Going right back to the original contract with Rough Trade, on which only the names of Morrissey and Johnny had appeared, making them, legally, the only actual members of The Smiths, Mike argued that the 10% share of income that he and Andy Rourke had received was unfair in comparison with the remaining 40% each share enjoyed by Johnny and Morrissey.
Alongside equally famed cases such as George Michael’s against Sony, Lol Tolhurst’s against The Cure, or Prince’s against Warner Bros, the case of The Smiths has gone down as one of the most dramatic and bitter in rock legal history. The press had a field day – it had been a long time since the British press had had a chance to take a pop against Morrissey in particular, and, regardless of the rights or wrongs of the case, it was largely the singer who unfairly took the brunt of the bad press. Andy Rourke had previously accepted a settlement with his former band-mates over the issue, but for Joyce it was clearly a matter to take further. While The Manchester Evening News noted that “the four band members barely acknowledged each others’ presence throughout the court hearing”, the esteemed local newspaper also observed a notable description of Johnny by his representative in court. Robert Englehart QC described Marr as “a very decent, honest person – scrupulously fair – who was not going to cheat his friends.” The press estimated the outcome in favour of Joyce to be somewhere nearing £1 million pounds, a huge sum of money if that was accurate, and consequently the bitterness between band members was long-lasting.
Of the two song-writers, only Johnny was in court to hear the judge’s decision, described by The Times as “looking shocked, pale and refusing to comment” as he left the courtroom. Described by the judge as an “engaging personality” and a “reasonable character”, the affair clearly affected Johnny significantly. Despite his losing the case, Marr came out of the debacle with generally positive press. But not only were his former band-mates at odds with him, in Andy – who had given evidence during the case himself – he was in court with a near life-long friend. Morrissey was to appeal against the judge’s decision made in favour of Joyce, though he was to lose that appeal, while Johnny accepted and settled the amounts proscribed by the judge. Years later the acrimony was still evident between Morrissey and Mike, though Johnny has kept a low profile on the subject. The British press gleefully attacked Morrissey, quoting and mis-quoting the judge’s words ad infinitum. Ten years on, Johnny and Andy prepared to take the stage together again for the first time since the demise of the band, and Marr hinted at the agony that the case had caused him: “Andy and I go way back before The Smiths,” he told journalist Pete Paphides on the subject of their appearance in the high court. “Our friendship was bigger than that.”
With the case behind him, Johnny – and indeed Morrissey – got back to work, though for Johnny it was a relatively quiet time. The release of Raise The Pressure kept Electronic’s stock high, a collection of breezy-but-melancholic dance tracks and slower pop numbers featuring some of Johnny’s loveliest guitar work for a long time.
‘Forbidden City’ had an air of the Pet Shop Boys in its graceful melody, but is pure Sumner in the lyric, while Johnny’s acoustic strumming has a fantastic crispness and lightness to it. The discrete electric accents that he puts into the track, and the stretching, yearning solo make ‘Forbidden City’ one of Electronic’s best tracks, and a beautiful album opener. ‘For You’ maintains the tone of guitar-driven pop, with Johnny again carrying Sumner’s vocal perfectly. The orchestral clouds that open the next track give way to the metronomic keyboards of ‘Dark Angel’, the first song on the album not co-written with Kraftwerk’s Karl Bartos, and a lovely blend of the optimistic and the melancholic.
‘One Day’ is powered by Marr’s guitars again – pulsating acoustic, howls of feedback and rich, atmospheric chords that lead into one of Johnny’s best, aggressive riffs on the album, though the verse is highly melodic. More glacial, orchestral keyboards introduced ‘Until The End Of Time’, another song with a Pet Shop Boy feel to it – refined, restrained dance music with an air of distraction. ‘Second Nature’ was a more reflective track, bringing the pace of the album down. ‘If You’ve Got Love’ pumped the energy up a level again. Johnny was particularly happy with ‘Out Of My League’, a song that combines the pace of ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ with the melodic transparency of the kind of carefree early Seventies pop of which Johnny has always been a fan. ‘Interlude’ was a short piece combining the claustrophobia of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs with the textured, pastoral feel of Tomita. Brooding electronica defined ‘Freefall’, while ‘Visit Me’ was another gentle piece in which keyboard and Johnny’s acoustic guitar complement Sumner’s assured vocal perfectly. ‘How Long’ and ‘Time Can Tell’ closed the album, the latter gently strummed by Johnny around cool, jazzy chords.
Raising The Pressure was a mature piece, the sound of writers and musicians at ease with one another and the music they created. Despite the heightened energy of many of the tracks, it was a reflective album, removed from the frenetic force that had defined Bernard and Johnny’s previous outing.
Early in the New Year, ‘Second Nature’ was released as a single. Johnny then worked with another old friend from Manchester, Mike Pickering. Formerly A&R man at Factory Records, Pickering had been responsible for bringing both James and The Happy Mondays into the Factory stable, and latterly Guru Josh and Black Box to Deconstruction, to where he moved after Factory. Then, fronted by Heather Small, and including former Orange Juice keyboardist Paul Heard and Pickering, M-People had had a club-land hit with ‘How Can I Love You More?’ in 1991. It was the album Elegant Slumming in 1993 that launched the hits ‘Moving On Up’ and ‘One Night in Heaven’ on the world.
By the time Fresco was released in the autumn of 1997, the band were on something of a slide, with critical reaction to the previous two albums being luke warm. The new album was another rich collection of highly polished pop soul tracks, on two of which Johnny appeared. ‘Believe It’ was a funky dance number based around a repeated riff, and ‘Rhythm And Blues’ a mid-paced number featuring Johnny’s echoing, wah-wah solo. Both tracks were, once again, a diversion from Johnny’s more familiar work, and were also – like so many of his diversions – steps into soul and dance.
At the same time, Morrissey’s critical standing was re-adjusted by the release of Maladjusted, after the under-whelming Southpaw Grammar. The album, according to Uncut, “confounded the obituary writers.” Morrissey and Marr could still cut it, however far apart.
* * *
In November, one of Johnny’s chance meetings while in the USA led to the genesis of his first truly solo work some years later. In an elevator in New York he “bumped into” a young guy. “We started talking, and we hit it off,” explained Johnny much later. When he discovered that the guy was a musician, the pair arranged to meet up and play back at Johnny’s house when they were back in the UK. At first, remembered Marr, “I wasn’t even aware that he was a musician.” Of course the young man was Zak Starkey, son of Ringo and drummer to the stars. Starkey’s career went back to the early Eighties, although technically of course, being the son of a Beatle, it had in all likelihood started at birth. Sean and Julian Lennon, Danni Harrison, and Sir Paul’s son James McCartney have all followed their dads into the business. By 1985, Zak was working with Roger Daltrey on his album Under A Raging Moon, with former Moody Blue and member of Wings Denny Laine on Hometown Girls, and was soon established not only as a touring member of The Who but also in his old man’s All Starr band.
