Johnny Marr – ‘Set the Boy Free’

Through music, the people who follow you have something of you in their life, and in some ways they’re like you, even if they think they’re just a fan. (p. 357)

As a teen with a classical guitar, and some fairly tortuous lessons behind me, I made the transition to playing songs through Johnny Marr’s example. I had the sheet music books of The Smiths and Meat is Murder, and, laid out as they were for piano with guitar chords above, they contained enough clues to attempt reconstructions of the wonders he was up to, just beneath the surface (it was always a disappointment when the piano part followed the vocal melody). Ludicrously, I spent hours grappling with ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ without realising that a capo would have rendered it possible to play. As it was, my fingers contorted into C-shape bar chords that were impossible to move between smoothly. I could play the guitar and bass parts to ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ and ‘Well I Wonder’ simultaneously, after a fashion. The spindly ‘Suffer Little Children’ was another favourite (just the guitar part for that one). It was a great way to learn, and of course I didn’t realise how unusual Marr’s guitar parts were – just as the rest of The Smiths seem not to have done when they tried to replace him in 1987 (you might as well have replaced Morrissey). He offers a few insights into how he arrived at them:

instead of focusing solely on what the guitars were doing I would try to play what I was hearing on the whole record, giving me an accidental ‘one-man band’ approach. (p. 30)

I was finding inspiration in all sorts of music, but mostly I was listening to girl groups. I wondered if the approach on those records could be applied to a guitar band, and I worked on eradicating any traces of traditional rock guitar that might be in my songwriting, while trying to maintain my own sound. (p. 127)

He’s also just the right age for T-Rextacy, which explains the music to ‘Panic’:

In 1972, not long after I bought ‘Jeepster’, T.Rex released the single ‘Metal Guru’, a record I thought was so beautiful, it sounded like it came from another world, yet was strangely familiar to me. I watched him perform it on Top of the Pops, and was so ecstatic after seeing it that I got on my bike and rode off down the roads until I got lost, then had to find my way home when I came back to my senses. (p. 28)

Isn’t that lovely? It’s echoed in later passages when he would run ten miles or so before each show he played with The Cribs, and it links to the book’s title, which amounts to a defence of his career choices. The section dealing with The Smiths’ split places the blame not on any individual, but on the pressure of not having proper management. There is also the decidedly odd session just after Strangeways, Here We Come was finished, which produced ‘Work is a Four Letter Word’ and ‘I Keep Mine Hidden’, in which Marr was made to feel like a session musician in his own band. Towards the end of the book, he says that The Smiths couldn’t have lasted any longer, because of the personalities involved. Those personalities didn’t have to take him for granted though. Compared to Morrissey’s account, which ‘mostly consists of side swipes at Geoff Travis and the hippies at Rough Trade’ as I thought after reading Autobiography, Marr’s is much less partisan and paranoid. Even when the pressure leads him into crazy behaviour like trying to steal the master tapes of The Queen is Dead or driving like a manic when he can’t even drive at all because he’s never learnt to, he just comes out and says it. His book has none of the literary ambition of Autobiography… but this is just stating the obvious. Morrissey wrote a self-absorbed Morrissey book, and Marr wrote a book absorbed in everything but the self: in guitars, the studio, bands, celebrities he has played with. Read both of them and you get the picture.