An Interview between Johnny Marr and Martin Roach for the latter’s book, The Right To Imagination And Madness, published by Independent Music Press in 1994.
“I was writing this book about my favourite twenty songwriters and contacted Johnny’s managment office. At the time, I had only two books to my name and was publishing this work on my own label. I didn’t worked for any magazines and, in many ways, offered Marr little or no benefit in return for the interview. Further, he hadn’t spoken to the press for several years. I was amazed and delighted when I got a phonecall to get myself to Manchester on a certain day and turn up at a central hotel. I waited anxiously and, bang on time, a blacked out BMW rolled up and Johnny Marr stepped out.
He walked straight up to me and introduced himself, not as ‘Johnny’ but as ‘Johnny Marr’. We sat in the bar area and drank tea, while he spoke for four hours about his songs and the music that had affected him. He wouldn’t let me pay for anything and offered to check any information he’d given me if I had any queries. He was a gentleman and a scholar of music. Oh, and he looked compeltely rock and roll, exactly as you would want Johnny Marr to look: shades, cool clothes and a rock star’s barnet. I have never had the chance to thank him directly for his leap of faith in me – a totally unknown writer asking him about his songwriting – so, hearty respect and cheers, Johnny.
JM: I think it shaped it massively, as I think it does with everybody really. I came from a particularly musical family. I grew up on the outskirts of the city, near the Ardnick Apollo, not the Harlem Apollo [laughs] and loads of my relatives lived on the same street. Four families lived next door to each other, all Irish immigrants, all very young families and so there were parties every night. Being an Irish situation there were always accordions and harmonicas and other instruments around. My first memory of guitar playing was this uncle who had big sideburns and Chelsea boots, he was well cool, he had a guitar and did a little bit of playing, I thought he was really hip. Because it was a big family there were always christenings and weddings and there was always what seemed like this same band playing at these functions. In between their sets I would go and have a look at the guitars. I remember this red Stratocaster, I can recall the smell of the case and everything. My parents had Beatles records but they were more into the Irish stuff, kind of country music, which spilled over into The Everly Brothers who were really popular in my household. No matter how much you believe otherwise, I think your upbringing indelibly affects your development, it gives you your musical personality and in some cases your entire musical vocabulary. Even when I started to rebel against that, when I was ten or eleven and I got into glam rock, it was still there. Even now, I hate country music, so the influence remains. Unwittingly or not, my family did shape my musical ideas and were very encouraging to my aspirations to play.
From what I have seen definitely, yes. It seems there are two ways you can go and neither include musical school. You can either come from the genetic thing like I did, or you can come from a completely non-musical situation. Take Bernard Sumner for example, he got into music from a completely different, almost political need, when he left school. He had no musical family at all. I don’t know anyone who’s had success from music school, that way always smacks for me of It Bites, too cerebral, too calculated, not very much soul. If you want it bad enough and connect with music on a spiritual level, tuition is completely irrelevant. Music is a purely spiritual connection.
From about ten.
That seems quite early.
Yes, very early. I had always had guitars for as long as I could remember. I thought once that maybe my parents were pushing me into it, but I soon realised that I was obsessed. I loved the feel and shape of them, so I always had toy guitars around. Then when I got to ten or eleven I heard Marc Bolan for the first time, like a lot of people, through Top of the Pops. The first record I ever bought was ‘Jeepster’ but it wasn’t until ‘Metal Guru’ got to No.1 that I really made that connection for the first time. It was a feeling that I’ll never forget, a new sensation. I got on my bike and rode and rode, singing this song, it was a spiritual elevation, one of the best moments of my life. The next day me and my mate went out and stole loads of glitter, put it all over our faces and started emulating our favourite bands. From then on my formative years were totally and utterly dedicated to music. I was into football like everyone else, but while most kids my age were into conkers and bikes, I was at home miming to ‘Metal Guru’ and ‘Telegram Sam’.
No, not at all, because I still think what I was doing was more interesting than what other kids were doing.
Yes, it was. Undoubtedly. I’m very one-dimensional in that respect, music is everything. When I left school I had jobs and all that, but they were only a means to playing loads of records and tapes and getting paid for it. That was a natural apprenticeship for being in a band because Billy Duffy from The Cult worked around there. He was my closest ally and a few years older than me, so he was kind of like my role model. Eventually he gave up everything to be involved in music and I kind of followed that.
