Johnny Marr: A Life Told Through Guitars

It was November 24th, 1983 and Top of the Pops had the most buzz-worthy band in all of Europe on the stage. A rainbow mirage of dancing disco light flickered on the ceiling as the four Brits became washed in pink neon and total 1980s pastel massiveness. Beneath a disco ball, the lead singer—lip-syncing and acting rather morose—waved a bouquet of gladiolus flowers around his face and looked despondent and woozy but sounded like a million dollars. Well, at least the recording of him did. It all felt like a ruse, perhaps some jab at MTV—though the American network was still relatively young at this point, only having been on-air for two years. The guys looked like they’d preferred to be any place other than that stage. Can you remember the exact moment when the entire cosmos of rock ‘n’ roll changed for you? I can, because it was like finding God—if God could positively shred on a six-string. If God was a 20-year-old named Johnny Marr.

The glibness of the Top of the Pops hosts 40 years ago felt a bit too commercial to be taken seriously. They were the musical establishment in Europe, to be fair, though they had started to lose their swagger when the punks took over the country’s cultural energy in the decade prior. But this was still the Big Time, at least by English television standards. Some folks argue that indie rock was born right there, as the opening riff to “This Charming Man” began to unfold throughout the space, oozing from the fingers of Marr, a Manchester kid donning a black turtleneck and a mop-top. Maybe they were right. It was post-modern flamboyancy; a perfect pop song boiled into a three-minute spectacle of a fireglo-colored Rickenbacker 330 smoldering like this big, burning sun that all of modern music would orbit around for the rest of time.

Johnny Marr belongs in the company of Hendrix, Richards and Prince as one of the most important guitar players since Buddy Holly died. His inclusion is not the result of a career built off of face-melting solos or stadium-sized riffs. No, it’s a byproduct of being a shining example of somebody who can write perfect melodies that serve the song and serve the vibe without boasting all of the composition’s weight. From the flamenco of “Bigmouth Strikes Again” to the sublime, Motown-inspired punctuation of “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” to the surfer buoyancy of “Ask,” those songs aren’t Guitar God reference points, but they don’t exist with the same wonder if Marr isn’t injecting precise, picture-perfect licks into their framework. After a 40-year career spent in the same rooms as The Smiths, Electronic, Modest Mouse, The Pretenders and Oasis, Marr is releasing Marr’s Guitars, a 200-page photographic archive of every guitar he’s owned and played paired with intimate, never-before-heard reflections from the man himself on every axe.

Marr’s Guitars is not just a love-letter to Marr’s beloved instrument; it’s a historical reference. It begins in 1980, when a wide-eyed Manchester 17-year-old gets his mitts on a black Gibson Les Paul standard. He’s just formed a band called Freak Party with his best mate Andy Rourke, and it’s the first “professional guitar” he’s ever owned. Earlier this spring, Rourke died at age 59 from pancreatic cancer, so starting the book off with such an intimate remembrance of his fallen bandmate and longtime confidant felt extra emotional—but that world doesn’t feel so far in the past for Marr. “I still feel pretty close, in my memory, to every period,” he tells me over Zoom. “I’m kind of, by nature, almost pathologically anti-nostalgia, I’m not particularly sentimental. I played that guitar for a couple of years, it was with me all the time, every night. I used to live at Andy’s house for a big part of that time, I was getting a lot of my direction together. Andy and I were very close. Even before Andy passed away, he was on my mind a lot. We spent a hell of a lot of time together in the last five or six years, even aside from him being ill.”

When he bought his Les Paul from the Manchester guitar shop A1 Repairs, Marr pulled the pickguard off of it and would play it until 1982, when he traded it in for a cherry Gretsch Super Axe. Growing up, Marr had found great inspiration in Marc Bolan and how the T. Rex frontman wielded his instrument. Of course, David Bowie had taken over the glam rock movement, but Marr held an affinity for how Bolan merged his own theatrics with a strong, longheld affection for his own Les Paul. In the The Slider song “Spaceball Ricochet,” Bolan even sings “With my Les Paul, I know I’m small, but I enjoy living anyway.”

