The Modest Mouse project that Marr had become involved in unfolded gradually, and ushered in a period of work for Johnny that lasted the better part of five years. He became one of the hardest-working guys in the music business, which – given his status and the profile his work to date afforded him – was something he certainly didn’t need to do. But Johnny Marr’s work ethic, the nature of the relationships he builds with those around him, and his enthusiasm and love for great guitar music are second to none. Invited by writer/guitarist Isaac Brock to come over to look at ideas prior to Modest Mouse commencing work on their next album, Marr was interested, intrigued, liked him, and told Brock to give him ten days. “A week seemed too formal,” he told one interviewer with a laugh – a ten-day air ticket was the cheapest travel option for him. In the end he lost money on the deal – he never took the return flight.
Modest Mouse, formed in Issaquah, Washington in 1992, were already on Marr’s radar before his joining. There was, indeed, already something of The Smiths about them. Named after a line in a Virginia Woolf story “The Mark on the Wall”, in which Woolf describes quiet, ordinary souls who “dislike to hear their own praises,” there was an echo of “The Smiths” as a band name, the making of something remarkable from something so mundane-sounding. Part-Pixies, part-Talking Heads, they were – like The Smiths – hardly a mundane band.
After the departure of guitarist Dann Gallucci in 2004, founder Isaac Brock sought Marr out on a whim. “I knew it was a demented notion,” Brock told The Guardian in 2007. But there was an instinctive feeling that Johnny was the right choice. Brock’s “people” contacted Johnny’s “people”. Initially Marr thought it was likely they’d want him as producer, something at the time he would not have been interested in. He told Atlanta’s 99X that given the choice, he would rather have been making his own record at this point than producing someone else’s. But Brock offered straight off the opportunity to come and write their upcoming album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, and it was the sound of the band, the potential for an interesting gig, that attracted Johnny, unfazed by Isaac’s colourful past. “I like working with people who aren’t run of the mill,” said Marr. “It’s good to shake things up a little – that’s what rock music needs.”
Marr was equally excited at the creative potential the union offered. “We don’t know each other, but we’re going to have fun trying,” he told music critic Dave Simpson. On the first night Johnny arrived, he and Brock set up opposite one another and simply started to play, that part-jousting, part-testing-out process of finding where your jigsaw pieces fit into those of the other player. “[Isaac] drank lots of weird concoctions,” said Johnny, “and he’s got this weird kind of mask on, and I’m thinking – right, so this is how you write songs!” The chemistry was immediately evident. A riff that had been lying around for a while with no great purpose found its way onto a 1963 Fender Jaguar that was lying in the guitar rack. As Marr played it, Brock immediately started improvising lyrics. Johnny was impressed at the speed of creativity, and – jet lagged – awoke the following morning at 4am, unsure of quite what had happened, the writing process was so fast and so productive.
The product was ‘Dashboard’, the lead single off the album that grew out of these sessions. It went on to be a top five hit in the US alternative rock charts, and was backed with ‘King Rat’, a track that attracted the attention of Hollywood actor Heath Ledger, slated to produce a video for the song prior to his untimely death in January 2008. Early on in the process, Brock spoke to Rolling Stone. It was evident from the start that Johnny was going to be integral to the band’s new album, and beyond. “It all came together… a really good fit,” he said. “Which I think actually surprised all of us.” Johnny was impressed by the openness of the band. After a couple of days he found himself struck not only by the creativity, but the apparent commerciality of what was happening and the sense of having no direction or agenda. Playing the beaten-up old Jaguar, he described the process as “like little fires starting all over the room.” In no time at all he was committed wholesale. “It was too damn strange to quit,” he explained.
The commitment was three-fold. First was the personal relationship with Brock and with the other band members. From this a relationship with the music was born that felt right from day one. The third commitment was to realise that this was a project that would require moving the family Marr out to Oregon. When he and Angie got together in their teens, he was already a musician. There would always be a van to pack, a long drive ahead, and a couple of gigs before he’d be back home. She’d been on this road with him for a long time. So over to Portland, where Brock had himself moved from Washington, they relocated.
