“The things that I aspite to”: the song Johnny Marr wishes he had written
One fateful day on tour with The Smiths in New York, Johnny Marr took a trip to a guitar store. Inside the naffly named We Buy Guitars, a red 1959 Gibson 355 shone like a beacon. In his eyes, it was lighting up the whole of 48th Street—an axe-shaped flare. In all likelihood, it had been hung there gathering more dust than dung beetle with a cleaning job in Dracula’s castle. But not to Marr.
It was snapped up by the mystic ‘Seymour’ from Sire Records, who had bought Brian Jones a guitar in a 48th Street shop a couple of decades before. He handed it over to Marr like a torch, and they headed back to the hotel. As Marr writes in his memoir, “When I got to my room, I took my new 355 out of its old, beat-up case, and with the very first thing I played, I wrote our next single ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’, then the B-side ‘Girl Afraid’. That’s what happens with some instruments. They already have music inside them.”
In truth, it was Marr who already had music inside him. Long before he even knew getting to New York was possible, he was buzzing around Manchester with tunes in his head, knocking on his mate Morrisey’s door, asking to lend a guitar double-quick so that he could get a melody down before he forgot it. He was always inspired by the sounds and sights around him, melding the music of Stooges that moved him with the maudlin poetry of Wythenshawe’s streets to create something entirely unique.
He wasn’t alone on this front. The frontrunners for capturing unerring Britishness while drawing inspiration from the roar of American rock ‘n’ roll were – and perhaps still are – The Kinks. They harnessed the brooding energy of Link Wray and mellowed it badinage and bliss of an English cricket pitch, or else twisted it to the tone of nights out in pubs.
The latter is captured electrically on ‘All Day And All Of The Night’. Now, there’s a riff. It sounds years ahead of its time. In fact, it’s utterly timeless. It couldn’t have been written by anyone else. And yet, it is so much part of the British musical canon that you barely consider it as something that was written at all at this point. Each and every single one of those superlatives could apply to Marr’s work with The Smiths, too.
So, it comes as no surprise that he told Fred Perry that it’s the track he wishes he had written. As he told Guitar Player in the 1990s, he always saw a kinship with the band behind the anthem. “We were against synthesizers, the Conservative government, groups with names like Orchestral Manoeuvers In The Dark, the English monarchy, cock-rock guitar solos, and the American music scene at the time,“ he explained. “We stood for the Englishness of the Kinks.“
In fact, they inspired his songwriting outlook in many ways. “I tend to like singing, wait for it, for want of a better term, rock and roll,“ he told Vulture. “I like singing kind of upbeat rock songs. I’m not really into being a crooner too much. The singers that I like — or the things that I aspire to, rather — are people like Ray Davies from the Kinks.“
These touchstones unite the pair. There’s a sincerity and naturalistic flow to them both. They are performers and rock stars yet distant and dreamy, like Bert Jansch, curled up in his bedroom, gazing at the ceiling, while covering Chuck Berry and thinking about playing The Filmore. You put all that together in amber, and you have something like ‘All Day And All Of The Night’—a song full of yearning, gusto, invention and attitude, all in equal and opposing measure.