“He’d go off with The Who, and then I’d get back and be writing with Beth Orton,” said Marr. “And he’d be doing some more Who stuff… We got to a point where we really liked the songs, and wanted to turn this into a band.” The pair had a natural affinity, and by 1998 it was Starkey who was discussing in interviews the ongoing work with Johnny that eventually led to Johnny Marr’s new band, The Healers. Johnny spoke of how he had been auditioning drummers who were so nervous that they couldn’t hold their sticks properly, but that when he met Starkey the adulation was the other way round. Remembering what Marc Bolan and T. Rex had meant to the teenage Johnny, he laughed when he told the tale. “It was when he said he’d been on the set of Born To Boogie (the T. Rex movie directed by Ringo Starr)… I just thought, ‘Oh my God!’”
1997 also saw eighteen years of Conservative drudgery come to an end. It was a heady few months: England beat Italy at football, the United Kingdom won the Eurovision song contest with – for a change – a proper band (Katrina And The Waves), and New Labour ousted the greying Tories under the banner of ‘Cool Britannia’. Tony Blair’s publicity machine recognised the new wave of optimism amongst the youth of the country, and – with the generation of acid housers and E-droppers who had gathered at Spike Island to witness The Stone Roses back in 1990 now all eligible to vote – Blair brought rock music on board to establish his own rock ’n’ roll yoof credentials. In truth, the move was both a genuine inclusive gesture from Blair – he was after all the first British Prime Minister to play the electric guitar, having fronted his own band at university – but it was also a demeaning and cynical ploy to promote a political agenda. The sight of Noel Gallagher, suited and booted at 10 Downing Street, troubled some, but not Noel, who had happily supported New Labour and used the previous years’ Brit Awards as an opportunity to tell the nation who to vote for. Since Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit had appeared on the front of posh style mag Vanity Fair, both the Gallagher brothers and Cool Britannia had become high profile across the British media. By the release of Oasis’s ‘difficult third album’, the band were established as both the darlings and anti-heroes of a nation reeling from the death of Diana Spencer, the former wife of The Prince of Wales. Be Here Now sold more than three quarters of a million copies on its first day of release, but the album received a critical mauling.
Soon though there was turmoil within the Oasis camp itself. While Alan White had replaced original drummer Tony McCarroll in 1995, the year 1998 saw the departure of both Paul McGuigan and guitarist Paul Arthurs. The never-ending story of the Gallagher Brothers’ band took another turn. ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs was a popular member of the band with fans, and his replacement would have to both fit in with the remaining members and appeal to the fan base. Who better?
Johnny denies that he was ever officially asked to join Oasis. That doesn’t mean to say that behind locked doors and between friends the matter wasn’t discussed. Of course, Johnny would play with them in the future, and tour with them with The Healers. For now Oasis was not for him, and the gig was taken on by Gem Archer of Heavy Stereo. Johnny is regularly linked with bands when their guitarist jumps ship – he was later to be associated with Blur, as a replacement for outgoing guitarist Graham Coxon, but of course this was even less likely to happen than his joining Oasis.
One of Johnny’s production projects was released in September, when Marion’s album The Program was released. The connection that brought Johnny in as producer on the second album by the Macclesfield-based Britpop band came via Joe Moss, who was managing Marion and invited Johnny down to the studio. The album was a follow-up to their first release This World And Body, for a band that had built up a strong live following around the country, including having played support roles for both Morrissey and Radiohead. “I wasn’t particularly looking to produce a group,” said Johnny. “They invited me down to a rehearsal. Before we knew it, six hours had gone by and we’d worked on pretty much the whole album.” As so often in Johnny’s career, it is the personal connection that leads to the collaboration. “It soon became obvious,” said Johnny, “that we were going to make a record.”
While Marion’s career was not long-lasting, the album they produced with him was well-received, and still sounds good nearly a decade on – unsurprisingly somewhere halfway between The Smiths and The Healers. Johnny’s input was very similar to what he had injected into Billy Bragg’s work: embellishment, re-writing, playing on the tracks and, in this case producing the band too. Marr also co-wrote ‘Is That So?’ and the single ‘Miyako Hideaway’. As with Bragg, Sumner or Talking Heads, if Johnny heard elements in the songs that he felt could be developed further, the band themselves were open to his ideas. “They had a steaming chorus,” Johnny said of the ‘Miyako Hideaway’. “And I came up with a middle-eight and developed the verses a little.”
Marion singer Jaime Harding watched Johnny at work on the tracks, and, like Billy Bragg, he too felt that there was a magical touch in what Marr brought to the party. Most of all, whatever Marr did, or added, or wiped, he never lost the feel of Marion themselves, never subjugated the band to his own ideas. “Johnny’s input [on the album] was as big as anybody’s, and he changed quite a lot of the music under the voice,” explains Harding. “He made it richer and gave it a different feel, but… it’s a Marion sound.”
Unfortunately, although the album was a very powerful piece of work – the sound of an established band making big strides – The Program did not progress Marion into the big league. By the spring of the following year the band was in tatters, but several years on they still have a strong following. Guitarist Phil Cunningham went on to join New Order and – completing the circle as so many times has happened in Johnny’s career – play with Electronic.
* * *
The death of Linda McCartney in 1998 had moved many people for whom Sir Paul and The Beatles had formed a backdrop to their life. While the turmoil that was The Beatles’ closing years had entertained and dumbfounded most observers, Linda had forever been at Paul’s side in the aftermath, and – as a member of Wings – become a pop star of sorts in her own right. Linda had also been dearly loved for her stand on behalf of vegetarianism and animal rights. Thus it was a congregation formed from many churches that mourned her death.
To mark the anniversary of her passing, an emotional concert was organised at London’s Royal Albert Hall in April of 1999. Paul appeared, of course, alongside Marianne Faithful, Tom Jones, Neil Finn, Elvis Costello and others. For Smiths fans, the appearance of Johnny getting back with Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders to sing ‘Meat Is Murder’ was a highlight of the show, and a natural synergy as Hynde had long ago joined Linda in the animal rights movement herself. It was moving to see Johnny put the past behind him to perform a Smiths song for a cause he felt truly noble. “There was a bigger principle at stake other than some silly sort of pop notions,” said Johnny, happy that the larger share of the proceeds from the event would go to the charity Animaline. Johnny also performed on the night with Marianne Faithful and – in a surprising coda to the performance of George Michael – added his weight to a performance of Michael’s ‘Faith’. How The Smiths fans of the Eighties must have smiled.
“[It] was pretty incredible really,” said Johnny. “I felt kind of honoured to play there… very grateful to be asked. And I felt quite flattered to have known [Linda] because she was a very beautiful person.” The event was the first time that Johnny met up with Neil Finn, with whom he would work closely, though their conversation was short. For all concerned, the Linda McCartney tribute was a delight all round.
