Tracks that Johnny had written had graced movie and TV soundtracks for years. John Hurt’s An Englishman in New York featured ‘How Soon Is Now?’, Shaun of the Dead had used ‘Panic’ and 500 Days of Summer was in many ways an illustrated guide to The Smiths. But these were trawlings of Marr’s back catalogue, tracks picked from history to enhance a scene or a character. 2009 brought an opportunity to contribute to a new and major soundtrack, and to work with one of music’s most successful and iconic composers.
Hans Zimmer had had an inauspicious but very visible start in pop, but one nevertheless associated with a number one record and the launch of MTV; he can be seen, fingertips on keyboards, towards the end of the Trevor Horn and Buggles’ clip for ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, the song that launched the nascent TV channel in 1981. But appearing in other people’s videos was not what fate had in store for the German musician. He moved into film work, and his first credit was as composer of electronic music for the Jeremy Irons’ movie Moonlighting in 1982. After working on various projects, including Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Launderette, he was commissioned to write the score for Rain Man, which won an Academy Award. Zimmer’s score was nominated too, and a year later the same pattern was repeated when his work on Driving Miss Daisy was nominated, while the film itself won the Best Film Oscar.
Zimmer was quickly established as Hollywood gold dust, and his extraordinary CV includes contributions to the scores of some of the biggest movies of all time – lots of them. 2009’s Batman movie The Dark Night was a high watermark for director Christopher Nolan, with Heath Ledger’s joker becoming one of modern cinema’s most iconic characters, and many critics hailed it the best movie of recent times. The movie grossed over $1 billion, and Zimmer’s contribution, while not awarded an Oscar itself, was not overlooked. For his next piece Nolan turned again to the atmospheric pen of Hans Zimmer.
Throughout the music for the film Zimmer used a technique that both developed character and created atmosphere. Adopting a series of repetitive, cyclical motifs, several pieces begin in a mood of solitary, reflective minimalism, recalling Michael Nyman or Philip Glass. As the piece develops, however, more orchestration is added, more instruments join the developing theme, until what began a thoughtful “little” piece develops into a fully orchestral monster. It’s astonishingly effective as Zimmer is not only a great orchestrator, but also has a handy way with melody. These are moody, atmospheric or emotional pieces, but they are catchy too. Something, one might imagine, that might appeal to the guitar player who wrote ‘How Soon Is Now?’
Hans Zimmer describes himself as “a hermit.” The score for Inception started, as his work often does, on a computer screen – one man, one keyboard, in a dark studio lit by candles – with an Egon Schiele painting gazing down on him from the wall. Ideas come slowly. “A lot of notes are easy,” he says, “but to just have a few that seem to say the same thing – it drives me insane.” As the themes developed to bring out the colours in Nolan’s script, these were gradually brought in front of a small orchestra to be re-imagined. The effect is to turn the tables on how synthesizers were originally developed, which was to imitate real strings, or real woodwind. Here, Zimmer brought pieces of digital, synthesised sound to the orchestra, notated or recorded, and said, “Okay, guys – you imitate that.”
The effect is stunning, bringing an interplay to the score that mixes organic and synthesised sounds in a rich, rich way. As the process continued, Zimmer began imagining another colour in the palette, a sound that would illuminate the piece differently. The instrument that he heard was a guitar. “But there’s a hideous thing that happens when you have guitars and orchestra,” he explained. With a little repeating riff, and “bad sample guitar sounds” to toy with, Zimmer speaks of suddenly realising who he was writing for, and when he told Nolan that he thought “someone like Johnny Marr” was what he was after, Nolan knew exactly what he meant. “To me,” he said, “that meant that’s exactly who we are going to have.”
Both Nolan and Zimmer were obviously very aware of what made Johnny Marr tick. While playing Zimmer’s compositions, Johnny was very much left to “sound like himself,” and that freedom contributes to the veracity of the overall sound. “Even though some of the parts sound simplistic,” Johnny told Guitar World, “I had to really work it out by detuning and playing in weird positions. Then there were the odd time signatures and key changes to deal with. But I really love Hans’ voicings, so it was fun to work them out.”