News of Johnny’s joining started to leak out in the summer of 2006. Brock told Rolling Stone that Marr had committed to the album and to touring after it was released. Both recognised the great fit in him joining the band formally. “You get tight with the band members as friends,” Johnny told Doug Bleggi. “And then you make [it] work together.” The relationship with Brock in particular mirrored those with his previous collaborators. He and Morrissey were a partnership of equals, but – in the same way that The Beatles started off as John Lennon’s band – it was Johnny who knocked on Morrissey’s door first. With Matt Johnson and Bernard Sumner too, even writing with the likes of Billy Bragg or Beth Orton on specific projects, Johnny is no sideman. “It was really shoulder to shoulder and loud,” he said of the writing process with Brock: a collaboration of equals, not a hired hand.
Recording began at Sweet Tea Studios in Oxford, Mississippi, birthplace of the previous Modest Mouse album, and with the same midwife to help the birthing process, producer Dennis Herring. Good News For People Who Love Bad News had been highly praised by critics, and successful in the charts too, reaching the top twenty on the Billboard album charts. Nominated for a Grammy, ‘Float On’ had been a big hit single too. Bringing in an untried (in the context of the band) guitarist might have been risky, but the resulting album, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, surpassed its predecessor and was Modest Mouse’s most successful outing to date.
The album, the band’s fifth, remained very much a Modest Mouse album, rather than a “Johnny Marr and…” piece. It mixed Marr’s funky and edgy contribution with Brock’s uncompromisingly indie sensibility, at times a nerve-wracked David Byrne, sometimes a growling Tom Waits. Critical response was uniformly good, if not ecstatic. For Spin it was “pissed-off and recklessly optimistic… a road-trip sing-along album not for vacationers, but for escapees.” The BBC called it “wonderfully mangled and yet massively accomplished.” For Marr it was “joyous.”
The album kicked off with ‘March Into The Sea’, dissonant and railing drunkenly between loud and abrasive and tinkle-bell quietness, the sea-shanty feel establishes the initial premise of a maritime piece. The neatly packaged ‘Dashboard’ springs like a near cousin of the previous hit, ‘Float On’, Johnny’s funky lead-rhythm beefed up and muscular, with string and brass washes across the track. ‘Fire It Up’, for Rolling Stone “the stoner anthem for 2007,” is slower, a track led by staccato rhythms and a clean vocal from Brock, while Shins vocalist James Mercer takes a turn on ‘Florida’, a funky track teetering on the brink of chaos, as it stops and starts, whistles and jangles along to Mercer’s catchy backing vocals. Cricket-clicking Latin American rhythms carry the delightful, acoustic ‘Missed The Boat’, a regretful, quieter moment amongst the album’s soaring confusions, again featuring Mercer. The spirits of Swordfishtrombones, Marc Ribot and Tom Waits at his most unbridled fuel ‘Fly Trapped In A Jar’. Packed with Marr and Brock’s guitars, ‘Spitting Venom’, at nearly nine minutes, starts on offbeat acoustic strumming and builds into a prog-gothic-indie-psychedelia-military piece of mighty proportions. ‘Little Motel’, on the other hand, starts small and stays there, with Johnny’s Jaguar teasing out pretty phrases, Brock’s vocals more restrained and personal.
The album is an intriguing listen, a ragbag of familiar sounds and phrases half-remembered from somewhere else. It’s like looking at the school photos of someone you don’t know: the photos are so similar to your own, but all the faces are different. The recurrent but lightly touched in theme of the sea gives a shape to the piece, and as a result, We Were Dead… sounds both exhilaratingly new and reassuringly familiar. Exciting and fresh, we don’t know what’s around the next corner but the journey feels worthwhile. It’s easy to see why Johnny fell in love with it.
* * *
In the meantime, one of pop’s untimely tragedies led to another project for the tireless Marr. The tragedy of drummer Paul Hester’s suicide in 2005 led to his former bandmate Neil Finn calling on their Crowded House colleagues to reform. The album that was intended to be a solo release for Finn in fact became the new Crowded House album. Initially Finn plus friends and session players, the various members of Crowded House came together, and Johnny was invited to contribute, which he did on two songs. ‘Even A Child’ is a lovely acoustic/electric piece, notable not only for being another Neil Finn/Johnny Marr co-write, but also for featuring Marr’s daughter Sonny on backing vocals alongside her old man. They’ve joined Crowded House live, notably at Manchester’s Apollo in 2010, to join them on the track. ‘Don’t Stop Now’, penned solely by Finn and again featuring Johnny as a guest, was chosen as the album’s lead single, released in June 2007. The album was a top three success in the UK, as well as a top fifty hit in the US and Canada.