Very little, very little. I moved from the city to the south of Manchester, which was vaguely middle class, and looked like Beverly Hills compared to the staunch, working class, tough city. My new place was only a little housing estate, and now it is really dilapidated, but at the time it felt like nirvana. I met guys who were only 13 or 14 but took themselves so seriously as musicians, they were already legends in their own minds. Billy Duffy was one of those people. In those circles, it was okay to regard yourself a a serious musician, even though they were so young. Without that I would still have been a musician but I don’t know whether I would have had the confidence to have done what I did. I used to walk around all the time with a guitar case, and there was actually a guitar in it, but there’s not much I could do with it outside the shops! But it was just to let everybody know that my whole identity was as a guitar player. I was very cocky. But in terms of writing I realised certain limitations, after being in a few of my mates’ bands. I knew that as a guitar player there are only so many times you can play someone else’s songs. Someone had to start writing.
As soon as as I could string a few chords together, I started putting them down on a cassette recorder. I was never really into being the typical guitar hero, I was always naturally into songs rather than all that. About 13, maybe earlier, I suppose, perhaps 11 or 12. I picked it up very quickly, it was only the physical discomfort of hurting my fingers that I struggled with.
Incredibly early. Coming from a punk mentality, Bernard thinks the whole ‘born with a guitar in your mouth’ story is really corny.
Not really in that respect. The most important thing about that whole period is that since then I have been able to look back and say to myself ‘Yes, my musical intuition was always correct for me’. I was playing James Brown in 1980, stuff that later went on to influence the baggy scene, Fatback, Sly Stone.
It was very unfashionable! [laughs] There was nobody dancing to it either so I couldn’t learn much from that!! [laughs] But it has held me in good stead since The Smiths split because if I had believed all the stuff about me being a musical megalomaniac I would have crumbled.
With the dance music I became involved in after I left The Smiths, it felt completely natural, because I was into all that well before The Smiths came along. I was listening to Chic in 1977, I have always had that schizophrenic attitude to music. But I think most people my age do, they are very open. If you’d talked to Shaun Ryder a few years ago he’d have been listening to Funkadelic and Rubber Soul as well. I think it is only the post-punk generation that understands that, because we have been left with a 30 year legacy of stuff that you can just take ideas from. You don’t have to be in any mind set or cult to appreciate it. My sister was always into dance music and she introduced me to 12” singles, so the whole DJ phase was just a natural part of what I do.
I didn’t get much from punk because of my age - I was too young to get into most clubs, although I did get to see Iggy Pop. I liked the American punk acts because they seemed to be more directly influenced by the British invasion of America, Patti Smith, The Stooges, New York Dolls, particularly The Dolls who were themselves interested in the girl groups whom I had already discovered. You see, what happened was that after glam rock I furiously back tracked because there was nothing around for me. I didn’t really get off on the records in the charts, I didn’t like Manfred Mann’s Band. The only records I liked were dance tracks at The Fair, all black music really. I used to go to The Fair to look at girls and clothes and listen to this stuff. In terms of material I could relate to as a writer, I had to go back even further which is when I got into Motown, and that led me onto Lieber & Stoller and Phil Spector and the Brill Building. Phil Spector was the second major influence on me behind Marc Bolan. That is why I got into American punk rather than British, because Patti Smith used to do Ronnettes numbers and the Dolls would do the girl group stuff.
The overall musician. Not purely sonically, but you could hear in his records that he was completely obsessed. There were no spaces in his music, any harmonic suggestion was realised. It’s kind of a production thing. If you’ve got four or five musicians playing then you will get loads of natural harmonics and spaces in there between the instruments. Well, Phil Spector was someone who would hear all these tiny suggestions and then fill every one in. This big, big, dense apocalyptic sound which I definitely connected with.
Well, as I say, I have never related to the Jeff Beck’s of this world, so it was completely natural - I have never seen the guitar as a solo instrument. When I started to write songs I wanted my one guitar to sound like a whole record, so I consequently developed almost a one-man-band style. I don’t fit very well with another guitarist, other than Matt Johnson, whose work I can embellish and feel very comfortable with. In terms of my own songs I like to be able to hear the whole thing - I’ll play a new song and hear piano and strings and then I try and play all that on my one guitar.
Um. [Thinks long]. Neil Young I suppose. His stuff is very fashionable again now, but his electric guitar playing is similar. I hear echoes of that in The Smiths. Or possibly Keith Richards and Brian Jones combined, ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown’ and all that.
The rhythm and melody really. Even if I play what can technically be called a solo, I regard it as a break. I believe music should be approached as composition, not as a free-form jam, everything has to be structured for a reason. I could always relate to Phil Spector far more than anyone else as a guitar player. For me you’ve got Jimi Hendrix and the rest is crap. As a musician, if you are going to be some kind of virtuoso, unless you can do it with the same spirit and depth of soul as Hendrix, you should forget it. I am a white English musician, born in the sixties in the Provinces, and that is the way it sounds. Too many people fall into the trap of the whole ethos and mythic identity of the guitar hero, which is largely a complete anachronism, the fastest gun and all that crap.