“He was my first hero,” Marr says. “The fact that he was so blatantly in love with guitars was a cool thing that set him apart from David Bowie. Siouxsie and the Banshees did a cover of ‘20th Century Boy.’ They’re a little bit before my time, but I think, much later on, Placebo did a cover of T. Rex stuff. They were quite enduring, but how they influenced my generation was that they happened to be very commercial and actually had #1 records on the charts but were credible at the same time and alternative at the same time. That’s always a pretty neat trick, to pull off massively commercial, literally the top of the charts, but also credible with the counterculture. [T. Rex] ticked a lot of the boxes.”

Marr had traded in his Les Paul for a 1977 Gretsch Super Axe so he could follow the 1950s aesthetic that The Smiths were trying to adhere to at the genesis of their formation in 1982. Traditionally, though, Gretsch guitars were large and expensive. When I ask Marr why he picked the Super Axe, his response is succinct: “It’s funny to me because the answer is, really, that that was the most affordable Gretsch,” he says. “It was a very 1981, 1982 thing to do, to have a Gretsch if you were switched on.” He was following cues from postcard acts like Bow Wow Wow and Edwyn Collins, playing Gretsch guitars and nodding the Velvet Underground and nodding to the apex of rockabilly. Marr would write tunes like “What Difference Does It Make?” and “These Things Take Time,” and we would perform the overdubs on “Hand in Glove” with it—mainly because it was the only guitar he’d had in his repertoire at that time.

When The Smiths signed to Rough Trade in early 1982, Marr was just a 19-year-old musician who’d—just five years earlier—played in a band called The Paris Valentinos with Rourke and Kevin Williams and making noise doing Rolling Stones and Thin Lizzy covers. I ask Marr about the pros and cons about putting out a major, historical record as a teenager, to which he can only register the pros. To be on Top of the Pops before turning 20, to have a deal with Rough Trade—it was all a dream that Marr had carried with him since he was eight years old and plucking away on a guitar for the first time.

“I was already getting pretty frustrated by that point, it felt like it couldn’t come soon enough,” Marr says. “And, it turns out, we were up to the task—so why not? It’s a good thing, musically, that we captured that youthful exuberance and idealism and were, just speaking for myself, off the street. I spent all my time on the street, because I worked in the City Center, I did a job there. And a lot of my ideas and my sensibilities—not just about the music and the way the band should be, but the clothes and what I thought we were about—came, literally, from the streets. The atmosphere and environment that we came out of was my shop assistant friends—people who owned clothes shops—talking about our very first few shows, hairdressers, some people who worked in the gay bars in Manchester and our friends—some of whom worked at the Hacienda. A couple of bars in town, one called the Manhattan. That was the coterie of the scene we came out of and it was, literally, conversations with those friends of mine in shops, out on the pavement, out drinking before the clubs opened and DJing. That’s the culture The Smiths came out of, and that’s a very ‘me at 18 and 19’ culture.”

I wasn’t a teenager in the 1980s, nor am I English—so I suppose I’ll never truly understand the gravity that The Smiths possessed, or what it meant to live at a time when there was a band making music that, realistically, rivaled The Beatles. You grow up with a Boomer dad and a Gen-X mom in America and the shrine of eternal greatness in music history is erected someplace in-between Bon Scott-era AC/DC and General Hospital-era Rick Springfield. My folks were not hip to anything that would have even been mistaken for post-punk or new wave or the like. I think my first interaction with The Smiths’ music came via The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a truth known and devoured by all of my Zoomer peers who were just a bit too young to discover (500) Days of Summer a decade earlier. And, perhaps, discovering “Asleep” first, before any of the big hits, was not a destiny that everyone would have latched onto. It’s a devastating song that’s not entirely candy-coated when entering 13-year-old ears—nor does it beckon further exploration at the surface. But I heard it and I fell in love with it and here I am.