We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank was released in March 2007 to uniformly good reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. The inevitable tour kicked off soon afterwards, with Marr as integral a part of the touring band as he had been in the writing and recording of the album. Firm friends with the band now, and completing a process that had taken the best part of a year, it would, said Johnny, have been “a little bit like jumping ship,” to have not gone on the road as well. While his initial involvement had been to contribute to the writing, he felt compelled to play the parts live himself rather than leave it to someone else.
The tour opened in Mexico City, then Portland, and by June the band were playing Glastonbury in the UK. It incorporated the Royal Albert Hall in London and The Ritz in Manchester, the ballroom off Oxford Road where The Smiths had played their very first gig. Across Europe – Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria – the gigs were almost non-stop; through the US and Canada, Japan, back to Europe. The week of Glastonbury, they also played two gigs in Germany, two in Sweden, one in Denmark. With a few weeks off periodically, Marr stayed with the tour through to 2009, and it appears that Johnny enjoyed, if not every minute, pretty much all of it. But a 14-month tour is a major commitment, and all good things come to an end.
In LA during the course of the tour, Johnny dropped by to play with one of his generation’s best guitar players, John Frusciante. The Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist had released nine solo albums to date, and while RHCP were on extended leave he took advantage of the time available to work on a new piece. Started late in 2006 and through to the spring of 2008, the album that became The Empyrean featured RHCP bassist Flea and long-time collaborator Josh Klinghoffer, who – upon Frusciante’s leaving the Chili Peppers in the summer of 2009 – would replace him in the band. Released in early 2009, it’s a poetical, lyrical album, filled with curious textures and rich, varied guitar parts. Johnny played on two tracks. He had one night to work on it, laying down multiple parts on multiple tracks, left to his own devices by Frusciante, who edited the parts down in the mix, leaving two major contributions from Johnny on the album. “I didn’t say anything to Johnny – I was just watching him,” explained John. “Watching him come up with stuff was really educational – I’ve learned so much from his playing.”
Marr’s two contributions were on the tracks ‘Enough Of Me’ and ‘Central’. The first of those is the outstanding track on the album, featuring a Robert Fripp-like solo from Frusciante that mixes atonal soloing with divine sustain and overdrive. But the first verse and chorus are all Marr, with Frusciante playing the second half of the track. On ‘Central’, using acoustic as well as electric guitar, he fiddled around with harmonics, spending several hours contributing texture and tone, which John then mixed into the final piece. When you have someone in the studio who understands your work, and has their own voice to contribute, “the best thing you can do is let them do what they do,” said Frusciante.
Marr was by this time using the elderly Fender Jag loaned to him by Isaac Brock almost exclusively. An instrument beloved of aficionados of the guitar, but mercurial, notoriously requiring patience, care and attention, the Fender Jaguar is a characterful beast. “It sounds like I am supposed to sound,” Johnny said. Many of his best-known tracks were cut on Rickenbacker 330s or 360s, or on Gibsons, either a vintage Les Paul or the ES-355 bought for him by Sire Records label boss Seymour Stein in 1984. Over dinner, in the process of wooing The Smiths to sign to Sire, Stein made the mistake of telling the story of how he had once taken Rolling Stone Brian Jones out to buy a guitar in New York. “If you take me to get a guitar, we’ll sign,” said Johnny in a moment of Manc-hustler inspiration. Stein was true to his word, and in the hotel that evening Marr wrote ‘Heaven Knows…’ and ‘Girl Afraid’. A good investment for Stein!