I’m not into jazz that much but what you said undoubtedly applies to bad jazz - however, the greats like Coltrane, and Miles Davies are the furthest I have been down that road. I don’t dislike jazz because of indulgence, I just dislike indulgence of any kind. For example, there’s a lot of indulgence in post-punk stuff, in fact some indie music has the worst kinds of indulgence. When that stuff is bad, it’s the worst.
Yes. There’s a pattern whereby I start to get a feeling, an uneasy feeling for a day or two and I try to harness that. I try not to party, I keep myself really straight and sober, which I guess is the opposite of what people might expect. I get up early and stay up late, sleep as little as possible and harness that disconcerting uneasiness. I feel a little bit uncensored and feel almost like a storm is coming and I know that something is going to happen.
Well, no, The Smiths was a completely and utterly different situation. We spent so much time together and we were incredibly pragmatic in approach. We were really into singles and we’d do batches of three songs at a time. We would sit down and say ‘Let’s write a song’. For my part it was the discipline of Lieber & Stoller which was at the core of The Smiths. It was like ‘this is what we do, we write songs and we can write thousands’. We recorded seventy songs in four and a half years. Morrissey would come round to my house and we’d do three songs just like that, then he would go away and do the lyrics and three days later he’d be in the studio recording it. When you have a partner who is so prolific and has that physical and emotional necessity to write, it makes things very easy for you, and in that way we propelled each other towards this endless supply of songs. I don’t want that to sound too clinical and demystify the process though, because as well as being pragmatic it was incredibly romantic. The songwriting process and the songs we produced were sacred, and still are to me now. One of the things about making records is that for it to work you have to be totally and utterly in love with it for those three minutes and you have to be able to hear that love in the tracks. That might be a particular idiosyncrasy of mine, because I guess some of my more distinctive songs have that romantic melodic content. When Kirsty MacColl asked me to write for her she said ‘I want one of those songs that make you feel happy and sad at the same time’. That is very much where I am at, I feel like that, it can almost be upsetting when I make records, that mixture of melancholia and vibrancy. I don’t like to hear bone-head records, I look for poignancy. Those are the feelings that I harbour for a couple of days when I get that uneasy feeling.
Absolutely, really ill. To avoid that heartache I sort a lot of stuff out in my mind first. Generally the best ideas are those that completely click in my head straight away and it’s like ‘Let’s go let’s go!!’ I will pick up a guitar and play it and it’s written really quickly. The songs that are crafted, I like less, although it can work well that way. An example of that is ‘Get The Message’ by Electronic, one of my favourite songs that I have written. It has this fragile element and could be from any time, and that was fairly well crafted. I knew I had a really great verse and a potentially great chorus, but I really had to rack me brains to nail it. I had to really concentrate to get the middle eight.
‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ by The Smiths, a simple song that just came out. That song perhaps more than any other has a great deal of my musical background in it - I think it sounds like a Del Shannon song.
I would go along with that school of the muse. When I write and I stay up late, my creative faculties are down and I think you are more open to receiving all that. That’s when drugs can help. They can also hinder enormously, you can get on completely on the wrong track. But in whatever way, if you let your creative faculties down you can get more stuff written.
No, because I prefer playing the guitar to sleeping. I hate getting up and that’s why Aphex Twin has it made. I wish I could do that! [laughs]. There is no way that I am going to get out of bed, no matter how good the idea is, not even to write a hit!! [Laughs loudly]
Well, it depends. Take this week. I am working on the next Electronic album and I want to get into more technical stuff, maybe guitar sounds, and I don’t feel like writing anything. The feeling hasn’t been there.
I would just go into another room and get it down. One of the other techniques you can work with is when you write a few songs, and think ‘Great, they’re pretty good’ and because you are relaxed you carry on noodling and that way write another good track immediately afterwards. The songs after the initial batch can be just as good. For example, ‘Idiot Country’ by Electronic was written like that, when I had completed three songs and I carried on playing for the fun of it. Loads of Smiths’ songs were written like that aswell, such as ‘How Soon Is Now’. I had written ‘William It Was Really Nothing, ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ and ‘Nowhere Fast’ all very quickly, and I was left to my own devices in my flat and that way I wrote ‘How Soon Is Now’. Another example was after a Radio 1 session. I was on the train home and I got loads of ideas that turned into ‘Reel Around The Fountain’, ‘Still Ill’ and then ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’, which I recorded as soon as I got home in twenty minutes on a two track recorder. Fortunately I’ve got a good music memory for ideas I have when I am away from a recording environment. A lot of ideas come when I am about to go to sleep though, which I know is common and maybe a psychic or biological phenomena because of which I have since started to keep a notebook by my bed.
