Johnny Marr Read online

  Johnny would spend long periods back in the home country, sometimes enjoying as much as four months of the year in Ireland. Alongside his immediate family in Manchester, Ireland itself influenced him strongly too – the atmosphere and the people. “The Irish connection is a big one,” he has said during a webchat on jmarr.com. “There is a sensibility that affects your life… passion, humour, irreverence.” Johnny was aware of the poetic nature of his Irish-ness, of its occasional surreality, and of the darkness in the Irish soul that is sometimes hard to ignore.

  As a kid though, most of Johnny’s earliest influences were most certainly poetic and occasionally surreal, but rarely dark. His first musical heroes were amongst the most incandescent of all. One of the first was Marc Bolan, and T. Rex was one of his earliest and most abiding influences. Bolan epitomised all that was fine about post-Beatles pop, his guitar playing ballsy and rooted in the electric blues of Howlin’ Wolf, his image glamorous and elusive. “If it hadn’t been for Marc Bolan, Roxy Music and David Bowie,” Marr recalled in Designer magazine in 2001, “kids of my generation would have been completely screwed.” Glam gave access to pop that more sophisticated acts such as Little Feat denied the ten-year-old Maher. Sparks was another of the bands that turned Johnny on, at a time when the Bay City Rollers were perhaps the ghastly, inevitable alternative. At the same time, Keith Richards was one of Johnny’s earliest icons. For the young Johnny Maher, pop music soon became a major preoccupation and took a complete hold on his imagination. It was the perfect time to be growing up in pop, and to be heavily influenced by the music of the early Seventies was to be introduced to a thousand different sounds, such was the diversity of the material around: The Beatles, Stones, Neil Young, Motown, blues, rock and soul – the wealth and the breadth of Sixties and early Seventies pop was astonishing. Throughout these years, Johnny soaked it all up, his appetite for the next cool band enormous. As it was for so many born in the early Sixties, it was a route outside of the formal education system via which we learned about the world. “I didn’t really think the world made very much sense,” Johnny has said, “until I discovered pop music. Music made me understand.”

  Like so many children whose imaginations were taken over by pop in the early Seventies, Maher would obsess over certain bands or albums for a while, and hungrily lap up every new influence as it came along. His music-crazy parents gave him a role model; “I learned the art of playing the same seven-inch twenty-seven times in succession from my mother,” said Johnny. His love of music was intuitive and instinctive, and Johnny has always preferred that to any academic route into music. “It seems to me there are two ways you can go, and neither would include musical school,” said Johnny when asked by author Martin Roach, in The Right To Imagination And Madness, whether a formal musical education would have helped his own development. “You can either come from the genetic thing, like I did, or you come from a completely non-musical situation… I don’t know anyone who’s had success from music school.” Tuition in a formal sense, was the last thing the young Johnny Maher needed, preferring to rely on an understanding of music “on a spiritual level… a purely spiritual connection” for his impetus. “I would play records at really deafening volume at eight o’clock in the morning, just playing the same song over and over again,” he admitted to one interviewer. Patti Smith, Television, The Stones, Rory Gallagher – they all came under his learning gaze and were gathered together one by one to appear by degrees in his playing as he matured.

  From the age of ten, Johnny’s future was almost pre-ordained. “I had always had guitars, for as long as I could remember,” he recalls. “I thought once that maybe my parents were pushing me into it, but I soon realised that I was obsessed.” One of the earliest influences on John were what he later called “crappy Elvis movies.” The Beatles movies Help and Hard Day’s Night were regularly on the television, and US Beatles cartoons were often repeated. Late night radio – John Peel in particular – had a huge influence. For Maher, pop music took him outside the ordinary life of school, family and friends, outside of the real world of rainy old Manchester.