But from Modest Mouse onwards, although of course he still plays a range of instruments, Marr found the Jaguar met many of his needs, both as a live instrument and in the studio. It became a passion, both to play and to tinker with. Working with his guitar repairer and tech of many years Bill Puplett, they made endless changes to the Jaguar’s configuration, playing with different pickups, adjusting the setting of the tremolo arm, the bridge, adding a bulkier neck and saddles from a Fender Mustang. Frequent requests for parts or specific assistance were fired off to Fender, who must surely have wondered what on earth was going on. Like all the great American cars, the design of the Jaguar is iconic, but Johnny made subtle refinements to the body shape so that it sat more comfortably on the player’s hip or in his lap if playing seated. While making the guitar more relevant to his own needs on stage, he also made the idiosyncratic Jag a more approachable instrument for the regular player who can’t spend half his life bent over a desk with a screwdriver in his hand. Fender were happy to provide parts and as much support as Johnny and crew required.
Over several years and between three to four hundred gigs with Modest Mouse and The Cribs, the project came to fruition. In celebration of 50 years of the Jaguar, in 2012 Fender announced the commercial release of the Johnny Marr Signature Fender Jaguar, a labour of love. Far from being simply the signature of a famous axe-wielder printed on the headstock, this was a genuine design job from Johnny. It was reviewed ecstatically from London to LA, and is something Marr can justifiably be proud of.
* * *
Johnny was equally enthusiastic about the Modest Mouse tour, telling interviewers around the world how much he loved playing with the band, and initially he was keen to get back into the studio and start working on new material. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the August 2009 release No One’s First and You’re Next, an EP of B-sides and unreleased tracks from their previous three albums, was the first activity from the band post-tour. At the same time they also released a completed version of the video for ‘King Rat’ that had been started by Heath Ledger. With a tour to promote No One’s First… it was time for Marr to move on. In the live band for the forthcoming tour he was replaced, in the friendliest of fashions, by Jim Fairchild, formerly of Grandaddy. Fairchild had been in the running to join Modest Mouse at the point Johnny had joined, and had played live with the band in their previous touring incarnation. For Johnny it was a natural point to take another direction and for Modest Mouse to do likewise. “It was an amazing time in my life,” said Marr. “I might look casual, but I am very committed.”
New projects brought this period with Modest Mouse to a close, but it is clear that the relationship is not over. As recently as July 2015, as the band prepared to play Manchester’s Ritz once again, Brock told City Life that for Johnny Marr the door will always be open. “[He’s] one of the greatest people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with,” said Brock.
It’s clear that the feeling is mutual.
* * *
The Cribs could not come from a more different background to Modest Mouse. Indeed, the three Jarmans hail from West Yorkshire rather than the West Coast of America. Formed in 2001, they quickly became the darlings of a music press looking for indie bands to break the mainstream. As authentic indie as could be, their eponymous debut album, The Cribs, led to tours throughout 2004 and 2005 across Europe, Asia and the US, building a loyal fanbase. By 2006’s The New Fellas, their second album produced by Orange Juice’s Edwyn Collins, they were troubling the lower echelons of the charts on a regular basis. With Alex Kapranos producing, and signed to Warner in the US, 2007’s Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever established the band as a regular on the main stages of major festivals.
The history of pop is littered with great three-piece bands, and with bands made up of multiple siblings. While there may not be too many fansites dedicated to The Nolans, family-based bands like The Beach Boys, The Jacksons or Sly and the Family Stone have proved that bands of brothers (and sisters) can prosper, albeit until family disagreements become as great as musical ones. Twins Gary, Ryan and brother Ross Jarman hail from Wakefield, a hop, skip and a 50-mile jump over the Pennine hills from Manchester. While it’s not one of Britain’s most prosperous cities, it’s far enough away from London and the beautiful south for the Jarmans to have been more inspired by the Pacific North West than what was happening in NW1. It was this that first endeared the band to Marr: “I was really knocked out by their song, ‘The Scenesters’,” he told Pitchfork. “For the longest time, when I was asked what bands I like, it was The Cribs.”
The life of an ex-pat often throws fellow countrymen together when least expected. Portland is a magnet for creatives, and one Englishman who had moved there from the north of England in 2006 was Gary Jarman. Raised on grunge and Riot Grrrl, he found himself amongst the kind of artists who had informed his politics and ethics in the first place, and settled well in the city. Inevitably, musicians will find one another, and Marr and Jarman met at a barbecue. Johnny told Luke Turner of The Quietus how, while confident they weren’t “little Englanders”, they did “go out for afternoon tea” a few times. The pair immediately got on, and before long were meeting socially, playing guitar together, and, perhaps inevitably, talking about writing songs together.
