Authors: Richard Carman
“When I got into Nils Lofgren,” Johnny explained to Martin Roach in
The Right To Imagination And Madness
, “there was no turning back.” Increasingly, and throughout his teenage years, Johnny was to be seen around the streets of Wythenshaw with a guitar case and a bagful of attitude and confidence. “It was just to let everybody know that my whole identity was as a guitar player,” he continued. “I was very cocky…” Besotted by New York New Wave, intrigued by the old waves of acoustic British folk, Johnny’s boundless enthusiasm made up for his inescapable youth. “I could pick like Bert Jansch, but I wanted to look like Ivan Kral from the Patti Smith Group,” he said.
At the same time, Johnny began to realise that there was only so far that he could get by playing other people’s riffs. He needed people to play with and he needed to write. Maher was starting to write songs for himself, and he needed people around him off whom he could bounce ideas and share the playing more formally. “As soon as I could string a few chords together, I started putting them down on a cassette recorder,” Johnny recalls. What was important to him was
the guitar. The idea of being the next Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton was anathema to him: Johnny Maher never wanted to be a guitar hero. For Johnny it was always the guitar and the songs that were important. As it gradually dawned on him that he needed some kind of context in which to play and write, so he needed a band to play with.
The names of Johnny Marr’s first bands have gone into the legend of pre-Smiths history. For one interviewer in the USA, Johnny claimed his first band was simply called ‘Johnny Maher.’ The Paris Valentinos was the first example of John Maher actually formalising an arrangement amongst his friends to form ‘a group.’ The Valentinos comprised Kevin Williams on vocals and bass guitar, Bobby Durkin on drums and Andy Rourke on second guitar. One half of The Smiths was almost in place at this very early stage in Maher’s career, when the teenage lads would hang out and plan their route to fame and fortune. “We had more names than we did songs,” Johnny was to say later. One day they were a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young outfit, and the next they were Television. Those early gigs were heard in the echoing chambers of local church halls and at Sunday mass. Gradually it became apparent that Williams – older than Johnny by two years – had other fish to fry. While he handed the bass role in the band over to Andy, he pursued his other creative love, that of acting. A member of Manchester Youth Theatre since the age of thirteen, Williams enrolled in Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre. While he appeared as a ‘helper’ on the irrepressible
Cheggars Plays Pop
, under the name Kevin Kennedy he then played the role of the inimitable Curly Watts in
Coronation Street
for some twenty years, one of UK TV’s best-loved soap characters of all time. By 2006 Kennedy was
appearing as ‘The Child Catcher’ in Manchester Palace Theatre’s production of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
. It’s interesting to note that Johnny repeatedly found himself in the company of other talented people who would go on to achieve fame in other spheres, or who had already done so. Williams himself described his own period of working with Maher as a privilege. “To see that germ of genius in Johnny’s bedroom,” he told film maker David Nolan, made it clear that “…this guy (was) going to be brilliant.”
It was the summer of 1977 that saw Johnny and Andy’s first ever gig in front of a willing public on the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Day. The band played Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It On Home To Me’, covered a decade or so before by The Animals. Before the song was complete, the performance was halted when the singer was dragged puking from the stage – Johnny’s first experience of rock ’n’ roll excess! With only one other proper gig to their name, which was at The Squat, a venue near Manchester University, The Paris Valentinos came to a withering halt. Johnny’s next gig, on his stripped-down Telecaster copy,
a la
Rory Gallagher, came as replacement guitarist with Manchester’s Velvet Underground-inspired Sister Ray. It was a stop-gap appointment with a band that was going nowhere. With Sister Ray, Maher supported Manchester’s nearly-men The Freshies.
The Freshies later reached the UK charts with their single ‘I’m In Love With The Girl On The Checkout Desk Of A Certain Manchester Megastore.’ The Freshies were the brain-child of Mancunian performer Chris Sievey, who also created the TV comic-book Mancunian Frank Sidebottom – he of the large
papier-mâché
head. Frank was, of course, The Freshies’ biggest fan, and in a wonderfully ironic turnaround, achieved far more mainstream success than The Freshies ever did themselves.