[Laughs loudly] Have you got three hours to spare? Well, for a start you can pretty much include the entire Smiths back-catalogue. ‘Disappointed’ by Electronic was a total ecstasy song after a long night doing E. Funnily enough, I find that booze is not very good for creativity and I think you can hear the effect of drink in the tracks, too morbid, too dark. I have to say the best stuff I have written though, has been when I have been sober and on a natural high, through pure exuberance. The Smiths was a very exuberant time. I pretty much lived my life for twenty years like that. And then I just plummeted!!! Still, that’s cool, you learn a lot about yourself with things like that. Joining The The was like going from Charlie Bubbles to Apocalypse Now.
Yes. I don’t want this to turn into some kind of Aerosmith drugs interview, but there are some really interesting stories behind that. I was working with Chrissie Hynde at the time, which was a fantastic period of great learning and being with a good friend. Working with her didn’t quite work out but just being around somebody so insightful and perceptive was brilliant. We came into the studio to write an album, although she wasn’t really ready for that. Then Matt phones me up and asks if I want to work with The The. So what I would do was work with Chrissie until 2 in the morning and then load all my gear into the car and drive across town to the other studio and start work with Matt. I’d get there and we’d take loads of mushrooms and ecstasy. It was the most intense psychological and philosophical experiment. That is one of the bonds between Matt and I, that psychological intrigue. When I first heard that he wanted me to work with him I was well pleased, and the night before the first session I took loads of ecstasy and had a real psychedelic night. I was supposed to be at that first session for noon but uncharacteristically I didn’t get there until 2pm. I walked in and I looked like one of the Thunderbirds with his strings cut. I glanced around and Matt was sitting there, looking incredibly intense, and the producer was the same, the atmosphere was unbelievably tense and dark, a really horrible vibe. The producer was staring at his hands and that was the day it transpired he had a nervous breakdown - Matt will do that to you. So we started ‘The Beat(en) Generation’ and I tried the harmonica and it just wasn’t happening. The feeling just wasn’t locked. The line I had to play was great and it should have been okay, but I just couldn’t work with all this bad atmosphere around. It was going nowhere so I turned to Matt and said ‘Look I’ll be honest with you, I took a load of E for the last three nights and I’m feeling a bit wobbly’. Matt looked at me and with great production acumen said ‘Well we’d better get some more then hadn’t we.’ So off goes the drummer and comes back with all this stuff and we just cocooned ourselves in the studio for five days and the results were amazing. Matt is intense. He’d be tripping and saying ‘I want it to be like Jesus meets the devil’ and I’d be like [Shrugs shoulders and smiles] ‘Sure, okay, I get you’ and it worked!!!
There are many privileges that you inherit as a musician, so if I am not writing I will work in the studio on something else, even if it’s just refining a guitar sound or learning a new piece of technology. The point is that if you are sitting in the pub you are not going to write a song. I like to work in the studio because at least then I am in an environment where a song could come out.
Well, it’s different for me because I write for a specific partner. For example, at the moment I am in the mode of writing for Bernard although I don’t want that to sound too clinical, because there are many sounds I could produce that would suit him. He has such good musical tastes so I am very open to what I can write. When I am working with somebody we become very, very close and naturally from there I write stuff that works for them.
I regard them all as very natural stages of my life. It is almost like a chicken and egg situation. The sort of person I was in The Smiths needed to write the songs that I did for that group, very disciplined, yet exuberant and still feeling new to have a partner. With The The it was home for me, I wanted to find my feet as a writer and still make records. That is why I did so many sessions early on because I wanted to make records but not form a band - if I had started a band soon after The Smiths split I would have been expected to play with three young guys with quiffs and glasses and the spotlight on those three would have been unbearable. So when Matt called and said he wanted me to expand the sonic picture of his band and get into sound effects it was exactly what I wanted to do at that time. You see, the problem with The Smiths was that towards the end it was very restrictive. I was the only melodic factor in the band. We didn’t use keyboards, sequencers or even backing vocals, so I was playing constantly and that became a bit tiresome for me really. So The The was very much expanding my musical consciousness and vocabulary. Electronic was very much a representation of a particular scene and lifestyle that Bernard and I both shared and found ourselves at the forefront of really, particularly Bernard because it was right on his doorstep at the Hacienda, the Manchester scene. That whole scene was a lot more complex than a lot of people wearing flares, it was very complex, there was a lot of violence around, and guns - yes, people were swallowing ecstasy and all that but there were also gangsters around and violence. Extremes.
