Girl afraid - "I had just got back from New York and was obsessed with Little Richard. I just kept thinking, 'What'd sound like Little Richard on guitar?', which is how I came up with it.

"I started to think about piano melodies. For example, Girl Afraid, which is an extra track on the Heaven Knows single; I started off playing 'pidgin' piano in the studio one day and transferred it to guitar. When I wrote the song I was conscious that it should have a fast New Orleans piano part. It turned into a Kinks-style, real 60's erratic drum beat bop, which is fine but it started off as a piano part!" - Johnny Marr

Still Ill - "Looking back on the first album now I can say that I'm not as madly keen on it as I was. I think that a lot of the fire was missing on it and most of our supporters realise that as well. Although having said that, 'Still Ill' and 'Suffer Little Children' and 'Hand That Rocks' are all still great songs."

"'Still Ill' came to me on the train back from London to Manchester around the time of Hand In Glove's release." - Johnny Marr

Hand In Glove - "When we did 'Hand In Glove,' that was brilliant because it was a fantastic piece of vinyl. But there was never a time when I put my feet up and said, 'Ah, I'm happy.'"

"That song came about when I was round my parents' house one Sunday evening. I started playing this riff on a crappy guitar I kept there. Angie - who's now my wife - was with me and she kept saying, 'That's really good!' I was panicking because I had nothing to record it on, so we decided to drive to Morrissey's, because he had a tape recorder. I sat in the back of the car playing the riff over and over so I wouldn't forget it. On the way, as is her want, Angie kept saying, 'Make it sound more like Iggy'. I was just hoping Morrissey would be in. Well, I knew he would be, he was always in. When we got there he was a bit taken aback, it hadn't been arranged and it was a Sunday night-unheard of! He let me in and I played the riff and he said, 'That's very good'. About five days later we were rehearsing and Morrissey wanted to play the song. When we heard the vocals to that we were all like,wow... From then on it was always going to be the first single." - Johnny Marr

What Difference Does It Make? - "It was all right. I didn't think it was a particularly strong one. A lot of people liked it and it got to No. 10. It followed 'This Charming Man' and was part of that peak. It was all right. It went down great live, and that's when I liked it.

Every song has to be worth doing every single night. There was one stage where I was playing 'What Difference Does It Make?' seven or eight gigs on the trot and I didn't like the feeling. I knew that this was not why I had got involved in a band in the first place." - Johnny Marr

"What 'William It Was Really Nothing' is about is... it occurred to me that within popular music if ever there were any records that discussed marriage they were always from the female's standpoint - female singers singing to women: whenever there were any songs saying 'do not marry, stay single, self-preservation, etc'. I thought it was about time there was a male voice speaking directly to another male saying that marriage was a waste of time... that, in fact, it was 'absolutely nothing'." - Morrissey

"Some [tracks] may have been sped up. I don't know whether 'Wiliiam' was though; I didn't think so, just because it was so fast when we played it, we can't have wanted it even faster!

This Charming Man

"Of all our singles I think I like 'This Charming Man' best, just because the rhythms are so infectious. Smiths music really moves me." - Andy Rourke

"A couple of days before I wrote 'This Charming Man' I'd heard 'Walk Out To Winter' (by Aztec Camera) on Radio 1, and I felt a little jealous. My competitive urges kicked in. I felt that we needed something up-beat and in a major key for Rough Trade to get behind. That's why I wrote it in the key of G, which to this day I rarely do. I knew that 'This Charming Man' would be our next single. I did the whole thing in one go into this TEAC 3-track tape recorder that I used to write on. I came up with the basic chords and immediately overdubbed the top line and intro riff."

"I wrote This Charming Man for a John Peel session. I just leapt out of bed and wrote it. It was the culmination of trying to find a way of playing that was non-rock but still expressed my personality. I felt we needed something more upbeat in a different key and was miffed that Aztec Camera's Roddy Frame was getting on the radio and we weren't. That's why it's got that sunny disposition; my usual default setting was Manchester in the rain. When we were recording it, Rough Trade's Geoff Travis came in and said: 'That's got to be the single.'"

"I remember writing it, it was in preparation for a John Peel single. I wrote it the same night as 'Pretty Girls Make Graves' and 'Still Ill'."

"I don't want to be playing 'This Charming Man' when I'm... 22." - Johnny Marr

How Soon Is Now? - "I had an impression of what Creedence were supposed to be about, partly because I had already gotten into The Gun Club and heard 'Run Through The Jungle' from their second album. It triggered off some echoes of what I'd heard of Creedence. So I made this demo, 'Swamp', trying to capture the same vibe. It didn't have the tremelo figure on it, but it had the slide part in regular concert tuning. It was quite a pretty figure, but only hinting at what it became. It was still quite passive, nowhere near as intense as it got. I remember us playing it for a while and me really hoping that we could make it sound like a Smiths track, because the chances were it might not have. We kicked it around until it did feel like us, but I could tell that it had something lacking. So I saw my opportunity to throw the tremelo part down that I'd been looking to use for quite a while."

"It was my boyhood love of 'Disco Stomp', Can's 'I Want More' and then tying the whole thing together with the Bo Diddley bow, as it were. That was the whole thing."

"I wanted an intro that was almost as potent as 'Layla.' When it plays in a club or a pub, everyone knows what it is."

