The Manchester music shop that gave Johnny Marr the sound of The Smiths
Back in the 1980s, The Smiths changed the ever-expanding musical legacy of Manchester forevermore, revolutionising the indie realm and spawning a litany of pretenders in their wake. Throughout it all, a core part of the band’s sound was indebted to an unsuspecting shop in the heart of the city.
Although Johnny Marr and the gang chose to sign to London’s Rough Trade label, rather than Factory or any of the independent labels springing up around Manchester at the time, the sound of the band was still endlessly indebted to the industrial surroundings of the city. You only need to listen to Morrissey’s lyrics in passing to make the connections to the perpetual drizzle and Thatcher-era gloom of Manchester. Despite their London label, then, The Smiths stayed put in the north.
It wasn’t only in Moz’s lyrics that their Mancunian surroundings were drawn upon, though. Aside from the fact that it was a Manchester performance by the Sex Pistols that brought the songwriting partnership together in the first place, Johnny Marr discovered a key part of his distinctive guitar sound via a shop on Oxford Road.
A legendary – now sorely missed – music shop beloved by multiple generations of Mancunian music obsessives, A1 Repairs stood on Oxford Road in the city centre for many years, and Marr gave them a fair bit of business during his glory years. Most notably, though, it was in that shop that he purchased the legendary red Les Paul that carved out the sound of The Smiths’ 1985 album, Meat Is Murder.
“I was looking for a harder sound for the Meat Is Murder album, and I tried a few different guitars before coming around to the Les Paul,” the guitarist once recalled of that time. “There are a lot of traditional rock cliches associated with this guitar, so I had to work past that.” Namely, Marr’s distinctive indie rock playing style didn’t share much in common with the flamboyant hard rock with which the solid body of the Les Paul is typically associated.
Nevertheless, as Marr continued, “My red Les Paul is on more records that I’ve done than any other guitar, by a mile. It’s on everything I’ve done.”
Cryptically explaining, “It’s my go-to for that thing that I think people think that I do all the time. Which I do a lot, but not exclusively! But I do think it makes me play that way – which might surprise a lot of people, with it being a Les Paul.”
Marr, having amassed multiple hundreds of guitars over the course of his illustrious career, has no shortage of iconic axes in his arsenal. Perhaps his most infamous, in fact, is the far more delicate Gibson ES-335, purchased during the early days of The Smiths’ success story while in New York City.
In terms of longevity, though, that fateful Les Paul purchased in A1 Repairs, Manchester, has been utterly essential, not just in carving out the sound of The Smiths and their Meat Is Murder era, but in influencing the sound of the guitarist ever since.
That red Les Paul was certainly not Marr’s last flirt with the instrument – he famously lent at least two different Les Pauls to Oasis’ songwriter Noel Gallagher during the 1990s, one of which was fittingly damaged in a stage brawl. However, it was that A1 buy that began Marr’s love affair with the model, changing the course of indie history in the process.