What worked best about the music for Inception was that in many ways it told a different story than the script told. As a movie that never took the intelligence of the audience for granted, but allowed every viewer to write their own movie in their heads, the music did that as well. It’s as though while a director might work with a lighting director to dress a scene in one way, so Zimmer’s music lights the movie in a different way. It was an elegant work that Johnny was proud to have been involved in, and immediately started talking up, wanting to do more movie work. When the film was released in the summer of 2010, Zimmer – perhaps unable to easily let go of a piece that clearly meant a lot to him personally – arranged for a concert to play the entire score live with a full orchestra, and arranged for it to be transmitted via the internet. The gig allowed the musicians to jump the velvet rope of the premiere, allowing thousands of people around the world to premiere the music in their own homes. So, on July 13 2010 Johnny joined Hans and a studio theatre full of players to perform the music live. Typically modest (and happy to admit he is terrified on stage), Zimmer told one interviewer that “having Johnny Marr there, having someone who knows what they are doing on stage – it helps.”
The event was beautifully lit, beautifully staged, beautifully recorded, and beautifully played and sung by musicians in beautiful ball gowns. And in the middle stood Johnny Marr, ex-Smith, Manchester lad, guitar hero. And he played beautifully too. As the evening ended, Johnny held up his now trademark white Fender Jaguar to the audience and was walked to the front of the stage with Zimmer’s arm around his shoulders – another notch on the musical bedpost of this remarkable man.
At the end of 2009 Johnny had another opportunity, this time to score the soundtrack for an Antonio Banderas’ movie The Big Bang. Director Tony Krantz and he had met in the eighties, when a mutual friend involved in managing bands was associated with The Smiths in North America. Krantz was very much aware of Marr and his music. Having been the muscle behind such TV greats as ER and Twin Peaks, The Big Bang was one of Krantz’s first forays as a movie director. A Raymond Chandler/Mickey Spillane-style film noir detective thriller, but with a secondary theme incorporating particle physics gags throughout, the film was well received but didn’t set the world alight. Banderas plays the part of Ned Cruz, a private eye hired to find a Russian stripper. Listening in his car to Boomslang, it occurred to Krantz that Johnny Marr would be perfect to provide an atmospheric soundtrack. A copy of the script was sent to Marr, who was immediately impressed and a wee bit nervous. “I liked the script,” he explained, “but was saying, ‘I don’t think I’m the right guy!’” But, despite doing the worst selling job he could, Marr got the gig.
Krantz left Johnny to his own devices for much of the movie. Originally, he worked direct from the script and then developed individual themes. Only at that point did he pick up a guitar and put the pieces together. The experience of having worked with Zimmer informed the process too. Rather than write the best piece first, cramming it into the first scene, and then writing a second piece to illuminate the second, Zimmer had explained the process of putting together an entire suite, which illustrated the whole movie, and then breaking that down into parts that could be used. The process worked for Marr, and he enjoyed the element of not having to release an album of songs – “handing in your homework,” as he put it – that would be reviewed and critiqued across the world’s press. Johnny’s soundtrack was a mixed blend of dark, claustrophic drones, pacy theme-pieces, Morricone-style solos, and it works perfectly. He even found a place for daughter Sonny’s vocals.
Marr clearly enjoyed film work, and particularly the process of working with Zimmer. A one-off project was to write the theme tune for David Cross’s RDF/Channel 4 comedy, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, but when Hans told him, over lunch in London in 2013, that he was working with American songwriter/rapper Pharrell Williams on the score for the new Spider-Man movie, Johnny went wild with enthusiasm. So much so that before they left the restaurant the music was already half-written. “This lunch started at noon, and four hours later we’re singing riffs to each other,” said Zimmer. “As a kid,” Marr explained, “[Spider-Man] was my favourite superhero. Bar none.”
Working this time with a bigger team that included Williams, Alicia Keys, Kendrick Lamar, Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger and Junkie XL, Zimmer created an impromptu band that worked together to create songs that were incorporated into the score. He dubbed them “The Magnificent Six”, responsible for the sort of music that Zimmer imagined would inhabit the mind of the young Peter Parker. Inhibited at first by the number of big names in the room, egos were left at the door. Zimmer explained that he didn’t pick big names because they were big, but because they were good. “Let’s channel being in our first band,” Hans told the ensemble of Spider-Man fans. Johnny’s riffing as Spider-Man drops through the chasms of the New York streets channelled that perfectly. The cultural clashes that sparked from the sessions created a perfect urban musical landscape that perfectly fitted the New York setting.