Sister Ray was a brief diversion for Maher, but one of The Freshies’ former keyboard players, Paul Whittall, became part of Johnny’s next, more important, career move. Whittall was working with one of Wythenshaw’s more achieving musicians, Rob Allman. Allman was a friend of Billy Duffy, the Wythenshaw kid who already had great ambition as a guitarist and had joined Manchester’s punk legends The Nosebleeds. Fate spiralled the future Smiths closer together, as Steven Morrissey had joined The Nosebleeds as vocalist to replace the legendary milkman/singer Ed Banger. In the meantime Allman and Whittall began working with Maher, Rourke and ex-Paris Valentino drummer Bobby Durkin, under the name White Dice.
Like The Cure, Japan and hundreds of bands before them, White Dice responded to a talent-scouting ad in the music press, spotting a chance of putting themselves before some of the real decision-makers in London pop. The cassette demo that the band sent to F-Beat Records boss Jake Riviera – the brains behind Stiff Records and the early careers of Elvis Costello, Madness, Dr Feelgood and The Damned – won them an audition in London slated for April 1980. The band threw themselves into rehearsals at Andy’s house, with Rob and Johnny sharing writing credits on new material. It was Maher’s first experience of a song-writing partnership, and it was mainly their own material that they played at Nick Lowe’s home studio between Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, where the session took place. Paul Carrack, who spent a lot of time in Lowe’s studio, remembers it as “a converted front room.” The band was as impressed with their meeting Lowe’s then-wife, Carlene Carter, as they were with the process of making the demo, but Riviera was disappointed with the results. A phone
call confirmed their worst fears a few days later – and in the meltdown that followed their initial enthusiasm, Bobby Durkin left the band. There was a handful of summer gigs, writing sessions and rehearsals, with Johnny occasionally taking the lead vocalist role, but White Dice weren’t to last.
Early 1981 saw Maher and Andy Rourke looking for pastures new musically. The next band, Freak Party, shook off the failures of White Dice, and – with drummer Simon Woolstencroft in tow – started earnest rehearsals. The band took a harder, more funk-driven line than White Dice had, with Andy a firm fan of heavy, driven funk bass lines. Numerous singers were rehearsed and discarded, but Freaky Party were destined, as Paris Valentinos and White Dice had done before them – to go nowhere fast. Johnny was often to be seen around some of the Manchester clubs at this time, in particular The Exit, or Berlin, behind Kendall Milne’s department store. One of the DJs was Andrew Berry, who at various times lived and recorded with Johnny. Occasionally Johnny would take control of the decks himself, mixing classic Sixties tracks with current dance hits. Early fan and Hacienda regular Joanne Carroll remembers how she would often go and sit with the DJs, as she knew Andrew Berry well, and recalls how more often than not Johnny would have a spliff on the go while he was spinning records.
For Maher this was a formative period, his months before the dawn of The Smiths when a number of important elements in his life came together. Musically, something needed to happen. It was clear that a new direction would have to be taken. At the same time as this became ever-more clear, three people entered Johnny’s world who would go on to have a profound influence upon his life.
The first of these was his girlfriend. Two years younger than Johnny, although they shared the same birthday, Angie Brown was firmly established as his constant companion. Angie and Johnny would later marry and raise a family together.
On a professional level, the second was Manchester businessman Joe Moss. Moss had started a clothing business in Manchester in the late Sixties, and by the early Eighties had a string of shops in Manchester and Stockport that traded under the name of Crazy Face. Maher had got himself what he describes as “a job of sorts” at the shop next door. X Clothes was a boutique in Chapel Walks just off one of the city’s main thoroughfares, an early Eighties honeypot for Manchester’s most-stylish, a must-visit outlet for DJs and musicians. Among its customers was Mike Joyce, who was very much aware of Johnny in the store, but was still unknown to him personally. On other occasions, many of the guys who would get The Hacienda moving would come in –Tony Wilson, Mike Pickering and Peter Saville were all regulars. Maher’s role was largely to hang around the shop looking cool, compiling music cassettes to play over the PA, and to generally enhance the place by bringing ‘hip’ people into the store.