In April, Johnny appeared on Top Of The Pops again, with Electronic, to promote the current single ‘Vivid’. Asked what the new album was going to be like, Marr and Sumner were in good form. “It’s not very good,” joked Barney. “It wasn’t worth making.” Marr denied having anything to do with it at all. “We’re not really on it,” he claimed on www.worldinmotion.net. “We got our friends to do it!” Twisted Tenderness was in fact a departure for Electronic, a rock album retaining their trademark sense of melody but this time heavy on guitar. In a sense, this was the first Electronic album proper, the first time that the band defined their own sound as a band. Bernard and Johnny were both keen to explain how much each had influenced the other’s work over the long period that they had been working together. “People don’t realise that we’ve lived in each other’s pockets for eight or nine years,” Johnny reflected. Despite being forever linked with Morrissey in people’s minds, Marr was proud of the relationship he now had with Bernard Sumner, saying that “this is the longest-running partnership I’ve been involved with.”
Whereas Raise The Pressure had been the product of years of work, Twisted Tenderness was completed in only a few months. The difference was that the duo, reversing their usual writing/recording process of composing on keyboards and overdubbing, wrote the songs on guitar instead. Marr found the process exhilarating – perhaps having reached the end of a natural cycle of experimentation and wishing to get back to the basics of what he did best. The resulting creativity brought a number of songs out of Johnny that he felt needed a different context – songs that required a bunch of guys in a room playing as a traditional rock band. So began the process – though a number of these tracks ended up as Electronic songs – of composing tracks for what eventually became The Healers.
The band for Electronic’s album was fleshed out again by adding Black Grape’s Ged Lynch on drums, Jimi Goodwin on bass and Astrid Williamson on backing vocals. It wasn’t only Johnny who played guitar. With a lot of what Marr called “coaxing and bullying”, he talked Bernard into including his own guitar lines on the final recordings too, just as he had encouraged Matt Johnson in the past.
Twisted Tenderness was another labour of love. When Johnny spoke of there being a unique sound quality to his material that he could only achieve when he worked with Sumner, it recalled his absolute devotion to the songs he had done with Matt Johnson. Sumner’s lyrics – aided and abetted by Johnny, who “helped out” on the writing – had an increased weight to them, beyond much of what he had written elsewhere, and for the first time his lyrics were printed on the album’s sleeve. These were not jobbing workaday fancies for wealthy freelance musicians, but projects of great worth and meaning to Johnny. He seemed to care as much about the music of Twisted Tenderness as he had about The Smiths more than fifteen years earlier. “I’m very proud of this record,” he told the BBC, “and want to promote it as much as possible.” Interestingly, the album was only released in the USA nearly a year after its European and Japanese release, including a handful of extra tracks.
‘Make It Happen’ and ‘Haze’ featured Johnny on vocals; ‘Vivid’ was one of the songs that Johnny had written and demoed initially with Zak Starkey and that Bernard jumped on for Electronic; ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ was the first cover version that Bernard had ever recorded, an ironic selection in itself. At the birth of Electronic, Neil Tennant had glibly called the band ‘the Blind Faith of the Nineties’, referencing the Sixties supergroup that combined Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood. So many years on, it was apposite that the group’s first cover should be one of Blind Faith’s best-known songs. Johnny was particularly proud of ‘Prodigal Son’, another song originally demoed with Starkey. On the album’s release, the band toured as a group proper, the first time that Johnny felt comfortable doing so with Electronic, which – in essence – was effectively a duo.
While Johnny openly admitted that Electronic’s mandate included commercial success alongside artistic honesty, it was felt that the release was under-promoted. Yet despite Johnny’s misgivings, the album made it to the top ten, eventually stalling at number nine. As it was, Twisted Tenderness proved to be – at least until now – the last album release from Electronic. A cycle of ten years had come to an end for Bernard and Johnny, during which time their work rate had been prodigious and the quality of their output – like everything else Marr has worked on – impeccable. As always – because partners such as Sumner, Bragg or Johnson were friends before they were working colleagues – Johnny would not write off the chances of Electronic convening again in the future.
For now though, Twisted Tenderness marked the end of an era. “I am really proud that we still [have] a friendship that is really strong,” Johnny said of his ongoing relationship with Sumner. “As I do with Matt Johnson and Chrissie Hynde, and pretty much everyone I’ve worked with.” The relationship with Bernard was perhaps closer than with any former collaborator. “When we took a break… we would get on a boat and go sailing together. I have never been closer to anyone.”
There were always distractions however, and not always welcome ones for Johnny. The year of Twisted Tenderness was also the year of Manchester United’s treble victory in the FA Cup, Premiership and in Europe – a momentous night for Manchester’s ‘other team’, but not one savoured by supporters of the blue side of the city. Marr and Sumner joked that while Bernard was becoming increasingly smug at Utd’s success, Johnny was becoming more and more ‘twisted’ in his perverse desire to see The Reds stuffed. With City’s form getting worse, Bernard would tease Marr that Man City “would be playing Salford Grammar School next.”
Electronic had run its course, but Johnny and Bernard remained close friends. “It’s one of the rare examples of a band that split up with no acrimony whatsoever,” said Johnny, and his friendship with Sumner – who he describes as “a real punk” – remains intact.
One of Johnny’s least-expected moves in the late Nineties took him back twenty years and more. Looking back to their early encounters around the Manchester scene in the early Eighties, Mike Joyce remembers how his future band-mate always stood out from the crowd, because, he claimed, Marr was “always his own little fashion industry.” In 1999 his life-long interest in matters fashionable led him to team up with one of Manchester’s coolest designers, and set up their own fashion label.
Marr had started out in ‘the fashion trade’ – as mentioned, before The Smiths he had worked in X Clothes and hung out at Joe Moss’s Crazy Face boutiques in central Manchester. Noted by everyone who remembers him back then for his sartorial elegance, Johnny had run back and forth to London fetching biker boots and berets back to put around town. An unlikely fashion leader for the new millennium perhaps, but the entire indie scene, Oasis and The Stone Roses all had a genetic link back to the look of Johnny Marr about them. Johnny had always been interested in cool.
‘Elk’ was a partnership with designer Nigel Lawson – no relation to the English Tory MP famed for his weight loss plan and notorious offspring. Lawson grew up in Hazel Grove, one of Stockport’s more affluent suburbs only a few miles from Manchester city centre. In the late Eighties he had opened a store called Quad in Manchester’s collective retail warehouse Affleck’s Palace, the place in Manchester to buy your second-hand duds, joss sticks and groovy clothes from young, yet-to-be-established fashion designers. Quad supplied, amongst other things, Henri Lloyd jackets – snapped up by Manchester’s fashion-conscious football fans, among them a young Mr L Gallagher. After Quad closed, Nigel took time travelling before a meeting with Johnny led them to found their own fashion label. The look was, according to Johnny, “a weird mix of native American, outdoor wear, Mod and other bits.” Marr spoke of how the enterprise was as much ideological as business-orientated, though the gear was certainly visible in exclusive circles, and in the UK it could be found at Selfridge’s, at Manchester’s Geese and Dr Jives in Glasgow, while Johnny had established outlets in Boston, San Fransisco, and New York. Bernard Sumner and various members of Oasis could be spotted in the self-styled ‘desert and forest clothing’ over the next year or so, in particular in leather cagoules ‘built in Manchester.’ “It’s like a band,” Marr said. “If you keep the ideas pure and the enthusiasm up, then people can realise it’s not a corporate thing.” Elk hung up its horns after a couple of years. But for a while Johnny was not just a fashion leader, but a fashion entrepreneur.