Naturally, the Jarmans were big Smiths fans, and there were similarities between the way Johnny came to join their band and how he had first involved himself with Modest Mouse. While The Cribs did not formally approach Marr with an offer to work with them, it’s clear that with both bands the relationship was one of developing friendships before committing to anything formal or permanent. But Johnny liked their uncompromising stance, their independence, and the fact that “they could have been on Rough Trade.” One of the things The Cribs hadn’t done was to take on the mantle of American-ness, despite spending large amounts of time there, something that US bands themselves admired, so when they started to put a few creative ideas together as a foursome, it worked.
By February 2008 it was announced that Marr was not just a collaborator, but a fully paid-up member of The Cribs. He remained a fully paid-up member of Modest Mouse too, but found sufficient time over the course of the next year to develop with the Yorkshire band the songs that would become their fourth album, Ignore The Ignorant. There was no “Johnny Marr and The Cribs big agenda,” he told music writer Gary Graff, but the seasoning he brought to the band’s mix was immediate. As with Isaac Brock, playing off another guitar was what really worked, both for Ryan and for Marr. They assiduously avoided the “one guy strums, the other does the fiddly bits” two-guitar routine, and clearly both play better as a result. Wherever they worked – whether California, Oregon, Stockport or Johnny’s own studio in Manchester, the sessions were productive, and each member of the band contributed to the writing process, rather than anyone bringing “finished” songs to the sessions.
Before the album was released, Johnny continued to receive offers and unexpected plaudits. In the autumn of 2008 he joined the “Electric Proms” season of concerts in London for the BBC, playing alongside Mali duo Amadou & Mariam. The event, produced by Damon Albarn, showcased the blind couple’s fabulous energy as part of a seven-hour gig. “I recognise a guitar dude when I hear one – and he’s one,” is how Johnny describes guitarist Amadou Bagayoko. “He’s very into his riffs.” Johnny knew the band from tour bus tapes with Modest Mouse, but first got head-down with Bagayoko over unplugged guitars in a London hotel room. There’s a way of getting into a jam with a player you have never met before, he explained, finding the space between you and the other guy, letting the music find its own way. But Amadou, Johnny told the Guardian, wanted him “to blow like Jimi Hendrix” within twenty seconds. The repeating, cyclical riffs of African music are an ideal pasture for the former guitarist with The Smiths to wander over, to such an extent that Johnny thought he heard distinctly Smithsian echoes in the track – “We’re cut from a similar cloth,” says Johnny. “I’ll leave it at that!”
In November Johnny was invited by Salford University, a mile or so from the centre of Manchester, to work with their Department of Media, Music and Performance as a visiting professor of music. As in almost every circumstance where Johnny takes on a new role outside of his comfort zone, one of the first things that appealed to him was the warm personal environment, the friendly atmosphere around the department, the students and the staff. “It’s exciting to think that someone I come across might become a producer, or start a record label,” he said.
But Marr was not the first Mancunian muso to join the staff at Salford. One of the best live acts, and one of the most entertaining bands of the seventies and eighties in Manchester, was the Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias, and their leader (if ever a job title could have existed in The Albertos), Chris “CP” Lee, was a senior lecturer at the university. John Robb, formerly of The Membranes, and latterly a writer, journalist and pundit-for-hire, was likewise. Professor Marr’s inaugural lecture was on the subject of “the outsider” in popular music.
Johnny established in his lecture that the premise of there being an “inside” to the British music industry, that glitzy world of endless limos, success-driven svengalis, money and glamour, was all a myth. That image, said Marr, “is Simon Cowell’s house, and I am not even sure that exists.” The music industry, whether in the UK or in the US, never created anything, he said. It has brought innovators to the fore, helped make great records and great events, but the work, the creation and innovation, has come from outsiders. Johnny cited Buzzcocks as his first lesson in this factor, launched on a Xerox Polaroid of “four freezing-cold, skinny poor boys from Manchester.” Bob Marley, Kurt Cobain, Joy Division, The Beatles and The Stones were all outsiders, he said, each of them having a leg up from someone else who was an outsider too.