“To have Pharrell Williams sitting there with Johnny Marr – the guy who wrote ‘Happy’ and the guy who came from The Smiths… it couldn’t have been nicer or more collaborative,” Zimmer was to say afterwards. His relationship with Johnny is clearly one built on massive amounts of mutual respect. Each talks of how much they learned from the other, but more tellingly they really like one another. At the time of writing, the pair were working on the new Peter Sollett movie Freeheld and happily discussing in interviews the invitation for Zimmer to work on Johnny’s third solo album.
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For a vegan rock and roller in his forties, if playing on best-selling movie soundtracks wasn’t diversion enough from the tour/album/ tour routine, summer 2010 found Johnny staring down the barrel of a meat-eating plant at the RHS show at Tatton Park in Cheshire, England. Plant cultivator Matthew Soper developed the hybrid pitcher plant over nine years’ work in the south of England and named it Sarracenia Johnny Marr after his favourite guitarist. Johnny turned up at the show, touched to have had a labour of so many years named after him, to be photographed with the other Johnny Marr. He planned to have a guitar painted in its colours, and – when asked if the fact that the plant was carnivorous bothered him – said, “I don’t have any complaints about lions being carnivorous, you know? Nature is the way it is….”
By early 2011 Johnny’s time as a member of The Cribs was coming to a natural end. As with Modest Mouse, there was no animosity or great falling-out, just a series of events that brought the project to a close. Key amongst these was Johnny’s itchy feet for solo work. Initially he was considering a new project for The Healers and had started to write on his own again, with an eye to bringing that project back on line. Marr planned to put out two albums over the coming year or so, and wanted to work on more soundtrack work too. “Touring with Ryan, Gary and Ross has been fantastic,” he told the Evening Chronicle, “and Ignore the Ignorant something I am really proud of. We ended up doing so much more than we originally set out to do, and I have made three good friends.”
For the three brothers too the time was right to let Johnny go: while new material had been worked on, it didn’t feel right. Gary was building a studio in Portland, ready for a break, in which he and the others could just work in there for fun, trying out gear and relaxing. The Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull produced an ash cloud that killed flights in Europe for a week or more. Gary got stuck in the UK and couldn’t return to work in the US. No one was happy with what was being written. It came as a blow but no surprise when Johnny took the opportunity to move on again. “I knew straight away,” said Ryan, “that Johnny was leaving the band.” It was an opportunity for the brothers to go back to being a trio, and to build on what they had gained from having Marr in the band. For Johnny, his creative instinct was kicking in, and it was time to go back to being Johnny Marr again.
Permanent relocation to the UK from Oregon reconnected him with the atmosphere he found most creative. Indeed, Manchester is a creative city by nature. A downtrodden, dirty city in Marr’s childhood, the destruction caused by the IRA bombing in 1996 and Manchester’s subsequent affluent rebuild into a smart, hip city did not affect its inherent creative heart. It was to here that Johnny returned and it was not lost on interviewers that both his home city and Portland have reputations for being, well, rainy – maybe staying indoors meant people created more! Johnny was happy to talk Manchester, happy to talk cities, as the lyrical content of much of the new work he was developing had a theme of urban dysfunction. “There’s a slight uptight quality that is in the UK,” he told a reporter from The Japanese Times. “More angsty, people trying to create some colour under the grey skies.”
“The music came first,” said Johnny. “The fact that Messenger is a solo record came second.” The songs developed as demos at such a rate that it never occurred to Marr that they could be for Modest Mouse, The Cribs or even The Healers. “[I] didn’t want to have anyone else collaborate on them, as they were pretty much fully realised,” he added. Several of the songs came about “lyric first”, an unusual process for someone whose career has mainly been about writing music to jigsaw into someone else’s words. “I had a bunch of lyrics that needed to be turned into songs,” Marr explained. “I turned to [the Jarman brothers] and said, ‘I think I wanna write thirty songs.’ And in my experience, anyone who says that – you don’t get in their way!”
Johnny assembled a band of friends, including production cohort James Doviak on keyboards and backing vocals. Doviak had been in and out of Marr’s music on guitar and keyboards since the early noughties and had played with The Healers. He brought in bass player Max James, while on drums Marr called Jack Mitchell, late of Haven, who had the unusual claim to fame of having replaced Noel Gallagher on drums in the band Tailgunner. Scattered across the album were Johnny’s now-adult son and daughter, Sonny and Nile (named for one of Marr’s early heroes and latter-day stage companions, Nile Rodgers). As a unit they are tight as a snare skin, heavy when required, and sniper-accurate across all the tracks.