In the summer of 1999 another new friend entered Johnny’s life via a casual meeting in the USA, and led to a beautiful track with which Johnny was closely involved. Norfolk-born UK singer Beth Orton’s debut album Trailer Park was a splendid, folky debut from a singer-songwriter who immediately turned heads and ears with her mellow, trippy songs. The follow-up, Central Reservation showed Orton very much on a journey both musical and spiritual. In 1999, Orton was appearing in the Lillith Fair, the women-only travelling festival founded by Sarah McLachlan. Backstage after one of her shows, she came off stage to find a friend in deep conversation with someone she didn’t recognise.
“I was just chatting to the two of them,” said Orton. The conversation lasted half an hour before Beth eventually asked the ‘other guy’ what his job was. “And he was like, ‘Oh, I play guitar.’ And I said, ‘Oh, is that right? Anyone I’ve heard of?’” Johnny introduced himself modestly as the guitar player in The Smiths. “I was like, ‘Oh no, you’re Johnny Marr!’” said Orton. While she might have been showered in embarrassment, she needn’t have worried. Johnny was cool. “He’s such a sweetheart,” said Beth. “We just carried on.”
“She knew who I was,” agreed Johnny, “but she didn’t know it was me.” The pair hit it off immediately. Discovering that they were staying in the same hotel, Johnny and Beth would sit into the small hours on the balcony with the requisite guitars and promises that they would work together again. Orton had songs unfinished, and one caught Johnny’s ear in particular. “He got very excited about one song in particular,” says Orton, “and started adding these chords underneath. And then sort of… ‘What about this idea for the bridge?’”
“I wrestled the guitar out of her hands when I thought she’d got to a bit that was wrong,” laughed Johnny. “That’s how it happens… If I’ve got something in common with someone it is very likely that I’m going to like what they’re doing in the studio.” Johnny kept adding bits here and there, fixing up the chorus. “He got all these chords out of the cupboard,” said Beth. “And he was putting in all these little things… he just added this other dimension.”
The result – ‘Concrete Sky’ – is a beautiful track on a beautiful album. By the time Beth Orton got around to recording Daybreaker, Johnny was on tour with Neil Finn, and not available for the sessions. Although he had sung the gorgeous harmony on the demo, Beth roped in Ryan Adams, and the resulting track is the peak of an album that was itself one of the highlights of 2002.
While Johnny was in the States, he was also introduced to current wunderkind Beck Hansen, who he visited in the studio during the making of the latter’s album Midnight Vultures. The pair got on immediately, and Johnny added some guitar parts to a couple of tracks, most notably ‘Milk And Honey’. Beck’s articulate writing and lush, rich arrangements suited Johnny perfectly, and the lengthy, cinematic track was a highlight of a landmark album. Beck reminded Johnny of David Byrne, his wicked sense of humour and sense of the absurd combined with a truly unique creative gift. “He’s not afraid to go down some necessary side roads rather than just take the main road,” said Johnny. “He’ll be discussed in the same way as Neil Young… and David Bowie.”
Johnny’s thoughts continued to turn to solo material, and he was keen to formulate a more coherent solo project. To a degree, Marr’s success as a ‘solo’ performer to date had been his undoing. Given that almost every project he had worked on had been very successful, commercially as much as artistically, it was increasingly difficult to find the space to really identify what he considered his ‘own’ work, to distinguish exactly which creation was his and and which that of his partner. As a writer, that was one problem. As a producer, Johnny noted also that there was no distinction between what was his input and how much directly came from the artists themselves. Increasingly frustrated – collaboration with other artists having been the mainstay of Marr’s career – Johnny was becoming more and more keen to put the shared responsibilities of Electronic and The The to bed and to work on his own material. “When I’ve worked with other artists,” Johnny told an interviewer for www.worldinmotion.net early in 1999, “my first thought in the morning is fretting about the production… If I’m going to do that then I might as well do it for myself.” While Electronic had been his priority, he would use the other priorities of his partner to excuse himself from the project as soon as possible. “When Bernard does his stuff with New Order, I’m going to kick that [solo stuff] off. I’ll be singing and getting a band together.”
* * *
Into the new millennium, Johnny continued to be involved in a number of projects with friends, new acquaintances, and – most notably – more formative work on his solo ambitions. Friends had been encouraging Johnny to develop his own material, and to get a solo album together for years. Matt Johnson was one of the ‘encouragers’, himself having been on the receiving end of Marr’s own enthusiasm in the development of The The. “I think the world of Johnny,” he told one interviewer in 1999. “I’ve been telling him to do a solo record ever since I’ve known him. I’ve been kicking him up the arse… and he’s finally doing it.” Chrissie Hynde was another advocate. While Johnny’s material was developing, almost in a mirror of his teenage years, he realised that he needed a band to front the songs that he was writing.
Inspired by a slew of bands like Santana and Jefferson Airplane (instead of Leiber and Stoller!) he began to formulise a band structure that would have at its core a fundamental looseness, a ‘tribal band’ with many members. Early in 2000, Marr met bass player Alonza Bevan, late of retro-rockers Kula Shaker, and with Zak Starkey on board he already had the nucleus of the band. Appropriately, Kula Shaker had been a band that could recreate in a modern context the hazy, pot-fuelled years of the first wave of Britpop in the mid- and late-Sixties. Under the heavy influence of The Beatles, Small Faces and Traffic, the group achieved considerable success in the singles and the album charts, and with Crispian Mills on vocals had ready-made headlines as Mills was the son of actress Hayley and the grandson of actor Sir John Mills. From 1996, the band enjoyed a couple of years in the sun, but then the music press turned on them, and by the end of the decade – despite claiming that by then they would be the biggest band on the planet – Mills had left and the band was in tatters.
With two high-profile members of his band in place, Johnny might have been accused of cherry-picking celebrity members. But he had met Starkey and liked the guy before he had any idea of who he was; further, while Johnny had seen Kula Shaker live a couple of times and been impressed by their performances, it was another mutual friend who’d introduced the pair. “I was fully aware of his reputation as a musician,” said Marr, “[but] the crucial thing was that a mutual friend said we’d get along as people. And that is really what counts for me. We need to have that friendship.”
The comment once again illustrates Johnny’s fundamental working ethic: friendship first, work to follow. Of all the people that Marr has worked with over the years, he cites only three examples where the idea of working with a third party came before knowing them well. Beck, Talking Heads and Bryan Ferry are the three instances where he was so intrigued that he went ahead with the work before really knowing his partners.
