‘YOU ARE WHAT YOU PLAY’
Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr makes no distinction between artists and their art
‘There’s honestly never been a day when I wished I was back in The Smiths,” says Johnny Marr. “I’m proud of all the bands I’ve been in. But I feel good about what I’m doing right now.”
The 54-year-old guitarist, songwriter and band leader has a simple goal in life.
“I want to make great guitar records,” he says. “It started as a young boy being knocked sideways by the wonder of pop music. The mission hasn’t changed much since then. Guitars and songs, that is everything.”
Marr makes a great rock star. He is small and skinny, tanned and dapper with a fantastic feather haircut dyed black with streaks of gold. “One of the perks of being in a band is having a great haircut. God bless Duran Duran; God bless David Bowie; God bless Siouxsie Sioux; these people know the score.”
Marr is chatty, easygoing and exudes positive energy. He is married to his childhood sweetheart, Angie, and they have two adult children. He is vegan and a keen long-distance runner who doesn’t drink, yet somehow manages to even make healthiness sound rock and roll. “It’s all about the work. Early Doors, early Velvet Underground, there was plenty of debauchery intrinsically tied up with producing really great records. And then, before you know it, there’s debauchery and it’s turned to s– and I can’t listen to that music. Put it this way, if staying up for days and doing loads of drugs made me make great songs, I’d be doing it right now.”
Since the breakup of his seminal band The Smiths in 1987, Marr has been one of the busiest sidemen in rock. He’s been a member of The Pretenders, The The, The Cribs and Modest Mouse, written and collaborated with the Pet Shop Boys, Bryan Ferry, Jane Birkin, Talking Heads, Beck, Blondie and Noel Gallagher. He also formed duo Electronic with New Order’s Bernard Sumner.
In 2013, he rather belatedly decided to focus on his solo career. Taking up vocal and lyric-writing duties, he has released three albums in five years.
Marr’s voice is thin but distinctive, dovetailing sinuously with his vivid guitar parts. His new album is Call the Comet, which buzzes with fantastic guitar parts, a melodic amalgam of riffs, licks, hooks, rhythm effects and lead solos.
“I feel like if there is something that can be done on a keyboard or as a string arrangement, I should find a way to do it on the guitar. Because I can.”
With his fascination for melody and concise song structure, Marr has always referred to his oeuvre as pop. But reluctantly, he has started to call it “rock” because “you don’t hear guitar in pop any more unless it’s obscured by digital virtual ridiculousness.”
He is not convinced the age of the guitar is over, however. “It is still the best instrument to hold on stage,” he says.
Marr is flourishing as a lyric writer. “I want to express myself but it doesn’t have to be about something personal. I grew up admiring David Bowie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith. We seem to have gone down some rabbit hole of earnestness and faux sincerity. A great song doesn’t have to be someone sitting on the porch or by a campfire offering emotional exposition with everybody crying into their cider. There are quite enough people singing from the heart. What’s wrong with singing from the brain?”
When he set about forming The Smiths at age 18 in Manchester, England, in 1982, he wanted a guitar band that created pop songs that really mattered. He famously tracked down Stephen Morrissey, a shy, eccentric local fanzine writer, and persuaded him to join forces.
“He had his own direction and talent and unique style that I really enjoyed.”
The group made four classic albums of socially and politically bold indie rock. But it ended with Marr feeling bullied by his fellow band members and walking out in 1987. He was 23.
“I have different emotions about all of it (now). There was a time when I was very bitter about the position I was put in. There is sadness that four young guys had a falling out. However, all of that is completely secondary to the fact that I made some fantastic music that people still love. As simplistic as that sounds, that trumps everything.”
Once considered a sensitive champion of marginalized outsiders, Morrissey has risked alienating fans with provocative political comments on everything from Islam and immigration to Harvey Weinstein. Social media has been filled with the wailing of disillusioned fans agonizing over whether to renounce their old hero.
Marr is careful when discussing his former bandmate. “Of course I completely disagree with those views. Anyone who knows me can guess how I feel about it, but on some level, I really don’t give a f–. Does it mean anything in my actual day-to-day life? No. Not at all.”
Can you separate the art from the artist? He says no.
“Why would you? I’m not talking specifically about Morrissey, but if I think about Sylvia Plath, or Nietzsche, or Picasso, or Aldous Huxley, or Goethe, or Martin Scorsese … I never make a distinction between their art and the person. It’s all completely the same thing. It’s what I have always thought about myself: you are what you play.” London Daily Telegraph
One of the perks of being in a band is having a great haircut. God bless Duran Duran; God bless David Bowie … these people knew the score.