The Smiths’ most recognizable riff, the one that christens the destiny of “This Charming Man,” is a double-tracked guitar melody—Marr paired a 1954 Fender Telecaster with his black Rickenbacker 330, and that was a sonic decision reflective of the resources the band had had access to at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. The fireglo Rickenbacker we see him “play” on Top of the Pops, however, belonged to Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, who let Marr borrow it for the taping. In Rolling Stone’s recent ranking of the greatest guitarists of all time, their blurb on Marr focuses on the “dropping knives” method he employed onto his Telecaster for the recording but, on our call, Marr suggests that the soul of the song germinated elsewhere. “Half the sound was the Telecaster, and it was doubling my black Rickenbacker,” he notes. “So, I think that song is, really, all about my black Rickenbacker.”

There’s an infamous video, from BBC Two’s five-part series I’m in a Rock ‘n Roll Band!, where Marr is breaking down the four-track layering of “This Charming Man.” “I’ll see if I can get this right,” he tells the cameras, before constructing a slower-tempo rendition of the song’s opening riff. It’s such an emotional chord progression, a language all on its own. Marr flubs a pluck slightly; he’s human after all. One of the top comments sums it up perfectly: “Even Johnny Marr can’t play guitar as well as Johnny Marr.” But Marr tells me he’s never had any trouble playing the song at the speed we first heard it in 40 years ago. In fact, when he performed it live with The Killers at Glastonbury in 2019 they played it faster than the original take (and he and his current band play it, as he says, “fairly spritely”). But the opening emoticons of the “This Charming Man” lick are the mark of a genius that didn’t arrive with an anticipated rollout. In fact, the riff’s existence is merely a product of creative inertia.

“I think some people might find it tricky because it’s quite intricate,” Marr admits. “The easiest way to explain how I came up with [the riff] was to say what it isn’t, what it wasn’t. It wasn’t something I’d been thinking about for weeks, or days, even. It wasn’t something I’d been carrying around with me for months. It wasn’t something that I imagined would be a clever riff. It wasn’t even something that I thought would be good for the song. My fingers just did it. As soon as I put down the rhythm part on a little multi-track cassette player, put the chords down and then rewound the tape and hit record, it was completely instinctive.” While “This Charming Man” has become so well known, it’s not the only tune Marr has lent his chops to that is immune to mimicry from casual players. He cites the top line in “William, It Was Really Nothing” as being particularly intricate and particularly fast, as are the arpeggios in “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby.”

In the 1980s, Marr would come into possession of a Gibson J-160E acoustic guitar, which might be familiar to some as the same six-string that John Lennon used on a lot of pre-Sgt. Pepper Beatles cuts. There’s that really deft scene in Help! where Lennon is using his J-160E while he sings “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and you can feel that reverberate on songs Marr wrote on his own 160E—including balms like “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” and “Well I Wonder.” The Beatles and The Smiths make appearances in the same conversations often, at least in the context of the greatest bands in the history of music—and they were both fixtures of neighboring generations. The Fab Four’s influence on Marr and his bandmates goes beyond just appearance and technique; gear and attitude made a lasting impression. And his purchase of the 160E was the realization of an affection he’d had for the guitar since childhood.

“I think, when you’re younger, it’s totally fine to be attracted to things mostly because of the way they look and the association,” Marr says. “I got that 160E entirely because I had seen footage of John Lennon playing it, and the Hollies. I really liked those bands in that period, and the songs that I could hear the J-160E on very distinctly—which were “Norwegian Wood” and “I Should Have Known Better” and “I’ll Be Back,” and “Bus Stop” and “On a Carousel” by The Hollies. I think, whether you’re young or not, you go, ‘That’s a fucking cool guitar.’ That’s usually the criteria for most boys and girls who want to buy a guitar; they see Kurt Cobain or Alex Turner or Nick Zinner or me and they just go, ‘That’s fucking cool, I want one of those if I can ever afford it.’ When I got the chance to be able to buy this stuff, I went for it.”

What’s pretty great is that Marr lets a different guitar become emblematic of whatever record he’s making. During the lifespan of The Smiths, he did that with all four studio albums: The Smiths was his black Rickenbacker; Meat is Murder flaunted a cherry Les Paul; he wrote much of The Queen is Dead on an Olympic white Fender Stratocaster; a Gibson ES-335 12-string is responsible for the tonal landscape of Strangeways, Here We Come; he used a Western orange Gretsch 6120 Single-Cutaway to write “Ask” and a sunburst Epiphone Casino homed tremolo riff on “How Soon Is Now?” It’s an intentional choice that’s a part of the crux of being a guitar player, that Marr is tuning into whichever instrument is speaking to him the most at any given time while also grandstanding whichever model is the most affordable.

