Johnny Marr (22 page)

While Johnny was in the States, he was also introduced to current wunderkind Beck Hansen, who he visited in the studio during the making of the latter’s album
Midnight Vultures
. The pair got on immediately, and Johnny added some guitar parts to a couple of tracks, most notably ‘Milk And Honey’. Beck’s articulate writing and lush, rich arrangements suited Johnny perfectly, and the lengthy, cinematic track was a highlight of a landmark album. Beck reminded Johnny of David Byrne, his wicked sense of humour and sense of the absurd combined with a truly unique creative gift. “He’s not afraid to go down some necessary side roads rather than just take the main road,” said Johnny. “He’ll be discussed in the same way as Neil Young… and David Bowie.”

Johnny’s thoughts continued to turn to solo material, and he was keen to formulate a more coherent solo project. To a degree, Marr’s success as a ‘solo’ performer to date had been his undoing. Given that almost every project he had worked on had been very successful, commercially as much as artistically, it was increasingly difficult to find the space to really identify what he considered his ‘own’ work, to distinguish exactly which creation was his and and which that of his partner. As a writer, that was one problem. As a producer, Johnny noted also that there was no distinction between what was his input and how much directly came from the artists themselves. Increasingly frustrated – collaboration with other artists having been the mainstay of Marr’s career – Johnny was becoming more and more keen to put the shared responsibilities of Electronic and The The to bed and to work on his own material. “When I’ve worked with other artists,” Johnny told an interviewer
for
www.worldinmotion.net
early in 1999, “my first thought in the morning is fretting about the production… If I’m going to do that then I might as well do it for myself.” While Electronic had been his priority, he would use the other priorities of his partner to excuse himself from the project as soon as possible. “When Bernard does his stuff with New Order, I’m going to kick that [solo stuff] off. I’ll be singing and getting a band together.”

Into the new millennium, Johnny continued to be involved in a number of projects with friends, new acquaintances, and – most notably – more formative work on his solo ambitions. Friends had been encouraging Johnny to develop his own material, and to get a solo album together for years. Matt Johnson was one of the ‘encouragers’, himself having been on the receiving end of Marr’s own enthusiasm in the development of The The. “I think the world of Johnny,” he told one interviewer in 1999. “I’ve been telling him to do a solo record ever since I’ve known him. I’ve been kicking him up the arse… and he’s finally doing it.” Chrissie Hynde was another advocate. While Johnny’s material was developing, almost in a mirror of his teenage years, he realised that he needed a band to front the songs that he was writing.

Inspired by a slew of bands like Santana and Jefferson Airplane (instead of Leiber and Stoller!) he began to formulise a band structure that would have at its core a fundamental looseness, a ‘tribal band’ with many members. Early in 2000, Marr met bass player Alonza Bevan, late of retro-rockers Kula Shaker, and with Zak Starkey on board he already had the nucleus of the band.
Appropriately, Kula Shaker had been a band that could recreate in a modern context the hazy, pot-fuelled years of the first wave of Britpop in the mid- and late-Sixties. Under the heavy influence of The Beatles, Small Faces and Traffic, the group achieved considerable success in the singles and the album charts, and with Crispian Mills on vocals had ready-made headlines as Mills was the son of actress Hayley and the grandson of actor Sir John Mills. From 1996, the band enjoyed a couple of years in the sun, but then the music press turned on them, and by the end of the decade – despite claiming that by then they would be the biggest band on the planet – Mills had left and the band was in tatters.

With two high-profile members of his band in place, Johnny might have been accused of cherry-picking celebrity members. But he had met Starkey and liked the guy before he had any idea of who he was; further, while Johnny had seen Kula Shaker live a couple of times and been impressed by their performances, it was another mutual friend who’d introduced the pair. “I was fully aware of his reputation as a musician,” said Marr, “[but] the crucial thing was that a mutual friend said we’d get along as people. And that is really what counts for me. We need to have that friendship.”

The comment once again illustrates Johnny’s fundamental working ethic: friendship first, work to follow. Of all the people that Marr has worked with over the years, he cites only three examples where the idea of working with a third party came before knowing them well. Beck, Talking Heads and Bryan Ferry are the three instances where he was so intrigued that he went ahead with the work before really knowing his partners.