The Messenger was released in February 2013. Recorded mainly in Manchester, with occasional visits to Berlin, the album comes out of its corner with its gloves up, punching first and hitting hard. ‘The Right Thing Right’ sounds like a lost, great Teardrop Explodes single – Johnny Marr at his best. Marr’s voice is confident, powerful, and more convincing than on Boomslang. His head is “in the south”, but his heart is in the north. Lyrically, it’s a dense start, but a proclamation in pure pop: Johnny Marr is back writing catchy three-and-a-bit minute wonders. ‘I Want The Heartbeat’ maintains the intensity, buzzsaw guitar lines strewn at a frenetic pace. It’s ambitious, personal, distinctive, and again, tailor-made for a heaving summer festival crowd. For listeners looking for Smiths’ references, there’s a whisper of ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ in the acoustic strumming of ‘European Me’, heavy on reverb and long, sustained chords that fill the room. Dispassionately looking out across a vista of bleak European migration, of souls searching for a better life but ever moving on, the highlight track features Johnny’s daughter Sonny on backing vocals and son Nile on guitar respectively.
‘Upstarts’, with its urgent, chiming opening, could have been released in 1978, while ‘Lockdown’ imagines ‘a cold Wednesday night in November’ in one of Britain’s worn-down seaside towns, a distant cousin of Morrissey’s ‘Every Day Is Like Sunday’, perhaps. ‘The Messenger’, the first track to slow the pace down, recalls Nile Rodgers’ lines for Bowie’s ‘China Girl’ and REM’s ‘The One I Love’, trippy indie swathes of guitar against a disco-boom bass.
‘Say Demesne’ hits a darker, minor key, its lyrics obtuse and repeating. Bearing some of the influence of Marr’s film work, the song is cryptic from start to finish, crawling through images of drunkenness, prostitution, love and friendship. It’s a stand-out track on the album, breaking its pace and opening a window on scenes from some of the city’s darker streets. ‘Sun And Moon’ lifts the blind and returns to the Manchester of the late seventies and eighties, long raincoats, Joy Division gigs and meeting Nico on the upper deck of the bus to Didsbury village. ‘New Town Velocity’, featuring Sonny and Nile Marr, is another track with Smithsian echoes, with an acoustic lightness of touch reminiscent of ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, but a generation on.
Critics, in the main, liked the album a lot. For The Guardian Michael Hann saw it as a mish-mash, albeit a good one, of Marr’s styles over the years. “The thing most people will want from a Johnny Marr album,” he wrote, “is that it sounds like Johnny Marr. And The Messenger certainly does that.” Writing for the same paper, Dave Simpson, while missing Morrissey’s emotional “wallop”, noted the collection consisted of “enjoyably spiky tunes.” Mark Beaumont, writing for NME, found the album not just “a summary of everything worthwhile in contemporary rock music,” but “an insightful and informed dissection of life in 2013 and all the futile iOS updates, cyberstalking conglomerates and financial travesties that clog up the spaces between us.” For Uncut, Gary Mulholland also found it hard to give the album his full blessing, but actually had to admit it had a distinct merit: “There is one thing above all that makes The Messenger worth 45 minutes of anyone’s time,” he wrote. “It features the guitarist from The Smiths playing guitar like the guitarist from The Smiths. And that remains one of the very best noises on earth.”
Johnny had every reason to be proud of The Messenger. And for Marr fans, it was exactly the record that most of them wanted to hear.
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The tour that promoted the album was a mighty affair. It kicked off, as all great things do, in Manchester in February, with further warm-ups within driving distance of home for Marr. After London, Liverpool and other UK dates Johnny headed for the US and Canada. Support was generally provided by Massachusetts-born Meredith Sheldon, either as herself, as Alamar (her side project with bassist Jen Turner), or with Johnny’s son Nile. The tour snaked back across the Atlantic, and ran to the end of the year. Once or twice Johnny joined New Order on stage, he played with Nile Rodgers at Manchester’s Ritz, and at Finsbury Park in June The Stone Roses were his host.