Crucially, it was the fact that the two shops were adjacent that meant that Johnny Maher got to know Joe Moss. “He came up to me in the shop,” Joe told David Cavanagh for Q magazine in 1994, “and introduced himself as a frustrated musician.” Moss was a music lover, and kept a guitar in the corner of his office, which Johnny would regularly pick up and play while he hung about the older man’s gaff. Ten years older than Johnny, Moss was a keen amateur player himself, interested in blues and R&B, and took naturally to the enthusiastic kid from Wythenshaw who seemed to
have what it took to become a professional. The two traded skills – a little from Joe here, a little in return from Maher.
As with so many of his lasting relationships, Johnny was to get to know Joe by hanging around, chatting and playing guitars. Moss could see that all the young man needed was guidance, the right people around him, and some funding. Joe would provide elements of all three to the burgeoning Johnny Maher over time. Joe Moss was another in a long line of ‘shopkeepers’ who brought their retail savvy to the completely unrelated world of managing a rock group, a list that includes the revolutionary Brian Epstein and the iconoclastic Malcolm McClaren. Like his relationship with Angie, Johnny’s friendship with Joe was long and lasting.
While settled in a relationship with Angie and developing his contacts around the happening Manchester scene, Maher met a third character who would go on to have an influential part in his story.
It was the winter of 1981. A friend of Johnny had recently been down to London. Wandering Soho, he had fallen into conversation with a musician he met on the street: Matt Johnson, the son of a publican, had grown up over a pub in Stratford, surrounded by East London’s finest hoodlums and gangsters. Like Maher, Johnson’s early imagination had been coloured by the likes of Sparks, Bolan and Bowie, and he was a confirmed John Lennon addict. The casually-established friendship brought Johnson to Manchester for a visit, and it was at the home of the mutual friend that Johnny and Matt met. Matt played Johnny stuff from his album
Blue Burning Soul
. Months before he would play the same song to Morrissey, Johnny offered up the song that would later become ‘Suffer Little Children.’ A life-long friendship and future professional relationship was born.
Apart from their immediately taking to one another personally, and the fact that they made a clear decision to remain in touch, Johnson’s professional development stunned Johnny. Although he was only a little older, Johnson had already released a number of records, and was a
bona fide
recording artist. Among Johnny’s friends, no-one had got this far this fast. As the pair sat and passed Maher’s guitar back and forth, it became obvious that the unthinkable could happen. Matt Johnson was about to start on his second album,
Soul Mining
. Johnny Maher could do this too. As Billy Duffy had himself recently packed in his job to pursue music full time, so did Johnny. While Freak Party floundered, Johnny put X Clothes behind him, and wandered off to create the best British band since The Beatles.