During the year, Johnny also worked with one of his childhood heroes, appearing – alongside Bernard Butler – on Bert Jansch’s twenty-first album Crimson Moon. Jansch had inspired a generation and more of guitar pickers, his idiosyncratic but wonderfully compelling playing being an inspiration for anyone who sought out his work. For Johnny it was a dream come true – a dream he first had way back when he was learning to play as a young boy. Dreamweaver, the accompanying TV documentary on Jansch, also featured Johnny and Bernard, while the following year saw Johnny present Bert with a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.
Marr and Butler’s playing on Crimson Moon is delightful, with Bernard’s perhaps being the more erratic – appropriate for a player like Jansch, who has no concept of ‘middle-eights’ or bar lines. Particularly haunting was Johnny’s plaintive harmonica on ‘The River Bank’, while his backing vocals on ‘Looking For Love’ were beautiful too. Johnny appeared on Later With Jools Holland in July, with Bernard and Bert alongside him, playing ‘The River Bank’ live. It was a briliant performance.
Bert Jansch was rightly feted in celebration of his sixtieth birthday in 2003. The BBC arranged and filmed the event in which characters as diverse as Bernard Butler and Ralph McTell teamed up to celebrate Jansch’s life and music. Even if they didn’t play together, for Bert it was remarkable that such a diversity of players should appear on the same bill. Marr, of course, was in his element.
For Jansch, Bernard Butler was a bit of an unknown quantity, but he knew that he had come to his work via Johnny’s love for it. Johnny Marr he knew well. “Johnny is unstoppable,” said Jansch. “He is guitar-mad! Endless – he just goes on and on!” On the subject of the famous rock guitarist, who has someone to tune his guitars for him, Bert smiled wryly, “I didn’t know what a ‘guitar tech’ was until I met those two!”
* * *
It was the members of the coalescing new band who talked Marr into standing up and fronting the ensemble. Whilst a decade before he had re-iterated his lack of ambition as a front man, now it seemed an inevitability, and he adopted the role with relish. Back in 1989, Johnny had told NME that he never wanted to stand in front of a group: “I know I will never be as popular, sell as many records or be as famous as Morrissey or any other singer I work with… and I don’t want that.” However, in The Healers he took centre stage for the first time. It was also a joint decision between Johnny, the band, management and label, that the band be called (in full) ‘Johnny Marr And The Healers.’ “‘The Healers’ on the posters – we may get 500 people,” said Johnny, explaining that that is how he would have preferred it. “But if it has my name on it, we may get 504.”
As Johnny came up with the basic concept of The Healers and recorded demos of the songs likely to be worked on, he also sang the vocals. All along he figured that he would ultimately add a singer to the band to take care of the final vocal job, and had listened to a number of demos from prospective vocalists around Manchester. One or two were even in mind for the job. What happened was that a democratic process proved to Johnny that he was actually the best man for the job himself. Presenting the demos to the band, the musicians themselves decided who they wanted for their singer, and elected Starkey to deliver their ultimatum: they wanted their lead vocalist to be their guitar player. By the time The Healers were his priority, Johnny was cool enough and confident enough in his abilities to accept the job.
Singing live toned up Johnny’s vocal chords. The band played their first gigs in the spring of 2000, kicking off in the northern England town of Lancaster, where they played for nearly an hour and a half. While Lancaster was a ‘secret’ warm-up gig, their first advertised show was in Coventry, to an audience of about three hundred people, too many of whom clamoured for Smiths songs throughout. More importantly, the gig was a warm-up for dates to come, because The Healers were booked to support Oasis on their forthcoming tour. Johnny was asked whether it was ‘humbling’ to be supporting a band that he had helped get off the ground in the first place. It wasn’t as though Marr had had to beg for the gig. “I didn’t ask to support them,” he answered. “They invited me out.”
In fact, by now it was pretty obvious to anyone concerned that what really motivated Johnny Marr was the studio, and that any gig, headlining or supporting, was more about fun and the transference and sharing of energy rather than ego. “I didn’t really give a shit about supporting Oasis, and I didn’t see it as being humbling,” he said. “And I think humbling experiences are good for you, anyway.” Johnny had also enjoyed recent tours more than he had ever done in the days of The Smiths, and for the first outings of The Healers everything went well. The bands played six shows in seven days, in Milan, Zurich, Vienna, Leipzig, Warsaw and Berlin before returning to the UK for two dates at Bolton’s football ground, the Reebok Stadium, where they shared the support slot with the reformed Happy Mondays.
After Bolton, the band headed way out East, appearing at the Fuji Rock Fest in Japan, then in Barcelona. By September, the band was back in the UK, playing gigs in Portsmouth and London. As the writer, guitarist and singer, Marr invested more of himself in the experience than ever before, but thankfully the gigs routinely received a good reception. The first incarnation of The Healers tended to ramble through the songs live. “I wanted to really stretch them out and jam,” said Johnny. People were curious, but went away impressed by The Healers, by Johnny, and – in many cases – particularly by Zak Starkey. Taking the full glare of the spotlight was clearly a risky strategy for Johnny, but he carried it off with aplomb. He would draw comparison with other notable Mancunian vocalists, of which there were of course many to choose from, but perhaps a rock audience in the twenty-first century could forgive and forget the past, and take Johnny Marr on his own terms. For Johnny, as always, his eyes were on the present and the future, not on the past, and if the comparisons irked him, he kept a dignified silence. If he was compared to Ian Brown or Liam Gallagher, so what? As Morrissey used to tell some of the early Smiths audiences – if you don’t like it, leave.
In September Johnny joined an all-star bash to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of John Lennon. The sessions were held at George Martin’s Air Studios in Hampstead, and included the Gallagher brothers, Ron Wood, Donovan, Lonnie Donegan, as well as Sharleen Spiteri and Jools Holland. Sounding fantastic, the evening was kicked off by Johnny, Noel and Gem Archer playing the Lennon classic ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, accompanied by sitar and percussion. Towards the end of the year, Johnny followed up the dates that he had played with Oasis by sitting down with Liam Gallagher and laying down some songs. Within a week, Liam was reported to have written, and Johnny played on ten songs that would be considered for the next Oasis album. Liam apparently said the songs were better than anything by either Radiohead or John Lennon. The tracks remain unreleased as recorded with Johnny, but the next Oasis album – which Marr would ultimately play on – featured three of Liam’s songs.
Outside of The Healers, Johnny was also busy on tracks with two of his former collaborators, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. Nearly twenty years into their own career, the sessions for Release, to be heard publicly in 2002, saw the band eschewing again the synth pop of their early years and developing a more rounded, organic sound, with Johnny’s guitars prominent in the mix. With Johnny approaching the tender age of forty, there was no sign of any kind of mid-life crisis as the team worked on tracks at Tennant’s home in north-eastern England.