  * * *

  Manchester is a tough town. It raises its musical children almost without kindness. In the early Sixties, the city’s mills were indeed dark and satanic, its huge, brick-built warehouses foreboding and claustrophobic. Compared to its limestone cousin along the East Lancs Road, Manchester was sooty and dotted with Second World War bomb sites, while Liverpool was shiny and romantic: an Atlantic city, not a northern town. From the early Sixties and the rise of Beatlemania, it seemed that when something happened, it happened in Liverpool first. Liverpool was on TV every time you switched it on. The Beatles, Jimmy Tarbuck or Cilla, for example, as well as being professional entertainers were professional Liverpudlians and celebrity scousers.

  But by the time Johnny Maher was entering his teenage years, Manchester’s inherent delights had become obvious to all. For the kids of the north-west in the early Seventies, it was often in Manchester that they saw their first gigs, in Manchester where they bought their first records, posters and books. Manchester was the harder town, but it was cool: it might have lacked a famous and iconic bronze parrot on the town hall roof, but it worked hard, got its jobs done, then went down the pub and rocked. It had the best record shops, the best bookshops, the best venues for gigs.

  In fact, the Manchester music scene had already shone brightly, both nationally and internationally. Though often eclipsed by the city some forty miles to the west, Manchester’s innate competitive relationship with Liverpool meant that some of Britain’s finest bands emerged from its environs over the years. In both Manchester and Liverpool, a huge influence came from the American airmen who flooded the region during the Forties, Fifties and Sixties. During the Second World War, nearly 75,000 aircraft that were used in the Allied campaign entered Europe through Liverpool’s docks, and nearly a million-and-a-half US servicemen joined the war effort in the same way. Young people looking for the latest jazz, skiffle, R&B and rock ’n’ roll music tuned into the American Forces Network, a radio station for the tens of thousands of Yanks away from home – at a time when the BBC’s output catered for rather dainty minds in rather middle-class homes. In the north-west of England, the influence of the Americans was felt perhaps more keenly than anywhere else in the UK, and consequently the influence of the music the Yanks brought with them was fired there like nowhere else. Over the years, much of the correspondence between troops and civilians was centred around the huge US airbase at Burtonwood, halfway between Liverpool and Manchester. It was a phenomenal place, and until the Seventies its storage facilities – designed for aircraft and tanks – was the biggest single-span building space in the world. In the Eighties, it was rumoured that more nuclear armament was stored there than anywhere else in Britain, while gossip of unnamed ‘goods’ being secretly removed in removal vans were rife.

  The local love affair with imported American pop music started during the war years. It was jazz and swing for starters, rock ’n’ roll and blues later on. After the war it was this romance with imported pop that led to the birth of great music in the region. While the short-trousered Harrison, Lennon, McCartney and Starr were picking up early Elvis and Buddy Holly records in Liverpool, at the other end of the Manchester Ship Canal the influence was equally keenly felt. Both cities had a burgeoning black market trade as sailors and airmen brought discs over from The States and sold them locally at mighty profits. With a vibrant immigrant community – Irish, Afro-Caribbean and Eastern Europeans in particular – and as a major inland port in its own right, Manchester was as likely as Liverpool or London to burst into cultural prominence.

  With Elvis and movies such as Rock Around The Clock everywhere across the region, the first major post-war teenage cultural development was the appearance in Manchester of the coffee bar. A juke box and a coffee machine were all the teenagers of the city needed to develop their own cool hang-outs. The youth of Manchester started to drag the city out
of its post-war austerity and into the modern world. The city centre boasted a plethora of such bars, and they were plentiful in the suburbs too. In the early Sixties, while clubs such as The Cavern flourished in Liverpool, in Manchester it was venues such as The Twisted Wheel, The Forty Thieves and The Oasis – labelled ‘the north’s top teenage rendezvous’ – that attracted the kids of Ardwick, Chorlton, or Wythenshaw into the city centre. By 1965 there some 250 such clubs in central Manchester alone. They were largely alcohol-free affairs, open late into the night, as teenagers listened to the R&B and skiffle sounds that predated English pop proper. As Jonathan Schofield, guru of all things Mancunian, has pointed out on the website www.virtualmanchester.com/music/features, the Mersey river itself is actually born in Greater Manchester. If the Mersey bands claimed Liverpool as their spiritual home, then throughout the Sixties, Manchester answered back with a raft of Beat groups of its own. The Hollies – from whence Graham Nash went on to revolutionise Californian pop – Herman’s Hermits, The Bee Gees, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and Freddie Garretty all hailed from the Manchester suburbs, and all had enormous success both at home and abroad. The oft-derided Herman’s Hermits clocked up sales of over sixty million records worldwide, while Freddie and the Dreamers and The Mindbenders both reached the number one singles slot in the USA. Manchester was exporting big-selling pop long before The Smiths or Oasis got in on the act.