T
he formation of The Smiths is now the stuff of legend. Joe Moss, with no ulterior motive other than to lend something to Maher that he knew would entertain him, lent Johnny a video that told the story of Lieber and Stoller, the two American writers who had joined forces to pen some of early rock ’n’ roll’s greatest hits, most notably for Elvis Presley. Apart from the incredible focus and determination that the pair showed, the fact that Jerry Lieber turned up on Mike Stoller’s door step, introduced himself and declared ‘Let’s write songs together’ struck Johnny as wonderfully romantic. Linked already via Billy Duffy, it was mutual friend Stephen Pomfret who suggested that Johnny meet his mate Steven Morrissey, taking him around – in May 1982 – to a house on King’s Road, Stretford, where the Morrissey family lived. The legend has it that there and then Johnny cited the American duo and indeed said “Let’s write songs together.” There’s a nice symmetry in the
idea that while Johnny Rotten met Malcolm McClaren on the King’s Road, Chelsea, Johnny Marr met Morrissey on the King’s Road, Stretford. How north-west playwright Shelagh Delaney, one of Morrissey’s greatest influences, would have been proud. While the event has been talked up to mythical proportions since, it is clear that the pair hit it off immediately, and it was indeed a natural and immediate outcome that they should form a song-writing partnership. “I just laid this heavy jive on him,” Johnny was to say many years later. “Three hundred words a second.” Every name that Johnny threw at Morrissey was greeted with enthusiasm – the pair shared an incredible love of the same left-of-centre music, and from that moment on nothing would ever be the same for either of them again. The first thing that Morrissey said to Johnny was “do you want to put a record on?” Johnny later thought that this was perhaps Morrissey “testing out where I was coming from.” Johnny never missed the opportunity to put a record on: “That was out first point of contact,” he said. “I went over to this shoe box with 45s in it, and pulled out ‘Paper Boy’ by The Marvellettes.” Their first point of contact was Motown. “Right from the beginning,” said Marr, “we knew it was going to be brilliant.” An enterprise that would change the world was born.
The Morrisseys were another Irish family settled in Manchester. Four years older than Maher, the young Steven had spent his early years deep in artistic ferment. Naturally shy, Morrissey had pursued a novel career throughout his teens. A published author of fanzine-style booklets on the New York Dolls and James Dean by the time he met Johnny, Morrissey had submitted scripts to the producers of northern soap
Coronation Street
, and had seen his record reviews and letters published in several of the popular music papers. Steven
was also an inveterate pen-pal, having a number of relationships with people via the written word in letters that flowed back and forth from his house in King’s Road. Most significantly, the pair shared a musical taste somewhat at odds with the times. While they both loved the garage-glam thrash of the New York Dolls and the impassioned, poetic cool of Patti Smith, they also shared a tendency towards Sixties US girl groups, T. Rex, Sparks, and the finer points of glam. The meeting happened almost as the legend would have it, but the musical joining of hands between Marr and Morrissey was a calculated move by which each party recognised that the other could be a conduit for the other’s frustrated talents.
Morrissey had more form in the Manchester music scene than Johnny. Present at the Sex Pistols’ famed Lesser Free Trade Hall gig, he had auditioned for a local band around the time that Maher had started the Paris Valentinos, and by 1977 was singing with The Tee Shirts, a band which boasted Billy Duffy amongst its members. Morrissey then went on to join Duffy in The Nosebleeds, playing support during spring 1978 to Slaughter & The Dogs and Howard Devoto’s Magazine. Steven was even referenced by
NME
’s Paul Morley, who reviewed a collection of Manchester bands in June, but despite the lyrical contribution to the band that their singer was now making, their split later in the year was inevitable. Morrissey dallied briefly as vocalist for Slaughter & The Dogs, with whom Duffy stayed when the band moved to London, and was seen at almost every significant gig in Manchester. Empassioned by music and creativity, Morrissey continued to write to the music press and to support Ludus, fronted by his friend Linder Sterling. By the time of his famed meeting with John Maher, Steven had quite a
curriculum vitae
on the fringes of the Manchester music scene. A
committed writer, and a lyricist with a background in a band that had done far better than Johnny’s; although he played no musical instruments, Morrissey was a natural foil for the younger guitarist.
Almost immediately the pair set about writing songs together. The initial impetus was to be
song-writers
, and it only dawned on the duo gradually that what they were doing would require a band to realise the potential of their partnership. At the same time they recognised that their immediate friendship had a unique element to it. Within two days, said Johnny, he knew that “they had everything.” Morrissey presented Maher with a set of lyrics that had enough shape to enthuse the musician. “Morrissey was very, very demanding of me,” Johnny enthuses, still excited by the memory. “He was always looking for songs, and without him I wouldn’t have written as many songs in that fashion, with such speed.”