Yes, extremes are very conducive to being in a group. It shakes things up. That first Electronic album is very much of its time. For example, ‘Feel Every Beat’ may sound a little obscure but lyrically it makes total sense. It is vaguely political - there were serious head-on conflicts for Bernard with the Chief of Police James Anderton that threatened his very livelihood. Where we are at at the moment is a different thing and we’ll have to see how that works.
The Smiths was entirely music first. I gave Morrissey the music and he’d fit stuff around that. I suspect he had lyrical fragments lying around and he would fit them in place to each song I gave him. There were one or two exceptions such as ‘Rusholme Ruffians’. I knew he had written a song about The Fair, so I decided to use ‘Marie’s The Name’ by Elvis Presley. Also, with ‘Meat is Murder’ I knew there would have to be that kind of heavy material content. Perhaps the main example of his lyrics prompting my music is ‘Panic’. I had been over his house and I knew he had a new idea with a hook that was ‘Hang the DJ’ so I basically wrote ‘Metal Guru’!! We even asked Toni Visconti to record it but he wasn’t interested. The line ‘It says nothing to me about my life’ ironically reminded me of the role ‘Metal Guru’ had in my life as I explained earlier, so I used that Bolan track. With Electronic it is a perfect step for me at this stage because for the first time I am totally writing with another musician. Sometimes I’ll write all the music, other times he will and I’ll just put a guitar break down. Sometimes we’ll both contribute to the music - for example, ‘Getting Away With It’: he wrote the verse and I wrote the chorus. That is when the real sparks fly when we write together, head to head. That is very new and fresh for me. Normally when people ask me to write a song they expect a whole backing track, such as Kirsty MacColl on ‘Walking Down Madison’.
I treat technology really in much the same way as I would a drummer and a bass player in certain situations. I can be completely musically fascistic and technology allows you to do that. I use it to make that connection with Phil Spector, who would get musicians to play and play and play until every single drop of individual nuance had gone and he got it to exactly how he wanted. ‘Get The Message’ sounded like a really odd band and I spent a long time just getting that sound, five days on just the rhythm track.
Well, touch wood, it works quite well. Something I do appears to inspire them to pick up on the mood I was after.
A feeling. There were two songs for The Smiths that are good examples, the first two songs we ever did - ‘Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ and Suffer Little Children’. That demanded not too much doom or all minor chords, that would have been too obvious. At the end of the day I have learnt from all the people I have written with that they want it to sound like is me. But the problem is they usually means ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ when they say that. I wrote that track in about four minutes and just did it. I guess there is something in the guitar part that appeals. I heard it on the radio recently and I can see what people are looking for - that mix again between happy and sad. That is my nature.
Oh yeah, loads. ‘I Know It’s Over’ by The Smiths. It isn’t my favourite Smiths track but when I heard him sing that for the first time in the studio it was amazing. ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ captures the atmosphere perfectly aswell. ‘How Soon Is Now’ is another example. Also, ‘Disappointed’ - Neil Tennant sang this great falsetto tone at the end which was spot on. Again ‘Get The Message’ as well. That song undoubtedly stamps Bernard’s genius as a singer, his is an incredible performance on that track. That vocal performance is as good as anything that Lou Reed ever did. ‘You And Me Babe’ for Kirsty MacColl was also very appropriate - I wrote that track on my knees with a tape recorder in the hall-way ‘cos the kids were asleep and I was feeling kind of sad, and she captured the spirit of that very closely.
Sometimes, yes. For example, much of The Smiths’ work was an evocation of being on the bus to or from school, in the rain, going under all these Victorian bridges. That was something that I heard in Joy Division’s music and it was something that Morrissey and I discussed and were both very aware of. It is a feeling that you can’t avoid if you are a sensitive person in Manchester.
Undoubtedly, and it is something that we are trying to address more now, especially with our slower, more atmospheric songs. A song called ‘In A Lonely Place’ which I believe was originally a Joy Division song but was released by New Order, is very Smiths-like, not in terms of sonic content but in terms of atmospherics. It has a certain melancholy that is almost beautiful and that is what those times were like. This is always in contrast to the other side of inspiration which is just pure driving exuberance, and I find I share that very much more with Matt. He is the only person that I have met that is able to draw on that peculiar environmental feeling I just mentioned, even though he lives in London. He seems to be able to focus on it, with songs like ‘Heartland’, ‘Helpline Operator and ‘Love Is Stronger Than Death’, he evokes a young white sensitive boy living in a Victorian environment. It’s not as obvious as Ray Davies because he did it lyrically, these little scenarios. We evoke it as a musical atmosphere, a feeling. It is not something that I particularly want to go back to, but I do recognise it, that unique melancholia.
