The band Johnny Marr could never understand: “Not being able to work it out”
Johnny Marr is most well-known for his contributions to The Smiths. The Mancunian musician forged the post-punk band’s truly iconic guitar sound, off-setting Morrissey’s melancholic laments with jangly strums brimming over with hope. But Marr’s contributions to guitar music extend far beyond ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’. He has worked with several other bands who have become essential names in the indie scene, from The The to The Cribs.
Decades after his days with The Smiths, Marr also played a brief stint with indie rock outfit Modest Mouse, who first formed in the late 1990s. Led by Isaac Brock, they concocted gorgeous guitar soundscapes that captivated audiences. They won the masses over with their signature track ‘Float On’ and even now, two decades after the single was first released, it remains a staple in the genre, as do Modest Mouse.
Although Brock is the only remaining member from the original lineup, Modest Mouse are still going strong. They carried on releasing consistently throughout the 2000s, keeping indie kids on-side with each new dose of indie rock goodness, and particularly with the addition of Marr in 2006. The band recruited the former Smiths member to play on their fifth record, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, which arrived in 2007.
We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank was a strange album. It was thrashing and unpredictable, both in its instrumentation and in its themes, committed to the nautical themes denoted in its title. The bold album stunned audiences when it hit record store shelves in the late 2000s, but they weren’t the only ones. Marr himself was stunned by the album, and by the process of working with Modest Mouse.
The guitar legend reflected on the record during a conversation with Uncut, remembering how he immediately gelled with band leader Brock. “When I first met Isaac from Modest Mouse it just worked straight away,” he recalled, “But we weren’t there to mess around, although we gave ourselves that get-out. Whatever it was we were gonna do, we were going to have fun trying over a 10-day period.”
It sounds like they certainly achieved that aim. As Marr recalls it, no idea was off limits. “There’s six of us, one of the drummers might want to do something Prince Buster or The Minutemen,” he remembered, “the bass player will want to get something like old Celtic music, the other drummer wants it to sound techno. And I’m on whatever trip I’m on and so is Isaac.”
But Marr didn’t find the genre-less chaos of their writing process overwhelming, as many other musicians might. Rather, he decided to lean into it, to accept that perhaps he didn’t know what Modest Mouse were trying to make, and perhaps he never would. “By the third or fourth day working I remember standing in the middle of the room playing very loud and wondering to myself what this music actually is,” he remembered, “And not being able to work it out – which was perfect.”
Although a specific direction can often help guide a band in the studio, it can also prove limiting to artistic creation. Rather than allowing this to happen, Modest Mouse threw everything they could at the wall to see what stuck. The chaos and freedom of the band’s process on We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, which Marr slotted into seamlessly, then spawned one of the most interesting albums in their entire catalogue.