During the year, Johnny also worked with one of his childhood heroes, appearing – alongside Bernard Butler – on Bert Jansch’s
twenty-first album
Crimson Moon
. Jansch had inspired a generation and more of guitar pickers, his idiosyncratic but wonderfully compelling playing being an inspiration for anyone who sought out his work. For Johnny it was a dream come true – a dream he first had way back when he was learning to play as a young boy.
Dreamweaver
, the accompanying TV documentary on Jansch, also featured Johnny and Bernard, while the following year saw Johnny present Bert with a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.

Marr and Butler’s playing on
Crimson Moon
is delightful, with Bernard’s perhaps being the more erratic – appropriate for a player like Jansch, who has no concept of ‘middle-eights’ or bar lines. Particularly haunting was Johnny’s plaintive harmonica on ‘The River Bank’, while his backing vocals on ‘Looking For Love’ were beautiful too. Johnny appeared on
Later With Jools Holland
in July, with Bernard and Bert alongside him, playing ‘The River Bank’ live. It was a briliant performance.

Bert Jansch was rightly feted in celebration of his sixtieth birthday in 2003. The BBC arranged and filmed the event in which characters as diverse as Bernard Butler and Ralph McTell teamed up to celebrate Jansch’s life and music. Even if they didn’t play together, for Bert it was remarkable that such a diversity of players should appear on the same bill. Marr, of course, was in his element.

For Jansch, Bernard Butler was a bit of an unknown quantity, but he knew that he had come to his work via Johnny’s love for it. Johnny Marr he knew well. “Johnny is unstoppable,” said Jansch. “He is guitar-mad! Endless – he just goes on and on!” On the subject of the famous rock guitarist, who has someone to tune his
guitars for him, Bert smiled wryly, “I didn’t know what a ‘guitar tech’ was until I met those two!”

It was the members of the coalescing new band who talked Marr into standing up and fronting the ensemble. Whilst a decade before he had re-iterated his lack of ambition as a front man, now it seemed an inevitability, and he adopted the role with relish. Back in 1989, Johnny had told
NME
that he never wanted to stand in front of a group: “I know I will never be as popular, sell as many records or be as famous as Morrissey or any other singer I work with… and I don’t want that.” However, in The Healers he took centre stage for the first time. It was also a joint decision between Johnny, the band, management and label, that the band be called (in full) ‘Johnny Marr And The Healers.’ “‘The Healers’ on the posters – we may get 500 people,” said Johnny, explaining that that is how he would have preferred it. “But if it has my name on it, we may get 504.”

As Johnny came up with the basic concept of The Healers and recorded demos of the songs likely to be worked on, he also sang the vocals. All along he figured that he would ultimately add a singer to the band to take care of the final vocal job, and had listened to a number of demos from prospective vocalists around Manchester. One or two were even in mind for the job. What happened was that a democratic process proved to Johnny that he was actually the best man for the job himself. Presenting the demos to the band, the musicians themselves decided who they wanted for their singer, and elected Starkey to deliver their ultimatum:
they wanted their lead vocalist to be their guitar player. By the time The Healers were his priority, Johnny was cool enough and confident enough in his abilities to accept the job.

Singing live toned up Johnny’s vocal chords. The band played their first gigs in the spring of 2000, kicking off in the northern England town of Lancaster, where they played for nearly an hour and a half. While Lancaster was a ‘secret’ warm-up gig, their first advertised show was in Coventry, to an audience of about three hundred people, too many of whom clamoured for Smiths songs throughout. More importantly, the gig was a warm-up for dates to come, because The Healers were booked to support Oasis on their forthcoming tour. Johnny was asked whether it was ‘humbling’ to be supporting a band that he had helped get off the ground in the first place. It wasn’t as though Marr had had to beg for the gig. “I didn’t ask to support them,” he answered. “They invited me out.”