“I’ve not really had any reason to change the habit over the years,” he laughs. “The fact of the matter is that the guitar was the thing I was most interested in [growing up]—more than trains, planes or automobiles. I liked clothes and I liked football and I liked girls, and I liked the guitar more than anything. I got very, very lucky that being a professional guitar player became my life. But, if it hadn’t become my life, I’d like to think that I’d still be someone who was obsessing over guitars. Whether I was making Smiths albums or solo albums or no albums, I’d still be hooked on guitars. Even though I say ‘I don’t need another guitar’ and ‘This is the greatest guitar I’ll ever own’ every 18 months or so, I start getting really obsessive about certain models. I never forget how fortunate I am to be in that position. It was never tricky; it’s a dream, really, to go ‘It would be cool to use Gretsches’ or ‘It would be cool to use a [Gibson ES-335] 12-string,’ like I used with the Talking Heads. Or, with Hans Zimmer on No Time to Die, I’m using a [Gibson EDS-1275] double-neck. On Inception, I’m using a double-neck. Like most guitar players, I get a guitar that I’m absolutely crazy about and then I’ll use it—whether people want me to or not.”

Sandwiched in-between the greatest debut of any British band from the 1980s (The Smiths) and, quite possibly, the greatest album of the decade altogether (The Queen is Dead) is Meat is Murder, a masterpiece that often goes unchecked because of its endurance as a middle-child in the annals of The Smiths’ CV. But it boasts two songs that are among Marr’s very best (and two songs he still holds an otherworldly affinity for, as opposed to “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” which he’s not nearly as fond of these days): “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” and “The Headmaster Ritual.”

“I think all the songs we wrote are pretty great, to me. What happens, over the years, is that you are, inevitably, asked about your favorites,” Marr says. “And all musicians are going to say the same thing, ‘Oh, it’s like choosing between my children.’ And, yeah, I kind of get that. That’s kind of true. But, you want to give an answer to that question. You don’t want to be vague. When we did [‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’] and we did [‘The Headmaster Ritual’], it was not only the music I wanted to make as an individual and as a writer but, when I was working on those songs in the studio, I genuinely thought ‘No one can touch this. No one else is doing anything like this.’ I’ve always got stuck on [‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’] because it’s just so dramatic and quite pretty. And I liked other bands, I liked New Order a lot and I really respected The Cure. I wasn’t really competitive, but I thought that those songs, when we did them, were particularly unique. [‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’], I liked it because it was emotionally heavy, and I tend to like anything if it’s intense—even if it’s pop music. I like things to be dialed up to an 11 or 12, and, in those Smiths songs, the emotion is them are dialed right up to an 11.”

Marr would link up with Joy Division guitarist and New Order vocalist Bernard Sumner in 1989 to form the duo Electronic. He’d wanted to do something new, as the times were changing and, as Marr puts it, “that music was yet to be discovered.” They made songs that conjured fragments of the very synth-pop movement The Smiths had revolted against. Songs like “Getting Away With It” and “Forbidden City” were unusual and sounded like proto-dream pop. When that first Electronic record came around, it was a distillation of collective talent and an elaborate masterpiece packed to the brim with eccentric, humongous synthesizers, Marr’s crystalline melodies and the convergence of funkafied construction and Sumner’s textbook, fragile vocal affectations. It was meant to arrive like it came from a planet The Smiths had never walked across, though Sumner would sometimes hope that Marr would return to his jangle-pop inclinations here and there.

“Bernard used to get very frustrated and beg me to play more guitar on the record,” Marr notes. “He used to say ‘Oh, man, everyone’s going to blame me’ and I was like, ‘No, no, it’s gonna sound like Kraftwerk.’ When you’re 24 and you’re forming a new group, it’s your prerogative to completely do a gear change. I learned so much during that period, playing with Pet Shop Boys on their records and working with Bernard, that has really made me able to make records on my own now. I mean, completely on my own. I wanted to learn how to write those kinds of hits.”