They began rehearsing with mutual friend Stephen Pomfret, who had been a member of the Tee Shirts with Morrissey. After Pomfret left and White Dice keyboardist Paul Whittal tried out, the duo joined up with drummer Simon Wolstencroft. They were so confident of ‘the product’ of their partnership that they booked Decibel Studios to record some demos. The studio’s engineer, Dale Hibbert, joined on bass and – in nascent form – The Smiths were born, a four-piece of guitar, bass, drums and vocals, with Morrissey and Maher as the primary creative force. “When [we] got together,” Maher told
Sounds
a year later, “it became immediately apparent that the songs we were writing needed bass and drums to make them work.” With a basic four-piece line-up, the new-found name suggested so many things too. In essence it was a reaction against the exotic, lengthier names popular with bands current at the time
(Kid Creole & The Coconuts, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Haysi Fantayzee et al) – it sounded gritty, working class, antipop, and interesting-by-being-not-so. If they sounded ordinary, their music would be quite the opposite. “The name doesn’t mean anything,” Morrisey was to tell
i-D
magazine some months later in the band’s first published interview. “It’s very important not to be defined in any one category.”
When drummer Woolstencroft didn’t last, and neither did his replacement Gary Farrell, the pair auditioned local punk sticksman Mike Joyce. Another Irish Mancunian, Joyce had already served an apprenticeship of sorts with regular gigging bands The Hoax and Victim, and was vaguely familiar with Johnny as a customer of X Clothes, where he bought his mohair sweaters. With The Hoax, he had already appeared on both John Peel’s radio show and toured outside the UK, while Victim was a known band on the local Manchester circuit. Joyce joined them in a Manchester studio after receiving a demo, playing through a number of songs and getting to know the singer and guitarist quickly. “It just happened by mistake, really” Joyce told filmmaker David Nolan. “My other groups weren’t just complete thrash, but Johnny’s subtlety and texture when playing the guitar were different to other players I’d worked with up until that point.” When Joyce joined The Smiths, he did so as by far the most experienced member. Twenty years later he described the meeting for BBC Radio. “I’d known Johnny… and seen him around town working in X Clothes. Morrissey was just walking up and down the room with a very long grey coat on, and he said hardly anything.” A brief period of doubt about leaving Victim was soon abandoned. Mike Joyce was the next piece of the Smiths’ jigsaw puzzle to
fall into place, and his arduous vigour as their drummer was an integral part of their appeal in the years to come.
An esoteric lyricist and singer of some eccentricity; an articulate writer/guitarist raised on glam riffs and acoustic folk, and a drummer besotted with Buzzcocks and the punk ideal. The Smiths were coming. “We were put together,” Marr said of The Smiths in
Designer
magazine. “We were a bunch of strangers for all intents and purposes – who then became incredible friends… We came together to make
that
music.” With hindsight, it is too easy to suggest – as some cynical observers may – that Morrissey saw a musician who could help make him rich and famous, and that Marr spotted a front man who could realise his own musical ambitions: the backroads of rock ’n’ roll are littered with such relationships that never got beyond idle plans. Nevertheless there was, with Joe Moss’s vital input, a calculated element to the new band’s structure. Johnny and Morrissey were laying plans right from the start. According to Marr, Morrissey’s plans for the group’s ‘aesthetic’ – its financial structure and the kind of record deal it would pursue – was in place long before a note had ever been put down on tape. Following their own instincts, this was going to be a band to die for. “Right from the beginning,” Marr told
NME
in 1989, “we knew it was going to be brilliant.”
Morrissey’s songs became the ultimate series of letters to thousands of unknown pen-pals around the world. As a young child he had been a natural writer; from the age of six he was compiling his own magazines; as a teenager he was using the pop press as a means to communicate with the outside world, placing ads in the press seeking other New York Dolls fans, and maintaining relationships through writing. In Johnny, Morrissey found a vehicle
for his writing that gave his words a context: Maher’s increasingly sophisticated music added weight to the structure of Morrissey’s words, and formalised their content. Before finding his co-writer, Morrissey was searching for a role. Johnny had already decided that the role of vocalist/frontman was not for him. But together they knew what they had to do. “The reason why Morrissey and I got together,” Maher told
Sounds
less than a year later, “was to write songs… we both felt the need to react against what we’d been hearing for the last [so many] years.”
