Johnny Marr: "Morrissey was someone who laughed a lot."
The first in a series of exclusive interview manuscripts conducted for my biography "A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of The Smiths."
This Saturday, May 31st, at 2pm, I will be presenting “How Soon Was Now: The Smiths 40 Years On” at the Orpheum Theatre in Saugerties, New York, during which I’ll be drawing from my experiences researching and writing my biography A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths, showing rare video, and introducing a personally curated one-off tribute group spanning ages 16-60, who will be bringing some of the songs from the Meat Is Murder period to life. Those of you in the area, I do hope you can make it.
This past week, in preparation, I have been revisiting some of the interviews I conducted for that book, especially my epic sessions with Johnny Marr. 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. (Johnny, as point of reference, was about to embark - again - on his solo career, promising me that he had committed to a minimum of two albums this time, with no side ventures getting in the way; he kept that promise and his solo career, as you may be aware, is still going strong well over a decade later.)
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.
For now, for the next couple of posts, I am going to feature – for paid subscribers – some highlights from those mammoth interviews, especially as pertains to the focus of this weekend’s presentation: the 40th Anniversary of Meat Is Murder, the Smiths’ second studio album, the first that really felt like an album, the one that broke them in the States, and the one that dislodged Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA from the top of the UK album charts, an achievement all the more remarkable given the album’s militant title, confrontational sleeve, and lack of accompanying hit singles.
That success was perfectly well deserved. Meat Is Murder remains a seminal album for any number of reasons, and playing it repeatedly in recent weeks only consolidates the feeling I have of great personal fortune, both for being able to witness The Smiths in concert as often as I did, to have been a part of their natural audience at the same time as I was part of the media that helped find that audience and, especially, to have been able to write their story for a major publishing house a quarter century after their demise.
The Smiths were Steven Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke (R.I.P.), and Mike Joyce, with a vast cast of key characters around them, most of whom I was able to interview for the book. Among those especially essential to the interview excerpts that follow are producers John Porter and Stephen Street.
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This excerpt is from our first interview, Monday March 7, held at the Night and Day Café on Oldham Street, still owned at the time by The Smiths’ original manager, Joe Moss.
-When did you become vegetarian?
Angie [Johnny’s girlfriend and future wife] was already vegetarian, I became vegetarian after meeting Morrissey. It was before Meat Is Murder. Angie has been vegetarian since before I met her. Just from off her own back, from being a little girl since before I met her, she never liked meat. I went vegan 5 years ago when I moved to Portland.
…I will never ever eat meat and I will never ever drink alcohol. Gave that up about 10-11 years ago. And that’s just to do with psychology and lifestyle. I’m not one of those guys who are like, rock musician who doesn’t drink, has to do AA, it’s none of that. You’d have to put a gun to my head to make me drink. I’m not one of “those were great days of my life” or “my drink hell,” I just got done with it. I was just: ‘This is useless for me.’ Back in the day, me and Andy and all his brothers, we went through a period in our teens when we were just anti-alcohol, very into pot, anyone who went to the pub we’d call pub monsters, we were very into rehearsing, we were very pure minded in what we were doing.