National Post (National Edition)
WORTH THE WAIT
Guitarist for The Smiths goes solo, 20 years later.
Johnny Marr has been praised as “the nicest man in rock,” but when it came time to record his solo debut, he felt it should have an edge. After living in Portland, Ore., for several years, he says, “I wanted to be somewhere that’s a little bit uptight, and have to deal with a lot of restrictions and traffic wardens and overpaying for things.”
So the guitarist, whom Noel Gallagher has described as “very much a hippy at heart … even though he dresses like a Mod,” decamped to Manchester, England, where in the ’80s, he and volatile frontman Morrissey achieved renown with The Smiths, before an acrimonious break-up. Clearly, his hometown gave him a jolt: His album The Messenger (Warner) is galvanic, fusing the immediate, interlocking riffs for which he’s famous to revolutionary sentiments. On the cusp of 50, Marr, it seems, is going on 20.
“I think there’s something to be said for hyperactivity,” he says, perched forward on an incongruously regal chair in a tiny room upstairs at Toronto’s Phoenix Concert Theatre. A few hours before he’s set to play, the vegan, teetotal rocker — his build wiry and slight — reaches for blueberries on the table in front of him, casts the twigs out the window, and holds forth about how he thinks too much — “but I’m not apologizing for it.”
His discography is already the stuff of legend in both quantity and quality: After leaving The Smiths, he became not only a hired gun for the likes of Jane Birkin, Talking Heads and Beck, but also a full-fledged member of The Pretenders, The The, Electronic (with New Order’s Bernard Sumner), Modest Mouse (appearing on the No. 1 album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank) and, most recently, The Cribs.
“I’ve worked with all these very strong people,” he says. “Maybe it’s something in my personality that new kind of guitar hero: one who disdained phallic posturing and grandstanding solos. His devotion to the texture and the architecture of a tune has made him an ideal foil for many a songsmith, and as a self-described “band animal,” he’s happy to let others soak up the attention. When first he became a frontman, as part of Johnny Marr & The Healers in 2003, he says he wrote every song as if it represented all of the band members; The Messenger, for once, represents him. No one famous guests
‘70-odd songs with anybody would really stretch my limit — I just like to move on’
is good at harnessing it or encouraging it.” But does the intensity of these musical relationships ensure that they’re brief ? “I think it’s just that I like to make records quicker than everybody else.”
Most recently, he left The Cribs after an album and a tour in 200910: “I had a back-up of ideas in my mind, and I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to take a year off.’ ” The Smiths alone ran their course over four productive years, and despite the oftcited irreconcilable musical differences with the nostalgic Morrissey, Marr insists, “70-odd songs with anybody would really stretch my limit — I just like to move on.”
As Morrissey’s right-hand man (onstage left), Marr was a brand- on the album, even though recordindustry people have suggested “for years and years” that he enlist a bevy of illustrious collaborators. “It’s all a bit ‘project-y.’ There’s something dilettantish and noncommittal to that.”
Instead, he’s put his lyrics (sung in a likeable, though somewhat indistinctive, voice somewhere between Bono and The Stone Roses’ Ian Brown) and his music where his heart is. His new song Generate! Generate! at once celebrates and sends up his restless thinking (with lines such as “Cogito ergo dumb”), and throughout, his youthful idealism is undimmed. When his lyrics are plaintive, he takes responsibility for bringing about change. “It isn’t some guy at the front of the music bringing the music down.”
The album opens with The Right Thing Right, a chiming salvo about “crass commercialism” and its opposition by “a compassionate and common sense ideology.” On one hand, he derides “fashion victim” hipsters (“If you’re walking down the street with a pair of short trousers on like an 11-year-old and a big beard, you’re ripe to have the mickey taken out of you”), but on the other, he finds hope in the nascent “arty” regeneration in a city like Detroit.
Marr isn’t entirely adverse to looking back — onstage at the Phoenix later that night, he’ll play Smiths tracks such as How Soon Is Now? to rapturous applause from a packed house, and he admits that one day, “There’s a good chance I’ ll go back to Modest Mouse,” as he and frontman Isaac Brock “hang out a lot.” But his new material is strong enough that songs like Upstarts — inspired by Occupy protests in England and New York — delivered live with verve and greeted enthusiastically, suggest a lively second act in his career. “Without being a hippy about it,” he says, “I believe that if you want to change the world, you have to start by changing your corner of the world. … You can’t put the responsibility on teenagers. Consciousness has got to change with people who are old enough to know better. I’m pretty positive on that.”