“A bit blow-waved”: The problem Johnny Marr had with Bryan Ferry
Towards the end of The Smiths, Johnny Marr was already looking to burnish his craft. While he had revolutionised British guitar music during his five years with the band, by 1987, he needed a total refresh. He felt stale. As with all prolific creatives, he had exhausted that particular sonic mine, and when frontman Morrissey started imploring the band to do more 1960s covers by artists of the ilk of Cilla Black, he knew it was enough. This wasn’t what he started the band to do.
The ending of a band of such consequence as the Mancunian quartet might have spelt the end of the career for other artists equally eager to fly the roost and go someplace else. Yet, Marr isn’t like most musicians. In just five short years, he had become his generation’s definitive guitar hero. His sliding arpeggios, punk ethos, and generally unique way of approaching compositions opened the eyes of many younger listeners. He’d majorly impact future Britpop stars such as Noel Gallagher and Bernard Butler. Even at this early point, he was a vital part of the country’s cultural fabric.
There wasn’t a world wherein Marr was going to slip through the cracks and fade into obscurity. Just as the news started to emerge that the end of The Smiths was nigh in June 1987, with him taking a break from the band, citing the inner band tensions and exhaustion, it became clear to the music industry that the hottest talent was about to become a free agent. Typically, the suitors queued up.
In August 1987, Marr briefly joined Chrissie Hynde’s The Pretenders and appeared on the single ‘Windows of the World’ and its B-side ‘1969’. After leaving the band, he toured and recorded with The The from 1988 to 1994. Also, in 1988, he formed Electronic with New Order frontman Bernard Sumner, and they’d be sporadically active throughout the next decade.
Yet, before joining The Pretenders, Marr had already recorded with another famous artist and one that had had a defining impact on the self-referential, avant-garde-in-pop-music experimentation of The Smiths, former Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry. He collaborated with Ferry on ‘The Right Stuff’, the lead single from that year’s Bête Noire, which was adapted from The Smiths’s B-side to ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ – ‘Money Changes Everything’.
In fact, Marr was one of many legendary musicians to feature on the record, with the likes of David Gilmour, Guy Pratt, Marcus Miller, and Neil Hubbard all appearing across its run time. The album was a worldwide success, and ‘The Right Stuff’ was its highest charting single, a credit to Marr and Ferry’s work.
However, according to Marr in an interview with Sonics in 1989, he didn’t have the best memory of working with one of his ultimate heroes in Ferry. Also, given the clean-cut sophistipop nature of the final product and his punk, anti-commercial ethos, he described the former Roxy Music man as “a bit blow-waved,” seemingly pointing to his apparently superficial or vacuous nature outside of music.
Marr said: “He [Ferry] didn’t know who I was. But he was looking for co-writers and someone suggested me to him. Someone played him some Smiths records and he went ‘Oh, this guy plays guitar all right!’ So he invited me down to the studio. Bryan Ferry was an old hero of mine and it was great to work with him, but the end result was…he’s a bit blow-waved.”
Regardless of Marr’s feelings about Ferry and the track, its release date, September 28th, 1987, is significant. That was the same day that The Smiths’s final album, Strangeways, Here We Come, arrived. They’re two majorly contrasting efforts, and you can only imagine how strange the guitarist felt that day, as The Smiths had already ended. One was the posthumous final release of the band that made him, and the other was a reminder that sometimes, despite their consequence for your life, it’s better not to meet your heroes, let alone work with them.
