“A NEW KIND OF GUITAR HERO”

How Johnny Marr re-articulated the guitar for a whole generation,

The Smiths really kicked in with me in 1984 with Hatful Of Hollow, which is still a lot of people’s favourite Smiths album. They hadn’t become a massive band at that point, hadn’t had millions of hits, so they put this sort of strange compilation out full of sessions and one-off singles, and it’s brilliant.

This Charming Man is what really switched me on to them. It was so offensive, but so erudite and articulate – I absolutely loved it as soon as I heard the intro. Morrissey was choosing different notes, words and phrases to everybody else. Mike Joyce’s drums were sensitive and beautiful, and I hadn’t heard bass playing like Andy Rourke’s since [The Jam’s] Bruce Foxton. And Johnny Marr was right in the centre of it. They were a so-called ‘indie band’, but if you listen to them The Smiths were – in the best possible way – a muso band. Everybody in that band was at the top of their game.

Then everybody recognises Marr as being a new kind of guitar hero, and Marr and Morrissey are immediately seen as the successors to Jagger and Richards, Lennon and Mccartney, and they live up to that over a very short period of time. I think Johnny’s a massive pop fan, which gave Morrissey so much to get hold of and work with. Morrissey realised, ‘I’ve got this amazing pop writer here, and I’ve got to sing stuff that’s even better than the guitar lines’. And that’s the battle, the tension, the competitiveness

– that’s what made the songs so good.

Like Jimmy Page, Johnny’s a master in the studio, a brilliant ‘overdub’ guitarist. He knows exactly how to layer guitars in and out of the song, exactly what to put on the left speaker then switch to the right. He’s an orchestrator. On songs like Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now he’s orchestrating the entire backdrop of the song so it was much fuller, much more lush and melodramatic. I think he’s trying to imagine other musical ideas, other musical instruments, through his guitar – when you get to, say, How Soon Is Now or The Graize Train [B-side to the single Panic] you can definitely hear it.

Johnny would sometimes use a vintage 80s Roland Jazz Chorus amp. I’ve got one, and there’s a quite abrasive top end to it, but if you bear that in mind when you record and roll that off, it’s a really sympathetic amp towards players. If you’ve got the song ordered in your head, a Jazz Chorus makes you sound brilliant. And listening to Johnny’s stuff, you can tell how precisely the song is ordered in his head. He’s tracking himself so much sometimes, and for that to be successful – to replicate something so finely – you’ve got know what you’re going to do.

A lot of guitarists stick with their signature guitar because it becomes part of their identity, and while he was this anointed new guitar hero, Johnny didn’t. Early on he went from the Rickenbacker to the [Gibson ES-]335, then at the start of The Queen Is Dead album [1986] he was using the Les Paul. Later when he was with Electronic he was using a Strat a lot. He just went travelling into the guitar world, wantonly using them all!

I’ve never met Johnny but saw him in passing once. He said hello out of a car window, promised he’d get me a discount on his signature Fender Jaguar, but never came through for me! He obviously always had a couple of really good acoustics, because whenever he tracked his acoustic onto his electrics it sounded amazing. Like Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now and William, It Was Really Nothing – that’s just an electric and acoustic beautifully tracked together to create that tender, squishy guitar sound.

When you watch him live you do think, ‘So how is he going to replicate all that?’ And even though it's not as full, he always gives a good representation of what he’s done on the record. It just shows his skill. He so articulate musically, his instincts are amazing. And you can tell he’s a true great because even now, because he keeps his guitar low! That’s an achievement because, as we know, as you get older those joints become less supple, and it’s a bit more painful keeping the guitar low. But he always did.

I remember trying to learn stuff like Still Ill and Girl Afraid when I was young, and playing This Charming Man for a TV crew and stumbling over three times – the b*stards still used it! The Headmaster Ritual took me a while to learn. It’s quite atonal, nearly dissonant, but they make a brilliant song out of it.

There are little Johnny Marr echoes in our own music, too. A Boy From The Plantation from [2020 solo album] Even In Exile has a little There Is A Light That

Never Goes Out to it. On the Manics’ last album [ The Ultra Vivid Lament] the song Snowing In Sapporo wasn’t working until Nicky [Wire, bassist] suggested we try strumming sixteenths on the acoustic so it’s like a tambourine, like on Bigmouth Strikes Again, and that unlocked the whole song. On Cardiff Afterlife [from the Manics’ 2004 LP Lifeblood], you can just hear the Marr/ Smiths influence all the way through.

Johnny’s on The The’s Mind Bomb album [1989] and I especially loved The Beat(en) Generation on that – some of the notes he chose on that were a highpoint for me in terms of his collaborations. He found a perfect partner there in [The The linchpin] Matt Johnson. I thought that was that was a pretty good ‘second marriage’...

As a musician, Johnny taught me that there’s more to the chord than I realised. I’d look at his chords, and the way he’d drop the fifth in there, do inversions and little hammer-ons, drop in a sustaining note, move the chord around the fretboard while having something dissonant in there. I loved players like [Sex Pistols’] Steve Jones, but Johnny took me on a bit further, made me realise there’s a whole separate subplot going on in just one chord. He taught me a new vocabulary.

When he came along the guitar had become something associated with vainglorious, heroic mountain-top actions – which is great, I love Slash and a big riff! – but sometimes you need to re-animate and re-articulate the instrument, and Johnny Marr’s legacy is that he re-articulated the guitar for a whole generation.

“JOHNNY’S A MASTER IN THE STUDIO - LIKE JIMMY PAGE”

JAMES DEAN BRADFIELD