Duran, Haircut 100 and Wham!, alongside soft rock behemoths like Foreigner, outnumbered the genuinely entertaining acts like Madness ten to one. But The Smiths knew they had the key to an upheaval not seen since the Pistols. Johnny gushed on the subject of Morrissey, and Morrissey was equally proud of the guitarist. “Morrissey’s so confident,” said Johnny “that he doesn’t have to cloud his lyrics in metaphor.” Morrissey said that “Johnny can take the most basic, threadbare tune and you’ll just cry for hours and hours and swim in the tears.”
“One of the things about making records,” says Marr, “is that for it to work you have to be totally and utterly in love with it for those three minutes, and you have to be able to hear that love in the tracks.” While real love and true passion was missing from the pop world in 1982 and early 1983, Johnny and Morrissey knew how to love. “That might be a particular idiosyncrasy of mine,” says the guitarist.
Johnny’s compositional methods have been outlined piecemeal over the years. What is clear is that the song develops from feeling – what Marr has called “an uneasy feeling” that he tries to harness. When the muse is active, Johnny closes down other distractingelements. “I try not to party,” he says. “I keep myself really straight and sober, which is, I guess, the opposite of what people might expect. I get up early and stay up late, sleep as little as possible and harness that disconcerting uneasiness.” Marr likens the feeling to “knowing a storm is coming and [knowing] that something is going to happen.” While this method served Marr best in his post-Smiths days, often during the early and heady days of the band’s career the group component would overtake the individual creative element. “We were incredibly pragmatic in approach,” he says. “We’d do batches of three songs at a time. We’d sit down and say, ‘Let’s write a song.’” The discipline of Leiber and Stoller was paramount. “Morrissey would come round to my house and we’d do three songs just like that. Then he would go away and do the lyrics, and three days later he’d be in the studio recording it.” Morrissey and Maher were remarkably prolific, recording seventy songs in four years, and part of that urgency came from what Johnny calls Morrissey’s “emotional and physical necessity” to write. It made the process easy, “and in that way we propelled each other towards this endless supply of songs.”
Johnny has called the process “incredibly romantic.” This was not, of course, in the sense of amour , but romance with a capital ‘R.’ Heightened sensation, heightened perception, heightened emotional involvement typified the Romantic poets – Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth – and this was the ‘romance’ that the two writers experienced together. “The songwriting process, and the songs we produced, are sacred,” Johnny was to say after The Smiths’ split. “And still are to me now.” ‘Suffer Little Children’ and ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ were amongst the first, brilliant flowers of this new musical romance. Morrisseymoved our hearts because his writing was so fine. Johnny moved our hearts with his passionate guitar. And they dragged us onto the dance floor too. Paraphrasing Joni Mitchell, a great song needs a little something for the heart, a bit for the mind, and something to get you on your feet. Between them, Johnny and Morrissey did that in spades.
“I have never related to the Jeff Becks of this world,” says Marr. “I have never seen the guitar as a solo instrument. When I started to write songs, I wanted my guitar to sound like a whole record.” Marr’s comments confirm his compositional premise: “I consequently developed almost a one-man-band style.” In relation to the oft-quoted comparison with the Phil Spector ‘Wall Of Sound’ – where Spector embellished tracks with multi-tracked drums,
“One of the things about making records,” says Marr, “is that for it to work you have to be totally and utterly in love with it for those three minutes, and you have to be able to hear that love in the tracks.” While real love and true passion was missing from the pop world in 1982 and early 1983, Johnny and Morrissey knew how to love. “That might be a particular idiosyncrasy of mine,” says the guitarist.
Johnny’s compositional methods have been outlined piecemeal over the years. What is clear is that the song develops from feeling – what Marr has called “an uneasy feeling” that he tries to harness. When the muse is active, Johnny closes down other distractingelements. “I try not to party,” he says. “I keep myself really straight and sober, which is, I guess, the opposite of what people might expect. I get up early and stay up late, sleep as little as possible and harness that disconcerting uneasiness.” Marr likens the feeling to “knowing a storm is coming and [knowing] that something is going to happen.” While this method served Marr best in his post-Smiths days, often during the early and heady days of the band’s career the group component would overtake the individual creative element. “We were incredibly pragmatic in approach,” he says. “We’d do batches of three songs at a time. We’d sit down and say, ‘Let’s write a song.’” The discipline of Leiber and Stoller was paramount. “Morrissey would come round to my house and we’d do three songs just like that. Then he would go away and do the lyrics, and three days later he’d be in the studio recording it.” Morrissey and Maher were remarkably prolific, recording seventy songs in four years, and part of that urgency came from what Johnny calls Morrissey’s “emotional and physical necessity” to write. It made the process easy, “and in that way we propelled each other towards this endless supply of songs.”
Johnny has called the process “incredibly romantic.” This was not, of course, in the sense of amour , but romance with a capital ‘R.’ Heightened sensation, heightened perception, heightened emotional involvement typified the Romantic poets – Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth – and this was the ‘romance’ that the two writers experienced together. “The songwriting process, and the songs we produced, are sacred,” Johnny was to say after The Smiths’ split. “And still are to me now.” ‘Suffer Little Children’ and ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ were amongst the first, brilliant flowers of this new musical romance. Morrisseymoved our hearts because his writing was so fine. Johnny moved our hearts with his passionate guitar. And they dragged us onto the dance floor too. Paraphrasing Joni Mitchell, a great song needs a little something for the heart, a bit for the mind, and something to get you on your feet. Between them, Johnny and Morrissey did that in spades.
“I have never related to the Jeff Becks of this world,” says Marr. “I have never seen the guitar as a solo instrument. When I started to write songs, I wanted my guitar to sound like a whole record.” Marr’s comments confirm his compositional premise: “I consequently developed almost a one-man-band style.” In relation to the oft-quoted comparison with the Phil Spector ‘Wall Of Sound’ – where Spector embellished tracks with multi-tracked drums,
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