The newly formed partnership was too passionate about music to allow the mundanity of the current scene to go unanswered. The key was their overwhelming optimism, the appeal of the nascent band to its first audience being the fact that they offered something to a congregation looking either for help or comradeship. While The Smiths over the years earned an undeserved reputation for glumness, Johnny’s guitar lines were resplendent in their optimism, as fresh as a walk at dawn on a cool spring morning. At the same time Morrissey’s lyrics leapt in an instant from the hysterically funny to the desperately heartfelt. Together, Johnny and Morrissey became the friend who one could always rely on, the shoulder to cry on or the cheesy mate to have a laugh with. With The Smiths, an audience found kindred spirits.
* * *
In 1982, one could be forgiven for thinking that punk had never happened. Although there were hits across the year for the likes of The Jam, XTC or Adam & The Ants, the biggest smashes of the year came from the likes of Bucks Fizz, Kool And The Gang,
Nicole, Steve Miller and Survivor, with their ubiquitous movie smash ‘Eye Of The Tiger.’ It was an era of big hair rather than great music. For every Soft Cell there was a bunch of bands like Dollar, Bucks Fizz, Tight Fit or Bardo: either Eurovision wannabees or real Eurovision acts clinging to the charts by their fingertips. Seventies hangovers were still around, the protagonists rolling their jacket sleeves up to establish their Eighties credentials. Cliff Richard, Rod Stewart, Barry Manilow, Leo Sayer and David Essex were all still having major hits. Floppy-haired, floppy-thinking icons like Duran Duran, Haircut 100 and Wham!, alongside soft rock behemoths like Foreigner, outnumbered the genuinely entertaining acts like Madness ten to one. But The Smiths knew they had the key to an upheaval not seen since the Pistols. Johnny gushed on the subject of Morrissey, and Morrissey was equally proud of the guitarist. “Morrissey’s so confident,” said Johnny “that he doesn’t have to cloud his lyrics in metaphor.” Morrissey said that “Johnny can take the most basic, threadbare tune and you’ll just cry for hours and hours and swim in the tears.”
“One of the things about making records,” says Marr, “is that for it to work you have to be totally and utterly in love with it for those three minutes, and you have to be able to hear that love in the tracks.” While real love and true passion was missing from the pop world in 1982 and early 1983, Johnny and Morrissey knew how to love. “That might be a particular idiosyncrasy of mine,” says the guitarist.
Johnny’s compositional methods have been outlined piecemeal over the years. What is clear is that the song develops from feeling – what Marr has called “an uneasy feeling” that he tries to harness. When the muse is active, Johnny closes down other distracting
elements. “I try not to party,” he says. “I keep myself really straight and sober, which is, I guess, the opposite of what people might expect. I get up early and stay up late, sleep as little as possible and harness that disconcerting uneasiness.” Marr likens the feeling to “knowing a storm is coming and [knowing] that something is going to happen.” While this method served Marr best in his post-Smiths days, often during the early and heady days of the band’s career the group component would overtake the individual creative element. “We were incredibly pragmatic in approach,” he says. “We’d do batches of three songs at a time. We’d sit down and say, ‘Let’s write a song.’” The discipline of Leiber and Stoller was paramount. “Morrissey would come round to my house and we’d do three songs just like that. Then he would go away and do the lyrics, and three days later he’d be in the studio recording it.” Morrissey and Maher were remarkably prolific, recording seventy songs in four years, and part of that urgency came from what Johnny calls Morrissey’s “emotional and physical necessity” to write. It made the process easy, “and in that way we propelled each other towards this endless supply of songs.”