“Indie justice”: the tale of Johnny Marr’s attempt to steal ‘The Queen Is Dead’
In this post-Arctic Monkeys world, I don’t think anyone of my generation can quite understand what it meant to have an indie rock band making waves in mainstream music in the 1980s. In the infancy of punk’s influence on mainstream music, there was still a feeling that “normal people” from council estates outside of London couldn’t make it as rock stars with any authenticity. Then, suddenly, you had Morrissey, Johnny Marr and The Smiths making waves and people lost their minds.
Nowadays, to call a band like that a big deal brings to mind The Arctics and Oasis having fistfuls of the fastest-selling albums of all time. Even minnows like Razorlight and Hard-Fi had moments of genuine mainstream megastardom, such as headlining the Reading and Leeds Festival and selling out five consecutive nights at Brixton Academy, respectively. However, they were all building on a foundation set in Manchester 20 years before their time.
That foundation was absolutely needed because, back then, the nascent world of indie rock was the Wild West. The stories from that decade are still completely mind-boggling because it really was a bunch of kids with a dream doing it themselves. Early indie record labels really were a group of 20-somethings in a parent’s garage pressing and packing vinyl records themselves.
So, the attitude among the whole scene was “do whatever you can and try to get away with it”. The major labels that tried to take these mental cases under their wings learned this the hard way, and the best example of this comes from one of indie’s leading lights of the decade. When The Smiths finished recording their masterpiece, The Queen Is Dead, they brought the record to their label, Rough Trade, and immediately ran into a legal dispute with them.
What got Johnny Marr into such trouble?
The truth was that The Smiths had a fractious relationship with Rough Trade. For all the band’s hype and devoted fanbase, the band were costing the label more money than they were bringing in, and communication between the two was beginning to break down. Rough Trade got wind of the band taking meetings with other labels and immediately slapped an injunction on them, preventing The Smiths from releasing the album with anyone else.
This was the last straw for guitar wizard Johnny Marr, who teamed up with his roadie to try to take matters into his own hands. In an interview with Radcliffe and Maconie on BBC Radio 6, Marr detailed what happened next. “It looked for a second like the record was never going to come out, and I was sat with my roadie late one night in Manchester, very disgruntled about it, I just figured it was time for some indie justice!”
Marr and his friend decided to jump into the car to the recording studio all the way in Surrey, a six-hour drive of well over 200 miles (“while it was snowing”, Marr adds) and steal the album master tapes right from under the label’s nose. The “intrepid indie Robin Hoods”, as Marr charmingly claims, left empty-handed, though, due to a confrontation with the studio’s owner, a man Marr had a lot of time for.
There was no violence involved, or even much disagreement. “The only reason he didn’t actually give me the tapes was not because I was trying to nick them, but because Rough Trade hadn’t paid the bill. Other than that, we would have been OK. Anyone else would have done the same!” A good message for all you budding rock ‘n’ rollers out there.
Even in the days where the music industry was the Wild West, and you could screw over anyone and get away with it. You could still conduct yourself with consideration for others who may be screwed over by your actions too.
