Johnny Marr on the first artists that “grabbed my attention”
The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr grew up in a household which was dominated by rock ‘n’ roll. Thanks to his parents, it was an unavoidable force of nature in his family home. The couple were keen to indoctrinate their children into their lifelong obsession with contemporary music, and Marr worshipped the guitar from an early age.
In those days, the guitar was still an exciting, fresh instrument, and Marr was insistent on seeking out as much of it as he possibly could get his hands on. Marr started playing the acoustic guitar when he was four years old and gravitated to any music he heard driven by the instrument on the radio or from his parent’s record collection.
Marr was raised upon a diet of artists who laid the foundations for rock ‘n’ roll during the 1950s, allowing the genre to become an even broader cultural phenomenon during the following decade. For the guitarist, Eddie Cochran and The Everly Brothers were two of his early favourites, as they were responsible for showing him the power of artistic expression.
During an interview on BBC Radio 2’s Tracks Of My Years, Marr selected a range of songs that have been important to them throughout his lifetime. Starting at the beginning of his relationship with music, The Smiths founder named ‘C’mon Everybody’ by Cochran, released in 1958 and explained why he appreciated the track.
Marr explained: “I grew up in a young Irish family. My parents were young; that is when my sister and I were born. Over the years, when people know that I was brought up in an Irish family, they have this assumption, and I’m always asked whether my parents used to play Irish music and the idea of The Chieftans or whatever it is, but they absolutely didn’t. If anything, they were rebelling against that because they were young and moved over from Kildare to Manchester and were really into rock ‘n’ roll.”
He continued: “‘C’mon Everybody’ (Eddy Cochran), there was a number of records that as a little boy I’d started to twig had guitar on that were built on guitars because some of those old rock ‘n’ roll records were built on piano, Little Richard and all of that stuff but the Eddie Cochran records and The Everly Brothers records were the first that really grabbed my attention because I really love the sound of them.”
Elaborating further on why he selected ‘C’mon Everybody’, Marr explained how Cochran was an innovator who created sounds which would later become familiar to millions. The guitarist remarked: “In modern parlance, Eddie Cochran doubled down really; he kind of went, ‘If we’re going to have acoustic guitars on them, let’s have them really loud’. The riff that you hear there to us 50 years later, he invented that really and put it in the culture.”
While Marr later moved on to bands such as The Stooges, who were critical to his artistic development, he may have never found them without his parents forcing Cochran and The Everly Brothers upon him before he could barely walk.
