"Me And Morrissey... we were exactly on the same page."
Part 2 of my mammoth Johnny Marr interview for the biography "A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of The Smiths."
I’m writing this intro to the second excerpt from my 2011 Johnny Marr book interviews immediately upon return from my presentation of “How Soon Is Now: The Smiths 40 Years On,” vibing on - and off of - the band’s music and charm. In preparation for the event, I listened to the entire Smiths catalogue, and at the presentation itself, I showed videos, talked about The Smiths, read a few excerpts from my bio A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths, and luxuriated in the performance of the tribute group I curated for the occasion, whose ages ranged from 15-60 and who did an incredible job of bringing the group’s music from that 1984-85 period around Meat is Murder to the stage of the Orpheum Theatre in Saugerties. Indeed, the event/presentation served to confirm that The Smiths music is truly timeless, constantly finding new audiences among young people, even as its original audience remains suitably devoted that they would come out and pack a local theater on a (suitably?) wet Saturday afternoon.
….Which brings us back round to me and Johnny working our way through the group’s protracted life story over the course of thirteen hours of a Tuesday in March 2011. (If you missed Part 1, it’s here:)
The extracts I am including for these couple of posts are very much related to the How Soon Is Now?/Meat Is Murder period that I focused my presentation on, and remain but a fraction of the 20+ hours/110,000 words total. More may show another time. For now, we pick up on discussion of the B-side that would define The Smiths; at this point in proceedings, I believe we were still sitting in Night & Day Café on Oldham Street, where we had been ensconced for the last several hours.
As with Part 1, the following 3000+ word interview extract is for paid subscribers. Those upgraded subscriptions are just $6/approx. £5 a month, with a 20% discount for a full year. I have posted twice a week since launching Wordsmith almost two years back, and a paid subscription gets you full and complete access to all those 200+ posts in the archives. It also gets you the Crossed Channels podcast I host with
(Smiths episode forthcoming), plus further future historic interviews and other exclusives. More to the point, your financial support will keep this page going; though I love writing, I can’t write only for that love. Thanks to all who have made the leap into “patron” status.-John Porter said to me that he set out trying to make “How Soon Is Now?”] American. Is that an exaggeration?
Hang on a minute. There was a demo of “How Soon Is Now?” before we went in the studio that I did at home, thank you very much: “Swamp.” And the vibrato guitar, which was the main motif, isn’t there, but it doesn’t sound that different. And the slide part on top of it was just a prettier version. But essentially the song was there. But John was always trying to make everything more American, because that’s what he liked, and that’s why he’s in New Orleans now. So it’s fair comment. I’m not taking anything away from his production because you can hear that it is produced by John Porter, and brilliantly so. But it didn’t have to try to be anything: we were all just throwing in, and it’s one of those great times when everything you tried worked.