Johnny Marr on how Chic inspired his Bernard Sumner collaboration
In the late 1980s, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr and New Order’s Bernard Sumner formed Electronic, a synth-dance act that remained their primary side project throughout the 1990s. Together, the pair released three albums and collaborated with fellow synthpop pioneers Pet Shop Boys.
When Marr sat down with Stereogum to discuss his varied discography, the guitarist highlighted the pair’s debut single, 1989’s ‘Getting Away With It’. Marr discussed the numerous influences that were put into the song and the band’s music as a whole. Although Marr himself didn’t have much experience in the world of synthpop, he trusted the people he was working with.
“The thing with synthpop, it was all about who was making it,” Marr explained. “In the hands of the obvious subjects, ’80s technology was vapid. But in the hands of New Order, Cabaret Voltaire, Bobby O, Pet Shop Boys, it was great. The first time I ever met Bernard Sumner, the Smiths were making their first album. He asked if I’d come play guitar on a record he was producing for Factory.”
“I walked into the control room, and he was finishing a mix of a song called ‘Looking From A Hilltop’ by Section 25. It just blew me away,” Marr added. “I don’t care what it’s made on. If it’s pop music, I like for it to be clever and heady. Sometimes the cleverness or the subversion or the interesting aspect of it is provided by the lyric. Neil Tennant was the master of that.”
For Marr, the experience became as educational as it was liberating. “I couldn’t wait to be working with the machines. I knew The Smiths were never going to make music like Kraftwerk. In my own way, going into that last Smiths record — I’d hired an Emulator II. I couldn’t buy one, they were so expensive then. I’d fallen back in love with David Bowie’s Low. I got this emulator, and I was thinking, ‘OK, this is a way me and my band can pull ourselves away from this kind of reductive ghetto the music press were trying to create.’ This anorak indie thing.”
“Luckily, we’d managed to stay ahead of it. I’m aware when I talk about this, it’s incredible musical snobbery, but, hey, it had to be that way, you know?” Marr opined. “That fed into my love of technology. It was a small leap from working with an emulator on those last two Smiths records to wanting to know exactly how a DMX worked.”
Marr also explained how his guitar expertise opened up opportunities elsewhere, comparing it to how Chic’s Nile Rodgers was able to make the leap to production. “The situation for me is, I became an archetypal guitar player to a lot of people. The archetype doesn’t do that. The archetype stays in the same jacket for 40 years with the same people. But if you look back to the few interviews I did in the ’80s, I used to mention Nile Rodgers. That wasn’t purely because of his guitar playing, I sensed a similar MO. Now that he and I know each other quite well, we know that about each other. He was working with Bowie, and INXS, and Duran Duran. We’ve just got this insatiable enthusiasm for putting our guitar in places it might not have any business being.”
“It’s the modern way of advancing the role of the guitar player,” Marr concludes. “We love playing the guitar, we love making records, so believe it or not Nile and myself have a lot in common. I was reading to make that leap. ‘Getting Away With It’, I wrote the music for the chorus and the verses I’m just doing Chic all the way through it, and I made no secret of that. It all makes sense to me, you know?”
