piano and strings – Johnny again relates his own attitude not to individual traits in the Spector sound, but to the entire package. For Johnny, as the guitar was an orchestra, so Spector was “the overall musician.” “Not purely sonically, but you could hear in his records that he was completely obsessed. There were no spaces – any harmonic suggestion was realised. It’s a kind of production thing.” Marr’s composition was a complete process from start to finish – individual songs conceived as a production exercise as much as a progression of chords or melodic structure. “If you’ve got four or five musicians playing then you will get loads of natural harmonics and spaces in there between the instruments. Spector was someone who would hear all these tiny suggestions and then fill every one in… [a] big, big, dense apocalyptic sound which I definitely connected with.” Johnny hears ‘the whole thing.’ “I’ll play a new song and hear piano and strings and then I try and play all that on my one guitar,” he told Martin Roach.
Maher’s playing style attracted attention early on. “Johnny would do interviews, and he wouldn’t cite the usual guitar heroes,” notes Alberto vocalist and academic CP Lee. “I specifically and distinctly remember him talking about the influence of English folk-rock. It’s now very apparent – because we know more about it – but [at the time] I detected the likes of Bert Jansch and Davey Graham. And it’s what made his sound unique – it’s definitely not American guitar-playing.” Billy Bragg spoke to me and also recalls talking to Johnny about his own guitar playing and the influences upon it. While most journalists summed up his style through analogies with The Byrds, Bragg was surprised that a British player should spring to Johnny’s mind first. “I said, ‘What were your influences in America?’” remembered Billy. “And he said, ‘Martin Carthy.’ If I would make reference points on people like Terry and Gay Woods, he would know them. It wasn’t beyond him, and he’s worked with Bert Jansch as well. [All that] is what he brought – that I thought was really great – to The Smiths.”
Early in the history of the band, Johnny was keen to emphasise that it was the band that was important, not individual members of it. This was not his vehicle, nor indeed Morrissey’s, but a group concept from start to finish. From that moment The Smiths were a unit. While he could not relate to self-indulgent guitar heroes, neither was he overly inspired by solo singer-songwriters. But The Smiths would represent the very best of pop music, whether it be Fifties, Sixties or Seventies. “We’re trying to bring back that precious element which is, I suppose, reminiscent of an earlier time,” he told Bill Black for Sounds . “Lots of common ground, but with separate influences to bring out something we believe to be the best we’ve ever heard.” This would be tempered – crucially – by Johnny’s ownexperiences. “I am a white musician,” he says, “born in the Sixties, in the provinces. And that is the way it sounds.” While Johnny would go on to earn respect, and an enviable reputation, for being able to walk into any studio in the world and ignite the work in hand, he never became a whingeing guitar soloist. “When that stuff is bad – it’s the worst,” he says.
While the general music scene was stagnant – unless you were in the hair-dressing or lace industries – there was some fun in the singles charts: Soft Cell, Culture Club, The Jam, Bow Wow Wow, ABC and XTC, Bananarama/Fun Boy Three, Adam Ant and the resplendent Associates all made serious inroads into the top twenty in 1982, along with an air of style or fun. However, a number of these were already five-years-old as acts, and pop was in perhaps its most vapid phase since the sterile months of the late Fifties and pre-Beatles Sixties. There was little heart, precious little soul,
Maher’s playing style attracted attention early on. “Johnny would do interviews, and he wouldn’t cite the usual guitar heroes,” notes Alberto vocalist and academic CP Lee. “I specifically and distinctly remember him talking about the influence of English folk-rock. It’s now very apparent – because we know more about it – but [at the time] I detected the likes of Bert Jansch and Davey Graham. And it’s what made his sound unique – it’s definitely not American guitar-playing.” Billy Bragg spoke to me and also recalls talking to Johnny about his own guitar playing and the influences upon it. While most journalists summed up his style through analogies with The Byrds, Bragg was surprised that a British player should spring to Johnny’s mind first. “I said, ‘What were your influences in America?’” remembered Billy. “And he said, ‘Martin Carthy.’ If I would make reference points on people like Terry and Gay Woods, he would know them. It wasn’t beyond him, and he’s worked with Bert Jansch as well. [All that] is what he brought – that I thought was really great – to The Smiths.”
Early in the history of the band, Johnny was keen to emphasise that it was the band that was important, not individual members of it. This was not his vehicle, nor indeed Morrissey’s, but a group concept from start to finish. From that moment The Smiths were a unit. While he could not relate to self-indulgent guitar heroes, neither was he overly inspired by solo singer-songwriters. But The Smiths would represent the very best of pop music, whether it be Fifties, Sixties or Seventies. “We’re trying to bring back that precious element which is, I suppose, reminiscent of an earlier time,” he told Bill Black for Sounds . “Lots of common ground, but with separate influences to bring out something we believe to be the best we’ve ever heard.” This would be tempered – crucially – by Johnny’s ownexperiences. “I am a white musician,” he says, “born in the Sixties, in the provinces. And that is the way it sounds.” While Johnny would go on to earn respect, and an enviable reputation, for being able to walk into any studio in the world and ignite the work in hand, he never became a whingeing guitar soloist. “When that stuff is bad – it’s the worst,” he says.
While the general music scene was stagnant – unless you were in the hair-dressing or lace industries – there was some fun in the singles charts: Soft Cell, Culture Club, The Jam, Bow Wow Wow, ABC and XTC, Bananarama/Fun Boy Three, Adam Ant and the resplendent Associates all made serious inroads into the top twenty in 1982, along with an air of style or fun. However, a number of these were already five-years-old as acts, and pop was in perhaps its most vapid phase since the sterile months of the late Fifties and pre-Beatles Sixties. There was little heart, precious little soul,
Similar Books
