I grew up in the Sixties. I was bathed in The Beatles’ music from the age of three. George was my favourite. I still get the shivers when I hear those fabulous intros on the first four Beatles albums. At the age of twelve I fell in love with Bolan, Bowie and Bryan Ferry, and life was never the same again. I was too old to be a punk, but Buzzcocks and The Sex Pistols were as exciting as it got in 1976 – or any other year. By the time I was twenty three and living in Manchester, I thought I’d heard it all.
Then came The Smiths.
Ever since I first heard them, they have been my favourite band. While I thought I had heard it all, it was evident that they had it all. And in Johnny Marr they had a new George Harrison, a man who could set the room alight within the first bar and a half. And of course, in Morrissey, The Smiths had perhaps the last great lyricist, the last great vocalist.
Over the years that followed, I heard many great records, from Billy Bragg, Kirsty MacColl, Talking Heads and Electronic. And I found in so many cases that Johnny played on these records too. What I liked, and still like, about Johnny Marr, was his refusal to play the role of guitar hero whilst being, evidently, the greatest guitar ‘hero’ of his age. While Carlos Santana pulled faces over his endless solos that made it look as though he was enduring an intrusive rectal examination while he played, and countless onanistic solos screamed egotistically from under the yard-long hair of a thousand so-called ‘geniuses’, Johnny remained solo-free, cool, distanced and locked into tighter grooves than were good for any of us. While he never took centre-stage until relatively recently with The Healers, he lit up virtually everything he played on. For Johnny Marr, it has always seemed that the guitar was the key thing, not Johnny himself. While other more visible guitarists over the years have used the instrument to tell us far more about themselves than we really need to know, Marr has resolutely continued to promote guitar playing as the end in itself.
The Smiths’ catalogue of recordings is much like any individual Smiths single: brief, concise, gorgeous, irresistible. Nearly every song is close to perfection, and theirs is a catalogue as near perfection as any band will get. For me in 1983, they were the best British band since The Beatles, and with hindsight they remain so. While any decent record collection should contain all The Beatles’ albums, so should it contain every record The Smiths ever released. A handful of albums that shook the world.
Since then, the boy Marr has ‘done tremendous.’ He is still working, still passionately involved in project after project, still exciting to hear, still the same guitar player who graced a hundred thousand bedsits in the Eighties, still supporting his beloved Manchester City. His most famous band, and his be-quiffed former song-writing partner, have been the subject – or the victims – of many biographies, amongst which there have been some good ones. Dave Haslam, writing for NME in 1989, pertinently noted that “the Johnny Marr story will run and run,” but nobody has yet chosen to look at Johnny’s career exclusively. Since the last major biography of The Smiths, a generation of guitar players and lovers of great pop have discovered the band. This book is for them.
I have tried to tell the story of Johnny’s career in full. It’s the tale of a guy who picked the guitar up in his pre-teen years and went on to change the lives of millions of listeners. And whatever the world around him thought of it, he ‘kept on keeping on.’