Johnny Marr on the Roxy Music track he called “the best kind of avant-garde”
While Johnny Marr is an indie hero, a mastermind who pushed guitar music forward with his constantly arpeggiating, sliding approach to the six-string, his worldview wasn’t just formed by the punk ethos and a desire to do something completely distinct from bombastic stadium rock. It was, in every sense of the word, high art, with Morrissey’s kitchen sink dramas offering the perfect other side of the coin to the guitarist’s highly stylised sound.
Although Marr’s influences range from the proto-punk of The Stooges to the disco licks of Nile Rodgers and Chic, one band that he’s also been openly enamoured with is art rock legends, Roxy Music. While the eclectic band of former art students are most often remembered for their spacey outfits, Brian Eno’s comically tiny bangs and their most accessible hit, the funky ‘Love is the Drug’, they were much more than that and absolute innovators.
Although Phil Manzanera’s funky predilections and choppy guitars undoubtedly made an impression on the young Marr, who has always been a fan of substantial grooves—as his love of Chic also confirms—as does the sheer number of incredibly dynamic basslines Andy Rourke delivered for The Smiths, the general philosophy of Roxy Music also made a tremendous impact.
One thing that Roxy Music did better than most was pushing the confines of popular music by stretching the scope of the form itself. Of course, they were an immensely popular band, but they were greatly experimental with and without synth wizard Eno, who left in 1973. Their forward-thinking fusion of genres, experimentations with songwriting and dynamics, and generally artful outlook were widely influential as, through it all, they created concise poppy hooks that had much more artistic substance than whatever else was on the charts.
When speaking to Music Radar in 2022, Marr noted that The Smiths also successfully managed to be catchy but deep. He then used the swelling funk of ‘Both Ends Burning’ from Roxy Music’s 1975 album Siren as a key example of this. He called it “the best kind of avant-garde”.
He said: “There are so many great examples. For me, growing up as a kid, it was Roxy Music with Street Life or Both Ends Burning. You listen to Both Ends Burning, that was a pop single! And the attitude of the singer and what he is saying, and the way he is putting his voice across, and just the start of it… That is the best kind of avant-garde, I think. “
These were precisely the artistic values that made an impact on Marr when he was young and developing his ear. Naturally, over time, they would form a part of his approach, which would be heard clearly in The Smiths’ work, such as on cuts like ‘Sheila Take A Bow’, which kicks off with a brass band playing. Another example is The Queen is Deadcommencing with a sample of ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’ from the 1962 drama The L-Shaped Room. Marr added: “The musique concrète aspects, fade in/fade out, all those kind of little arty things are subversive.”
These are the kinds of things that qualify pop music as art for Marr because, when done properly, pop music requires much more thought than simply catchy hooks and throwaway lines. Whether it be slick musical additions or the presentation itself, The Smiths understood that the whole package was required to make a splash, and that’s exactly what they did. It was very Roxy Music-esque.