In December Johnny rejoined The Cribs on stage in Leeds for their final Christmas gig at the Academy. Introduced as a special guest, “because it’s Christmas,” they played ‘We Were Aborted’ and ‘We Share The Same Skies’, his first appearance with the near-local boys since 2010. Throughout the tour Johnny played songs from his back catalogue, from The Smiths and Electronic in particular, but best of all was that he could play more or less the whole album live, every night, and get a fantastic reaction from the audiences. As he has so often said, these were songs written for people who wanted to hear Johnny Marr playing great Johnny Marr songs.
As if putting together a new album and tour wasn’t enough, Johnny had the distinction in early 2013 of becoming “godlike”. Awarded NME’s “Godlike Genius” award, he joined a list of rock heroes and heroines including fellow-Mancs Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown, New Order, Mark E. Smith and Shaun Ryder, as well as the likes of “outsiders” John Peel and Michael Eavis. “I guess it means that some things are alright with the world,” was Marr’s response. The Cribs wryly observed that it was hard to accept someone as Godlike, once you’d seen them in their pyjamas. “All hail Johnny Marr,” said NME editor Mike Williams. “Never has anyone been so utterly deserving of the title.”
The Messenger tour invigorated Johnny’s writing as much as it fed his hunger for live performance. As ever, before the tour was even finished he was writing material for a second solo album. Some demo tracks from the tour bus made it into the finished mixes on Playland, but the majority of the songs were written on the road and demoed between gigs. If Johnny Marr has a muse, she doesn’t get much downtime! The album picked up on the energy of a band on tour and a writer keen to keep the ideas coming. Haven bassist Iwan Gronow replaced James for the sessions that were recorded mainly in London, with vocal tracks added in Manchester.
The album was resolutely upbeat, tambourine-driven, bang on the beat, despite its edgy themes of consumerism, urban tension and contemporary anxieties. ‘Easy Money’, separated at birth from Modest Mouse’s ‘Dashboard’, received extensive airplay on BBC radio, and became one of the most memorable, ear-worm singles of the year. But its theme is the continuous, debilitating chasing of filthy lucre. Amazing for a track on which the guitar bass and keyboard parts were all recorded at 2am on the band tour bus. Album opener ‘Back In The Box’ takes an askance look at freeing a madness, letting the demons within loose into the world. ‘Dynamo’ – written during the first week of the Messenger tour – is a love song, but with the object of love being a building, London’s Gherkin or Manchester’s CIS or Beetham Tower maybe. There’s plenty here for those with a backward glance to earlier Marr songs. ‘The Trap’ has an air of Electronic about it, ‘Boys Get Straight’ has that lovely reminder of Smiths’ riffs that occasionally crop up in Johnny’s work, while ‘Playland’ has a glam seventies stomp throughout.
Johnny spoke of being inspired to write “Candidate”, about the strong women who have coloured his life, by walking through Times Square and looking up at one of the huge screens there. Daughter Sonny and friend/support act Meredith Sheldon both appear on the track, and – as on The Messenger – Sonny and Nile’s contributions are heard across the album. ‘25 Hours’ is perhaps the most autobiographical song on either album, looking back at the young Johnny’s early relationship with the guitar, when, as he put it, “I saw that the guitar, and culture, and TV and films and books would be my main companion.” ‘Speak Out, Reach Out’ snapshots the irony of the complacent and the wealthy living back-to-back with the disadvantaged and the invisible. ‘Little King’ is about the raping and pillaging of culture and environment in the name of business, government and profit, as direct in the message as on Johnny’s guitar.
Reviewers recognised that Playland, released in October 2014, was cut from the same cloth as The Messenger. On the whole it was well received, but there was a general feeling that it was rather too like its predecessor, a point that Marr himself addressed, pointing out that he had really liked The Messenger, and actively felt he did not want to stray too far from that path at present. He didn’t stay off the road long either, as dates through October, November and early December picked up again in the spring, and through the summer of 2015 the band played alongside The Who and Paul Weller in London’s Hyde Park, as well as returning to Australia and New Zealand, Singapore and Japan. The tour ran well into the autumn, the momentum never stopping, the songs still coming, the guitars still ringing out.
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While his former colleagues in The Smiths continue to prosper, with Morrissey – despite ill health – releasing some of the best music of his career in recent years and finding success as a writer of books as well as of songs, Johnny Marr never looks back. Except that, when asked, he seems to really enjoy looking back. He’s happy with his legacy of The Smiths but while that band lasted a handful of years, he has spent nearly 30 years fielding questions about whether they will reform. When one interviewer pointed out how much Abba had been offered to get back together for a series of shows, Johnny archly suggested it might be better for him to join Abba then, and forget about The Smiths.