Bert Jansch, the guitarist from Pentangle. Incredibly unfashionable group to mention but an amazing guitar player. When I moved to Wythenshawe, Billy Duffy and some of his mates introduced me to all that. There was Richard Thompson as well, but I could never really get it on with his singing, I couldn’t get with all that finger in the ear stuff!! The way Jansch and Renbourn worked together was very jazz and that introduced me to tunings.
Yes, I think it is, that captures that feeling. ‘Unhappy Birthday’ by The Smiths has really strange chords, but what happens on the left hand is quite jazzy. Also, ‘Headmaster Ritual’ is similarly written with different tunings, which I think doesn’t sound like anyone except me. That was the song that took me the longest time to write, about three years. Each album had a new bit. First the chords, then the riff and suddenly three years had gone by. With that song if you analyse what I am doing on the left hand it is like Joni Mitchell, and what I am doing with the right hand is like Dave Davis.
I am doing so again, yes. I get bored with the way a guitar is set up. The great thing about tunings is that you’ll play two chords and think ‘I’ve done it, I’ve come up with a chord sequence that no-one else has ever used. Then I put it back into concert tuning and it’s C to F!! But again, using different tunings breaks down those critical and creative faculties that we were talking about earlier, you follow things that you might otherwise not go with because it sounds like a piece already out there. You don’t second guess yourself, you find different harmonics and get more into it.
Definitely. Funnily enough, there was a piece in a guitar magazine a few years ago about my use of capos and I thought ‘Shit am I the only person who does it?’ They cost about three quid and you get a new song out of it, you know, it’s well worth it.
Loads. ‘Big Mouth Strikes Again’ because the chords are really quite simple but if it had been in regular concert tuning it would have been boring. ‘Cemetry Gates’ as well. ‘Feel Every Beat’ by Electronic. Those are kind of ‘Headmaster Ritual’-Joni Mitchell chords that are really weird.
Very much sometimes.
Yes, a little, but it does give you that first identifiable sound. A band’s first album is quite often just a sound that people latch onto and that is great. Then on the second album they can afford more gear and so they can bring in more textures. I think that is a good thing. I always had a Les Paul and I thought I was getting too bluesy, so I got a Rickenbacker which is much less suited to solo-ing. The only solo I think that has ever worked on a Rickenbacker was ‘Eight Miles High’. But yes, the make of guitar you write with can really dictate the songs.
After about a minute and a half of writing ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ it had a Del Shannon feel, so I continued to write that with my mother in mind, because she listened to so much of that. ‘Back To The Old House’ I wrote with my wife in mind.
What you need to look for is one partner to give 100% and the other to give 100% and those two halves to make 300%, a chemical reaction that creates a song which is far greater than the sum of its parts. Again, ‘Get The Message’ is a very elementary song but the atmosphere of the vocal is superb. The vocal was actually a stream of consciousness. Bernard sang these two lines, recorded it then stopped the tape. Then he went [picks imaginary tunes out of the air with arms]… and put those two lines down and the whole track was done first take. It’s not just about the content of the lyric, it’s also about the delivery, the atmosphere. That fragility he captured mixed with my music in a way that was so simple, but it was so much bigger than the sum of the parts. The Smiths had it, and I had it with Matt but I have seen it the most with Bernard and Electronic.
Yes. I didn’t really analyse the lyrics that much, because Bryan is more into phonetics anyway, and for me that song is very much phonetical and rhythmic. The fact that Bryan didn’t write anything radical didn’t worry me because phonetically he got it right and with those really high backing vocals it sounded perfect. And the band that Bryan used was much more true to the spirit of the track. He used Andy Newmark on drums from Sly Stone and Guy Pratt on bass which was exactly the nature of the track really. Perfect.
Well, the knife thing was used on ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’. I do all kinds of stuff like that. I’ll tape up the strings for example. Take ‘Violence Of Truth’ by The The, there is an almost glam rock riff that comes in where the lyric goes ‘These are the rules of religion, these are the rules of the land’ and the only way I could get that sound was to pick the most horrible guitar I had and then find the key, tune up the bottom string so the bass string was in sympathy with it, then tape the top four strings up and just whack the bottom ones. It turned out almost like glam sax. Another one is for when you want really accurate warble and pitch bend like you normally would with a whammy bar, you sample it into a keyboard, use the pitch bender on the keyboard and then quantise it in the actual sequencing. Whatever it takes I will do to a guitar, tape strings whatever. The Nashville tuning method is quite good as well - put the high strings from a 12 string onto a six string - that can have good results.
