Johnny Marr (32 page)

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.