Interestingly, given the background of his own manager, Joe Moss, who also managed The Smiths, so many of the “svengalis” who took these outsiders and made them successful were shopkeepers, not record industry executives. Brian Epstein, Malcolm McLaren, Andrew Oldham and Joe Moss all ran shops. Epstein didn’t invent John Lennon any more than McLaren invented John Lydon, but they knew how to give their bands a route into commerciality, and only then did “the industry” pick them up.
For the outsider, Marr explained, it’s almost more important to be defined by what you are against rather than what you are for. In his thirty-year campaign to prove to the world that Manchester was culturally superior to London, Factory boss Tony Wilson, himself a journalist prior to becoming a record label boss, was a perfect example. Motown and Def Jam were two more. Tellingly, Johnny pointed to the fact that these lessons taught him early on that no high-flying record exec was ever going to “discover” The Smiths. Rough Trade was also originally a record shop, owned by Geoff Travis to promote records from outside of the mainstream. With their own shop manager in Joe Moss, with Morrissey perhaps the greatest “outsider” in contemporary pop, and with Johnny – who had packed up school to put everything into his passion for pop and electric guitars – The Smiths had been the perfect outsiders.
Summing up almost his entire career to date, Marr pointed out that, if you are on the outside, and you know that you are probably not going to make a difference, who do you make music, art or literature for? “For your friends,” he said. For him it was “for the other three guys [in the band], because they were my best friends.” It’s a motif running throughout his work: friendship, loyalty, enthusiasm and a firmly entrenched work ethic. But, as he pointed out, make sure your friends have good taste!
As a “visiting professor” it was Johnny’s role to run workshops and seminars to give the lucky students a real picture of what lay ahead of them in the creative industries. In recognition of his “outstanding achievements in a music career spanning four decades”, in the summer of 2012 Marr was awarded an honorary doctorate by the university. Amongst other recipients of honorary degrees awarded by the university to those in the creative arts have been the mighty voice of Salford, poet John Cooper Clarke, cellist Jacqueline du Pré, composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle and actor Sir Albert Finney, all, in their own way, outsiders. Wearing the traditional brightly coloured cap and gown (“it’s not a gown, it’s a cape,” he tweeted), the newly minted Dr Marr beamed for photographs. “This Charming Grad,” as the University themselves put it.
As if becoming an academic wasn’t enough, Christmas 2008 saw Johnny and his family once again decamp to New Zealand at the invitation of Neil Finn. Finn’s original Seven World’s Collide project of the early noughties had been a successful and pleasing exercise for Marr, who had been able to give test-flights to some of his as-yet unpublished Healers material, while playing alongside some fine contemporary musicians. Towards the end of 2008 Finn called the contributors together for a new studio album, to be titled The Sun Came Out, in aid of Oxfam, who had approached the songwriter just at the time he was thinking of reconvening “the seven-worlders”. Most of the original players came back, joined by newcomers such as KT Tunstall, Wilco and Bic Runga.
Sessions were held at Finn’s own Roundhead Studios in Auckland, and Neil teased participation out of willing contributors by reminding them of the benefits of Christmas spent in the South Pacific, with kids and family members welcome. Johnny contributed a number of new songs and co-writes to the project, collaborating with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy on ‘Too Blue’ and with Ed O’Brien of Radiohead on ‘Learn To Crawl’, also involving Finn and his son Liam. ‘Run In The Dust’ and ‘Red Wine Bottle’ were Marr’s other writing contributions, and for the live shows in the New Year he reprised some old favourites. Johnny took the lead vocal for ‘Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’, while Finn led on ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, after asking the audience for a whip-round to get Johnny to play.
* * *
Reconvened in Los Angeles, the first song The Cribs had written with Marr became the opener on the album. ‘We Were Aborted’ is about lad-mag culture from the least laddish of the current crop of indie bands. From the first B-minor to G chord change, it’s clear this isn’t Modest Mouse, but immediately feels like it’s out of Johnny’s Buzzcocks or Patti Smith collection. The album, released in September 2009, was preceded by ‘Cheat On Me’ as a single at the end of August, and was a top ten album in the UK. It was clearly a Cribs album, but it is equally an album that Johnny Marr fans would love too, and that’s quite an achievement, testimony to the respect which each party held for the other.
