JOHNNY MARR
Ardwick’s boss guitar on future sounds, letting altruism out and what’s eating Steven Patrick.
In an old industrial building, somewhere on the western side of the Pennines, is Johnny Marr’s Crazy Face Factory. Partly named for the clothes shop managed by late Marr guru and manager Joe Moss, the studio moniker also references the quixotic glories of Manchester music. A northern post-punk ambience is also marked on Marr’s new album, Call The Comet. A magic-realist, night-time suite which dreams of a new society while delving into its creator’s psyche, it’s the latest transmission in a story that began 36 years ago, when Marr’s guitar gave the music of The Smiths life. Peripatetic activity with groups including Electronic, The The, Modest Mouse and The Cribs would follow; a solo concern since 2014’s The Messenger, today Marr continues to create with regard for his past and the urge to push forward. “I feel I’m in the band I really want to be in, where the guitar’s the star,” he says. “And what I’m doing is only being done by me.”
You haven’t released an album since 2014. Why?
I went from touring to writing the autobiography [Set The Boy Free, 2016], which meant a lot of immersion in my own mind and my life story, and I did a lot of promotion for it. Which was quite intrusive. So I needed to make a record for my own emotional sake. I was in a pretty precarious place, I think. The song Walk Into The Sea is quite a strong metaphor for trying to find some kind of rebirth, really.
The LP also has a conceptual base.
Yeah. [It’s] looking outwards into some imagined realm, and inwards into your own imagination, anywhere but the present society. I didn’t want to look back on this record in a few years’ time and go, Oh that was my Brexit album, my Trump album. I managed to avoid that big thing that doesn’t deserve to contaminate our fun or our escape.
Where did the striking post-punk mood come from?
I think that has to do with environment. [New track] Actor Attractor was written on a very foggy night in the north of England. A factory has very deliberate associations to me. The promise of industrial music married with guitars, I think, is the promise of a future sound. I see the first two solo records as daytime music, the feeling of being in the city. Call The Comet is more dramatic, with a dark vibe.
Have you ever felt like recording an acoustic album?
I’ve never given it very much thought. I’m in love with the sound of a few electric guitars on top of a drum kit – there’s still a challenge there, to honour the guitar as an amazing machine. It’s a mission I had sort of even before The Smiths.
Speaking of which, lead track Hi Hello sounded very Smithsy.
If anything had been conscious about that then I would’ve abandoned it. Over the years I’ve deleted so much stuff because it sounded like ‘me’, in the pursuit of going forward. When I was making it, I knew I’d written a really good song. It had a sincerity about it, so how about switching off that critical facility and letting something altruistic come out of it?
Will there be further Smiths reissues, like last year’s The Queen Is Dead box?
I’d like to think so. The record label know that I would be available to do the rest of the records in the same way. As long as they’re packaged well and they sound right, and are respectful not only to the band but the audience, then it’s all good.
How did you regard this year’s stillborn Classically Smiths project, which was to involve ex-bandmates playing the canon with strings?
What a farce. That was so obviously about money. The legacy was being plundered. I wasn’t consulted and that tells you all you need to know, I think. It felt like being burgled by someone you used to know. It’s a good job those guys weren’t running the band when we were actually together, else we would never have been able to get one concert together.
We have to ask – what’s wrong with that guy [ie, Morrissey]?
Ha! It seems to be upsetting people more than it’s actually upsetting me. Me and Morrissey were always very different people. It’s OK. You can’t change history. The Smiths stood for the marginalised, and the disenfranchised, whether that was because of your sexuality, or your lifestyle, or your sensibility, or where you were born, or your race. Everybody knows The Smiths were never about hate. I don’t think of The Smiths any differently. Anything else, it’s not The Smiths, it’s something else. And that hasn’t been anything to do with me for 30 years.
Tell us something that you’ve never told an interviewer before.
In 1988, when I was in California with The Pretenders, I met David Crosby and he invited me to hang out at his house on Mulholland Drive and play acoustic guitars. As we were driving through Laurel Canyon in his open-topped Maserati, I couldn’t resist pulling out a joint. He was in the early days of his recovery and he nearly ran the car off the road. When I told him there was tobacco in it, he said, “English joint, I’m safe then.” So he drove me across the Hollywood Hills while I smoked a joint. I wasn’t going to miss that moment.