Well, we weren’t really that purist behind the scenes. Morrissey liked the ideas of sixties techniques, so we’d use sound effects from BBC sound effects records, whereas now we’d have used a CD Rom but told people it was from the BBC records! Take a look at the ‘Strangeways Here We Come’ sleeve and there is a picture of me with my head in my hands, and in the background there is an Akai sampler, clearly!! Having said that, we were a guitar group and if I wanted a certain sound I would use a guitar. So if I was looking for strings, I would get that through the guitar, using sustain and turning the tape upside down. That approach has its difficulties but it can also get great results and it’s more interesting than doing it with synths. That is where I am at now, taking that experimentalist approach and using it for guitars rather than synths.
Absolutely none. No difference. Unless you’re producing someone else. With Billy Bragg I showed his guitarist some tricks and that was great fun. Take S’Express - the distinction between the writer and the producer had completely gone and I think that gelling of the roles is completely healthy.
Sure. Matt Johnson did it in reverse for example. He started in the early 80’s with all this technology and yet now he has come round to real purist material. Years ahead of his time, always has been. But yes, I take your point, technological abuse has to be avoided, it’s back to that indulgence idea again. I think my sense of the song always stops me from doing that fortunately.
Yes, as I get older it appeals more. Paradoxically, I like changing things around, changing structures and playing around but still using some form.
As a kid I liked to hear records that you didn’t know how they were achieved, where you get this environment that is almost from another planet, I love that. It is far more interesting than just four musicians playing in a room. If you are going to do that you have to do it like Matt did on ‘Dusk’ I think. He got these very intense, interesting dynamics that captured your attention completely. That degree of presence is pretty rare though. You see, too many bands are just record collectors and four guys in a room with a big record collection each doesn’t mean you can come up with the goods. That is a mistake that has come through more and more in the eighties.
It’s the question of relativity. The thing I liked about the Beatles for example was that they made use of the technology that was available at the time. Bands who want to sound like the Beatles and only use the same gear they did are completely missing the point. If The Beatles had adopted that attitude they would have sounded like a swing band. Jimi Hendrix was all about capturing his own spirit and being obsessed with the power of music and taking his many references and building on it and making it his own. All the greats are about living in their era and saying something about their times. That was something that frustrated me about my detractors when I left The Smiths because they equated me with this fickle music careerist persona that was now into dance. There were two answers to that. One, what I was expressing in The Smiths was the spirit of the sixties but in its own time, in its own way. The pragmatic approach of those sixties songwriters was what inspired us. It didn’t sound like Gerry & The Pacemakers to me, it sounded very much like an eighties group. Also, I feel that we made it cool again to be on Top of the Pops. The second thing about that criticism was that I am a faddy person, unashamedly, I have always liked fashion. I think it is fascinating, fashion in music and fashion in clothes. There is a philosophy of some rock musicians that says a song has to be timeless to be great. If you pull that off then great, but one of the things that attracted me towards Marc Bolan was that he was of his time. That is why I have got the utmost respect for the Pet Shop Boys because they are not trying to write ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, they want it to sound like the year it was written.
Totally. I can’t work if I am down. I get things done by being genuinely positive and using that energy. There have been times in my life when I have tried to control it and drown my intensity and I did that for a couple of years but I got nowhere. I try not to succumb to cynicism. I have to be positive otherwise it goes nowhere.
Yes.
Not really, but I have partners who do that for me.
No. I sort of did things the other way around. When we first went down to London as The Smiths I wasn’t nervous at all, because I was very cocky and I knew inside me that no-one had ever heard music like this before. I felt up against it and that confrontational element fired me up. I would be on stage thinking ‘Don’t go to the bar ‘cos you’ve never heard anything like this before, check us out’. Then later when we were more successful I would be throwing up all day which is why I was always so thin!!!
I do hear echoes of what I have done in one or two groups and it is very flattering and then I will watch those guys to see what they do next. One of the best things was when my friends and family started recognising my style. My sister phoned me up once and said ‘I’ve just heard your new record, I knew it was our Johnny’, and although that was The The’s ‘Slow Emotional Replay’, it was a real triumph for me, because the harmonica was like nobody else but me.
Well, yes. I wouldn’t have played that instrument with The Smiths unless I had met Matt Johnson. After I went for a record deal in London I stayed with him and slept on his floor. He had nearly finished ‘Soul Mining’ and he played me ‘Perfect’. I thought ‘I can do that’ so I took it back to The Smiths. Originally though it was ‘Love, Love Me Do’ that started my whole interest in the harmonica.
