Rocks ahead! I had a lot of insight and wisdom for a year-old. Marr says he doesn't know what the chances are for a Smiths reunion, but he does realize that it would make a lot of fans happy. Marr says he heard the rumors but was never officially approached.
But I did hear that, yeah. Ever since the Smiths split, Marr has been reluctant to talk about the band and his relationship with Morrissey. Like Paul McCartney and the Beatles, he was blamed for being the one to walk away, and felt he was never quite forgiven.
But at the age of 52, enjoying a successful solo career, Marr has just written a memoir, Set The Boy Free. We meet in his studio, a converted warehouse just outside Manchester. Marr is in skinny jeans and a polka-dot shirt, looking fit and clear-eyed. He says he loves the title of his book because it sounds like a famous song. As a little boy and he was tiny, growing up it was music that set him free from the mundanities of everyday life.
He was brought up in a working-class family in Ardwick Green, Manchester, by Irish Catholic parents who were also mad about music.
There was nothing unhappy about his childhood, but there was something stultifying about suburbia. I really like the word free. He was a bright boy, and went to grammar school. Like all guitarists, he says, he was good at English and art. He was obsessed with music: girl groups the Shangri-Las and the Shirelles, glam rockers T-Rex and Roxy Music, and most of all with guitarists. By the age of 13, he was playing in bands with people four years older. It felt like an apprenticeship for the only thing I was going to do — be a rock guitar player.
He was a talented footballer and had a trial with Manchester City, the team he supported. But nothing could compete with his passion for music. Football fell by the wayside. So, rather than playing lead guitar, he devised a new way of playing for himself — using the rhythm guitar to replicate a whole band or orchestra. It often involved numerous guitar overdubs, and Marr referred to it as the Guitarchestra. When he got the idea for the Smiths, which he formed at 19, it was already his fifth serious band.
Marr was looking for a singer for his new band. When Marr left, Morrissey gave him some of his typed lyrics. After that, they were inseparable. The love of pop culture, and the pure dedication, was mirrored in my partner. And the desperation. He was looking for someone like me and I was looking for someone like him. And we liked each other straight away. We really liked each other. What was the desperation? Were they as intense as each other? Mine comes out in physicality, exuberance.
Marr says his relationship with Morrissey was as close as is possible without being lovers. Was he in love with Morrissey? I think we all did. The four became good friends, but Marr says it was always clear that he and Morrissey were the leaders. Well, at the time, he says, they were so besotted with each other, the lyrics were secondary. You look good, I look good. I write music, you write lyrics. And because they never reformed, despite the perennial feverish speculation — Smiths reformations have become the latter-day Elvis sightings.
Why on earth would we be on a stage together? Besides, since the termination of his union with Marr, Morrissey has had a long and mostly successful solo career doing pretty much precisely what he wants — which is partly why the Smiths reforming without him is so inconceivable. The breakup of the Smiths was pre-ordained anyway.
The prospect of losing what has been gained just after gaining it is what is already preoccupying Morrissey. But then, the masochistic logic of pop music decrees that the whole point of possessing someone is so that you can lose them — so that you can possess them forever, nostalgically. At its happy-sad heart, the magic of great pop music is this bitter-sweet-sweeter blend of hope and despair, possession and loss: The sweetness of happiness and the even sweeter sadness that lies behind happiness and the prospect of losing it.
The Smiths, of course, had this magic in spades and were a beautifully-doomed band for a beautiful, doomed generation. Their demise was always part of the deal. Mark Simpson is the author of Saint Morrissey. Pictorial Press Ltd. Newswire Powered by. Close the menu. Such is the case with the British cult indie band The Smiths , whose break-up in spelled the end of one of the most truly poetic and evocative bodies of work in pop history.
Having released four classic studio albums in four years starting with their self-titled LP in and finishing with Strangeways, Here We Come , which was released several months after the group had disbanded, as well as a slew of well-received singles, the highly-creative collaboration between singer and lyricist Steven Morrissey and guitarist and chief music composer Johnny Marr, as well as drummer Mike Joyce and bassist Andy Rourke, came to an abrupt and painful end.
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