Marr said a long time ago that, if Martin Carthy sped up his playing style and used the Patti Smith Group’s equipment, you’d get his playing style. It’s a succinct explanation that hits every layer of Marr’s guitar-wielding bravado. He’s likely the only musician of his time that merged influences of folk and punk rock together. When he was 14 years old, he obsessed over the Patti Smith Group. He’d learned how to play folk guitar by listening to Bert Jansch, but he didn’t want to be in a folk group—preferring to be in an outfit that sounded like Radio Ethiopia. The players that Marr came up with, like Will Sergeant from Echo & the Bunnymen and Billy Duffy from The Cult, weren’t interested in folk music whatsoever. Marr was in a league of his own, getting stoked on pentangle riffs and the pieces of guitar playing that were peculiar and counterculture. It makes sense that Marr once called Mahavishu Orchestra’s John McLaughlin the greatest guitar player who ever lived. There was a common denominator of Velvet Underground-inspired beauty, but the intricacies of Jansch-inspired right-hand arpeggios and jazz dynamics separated Marr from his peers—though they all exist on a similar continuum of complexity.

“That’s a great thing about creativity,” he says. “It suits eccentric thinking. I’d heard Bert Jansch—who, to this day, I know is regarded as a folk musician, but it sounds just as jazzy or bluesy to me—and, because I fell in love with Bert’s playing, I then obsessively checked out the idiom or the genre, as we call it now. It wasn’t a big jump from first hearing Bert Jansch in 1976, which was the year of punk. It didn’t really matter to me. Then, checking out Nick Drake—who was influenced by Bert—and then hearing more of John Martin and, because of that, Richard Thompson, the thing about that was, not only did liking Bert Jansch open that door for me, it was something that I found I could do quite comfortably. When I got into the Velvet Underground—who me and my generation absolutely revered as the greatest group ever—their stuff was very focused. ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘Here She Comes Now’ and ‘Stephanie Says,’ it’s very pretty and there’s a real pure Gretsch arpeggio that all of that music is built on.”

Without Marr’s influence, we wouldn’t have Jonny Greenwood, Noel Gallagher, Isaac Brock and countless other players who explore construction with a balanced curiosity, a propensity to harness the intricacies of pop music while obliterating it all at once. Even now, as he’s about to turn 60 years old in two weeks, Marr is still mining for ways to become the best musician possible. He’s got a penchant for running and an affection for fitness, which stemmed from seeing a couple of pals “who looked great and, seemingly, had a really good life.” Marr is no longer a teenager hopping between bands and just trying to survive while gigging at pubs and clubs across England. He has the space to pursue what might make his relationship with guitar playing and singing and performing even more sweeter and worth continuing for the rest of his lifetime. He’s a living legend still devouring the riches of the “living” part, and thank goodness for that.

“If I thought that taking drugs and staying up for three days would make me a better guitarist, I’d do it. 100%, that’s what I’d do,” Marr says. “Over the years, every so often, taking psychedelics, I thought ‘Okay, I might get a few good notions that might lead to songs, either lyrically or musically.’ I’ve done them, I’ve taken them. Everything is just about the support of who I am. If I said to my wife or my friends or my children or my management ‘Hey, I’m thinking of dialing it down a little bit and spending less time and less interest in the guitar,’ there would be an intervention. Everyone would say ‘But that’s not who you are. What’s wrong?’ I’m fortunate I’ve had a life where I’ve been able to express and explore that obsession. But I work at it all the time. I’m constantly all about the new technology, checking out new players and new bands who are out there, [talking with] my pals who are buying new pedals and who are hearing new records. It’s never been any different, I’m still exactly the same. If I get time to go for a run, that’s the maintenance of good energy and good psychology and good philosophy and good spirituality. It’s just the maintenance to keep talking, to keep on doing it and live a longer life doing it. I just hope that I’m able to keep on playing, in whatever capacity, right up until the day I drop.”

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.