From my Johnny Marr interview archive: Manchester, The Early Years
Diving into my mammoth two-day interview, from the beginning.
A few months back, in advance of a presentation I gave at the Orpheum Theatre in Saugerties entitled “How Soon Was Now? The Smiths 40 Years On” I published a couple of extracts from my extensive interviews with Johnny Marr, choosing those specific to the subject matter of my presentation: the Meat Is Murder period when the Manchester group truly declared themselves as an albums act worthy of the international stage (and their number 1 UK album).
As to how and where those interviews came from, they were conducted for my biography of the group, entitled A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga Of The Smiths, which was published in hardback by William Heinemann in the UK in 2012, and Crown in the US in 2013 [as below], both followed by paperback editions a year later. Far be it from me to insist that it is the definitive biography on The Smiths; others have done so already over the years, and the book remains in print after all these years. (It was also published, in Portuguese in Brazil; contact me if you are obsessed with getting a copy.)
With Johnny (and, coincidentally, his former musical partner Morrissey) having just played in New York City in the last few weeks, I returned to the interview manuscript again, and it really is a gem. Best of all, I had typed it up properly back in 2011, proper English an’ all, and so, unlike some of the archive Keith Moon interview transcripts that have taken extensive work to scan and/or retype and otherwise knock just into readable shape, for this project I can focus on editing our conversation down to the meat (is murder) of the matter.
Starting today, I am going to publish occasional excerpts, working our way through the mammoth conversation, which I summarized in May as follows.
We had arranged to meet in Manchester, back in March 2011 very late in my interview process, on a Monday and Tuesday, and I’d figured on maybe 3-4 hours a day if I was lucky.
On Monday March 7, after about seven uninterrupted hours of talking, or around the point that we broke the record for my previous longest interview (with Peter Buck on an overnight tour bus journey for my R.E.M. biography), I pointed out I needed to get going as I had to drive back almost the entire distance of the M62, given that I was staying at my mother’s house near Hull. For the Tuesday, I booked a Manchester hotel and wisely so: we went over thirteen hours that day, barely breaking to eat, closing out at least three venues and winding up the discussion in his car, driving around Manchester revisiting some of the sites that had become part of The Smiths’ legend.
Those two days (and a night), once transcribed and edited, added up to over 100,000 words, with another 10,000 words added via a couple of transatlantic phone calls for gap-filling and fact-checking. That total word count was more than the required length of my entire book; indeed, it’s perfectly fair to say that ‘The Johnny Marr Interviews’ would make for an incredible book on their own.
We began our conversation on Monday lunchtime at the Night & Day Café on Oldham Street, as owned by Joe Moss, The Smiths’ original manager and his manager again by this point. It was known as Johnny’s home from home, and a suitably central location for the initial conversation. As often the case when one is settling for the long haul, we didn’t so much begin from the very beginning, but in this case with reference to a key figure in The Smiths story: Andrew Berry, who Johnny had first met at, of all things, a Uriah Heep show in 1977, and who later cropped up (on his way to becoming Manchester’s hairdresser on fire) as the DJ in one of the city’s early 80s clubs, The Exit. There he and Marr bonded again, to the point that Johnny frequently stayed over at Andrew´s place on Palatine Road along with flamboyant local promoter John Kennedy.
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