To me writing a song is about having a feeling and trying to catch it. It is much less cerebral than many people make out, much more spiritual, more about a feeling than anything else in my life. Once I have identified that feeling it might take a month or just five minutes, but I will capture that feeling in a song.
Once I have the idea I am, yes. I have had enough experience to be efficient. In the early days it was a necessity because Morrissey was very, very demanding of me, he was always looking for songs, and without him I wouldn’t have written as many songs in that fashion, with such speed. Bad songs don’t tend to get beyond the second guitar overdub, I can hear by then that it isn’t working. There is a lot of truth in the school of thought that if a song is any good you can play it on an acoustic guitar. Billy Duffy said that of the first Electronic album, that although it was a dance record you could play all the songs on an acoustic. I said ‘Well, you’ll have to teach me ‘cos all I do is stand to the side at the ironing board playing keyboards!!!!’ [Laughs]
Yes, when I got caught up in all the machinations of the fame game. It would have been incredibly hollow had I had nothing else to think about. Around 1989 me and Matt were ready to go on tour. The ugly situation with The Smiths split meant that trying to produce work after was really difficult, almost unbearable. I had to grow up a little bit and develop a really thick skin. I had to, otherwise I would have gone under. I felt hollow at that time, yes.
No, what was scary was that I didn’t want to listen to records and to be robbed of that is much, much worse than being robbed of the impulse to write. I have as much joy from having a son as I do from writing a song, but to lose the enjoyment of listening to records would really, really sadden me. I would be devastated if the music business gave me such a cynical ear that it would rob me of the love of my life.
‘Gimme Shelter’ by The Rolling Stones. That was the soundtrack to my life from 14 to 22. The intro is amazing. I have tried to capture the spirit of that on the whole of ‘The Queen Is Dead’ but I would never try to lift it. It is a spiritual reaction between those people that could never be recreated.
Musically it is that I still make records with the same passion and exuberance that I had when I was a kid and that has taken some doing. On a personal level it is my kids and family.
The way The Smiths ended. We should have split when we did simply because we had lost the touch with basic emotional values which we all possessed, but were subverted by our egos which by then had turned us into caricatures. We were good people, but we did the split all wrong.
New York in 1993. It was the last time I was going to work with Matt and I hadn’t slept for three days. I had been exposed to the most incredible mind states, dragged through all these mind trips which were recorded as the video for ‘Slow Emotional Replay’ by Tim Pope. We went right into the heart of the New York porn world. The basic premise was to go right up to all these weird street characters we had been told about and stick a microphone in front of their faces and ask them ‘What is wrong with the world?’ Their reactions were just incredible. It was one of the most unbelievable experiences I have ever been through. Tim didn’t tell us where we were going at all. We went into this one innocuous looking building and he told me I was going to need my guitar to mime. I walked in and I was on live porn TV being interviewed by this guy. Then we went to this meat district as they call it, and I saw this guy, tattoos, beard, a real trucker and he gets out of his truck and he was wearing a tutu. Then we met these transexuals who were so beautiful. These people, who were supposed to be down and outs and losers came out with the most humane answers and ideas about the world’s problems. One guy was this Irish chap who seemed really down, not down and out but just very down, and we asked him the same question, and in front of our very faces he just broke up, this massive guy, he completely broke down over the course of three minutes. He completely went, it was like turning a key in him, and he cried. Fucking horrible. There was another club where we’d been told that snuff movies had been made in, the atmosphere was horrendous, dire. I was sitting on these plastic sheets and there was very little light, only a trickle coming through from the streets. It was so Twin Peaks. We were miming when this guy comes in called Danny The Wonder Pony, who makes his living going round these sex clubs with a saddle, giving people rides on his back. He had neon lights flashing from his mouth and when we asked him, this freak, he gave this real compassionate answer. After a while I became very numb, but at night-time I had the most graphic images, so I know that it all goes in to your head somewhere. It was a very surreal, weird experience. That reduced me to tears.
Melodic guitar counter-point. You can hear it in all of The Smiths stuff. ‘Sexuality’ by Billy Bragg, ‘Still Feel The Rain’ by Stex, you hear it in ‘Disappointed’ by Electronic, ‘Beyond Love’ by The The, ‘Jealousy Of Youth’ by The The. It is there throughout my work and absolutely essential to it.
I wrote some good songs… didn’t I?
1. -‘Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me’ (The Smiths) has that sense of yearning which I feel mirrors certain aspects of my spirit.
2. -‘Get The Message’ (Electronic) displays the spirit of two partners, both putting in 100% of themselves and resulting in a creation that is more than than 200%.
3. -‘How Soon is Now?’ (The Smiths) shows that I’m a cool guitar player and that I can get it right when I really want to.