  By 1967, the number of Beat clubs in Manchester had been reduced – by legal intervention – from 250 to just three. The clubs were described in a police officer’s report as “dirty and crudely decorated, with a minimum of furniture.” The beatniks, mods and rockers came under the critical eye of the law too. Professor CP Lee of Salford University, and formerly vocalist with popular Manchester outfit Albertos Y Los Trios Paranoias, has researched this blitzkrieg of the Manchester scene extensively, and notes that in the wake of the demise of the smaller venues, larger clubs and discos flourished. The Ritz, run by DJ Jimmy Savile was one of the biggest, while audiences of up to 4,000 would attend similar nights at The Plaza and Belle Vue Ballroom. Yorkshire-born Savile was one of pop’s first local impresarios to break nationally and a local myth claims that the enigmatic and later-to-be-knighted Sir Jim boosted his clubs’ attendances by offering free polio jabs to punters. Other characters built popular and enduring venues around the city. When the BBC launched its premier pop TV show, Top Of The Pops, it did so from a converted chapel in the south Manchester suburbs, cementing Manchester at the heart of Britain’s pop culture. For all the acts that appeared on the show, it was to Manchester that they travelled to make their reputations.

  John Mayall was another Mancunian with a huge influence on British pop. One of the prime movers in the introduction of traditional American blues into Sixties Britain, his band The Bluesbreakers was a cradle for Eric Clapton, John McVie, Mick Taylor, Peter Green, and many other influential rock artists of the following decade. 10cc were one of the most popular Mancunian bands of the Seventies. Graham Gouldman, formerly of The Mockingbirds, had written hits for The Hollies, The Yardbirds and Herman’s Hermits. Eric Stewart was an ex-Mindbender. With Kevin Godley and Lawrence Crème they developed into one of the most articulate, witty, accomplished songwriting and performing outfits of their time, described by one journalist as “the UK’s Steely Dan.” Rusholme’s Roy Harper established his own musical voice internationally, helped along by his associations with Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and his sensitive, romantic and woefully underrated work continues to influence to this day. Sad Café’s album Fanx Ta Ra helped establish them as one of Manchester’s most successful mid-Seventies bands, while Salford’s Elaine Bookbinder, under the moniker Elkie Brooks, hit pay dirt in the late Seventies with ‘Pearl’s A Singer’ and a run of other hit singles after a stint in Vinegar Joe, a band that also featured Robert Palmer. Thus while he was taking his first, rudimentary steps in guitar craft, the young John Maher had a healthy local culture on which to build his castle.

  * * *

  In the early Seventies the Maher family was to move to Baguley, Wythenshaw, a bus ride to the south from the city centre and one of Manchester’s most significant urban sprawls. At the time, the area was the biggest council housing estate in Europe, a major part of the south Manchester conurbation. It was by no means a poor and down-and-out place however. Maher has said that the area was middle-class in comparison with the streets of his upbringing, “like Beverly Hills,” compared to the tougher streets of his earliest years. Much of the area was ‘village-ised’ – the great urban sprawl divided up into smaller units with their own facilities and services, encouraging a village mentality among the residents. While it wasn’t the haven of crime that many similar developments would become, the area was nevertheless a breeding ground for petty crime and thieving. Set as it was only a mile or so from the wealthy suburbs of Hale, Halebarns and Bowdon, the temptation to wander across the great divide was always there. It was said at the time that there were more millionaires per square mile in these areas than anywhere else in the UK.

