A review of Johnny Marr: Set The Boy Free
Johnny Marr is something of a legendary character in pop music. His prolific songwriting and unique yet varied guitar style have combined in various forms over the last 40 years. The speed of his movements and his perpetual creative transitions translate into a punchy life story. His new autobiography rarely pauses for breath. The pace of the book seems to reflect the pace of the life being described. It’s dizzying stuff. Even when he has to take a little break to recover from illness, his convalescence is cut short when a tempting offer comes along.
In these pages it seems clear that he is driven by a kind of pulsating and unyielding creative impulsive. We feel his eagerness to get down his ideas and to make music — and then to move on to the next opportunity. The need to create is relentless. Obsessive perhaps. There is a sense of constant movement, with one project being completed and the next immediately following it. That pattern repeats throughout the book.
The Smiths finished when Marr was only 23. At that point he already had a career’s worth of music behind him. But it is at that moment that the book finds another gear. Hearing about The Smiths is interesting, but this book is as much about what happened afterwards. The stories rattle away at a pace that means that the book sweeps you along. Never really dwelling or reflecting for too long, Marr doesn’t seem to like to live in the past. Occasionally I found myself wanting the book to slow so that we could get more detail or find out exactly what happened. The pace makes it a bit tantalising in places, with interesting lines or little ruptures being left without being given much attention.
Each step of the book comes with a new opportunity to write songs — Marr admits that he far prefers the studio to touring, though there is a clear relish for live performance. Songs take centre stage in the stories told here. The opportunities that Marr follows take lots of forms, but they are always about songs. At its heart though is the love of collaboration. The story of The Smiths is told here in terms of the collaboration with Morrissey. What happens after is also a tale of collaborations. Moving through new collaborations as he joins bands like The The, The Cribs, Modest Mouse, The Pretenders, The Healers or where he writes with other artists like Kirsty MacColl or Billy Bragg. Then Electronic falls somewhere between these two — giving his impulse to create a space beyond the possibilities of the guitar. It is only towards the end of the book that his two solo albums mean that he is focusing less on collaboration and more upon individual expression. Even then the band he forms still offers a collaborative outlet for performance and he invites others to contribute to his solo recordings.
The book is a story of collaboration but it is as much a story of the honing of a craft. Admirably Marr doesn’t get caught up in the gossip, he has too much to say about art. The book tells a good deal about the development of his technique, his sources of inspiration, how he crafted his style of playing and the studio techniques he deployed.
This is not a book that tells all the grim details of the demise of The Smiths and the subsequent legals battles. But it does tell of how Marr amazingly wrote the music for ‘William, it was really nothing’, ‘Please, please, please, let me get what I want’ and ‘How soon is now?’ in a weekend. There are many such stories of inspiration. This is not to say there is nothing personal here, but rather that the tone is more positive and avoids the salacious. There are still personal moments, with accounts of his childhood attachment to a toy guitar, his loss at hearing of the death of Kirsty MacColl and Joe Moss, his love of running and his reconciliation with Andy Rourke. Written in a very direct style, the balance is towards stories of creative expression, craft and the possibilities of collaboration. Johnny Marr’s book is a story of a mobile life lived in creative motion. A little like a riff.
