Johnny Marr
of the Smiths/The The/Electronic/The Healers

photo by Lisa King, 2003

May 12th, 2003 - On Johnny's tour bus at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia.

LK: Talk about some of the influences that you had as a child, very early on.

Marr: Very early on? Johnny Cash and The Everly Brothers. Then T. Rex was a real big jump for me. Then Motown music. I was heavily influenced by my parents record collection. They were really music obsessive, and still are. They came over from Ireland and they were young, like sixteen or seventeen, and I was born a year later. So they were young music fans. They didn’t bring over traditional Irish music; They were into the American music of the day. Like the hits Johnny Cash was having, and people like the Everly’s, and I remember them liking the Hollies as well. They were in the British charts obviously.

But being Irish immigrants they were really big on American music. Things that were in the modern Country charts. They encouraged me to buy my own records. The first one I bought was a T. Rex single, just because it was at a discount rack, and “Jeepster” happened to have a photograph of Marc Bolan and Micky Finn on the cover of it, and I figured I was just getting more value for my buck by buying this record with a picture on it. Plus it was really beautiful looking.

LK: When did you start playing guitar? Did guitar in particular speak to you?

Marr: There was a shop around the corner from where I lived which was en route to where I went to school, I was about five. This shop used to sell mops and buckets, and brooms. For some weird reason they had a little toy guitar in the window, and I was completely obsessed about this one guitar. I would have to go and see it every morning. My folks were not displeased because they were music freaks as I’ve said, so they bought it for me. From then on I always had a guitar every year for Christmas, under the tree, in this cardboard box that would get bigger and bigger.

I remember the first one; I had it painted so it looked like what I was seeing on the television. I put beer bottle, or soda bottle caps on it so it would look like knobs. I used to just stand in front of the television doing this (guitar playing gesture). I was just completely and utterly obsessed with it. So when I got to eleven, the guitar I had was able to stay in tune, and I could get a tune out of it. It goes really way back to being a toddler really. I always feel like Whitney Houston or something, somebody saying that, “I’ve been singing since I was in the cradle.” But it is actually like that.

My mother was telling me recently that she would go into a department store on a Saturday, and on the top floor they used to sell amplifiers and guitars. I was wondering if it was something about the aesthetic shape of the guitar, but she said amplifiers as well. She could leave me in the store, and she would go and do the shopping. She then explained that the times were very different, and she wouldn’t consider doing that now with grandchildren, but she was able to do that. So there was something to do with guitars and amplifiers that I was completely with it.

Now on the rare occasions that I see my folks, I notice that my guitars that I had in my teens, a couple of them are still in the exact same position they were, yet they’ve decorated. I notice that the guitars in my house, and in my folks house, and my brother’s house are almost like plants really. When you decorate you take them out, and you paint the walls, and you put them back. And the dogs are very careful not to knock them down, and the little children don’t break them. They are this organic part of our life, and they’ve always been that way.

LK: Talk about Slow Fear.

Marr: Slow Fear; Panic. Airplanes for some reason. Even though I don’t have a fear of flying anymore. But I used to, and it was pretty horrendous. Slow Fear is Panic. Predictably.

LK: Pink Fuzz.

Marr: Carney Erotica. Carney Websites. High Street sex shops. That aesthetic I have some sort of attraction to. I like that kind of tacky, futurist…but even the word futurist is kind of an anachronism now which is kind of interesting. But I like that kind of pink neon, slightly airbrushed, kind of glamoury vibe. There’s something about it that is its own thing. Even the typeface. I’d considered having a run of singles like that; I’d collected quite a lot of banners. Not of just women, gay stuff as well. I checked them out, and there is a certain kind of pose, and use of color and typeface that is very distinctive. I wanted to put the band in these kinds of poses whereby you wouldn’t really be able to nail it down. It would be very not rock and roll, and not macho, and it would suggest it, but straight people wouldn’t really know why there was something disconcerting about it. So, Pink Fuzz. Yeah.

LK: White Glitter Notebook.

Marr: Sisters. Teenage Sisters in the Seventies.

LK: Blue Screen.

Marr: Bernard Sumner. Just because he ended up saving one of our videos. Yet another one of the dreadful Electronic videos. He stayed up all night himself with a blue screen, doing all kinds of stuff. I just think of Bernard Sumner and generally bad videos.

LK: Lamppost and Television.

Marr: Are you just making these up as you go along? Lamp post reminds me of sodium light, which is a subject Matt Johnson [The The] and myself had a real affinity for. The two of us used to, before we were really old enough to know what drugs were, used to squint at sodium lights in the rain when we were kids to try to transcend the experience of a winter’s night in glum seventies England. Or in the back of a car. We had a song called, “Sodium Light Baby” and he mentions sodium light quite a lot. It does remind me of lamp posts and that kind of orange light, particularly what you get in the cities in England. It’s almost archaic and Dickensian, and gothic. There is some sort of strange kind of beauty about it.

Television is you know, the drug of the people isn’t it? Not a very good one either, really.

LK: Black Feather Limbo.

Marr: That reminds me of Dr. John. Every one of those words really. And gumbo which I’ve never tried, but I’m sure I wouldn’t like. And Voodoo. My production company is called New Voodoo. I’ve always had some kind of aesthetic attraction to Voodoo and Magick. Kind of spook stuff really. Sometimes to a very far degree, and other times just to a surface degree. Voodoo, New Orleansy, Dr. John…the whole thing.

LK: One more. Modern Orange Sky.

Marr: Modern as a word, to me, became the whole very early eighties. Modern has almost become, if I think about it too much, which is what I’m doing now, it becomes kind of a dated conceit. This obsession with modern. Which we’re all kind of guilty of. Like a lot of boys, and girls I guess, I like technology and gadgets.

Maybe because of The Jam and the whole Mod thing, and “This is the Modern World,” what does remind me of that word is seeing it on the cover of The Jam record, which I didn’t really care for. That whole shallow aesthetic of modernism for modernism’s sake. That came through in a period in the very early nineties where we saw the siblings of people who grew up with Madonna and the technological revolution of the eighties, these people turned against it and went more for authenticity. More of an organic thing. Certainly in Rock music, which particularly I know about, seemed very concerned with authenticity as a reaction against Photoshop and Designer Magazines, and Computerism, which was all stuff that I was very into. I think it has a use. But the pendulum always swings the other way.

Modernism right now, is a word like Futurism. It has almost become the opposite of what it really meant. Futurism is like the Seventies idea of Modernity, Modernism is like an Eighties idea of Modernism. It’s very weird. Right now the Ohm sign seems like the most modern thing with us, that’s kind of available really. Most pertinent. Or a Crucifix. Or piercings. That’s a really modern thing, but one could argue you could look at it, and it’s complete evidence of a display of people’s intrinsic need to be part of a tribe. Almost Paganism. And that’s modern.

It’s interesting when you start hooking on a word, isn’t it? The word becomes disassociated. It’s like when you’re tripping and someone says your name, and you just look at that name and think, what the fuck does that mean? I used to get that with “horse.” When I was tripping I used to always know I was really getting there when I’d look at the word “horse” and it would seem like a ludicrous word.

I forgot the other words you said, I just got caught on modern. But It’s quite a good way of doing an interview because you just end up like, not talking about The Smiths.