“We were very much on our own,” Chris Lowe told Sylvie Simmons, “in a very organic situation, and it all just sort of evolved.” While Tennant and Lowe had written many of the songs on guitar, Johnny’s final input was paramount, and the tracks that worked the best were the ones that were more guitar-oriented. A few years previously, Johnny had joked with an interviewer that Neil Tennant was ‘a closet Ritchie Blackmore’, but – he noted – was very melodic in his playing. One of Johnny’s roles on Release was to ‘re-do’ Tennant’s own guitar parts, digging into the tracks that Tennant and Lowe had put together, picking out elements on the guitar that brought them even further to life, just as he had done with Billy Bragg over a decade before. If the album was a departure for the Pet Shop Boys, nothing could encapsulate this more than the fact that the piece was critically compared to Oasis, surely as far away from what the Pet Shop Boys were perceived to be by their public as possible. “If we had wanted to,” admitted Tennant, asked about the songs on the album, “we could have turned them all into dance tracks… [but] we just felt there’s so much dance music around nowadays what was the point?”
Much of the middle of the 2001 was occupied with a tour that Johnny undertook alongside Neil Finn. After that brief meeting at the Linda McCartney tribute concert, Finn simply called Johnny out of the blue and asked him if he wanted to go out on the road again.
Finn had been playing a few low key gigs around New Zealand with bands made up of local amateur musicians, who would cover his hits and those of Crowded House and Split Enz, the two bands with whom Neil is most closely associated. To end the tour, Finn decided to form a little band of his own and contacted Johnny, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Phil Sedway and Ed O’Brien from Radiohead amongst others about sharing a bill.
“It was a whimsical notion I had around Christmas,” said Neil Finn. For the gig in Auckland, Neil decided his new little band could be something special for the town. “I was going out to do a tour with a band of strangers every night,” Neil continued, “and I thought it would be good in Auckland… to do something in Auckland that Auckland would never normally get.” As Finn explained, “it took a few phone calls.”
Johnny was intrigued – Finn’s new material, the album One Nil, had impressed him, and the more he thought about it the more he really wanted to get out and do the gigs. On arrival, the band rehearsed for three or four days, and when the band hit the stage they were supported by Betchadupa, Neil’s eldest son’s band. Dates in the Antipodes were followed by a European tour (“which I had no idea I was going to do,” said Johnny, “until I got back from New Zealand!”), and according to Marr it was one of the best experiences of his career. “In the past,” said Johnny, “I always had to be dragged by the collar by the lead singer,” whereas this tour was a joy. “I didn’t realise how great Neil was until I started playing with him,” Marr admitted, “[but] when you get inside those songs you realise what a talent he’s got.” During the tour, Johnny ‘allowed’ Neil to cover much protected/little played Smiths songs. They included ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ and ‘How Soon Is Now?’ – perhaps two of the most sacred songs in Johnny’s back-catalogue. The pair shared the vocal duty. “We got better as we went on,” said Finn.
Meanwhile, Johnny was working hard on his own new material too. The new Healers song ‘Down On The Corner’ was played at virtually every gig, and often Neil would ask Johnny to run through the song for the purposes of sound-checking too.
By the time the tour reached the UK, and Manchester, they were really flying. Of the gig in his local home theatre, Johnny observed that “I haven’t seen the Manchester Apollo rock that much since Thin Lizzy.” In the spring of the following year, Johnny re-joined Finn for a series of concerts on the west coast of America. The response from the Californian audiences was as enthusiastic as it had been elsewhere. The ensuing live release, Seven Worlds Collide, was testament to the fantastic experience that the band enjoyed. As well as becoming friends with Neil Finn – who Johnny clearly respects extremely highly, Johnny got to know Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam and Lisa Germano too. Johnny was to work on two of Germano’s own solo albums in the next few years.
Although The Healers had been out alone and had toured with Oasis, there was still no published evidence of Johnny’s ‘solo’ project. Nonetheless, work continued on his return from the Finn tour, and the first fruits of it were released in early October. The EP ‘The Last Ride’ was completely unlike anything Johnny had released before, and he was happy for it to be considered a new beginning. “It’s really nice for people to know where I am at,” he told one interviewer, “and not have to talk about the past all the time.” ‘The Last Ride’ was a postcard from where Johnny was at in the early years of the new century, and that was certainly a mighty long way away from The Smiths which was, after all, nearly two decades previous.
Heathen Chemistry, the dull new Oasis album, was released in the summer of 2002 to a better critical response than some recent Oasis records. To some degree the media love affair with Burnage’s finest had run its course, and the Oasis congregation was now a more settled church, a firm fan base rather than a Pavlovian response to anything the Gallagher brothers did. The album featured a number of contributions from Johnny. With a laid-back feel from Oasis, the record showcased several of Liam’s songs as well as one each by ‘new boys’ Gem Archer and Andy Bell. While Johnny was never likely to have replaced Paul Arthurs, his relationship with the Gallaghers was still good. ‘(Probably) All In The Mind’ was very reminiscent of The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, and Johnny added an uncomplicated but raw and effective solo. ‘Born On A Different Cloud’ – one of Liam’s songs – featured Johnny on slide guitar. He played a really effective session that recalled the slide of George Harrison as much as Liam’s fantastic vocal revisited John Lennon’s. ‘Better Man’, a rocking track much in the tradition of The Stone Roses’ ‘Love Spreads’ was Johnny’s final cut on the album, another one of Liam’s songs on which – as well as guitar – Johnny also contributed backing vocals.
On the subject of Johnny Marr, Noel Gallagher is hysterically funny. “There’s nothing he can’t do on a guitar,” says Gallagher. “You can’t be influenced by Johnny Marr, because he’s unique. You can’t play what he plays.” Noel rises to his subject with enthusiasm. “Even he can’t play what he plays. He told me a story of trying to recreate ‘How Soon Is Now?’, and it was like an Abbot and Costello sketch… even he’s not as good as he is!”
Another production credit came Johnny’s way in 2002 when he worked on the first album by Joe Moss’s recent signing Haven. Between The Senses was a strong album, compared in parts to Travis and Coldplay. In a series of events closely resembling the birth of The Smiths, Joe Moss, on holiday in Cornwall, was invited to see the band play live. Although Moss was still managing Marion, and they were gradually dissolving under his gaze, he liked the band that he saw, and invited them up to Manchester, getting them some support slots with Badly Drawn Boy in the process. Haven and Joe Moss got on really well, but the band and Johnny hit it off straight away. Johnny and Haven were to work on the follow-up album in a year or so’s time.
* * *
In the spring of 2003, the BBC marked the twentieth anniversary of the release of ‘Hand In Glove’ by broadcasting live from Salford Lads Club, by now firmly ensconced as The Smiths’ ‘own Abbey Road’. Andy Rourke had been playing with Badly Drawn Boy, the Mancunian sensation whose work had rightly become feted nationwide. Mike Joyce was drumming with new band The Dogs, including former Oasis guitarist Bonehead. Johnny was of course playing with The Healers. Lisa Germano, who had met Johnny through the Neil Finn tour, released her critically acclaimed album Lullaby For Liquid Pig, on which Johnny played a part. Germano’s solo career – she first appeared in the mid-Eighties playing violin for John Mellencamp – was well-established, and her Geek The Girl was one of the highlight albums of the previous few years.