It wasn’t universally loved, but it was pretty universally well-received, and some reviewers thought it their best album yet. If it lacked a little of the grit of previous Cribs’ releases, it was essential nevertheless. With retrospect, it sounds even better today, and if there’s a bit of venom and hiss missing, it has gained a little pop sophistication that did the Cribs no harm. Marr certainly hadn’t trampled over a group half his age and turned them into “Johnny Marr’s band” rather worked with them to develop something new, lit up some new rooms for the Wakefield trinity to wander through. Along the way, a lot of Smiths and Marr fans would have found a new band to love, and a lot of young fans of The Cribs would have been signposted to Johnny’s previous work.
Other highlights of the album included the second single, the New Order-ish ‘We Share The Same Skies’, and the ‘Panic’-like title track. Johnny’s influence is heard across the album in the long sustains, gutsy chord shapes and whammy-bar tremolo. There are plenty of familiar phrases to make long-time Marr fans smile. The staccato chords of the lovely ‘Last Year’s Snow’ recall ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, perhaps as recorded by Teenage Fan Club. The tour to promote Ignore the Ignorant started in September 2009, and lasted the better part of a year.
For Marr it was just as it had been with Modest Mouse, the opportunity to take work he found exciting and of which he was very proud out to play. Working with people he was very fond of, once again he found himself playing for those who were very fond of him too. With few chances of an extended break, in August 2010 the tour climaxed with a series of European festivals, culminating at the Leeds and Reading festivals the following August. Johnny did, however, still find time for even more side projects.
Through 2008 and into the spring of 2009 Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe were back in the studio with new songs ready to go for an album produced with Xenomania, centred around writer and producer Brian Higgins. With a background of truly mighty hits for singers like Cher, Sugababes and Girls Aloud, Higgins has often been credited with re-inventing quality pop for the 2000s. Lowe and Tennant started writing with Xenomania over the summer of 2008 and as recording at Abbey Road progressed, Marr – a long-time friend of the pair – was asked to contribute to the album, which was released under the title Yes. Johnny’s touches grace four of the tracks on the album, on both harmonica and guitar. ‘Beautiful People’ opens on his minor chord arpeggio. The song imagines a woman, tired of mundanity and city life, aspiring to the celebrity lifestyle of magazines such as OK! and Hello! As in much of the Pet Shop Boys’ output there’s a lush sixties string arrangement over which Marr also plays harmonica, strings and harmonica, playing off one another beautifully.
‘Did You See Me Coming’ opens with Johnny again, this time sun-drenched, acoustic Marr, as Tennant’s lovely song celebrates the start of a relationship born of a chance encounter. The more claustrophobic ‘Building A Wall’ has Johnny on guitar, and on the synth-driven retro-Dr Who track ‘Pandemonium’ he contributes guitar and harmonica again. The track was originally written for Kylie Minogue, and has hit single written all over it, though it was never released as such. The album, however, was Chris and Neil’s best-performing work for more than a decade, charting at number four in the UK and higher across Europe.
‘Did You See Me Coming’ and – in Germany – ‘Beautiful People’ were both released as singles, and the album released in the spring of 2009. One song co-written during the album sessions, ‘The Loving Kind’, made its way onto Out of Control, the fifth album of British power-pop group Girls Aloud. Johnny – after a passing remark that he had enjoyed the guitars on some of the early Girls Aloud singles – was invited to play a part on the album too. It might seem an odd mix, but girl groups of the sixties were one of the bonding themes of the early Morrissey and Marr relationship, so why not girl groups of the noughties? A self-confessed lover of pop rather than rock, the idea that pop is crass and commercial “is an old-fashioned rockist conceit,” he told Uncut. The Smiths were, after all, primarily a pop group. For the Girls Aloud sessions he devised a guitar part for the wistful ‘Rolling Back The Rivers In Time’, and added vamping harmonica to the closing bars of the jaunty ‘Love Is The Key’. The album also provided Girls Aloud with their fourth number one single in the UK. ‘The Promise’ was another Higgins/ Xenomania track, high on sixties production values, Supremes-style video and winner of the Best British Single award at the 2009 Brit Awards – vindicating Johnny’s pop taste in joining the project.