The guitarist who became Johnny Marr’s first hero: “A neat trick”
Indie as a genre is a wooley and largely useless tag, never meaning much beyond ‘band with guitar’. Even then, it often enjoys publicity and promotion afforded by corporate pushing behind the ‘independent’ label. But if indie was to look or sound like anybody, it would be Manchester’s The Smiths.
Signed to Rough Trade Records in 1983, guitarist Johnny Marr’s melodic jangle punk and frontman Morrissey’s sensitive, lyrical wit and eschewing of rock machismo crafted a formula with bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce that oversaw a breathtaking flurry of brilliance in four short years, four albums and numerous singles at a pace unseen since The Beatles.
Like so many bands in the UK music world before them, The Smiths’ major break would come from their 1983 debut on BBC’s Top of the Pops miming to ‘This Charming Man’. While the post-punks often rejected the TV institution, and The Clash famously refused to ever play, Marr and the band had a cherished affection for the show, feverishly exposed to all the glam and glitter that dominated the charts in all its Technicolor effervescence in the early 1970s.
Remembering how arresting those performances could be, Morrissey swished his bunch of Gladioli with lacklustre indifference as they ‘performed’ their single, ingraining themselves alongside Ziggy Stardust‘s limp-wristed arm over Mick Ronson’s shoulders or Alice Cooper’s sword-fencing shenanigans during ‘Schools Out’ in the TV pop landscape.
“The fact that he was so blatantly in love with guitars was a cool thing that set him apart from David Bowie…”
Johnny marr
Marr never forgot the characters that beamed into his living room every Thursday evening as a kid and stayed with him as a teenager, first nabbing a black Gibson Les Paul standard and on the road to pop stardom. It was Marc Bolan’s T Rex that first struck Marr as the glam poster boy for pop’s transportive window away from Wythenshawe suburbia.
“He was my first hero,” Marr told Paste Magazine in 2023. “The fact that he was so blatantly in love with guitars was a cool thing that set him apart from David Bowie… how they influenced my generation was that they happened to be very commercial and actually had number one records on the charts but were credible at the same time and alternative at the same time. That’s always a pretty neat trick, to pull off massively commercial, literally the top of the charts, but also credible with the counterculture”.
Bolan keenly pursued an unabashed embrace of pop at the dawn of the 1970s. Before T Rex, there was Tyrannosaurus Rex, the psychedelic folk outfit championed by John Peel, playing the first-ever Glastonbury Festival and boasting album titles like My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows. Sensing the glitter in the air before Bowie had conceived his Martian alter-ego, Bolan shortened the band name, ditched the flares for shiny satin slacks and velvet jackets and heralded the arrival of glam with 1971’s ‘Hot Love’ and the ensuing ‘T Rextasy’ that gripped the nation.
Bolan’s simplified rock heft and glitter fun echoed into the 1980s, with Marr honouring the late glam star with The Smiths’ ‘Panic’, a fantastic single that took potshots at the DJs of the day, lovingly draped in Metal Guru’s arresting vibrato swagger.