Despite so much activity, The Healers took off on tour, and their dates through 2003 made it one of the most extensive jaunts of Johnny’s career to date, encompassing a dozen countries and varying from small clubs to major stadia. The band kicked off in the USA in mid-January in Hoboken, New Jersey. Although Johnny had played many times in the USA, and loves the country dearly, he was as nervous as hell when he took the stage at Maxwell’s. His first words to an American audience as a Healer summed his pre-gig nerves up perfectly. “I can’t speak for everyone else,” Johnny told the crowd, “but I’ve been shitting myself!” The band played three dates at Maxwell’s before heading to Philadelphia, Washington and New York. By February, via Toronto, the tour arrived on the West Coast, where The Healers played at venues such as LA’s Troubadour and appeared live on The Late Show with David Letterman. Apart from playing songs from the album, Johnny also regularly performed the Bob Dylan classic ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ to the delight of audiences.
Still avoiding Smiths covers in the set, and sticking to largely tracks from Boomslang, the band played two gigs at the beginning of March to finish off the world tour. The first was back in the home town of Manchester, while the second was a triumph at the ULU, where so long ago The Smiths had been introduced to John Walters, had been invited to their first session for John Peel, and had set off on the mighty journey that Johnny was very much still a part of.
Long-awaited, The Healers’ first album Boomslang was finally released to a modest but generally enthusiastic reception in February 2003. Inevitably the album was compared to The Smiths and to all the other bands who had come out of Manchester shouting, from Oasis to The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays. The comparisons were not always entirely fair, nor were they by any means all positive, but many reviewers and fans fell in love with the record. The fact was that the idea of a Johnny Marr album on which Johnny sings all the songs was hard to get our heads around, but as always with his work, the album works perfectly if it is viewed as a snapshot of where he stood at a given time and in a given place. The album isn’t the culmination of Johnny’s career, and critics looking for the ‘final solution’ to twenty years of shunning publicity while crafting immaculate pop year after year were searching in vain. Johnny wasn’t trying to sound ‘like’ anyone, not least any of his former bands. With his ears constantly on contemporary bands, he was aware of how much his output would be likely to be compared to others too. “It would be undignified for me to try and sound like The Strokes, or Coldplay,” he explained. “God Forbid! I just wanted to make sure the [album] was wide awake, and natural and honest.”
The fact that Marr took the microphone and the centre stage for the first time in his adult career signalled that this was a different Johnny Marr altogether from the one we were used to. Not least the confidence he exuded in discussing the project. For one riotous Canadian interview, Johnny was asked whether, looking back at the Linda McCartney tribute concert, Sir Paul had been familiar with Johnny’s own work. “Linda was a fan,” said Johnny. “And Chrissie Hynde probably played him some stuff. He just said I should have started singing a long time earlier. He said I was amazing, and he’d wished The Beatles had had five people in it!”
The title came to Johnny in a dream, in which a snake (a ‘boomslang’ is a breed of snake, and the word is a Dutch translation of the name ‘tree snake’) approached Johnny and revealed its name. The album was the result of a long period of waiting for Marr; since the last Electronic album he had been talking the project up. It started as a solo process and turned into a band, which then turned into an album. Johnny had a clear concept of what the album would be from the beginning, but as time went on he refined the concept when needed. “I wanted to make a record that was less layered,” Johnny explained. “But when I came to finish the record, I decided to do what came naturally, and what excites me.” The agenda was out of the window, and Johnny decided to add as many ‘colours’ as he could, if they were the right colours. It was irresistible for Johnny to “put a capo on a Gretsch and see what happens.”
Grant Showbiz heard demos of much of the album before its release, and knew that the project was high quality stuff. “There were versions of that Healers’ album that I just thought were stunning – I heard versions… that I just thought were killer.” The opening track, ‘The Last Ride’, clearly sets the tone for the whole collection. Johnny’s vocal has a Mancunian drawl that is, of course, immediately comparable to Liam Gallagher – perhaps the slight distortion applied hinted that he was not entirely confident in his voice. There’s a feel of John Squire in some of the linking riffs, but that points more to a combination of shared influences than to Marr’s referencing the Roses: there’s far more George Harrison, Cream and Rory Gallagher in the track than there is John Squire. Underpinning the entire track – fluent and melodic and fired by fine percussion – is heavy strumming on Johnny’s favoured acoustic. While the opening two tracks have a very Beatles-feel, Marr is in Neil Young territory on ‘Down On The Corner’: acoustic and breezy, it builds over acoustic guitar and piano to a lilting pace, the electric picking of which does recall a few Smiths moments. The rising crescendo, treated guitar sounds, Bo Diddley riff and harmonica that introduce ‘Need It’ suggest more Smiths reference, but again this is far more Rory Gallagher than Marr, Joyce and Rourke. Johnny’s solos are more extended chorus riffs than showboating, his vocals tight within a narrow range that suits the chugging boogie of the track.
‘You Are The Magic’ strums off in Oasis fashion, but is soon coloured with sonic details that mark it out as something else. Johnny’s wah-wah, discrete percussion and rootsy bass recall some of the Madchester dance scene of ten years before; it’s funky, dissonant and groovy, ending on gently looped guitar sounds, and Johnny was pleased that it was also compared to ‘Crazy Horse’. ‘InBetweens’ is another rocker reminiscent of album-track Oasis, but the song was very much about himself and people of his generation who were ‘between labels’. “They’re interested in esoteric things, like what’s going on in the ether,” said Johnny, “but at the same time they know that it’s important to [match] the right shirt with the right shoes!” For Johnny, the people caught up in the in-between corners of life are the ones with their eyes pointing in the right direction. As he expanded, “they’re not sitting on the couch getting sucked into so-called reality TV and the shopping channel.”
Six tracks in, Johnny’s vocal style is well-established – he sounds confident and assured at the microphone. Of course this was not what many Marr fans had expected, but if they had been looking for rockabilly Johnny with esoteric Morrissey-lite lyrics then they hadn’t watched Marr closely enough over the last few years. ‘Another Day’ has a simplicity of approach tempered by tambourine and a John Lennon vocal, major seventh chords and gentle harmonies that belie someone steeped in country rock as well as in grinding rock ’n’ roll, a major key psychedelic optimism that is very pleasing. ‘Headland’, at a little over a minute and a half, is the shortest track on the album, an acoustic instrumental loaded with atonal guitar clips, threatening feedback growls and bubbling undercurrents in a lighter tone. It introduces ‘Long Gone’, another heavily riffed, loose drummed song. Johnny described the song as being inspired by the rock ’n’ roll carousel. “It’s about hanging out with five pretty crazy fans after a The The concert in Los Angeles in 1992… ending up in the ocean at Venice Beach at around six in the morning, and getting my clothes wet…what happens to everybody really!”
‘Something To Shout About’ slows the pace again, acoustic strumming and lovely finger-picking on electric guitar. Johnny’s vocal is one of the most affecting on the album, high in register and sincere amongst a wash of backing vocals. ‘Sympathy for The Devil’-style percussion introduces the last track of the album, ‘Bangin’ On’, with Johnny’s chords hard and fast, Starkey’s percussion heavy and tough.
