麻豆约拍

1. The Smiths wrote their first song in less than 20 minutes

Marr was 18 when he and The Smiths’ frontman, Morrissey, kicked off what he describes as an “odyssey, mission, spiritual life journey” and sat down for their first song-writing session. He recalls how, despite it being only the second time they’d met properly, they “were off to the races pretty quickly.” “The first one took about 17 minutes,” says Marr, “and then I would have stopped to have had at least one cigarette, and then we did another one.”

There鈥檚 a lot of misconceptions about writing songs... it鈥檚 half divine inspiration and half craft.

Johnny Marr

2. Listening to his Irish aunties sing had a big influence on his music

Marr’s family were all from Kildare, Southern Ireland, and they moved over to Manchester in the early sixties. (His surname was originally Maher.) His parents’ “enthusiasm… obsession for music… awareness of the club scene… and this thing about going out to let off some steam and be part of a sort of community” really rubbed off on him. But the talent within his wider family also influenced his music. “I grew up around a lot of aunties and a lot of them could really sing – and with a real sadness and emotive quality,” he recalls. “I was a little kid watching all of this… That was magical to me.” It was intense but he loved it, and he acknowledges how the “melancholy thing” can definitely be heard in some of his chord changes.

3. He finds cities magical

Marr grew up in central Manchester and, although he’s considering moving to the “cusp” of a city, he can’t see himself ever saying goodbye to urban life, which is “99.9 percent” of who he is. He admits he “almost brainwashed” his children into having Saturday jobs in the city centre so they could have the same experience of being “townies” as he had as a child. These days, he likes touring Britain’s diverse towns and cities. “It’s a bit too late for me to not regard cities as magical, particularly UK cities I think,” says the musician.

4. He thinks songs are half divine inspiration and half craft

“There’s a lot of misconceptions about writing songs,” says Marr. He believes “it’s half divine inspiration and half craft,” and that the latter is often underrated. “I think craft’s got a lot going for it and is not near as dry and unemotional as people might imagine,” says the songwriter. For him, work ethic is an important part of being creative. He quotes David Hockney: “‘The muse exists but she doesn’t visit the lazy.’”

5. Marr and Morrisey wrote songs in batches of three

Marr wrote The Smiths’ music and Morrisey supplied the lyrics to his compositions. At first Morrisey handed over words written on paper but very soon the pair started getting together in a room to create the songs. “We fell into this thing of writing batches of three, which is a really good number,” says Marr. “If you just concentrate on one you get too myopic… Three’s good – you’ve got some variation.” If he arrived at a writing session with a song partially incomplete, the excitement or inspiration in the room would help him to finish it off. “We’d always walk away from a session with three really good bits of music,” says the songwriter.

6. His favourite Smiths song is Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me

Marr was on the bus when he came up with the chord sequence for his favourite Smiths song. It was a seemingly ordinary day but he fell into “a bit of an emotional hole.” It was a kind of sadness that he often experienced and actually enjoyed. The result was Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me. “There’s drama in it. There’s passion in it. It doesn’t sound like any other rock band, I don’t think. It’s almost operatic,” says the song’s creator. He says the record is “an example of everyone in the band being just brilliant,” so he’s proud of that and all his bandmates. “But speaking personally, because it started off with me having these feelings, the record, when I hear it, regardless of the words, is just my feelings blown up on a gothic scale,” he says. “So, if anyone thinks they like that song, I like it more.”

7. His guitar is “always a friend and a comfort”

Marr says his guitar enabled him to make friends. “It helped me to be sociable because I met strangers from other housing estates who wanted me to play with them,” says the musician. “But also, and more importantly for me, being a very, on the face of it, quite social person, it was a way I could get away as well.” He equates it to keeping a journal and getting his private thoughts down. “It’s a way of me being very private… It’s kind of meditative in a way.”

8. His “thing was and still is wanting to do something great”

Marr says from the age of 10 or 11, his “compass was always faced forward.” He was very young when he was in his first band but he was “dead serious.” “My thing was and still is wanting to do something great,” says the musician. “People who are great are really passionate,” he says. So, his advice to struggling songwriters now is “no one’s stopping you from being an absolute expert at what you do. And when you put your head on the pillow at night that really counts for a lot.”

9. He thinks he’ll be playing the guitar to his grave

He says it does cross his mind, as he gets older, what life would be like if he didn’t do music. But he’s certain he’ll be playing into old age. “I’m so fortunate that I have an awareness that there are people who really like hearing what I do, and they’re getting older with me,” says Marr. “I imagine that even if it’s just a handful of them, it’s worth sharing it I think.”

10. He likes his guitars beaten up

Marr isn’t a fan of new guitars that have been made to look old when they come out of the box. He prefers to distress his instruments himself. Roadies who haven’t worked with him before are “really alarmed” by the way he treats guitars, he says, but he grew up in the 70s, without fancy guitar stands. “I kind of like the look of them just strewn around,” says the musician. “I don’t mind guitars being beaten up and knocked and like they’ve had a life.”

To find out more, listen to The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed: Johnny Marr.