He continues to live in the wealthy suburbs of southern Manchester, on the edge of the Cheshire countryside. It’s an area of trendy wine bars and footballers’ wives, a hop and a skip from Manchester Airport. But one would imagine that Johnny will be listening to music or tinkering with a guitar. Grant Showbiz looks back on his years working with Johnny with great affection. He remembers a time when the pair would simply sit and listen to records, in exactly the way that Marr did with his friends in the years before The Smiths. And Showbiz also recalls the warmth and companionship of the man. A pleasure simply to be with – “Johnny is one of the nicest people to sit and just play records with,” he says. “He has that wonderful ability to just compress time.” The former Smiths’ sound engineer sees parallels between Johnny and another wunderkind guitar player from another era. “I’ve been vaguely seeing comparisons between him and Jeff Beck recently,” says Showbiz. Especially in the way Beck went from being the hottest gun in town to a point where he could pursue his own projects and itinerary at his own speed. “He has kind of avoided all that ‘fashionable’ stuff really, and just carried on.” Grant compares the two in terms of character as well, and finds more similarities – “[Beck] is an interesting, quiet man – a nice guy to hang out with too.” He imagines the Jeff Beck of today may be slightly less obsessed with music than he supposes Johnny is. When interviewed for this book, Grant summed up Johnny’s passion: “I assume that Johnny [will be] listening to music as we speak.”
Indeed, it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about him. Marr appears to be universally popular with everyone he has ever worked with. Even at the break up of The Smiths or at the 1996 court trial, no one dissed Johnny on a personal level. Even the High Court Judge summoned up all his charity and described him as “engaging”. For Noel Gallagher Johnny is “euphoric – an ‘up’ kind of guy.” He can walk into any studio in the world and enhance whatever is going down. At the same time he’s modest – he knows just how good he is, because he has studied what he does for more than forty years, yet he remains a self-effacing man.
Every interviewer seems to trot out the same questions about whether or not he will ever work with Morrissey again, and only rarely does Johnny’s patience crack. His answer is always simple: he won’t. Or maybe he will. Who cares? He did in fact confirm at one point that The Smiths would reform – if Prime Minister David Cameron dissolved the current UK Government – but there remains no sign of that happening. Johnny certainly has enough work, and will receive enough offers of work, to last him another decade or two at least. As long as one of The Beatles is still alive there will always be rumours of a reunion, and it seems The Smiths will suffer the same fate. But it would be just as interesting to know if he has any plans to work with Billy Bragg again, or David Byrne, Modest Mouse or The Cribs. Morrissey, too, seems happy to let sleeping Smiths lie, with his first novel, List of the Lost, due to hit the streets as this book goes to press.
With his wife Angie still his companion at arms, and children Sonny and Nile themselves growing into careers as musicians, you’d think Johnny Marr, now in his fifties, would start to slow down but if anything he appears to be speeding up. As well as the astonishing amount of work he manages to pack into a year, this teetotal, vegan Godlike Genius runs anything up to eighteen miles a day, four days a week. He has supported The Big Issue magazine and UNICEF, and is currently an honorary board member of Rock For Kids, supporting disadvantaged kids in Chicago with musical education. “I’d rather have silence than bad music,” he once declared.
His friendships are long and lasting, as well as productive. He still occasionally appears on stage with Andy Rourke, after more than forty years of friendship. There has never been a door closed publicly on the chances of one day working again with Matt Johnson, Billy Bragg, Isaac Brock or The Cribs. Even with Morrissey, with whom he shared nerve-shattering experiences at an age when most people would struggle to make themselves an omelette, there seems no lasting animosity. If once-in-a-blue moon emails are exchanged between the pair, let’s be happy that that happens and leave it there.
With his usual down-to-earth modesty and understatement, this deeply inspiring musician, whose entire professional life has been devoted to the instrument that put him in the spotlight as a teenager, is under no illusions as to what would have happened to him if he hadn’t achieved what he has. “If I hadn’t made it,” he says, “I’d have been the biggest ‘hasn’t been’ in south Manchester.”
“I just regard what I’m doing as a journey, you know?” says Marr. “I feel very blessed.”