* * *
While Johnny could probably have signed with any number of labels, he was keen that – in an echo of The Smiths first contract with Rough Trade –he did so on his own terms and not be ‘managed’ by people who didn’t understand him. “Some of the people I would meet with had this look in their eye, like ‘Shit – this guy’s an anarchist,’” he said. The last thing Marr wanted was to have to make a video in which he had to “walk around Barcelona in a white suit with a model.” Instead, he signed with the indie co-op label iMusic, led by old friend Marc Geiger, retaining control over the music rather than surrender to the whim of a major traditional label. Old habits die hard, and the parallels with the original deal Rough Trade are obvious. “I was pretty much in the same situation with The Smiths,” recounted Johnny. “We were invited down to record companies, sitting under posters of people I couldn’t relate to.”
While setting up a deal that reflected his priorities in the early days of The Smiths, Johnny also cleaned up another element of his past when he reunited with early Smiths manager Joe Moss who became his manager once again. The pair go back a long way, before The Smiths, and it was Joe who first encouraged Johnny to realise that there was more than local bands and gigging around south Manchester ahead of him. The synergy of Johnny, band, label and management was complete.
Should Johnny Marr have waited so long before releasing what is effectively his debut solo album? Some have noted that if Johnny had released something under his own name early in his post-Smiths career, and perhaps put out half a dozen albums over the years, then his solo career might have followed a trajectory similar to Morrissey’s and the critical surprise that greeted Boomslang have been avoided. The problem for Boomslang was that Johnny had no solo credentials for fans to compare it to: while Morrissey’s next album might be a masterpiece, or it may disappoint, at least people had an idea of where he would be coming from. With Boomslang, nobody quite knew what to expect from Johnny Marr, and so it either met with the listeners expectations or disappointed them – there was little middle ground.
But such expectations missed the point of Johnny’s career in its entirety. From working with Morrissey, through The The, Electronic and occasional one-offs with the likes of Kirsty MacColl, Billy Bragg or Beth Orton, all of Johnny’s work has been about cooperation and collaboration. Whether forming a band with Andy Rourke or shacking up with Modest Mouse, whether lighting up a spliff at the desk in The Hacienda or joining The Pretenders on tour, music for Johnny has been constantly evolving ‘community,’ a social activity based around music. One of the key elements to Johnny’s music over the years has been that it has always been the child of creative comradeship. If Morrissey’s lyrics spoke to a body of people lonely within themselves and looking for a voice that mirrored their own relationships and agendas, Johnny’s music did exactly the same, because it was born out of the very emotional correspondence that Morrissey’s lyrics were. A Johnny Marr solo album was never going to be Johnny alone with a finely-picked acoustic, nor was it going to be simply a step on from The Smiths, as though the intervening years had never happened. It was always going to be a collaborative effort of some kind, again a snapshot of where he was on the journey at the time.
So, of course, while the world waited for Johnny to present an album all about The Smiths and his relationship with Morrissey, he couldn’t win. We were post-Mondays, post-Oasis, post-Roses. If the album had been filled with Smiths-like grooves then Marr would have inevitably been accused of sitting back and resting on former glories. If he had made an experimental album of tape loops and guitar clicks he would have been guilty of excessive self-regard. If he sounded anything like the bands who owed him so much debt themselves then again he would be chastised. Whichever way he turned there would be an enormous raft of fans ready to be disappointed, and just as many (more enlightened ones) ready to simply go and find out where Johnny was at.
In fact, the album rocks. Sonically varied, confident, laid back but punching its weight, it is an assured piece of work from some heavyweight talents. Given that this was generally perceived as his first solo outing, could listeners expect any revelations? Were any of the songs about Morrissey, The Smiths, or the time in Johnny’s life that still meant so much to his fans? Johnny put the record straight on this one with aplomb. “None of my songs are about Morrissey,” he said. “I think that would be a bit showbiz, a bit cheesy. A bit corny. Singing about someone I used to work with sixteen years ago in a cryptic fashion so that people could decode it? That would be a bit cheesy!”
Billy Bragg was a big fan of Boomslang. “I thought it was great,” he said, when interviewed for this book. “I thought it was great of him to finally do what he wanted to do – his own project. If you are constantly working a lot with side-men it can be hard.” Grant Showbiz also feels that to some degree Boomslang was Johnny coming home. To have lived through the exhilarating career of The Smiths at such a ridiculously young age and still to be contributing so many years later was a remarkable achievement. “I sort of looked at Johnny’s life and thought, ‘it’s been fantastic, and he’s been so lucky,’” says Grant. “But I don’t know how I would have taken to being king of the world at twenty one, then had the rest of your life to go on [to].” Simply getting to Boomslang intact, and with such a creditable body of work behind him apart from The Smiths was remarkable. What was pleasing was that Johnny simply decided to follow his own nose on the project. With friends like Bernard Sumner telling him that he should have the confidence to just sound like himself (“What the fuck is wrong with sounding like you?” Sumner had asked him), Johnny had come to the same conclusion. “I had to tell myself, ‘Come on Johnny, make the assumption that your audience wants you to sound like you,’” he told one interviewer.
According to Bragg, it was evident that the album was a personal labour of love. “He put a lot of himself in that record I think,” he said, and – in response to the critics who unfavourably compared the album to Oasis – noted that such a comparison was “bitterly unfair”, given the support that Johnny had given to the Gallaghers himself. Johnny pointed out that if listeners thought he was influenced by Oasis, they should go check out the rock family tree. “I’m not influenced by Oasis,” he said. “The Smiths were very, very influenced by the White Album, so – years later – [Noel’s] obviously heard the White Album a few times!” The message is clear – if we sound similar it’s because we are coming from the same places, not because one of us copies the other. Billy has suffered a similar backlash at times himself. “The point is that the public get a fixed idea of you in their heads… it’s like me with my politics: if I don’t make those kind of records people aren’t interested.” Bragg sees a classic opportunity to knock someone down being taken by the press, who had – in the main – supported Marr since the demise of The Smiths. “There is an element of… they’ve lauded you all that time, they want to give you a going over now,” he says. “A lot of us have had to put up with that sort of mentality.”
In the wake of Boomslang’s release, Johnny ceaselessly fielded the endless questions about The Smiths and why – after so many years – he suddenly wanted to be a singer. With the tour over, there was more production work to finish off, as Johnny handled the second Haven album, All For A Reason. The record was released in March 2004. Marr once again brought the best out of the four-piece, playing the role of producer again but adding harmonica and backing vocals too. Since Between The Senses, although it was tiring for the band to be constantly asked about The Smiths, they had found a supplementary audience that came to them because of Johnny’s history. “In America,” said vocalist Gary Briggs, “a quarter of our audiences were curious Smiths fans. You’ve got to respect that, so we’ll answer as many Smiths questions as [are] put to us!” In some respects that probably made it easier for Johnny Marr.