Set the Boy Free by Johnny Marr

Author:Johnny Marr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Queen Is Dead

It occurred to me one afternoon that the next Smiths album had to be a serious piece of work. I was walking through my kitchen when it hit me that, amazingly, the band were now being talked about in England in the same exalted terms as bands like The Who and The Kinks, and that we had come to mean a lot to a generation of music fans. It was at this moment that the pressure of it really hit me. Our previous album had been number one, and we’d had a run of hits. As great as the situation was, it felt to me that if I was to accept that kind of praise and be compared to those kinds of artists, then I would be similarly judged, and this revelation, far from being a cosy ego trip, was suddenly overwhelming and froze me in my tracks. I knew that the next album had to be the best I could possibly do. The stakes had got higher, and greatness was a possibility for the band if we were prepared to go for it. I stood and thought about it, and then I said to myself, ‘You’re going to have to dig deep, whatever it takes.’

Morrissey came over to my house one night. There were some other friends knocking around, and after socialising for a while we decamped to a room on our own and I picked up my Martin acoustic. I was ready to play him the songs I’d been working on, and as usual we sat just a couple of feet away from each other, with me on a chair and him on the edge of the coffee table. There was the customary sense of anticipation as I hit the ‘record’ button on the cassette machine on my knees and started strumming a tune. It was a waltzy ballad that was tentative in the verse and then kicked into a dramatic chorus, building in intensity as it went along. There was a lot of promise in the tune, and we knew it would be good for the new album. I’d been playing the next one for just a few days: it had a breezy minor chord pattern that went to an uplifting chorus, and I’d inserted a rhythmic skip from The Velvet Underground for some mischief, as they’d copied it from the Stones. At first I thought the song might be a B-side because it came to me so easily, but as I played it there was something certain about it, an indefinable quality that comes out of nowhere. We were getting the feeling that we had something good. Then I threw down a third tune, just because we were on a roll. It was in total contrast to the others and sounded like Sandie Shaw or an eccentric vaudevillian romp. I drove Morrissey back to his place with the cassette of the three songs that would become ‘I Know It’s Over’, ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ and ‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’.

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