In fact, by now it was pretty obvious to anyone concerned that what really motivated Johnny Marr was the studio, and that any gig, headlining or supporting, was more about fun and the transference and sharing of energy rather than ego. “I didn’t really give a shit about supporting Oasis, and I didn’t see it as being humbling,” he said. “And I think humbling experiences are good for you, anyway.” Johnny had also enjoyed recent tours more than he had ever done in the days of The Smiths, and for the first outings of The Healers everything went well. The bands played six shows in seven days, in Milan, Zurich, Vienna, Leipzig, Warsaw and Berlin before returning to the UK for two dates at Bolton’s football ground, the Reebok Stadium, where they shared the support slot with the reformed Happy Mondays.

After Bolton, the band headed way out East, appearing at the
Fuji Rock Fest in Japan, then in Barcelona. By September, the band was back in the UK, playing gigs in Portsmouth and London. As the writer, guitarist and singer, Marr invested more of himself in the experience than ever before, but thankfully the gigs routinely received a good reception. The first incarnation of The Healers tended to ramble through the songs live. “I wanted to really stretch them out and jam,” said Johnny. People were curious, but went away impressed by The Healers, by Johnny, and – in many cases – particularly by Zak Starkey. Taking the full glare of the spotlight was clearly a risky strategy for Johnny, but he carried it off with aplomb. He would draw comparison with other notable Mancunian vocalists, of which there were of course many to choose from, but perhaps a rock audience in the twenty-first century could forgive and forget the past, and take Johnny Marr on his own terms. For Johnny, as always, his eyes were on the present and the future, not on the past, and if the comparisons irked him, he kept a dignified silence. If he was compared to Ian Brown or Liam Gallagher, so what? As Morrissey used to tell some of the early Smiths audiences – if you don’t like it, leave.

In September Johnny joined an all-star bash to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of John Lennon. The sessions were held at George Martin’s Air Studios in Hampstead, and included the Gallagher brothers, Ron Wood, Donovan, Lonnie Donegan, as well as Sharleen Spiteri and Jools Holland. Sounding fantastic, the evening was kicked off by Johnny, Noel and Gem Archer playing the Lennon classic ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, accompanied by sitar and percussion. Towards the end of the year, Johnny followed up the dates that he had played with Oasis by sitting down with Liam Gallagher and laying down some songs. Within a week, Liam
was reported to have written, and Johnny played on ten songs that would be considered for the next Oasis album. Liam apparently said the songs were better than anything by either Radiohead or John Lennon. The tracks remain unreleased as recorded with Johnny, but the next Oasis album – which Marr would ultimately play on – featured three of Liam’s songs.

Outside of The Healers, Johnny was also busy on tracks with two of his former collaborators, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. Nearly twenty years into their own career, the sessions for
Release
, to be heard publicly in 2002, saw the band eschewing again the synth pop of their early years and developing a more rounded, organic sound, with Johnny’s guitars prominent in the mix. With Johnny approaching the tender age of forty, there was no sign of any kind of mid-life crisis as the team worked on tracks at Tennant’s home in north-eastern England.

“We were very much on our own,” Chris Lowe told Sylvie Simmons, “in a very organic situation, and it all just sort of evolved.” While Tennant and Lowe had written many of the songs on guitar, Johnny’s final input was paramount, and the tracks that worked the best were the ones that were more guitar-oriented. A few years previously, Johnny had joked with an interviewer that Neil Tennant was ‘a closet Ritchie Blackmore’, but – he noted – was very melodic in his playing. One of Johnny’s roles on
Release
was to ‘re-do’ Tennant’s own guitar parts, digging into the tracks that Tennant and Lowe had put together, picking out elements on the guitar that brought them even further to life, just as he had done with Billy Bragg over a decade before. If the album was a departure for the Pet Shop Boys, nothing could encapsulate this more than the fact that the piece was critically compared to Oasis, surely as far
away from what the Pet Shop Boys were perceived to be by their public as possible. “If we had wanted to,” admitted Tennant, asked about the songs on the album, “we could have turned them all into dance tracks… [but] we just felt there’s so much dance music around nowadays what was the point?”

Much of the middle of the 2001 was occupied with a tour that Johnny undertook alongside Neil Finn. After that brief meeting at the Linda McCartney tribute concert, Finn simply called Johnny out of the blue and asked him if he wanted to go out on the road again.