For anyone who believes rock stars don't say it like they used to, you might well be right. Johnny Marr certainly didn't hold back in an interview with Guitar Player back in 1990 when he took swipes at lengthy guitar solos, Spandex, OMD, and the tories, while revealing the reasons for his former band The Smiths breaking up, and even having a go at the very magazine that was interviewing him.
Some ‘fans’ just wanted me to jingle-jangle on my Rickenbacker till I died
Johnny Marr
“I get Guitar Player, Guitar World and Guitarist every month,” Johnny Marr told the first of those magazines, back in 1990. “But I just read the reviews. I find most of the interviews absurd, and so anally retentive that they're meaningless.”
Someone get this man a Snickers, although to be fair, even some of the people here agree with his last point.
Luckily, though, Marr's own chat would end up being anything but absurd or meaningless as he gave Guitar Player a fascinating insight into his own career. At the time Marr had gone from a Smiths main man to playing with everyone from Electronic to The The, but there was plenty of talk about his former band and what The Smiths stood for in the first place. And against…
“We were against synthesizers, the Conservative government, groups with names like Orchestral Manoeuvers In The Dark, the English monarchy, cock-rock guitar solos, and the American music scene at the time.
"We stood for the Englishness of the Kinks, T-Rex, and Roxy Music. Morrissey and I wanted to be a modern-day Leiber and Stoller, writing bubblegum backing tracks with intense lyrics.
“I’m very proud of everything we did, musically, lyrically, and politically. It was a really great time, but only a fool doesn't know when it's time to stop.”
The Smiths went through every conceivable rock and roll tragedy: drug busts, police harassment, controversy. Everything but a death.
Johnny Marr
And on this break up, the 1990 interview also revealed Marr's many reasons for The Smiths ending.
“It was mostly a personal thing. We were working at such a breakneck pace – 50-odd tracks in four years – that I thought I was going to end up repeating myself.
“Also, I was frustrated with what people expected me to come up with. By creating your own rules, the influences and methods of songwriting that you allow yourself to use, you end up boxing yourself into a corner of musical politics. And if you step out of that corner, it's immediately called ’sell-out’. Some ‘fans’ – for want of a better word – just wanted me to jingle-jangle on my Rickenbacker till I died. But if I have to forsake fame, fortune, and popularity for the experience of being able to play exactly what I want when I want, I'd do it again.
“The Smiths went through every conceivable rock and roll tragedy: drug busts, police harassment, controversy. We had everything but a death, thank God. That was avoided by us splitting up. We were smarter than some. Some groups actually start believing they're the Rolling Stones, and that's how they do themselves in.”
And finally Marr didn’t exactly hold back on what he thought of the guitar scene of the time either.
“There's a lot that I don't like at all. I find the traditional idea of the guitar hero to be really irrelevant to the 1990s. I don't think that young people are that impressed with some guy brandishing Spandex trousers and a hideously shaped guitar, playing that kind of masturbatory, egotistical noise.”
Read more of the original Johnny Marr Guitar Player interview here.
And for balance, and to prove we don't just wallow in the past, here's Marr's (quite excellent) Spirit, Power and Soul.