  Wythenshaw, says Johnny felt “like nirvana” in comparison to his former home. Initially placed at the Sacred Heart Primary School, Johnny earned a place at St Augustine’s Grammar School, a traditional Catholic institution for boys where the staff wore traditional mortar boards and gowns. Children were expected to enter the school with an 11+ pass and to leave with nine or ten O-levels and the prospect of a university education. By the mid-Seventies, St Augustine’s had, like the majority of grammar schools, joined the movement towards comprehensive education. It was renamed St John Pleasington, and, with a much broader net bringing in a greater variety of pupils, loosened up seriously. Johnny was happy at the school, excelling in English, Art and Music, but claims that by his fourth year there he was losing interest in academia and found himself increasingly poring over music rather than school books.

  If the education system lost a potentially very able scholar in Johnny Maher, the youngster did get something out of school, even if it wasn’t marked in percentages and grades. “I think the most useful thing about school for me,” he told a webcast many years later, “was that I learned to suss out different types of people, and they crop up later in life sometimes… especially loudmouths!” Johnny did go on to enrol at Wythenshaw College, but his real education was taking place elsewhere.

  Johnny made friends easily, and one of the lads he teamed up with early in his secondary education was Andy Rourke, a kid from Ashton. Rourke was one of four brothers, whose parents had recently split up, and the two became firm friends, inspired by music, truancy and clothes. While they initially disliked one another – a keen sense of competition between long-haired rock fans – they got together because Johnny was wearing a Neil Young Tonight’s The Night badge. Within days they were friends for life, and Andy the better guitar player of the two. The boys led a mildly wild lifestyle – nothing too heavy, but there were soft drugs around the scene as there were in most teenage environments.

  By the age of fourteen, Johnny had moved out of the family home and moved in with Andy and his dad chez Rourke. It was a short-term separation from parents whom Johnny would remain extremely close to, and who had always supported his musical endeavours. While John and Frances Maher willingly helped Johnny out by buying him his first guitars and letting him practise around the house undisturbed, by the time their rebel son was hanging out with older kids and taking his music very seriously, they were naturally concerned that the lifestyle of the musician was too advanced for their young son. For Johnny though, his commitment was already absolute, and there was no going back. “They could see disaster looming,” Johnny was to say towards the end of The Smiths’ career, but by then, of course, it was too late.

  Pop music – in the early-Seventies world before PlayStations and video games – was the means to another world, a world of style and individuality, of achievement and of standing out from the crowd. Pop was the badge you wore, the currency you carried with you. Soul
boys. Quo freaks. Metal heads. Prog rockers. Folk fans. The breadth of pop in the post-Beatles climate was exhilerating, and exciting, and every week on Top Of The Pops or John Peel’s Radio One show there was something new to admire, dissect, reference in class or follow slavishly.

  “The first record I ever bought,” Johnny remembers, “was ‘Jeepster.’ But it wasn’t until ‘Metal Guru’ got to number one that I really made the connection for the first time.” Marr remembers riding his bike around the local streets and singing the song over and over. “It was a feeling that I’ll never forget,” says Johnny. “A new sensation. I got on my bike and rode and rode, singing this song… one of the best moments of my life.” Johnny remembers stealing ‘loads of glitter’, putting it on his face, and emulating his favourite bands. “From then on my formative years were totally and utterly dedicated to music.”

  Maher, Rourke et al would get together at local youth clubs, meet in town or at one anothers’ houses to compare notes, practice the guitar or simply hang out. “What I was doing was more interesting than what other kids were doing,” he told one interviewer. “When I left school I had jobs and all that – but they were only a means to playing loads of records and tapes, and getting paid for it.” A promising footballer – he tried out for Manchester City and was apparently pursued by Nottingham Forest – and potentially academically very capable, Johnny soon began to neglect both his sport and his homework for music and for the nights out with the boys.