"I've actually started using a digital delay line, just because for one song in particular I needed to use it. I just sent the effect straight through the Fender twin. The song is the 'B' side of the twelve-inch 'William, It Was Really Nothing' and it's called 'How Soon Is Now?' which is a 'Bo Diddley' thing, so I had to have the vibrato. I sent all the signal through the Fender twin and just put straight guitar through the Roland. I just stuck a slide on and it worked. I was a little bit worried because it was difficult to play. For the first time I'd done something really tricky in the studio which I had to reproduce live. We've done lots of things which I'd never be able to reproduce live just because there are more important things going on. The songs have never suffered because I normally tend to play them the way they're written live and if an overdub turns out to be an essential part of the song maybe I'll switch to that. 'How Soon Is Now?' is quite a difficult one as there are two completely separate guitar parts that can't be played at the same time. What I do is change to a guitar which has the bottom four strings tuned conventionally, but the E string is tuned a third above the B. I play into the digital delay and put it on hold to play over it. I just take the hold off when we get to the other chorus bits and I can play that with the bottom four strings and then the hold goes back on. I had to send the signal through the Fender twin because of the vibrato. The only difficulty with using vibrato all the way through a song is that you've got to really get it in time and Mike the drummer has got to ride the beat. I was really panicking before the gigs but it turned out OK. It doesn't sound exactly the same live as on the record but it is still as powerful and still as atmospheric so I'm happy with it."

"'How Soon Is Now' was in F# tuning. I wanted a very swampy sound, a modern bayou song. It's a straight E riff, followed by open G and F#m7. The chorus uses open B, A, and D shapes with the top two strings ringing out. The vibrato sound is fucking incredible, and it took a long time. I put down the rhythm track on an Epiphone Casino through a Fender Twin Reverb without vibrato. Then we played the track back through four old Twins, one on each side. We had to keep all the amps vibratoing in time to the track and each other, so we had to keep stopping and starting the track, recording it in 10-second bursts. I wish I could remember exactly how we did the slide part -- not writing it down is one of the banes of my life! We did it in three passes through a harmonizer, set to some weird interval, like a sixth. There was a different harmonization for each pass. For the line in harmonics, I retuned the guitar so that I could play it all at the 12th fret with natural harmonics. It's doubled several times."

"In ‘How Soon Is Now’ the harmonic lick is from Lovebug Starski: that was me getting one up on the journalists, putting a lick from a hip-hop record into a Smiths song. "

"If you were to play 'How Soon Is Now?' on piano or acoustic guitar, it wouldn't have the same impact as the finished article – the power of the record has a lot to do with the sound and the instrumentation and not necessarily the words and the chords. That's very satisfying for me because 'How Soon Is Now?' is built on the guitar – unlike poetry, sound is something that's beyond intellectual ideas, it's primal and otherworldly. But I was ecstatic when the words came on top of the music. They are actually quite brilliant. The contrast between the two worlds that Morrissey and I lived in worked especially well on 'How Soon Is Now?'. That's what made our songwriting partnership so interesting; the intellectual, self-conscious analysis, and the streetwise druggy exuberance."

"As a kid I was fascinated by Hamilton Bohannon's 'Disco Stomp' and 'New York Groove' by Hello, and I wanted to make something with that stomp. The first decent amp I got was the Fender Twin because the Patti Smith Group used it, and it had this amazing tremolo. Later when we'd had a few hits, a review of What Difference Does It Make said I'd written a riff that was instantly recognizable, which fascinated me. One night I was playing for my own pleasure and I suddenly got the riff. It all came together - the tremolo and the stomping groove - for what became How Soon Is Now, although my demo was titled Swamp. Because it was a groove track it originally appeared as an extra track on a 12-inch, but popular clamor forced its single release. I remember when Morrissey first sang: 'I am the son and the heir...' John Porter went, 'Ah great, the elements!' Morrissey continued, '...of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.' I knew he'd hit the bullseye there and then. - Johnny Marr

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now - "We went to America to play Danceteria on New Year's Eve and Mike got ill so we couldn't do the rest of the gigs, and 'Heaven Knows' was written in a hotel room while me and Morrissey were waiting to go home. And I wrote the music for 'Girl Afraid' the day I got back, so really we were more concerned with what came next. I don't really like 'Heaven Knows'. Well, I like it but less than the others. I don't like the tune and the backing track. I don't like the rhythm or anything."

"'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now' is a period piece to me. It's probably a lot of people's introduction to this strange band with the flowers or whatever, but as a musical experience I'm not that keen on it." - Johnny Marr

Accept Yourself - "The fundamental request of Smithdom. Simply accept yourself, be yourself, relax, don't worry about anything as there's no point." – Morrissey

Back to the Old House - "‘Back To The Old House’ I wrote with my wife in mind." - Johnny Marr

Reel Around The Fountain - "'Reel Around The Fountain' was my interpretation of Jimmy Jones' version of 'Handy Man'. It came from one of mine and Joe Moss' marathon R&B record sessions one morning at Crazy Face. We went from listening to The Platters, which I wasn't really getting behind, to Jimmy Jones. I remerbered hearing the track from when I was a kid, 'cos one of me aunties or somebody used to play it. So I remembered the melody of 'Handy Man' but then when I tried to play it myself I got it all wrong, which was useful really. I was trying to do a classic melodic pop tune, and it had the worst kind of surface prettiness to it. But at the same time, Joy Division was influencing everybody in England. That dark element -- it wasn't that I wanted to be like them, but they brought out something in the darkness of the overall track. In a sense, Bernard Sumner was one of the most influential guitarists and writers of the '80s. There would never have been a U2 or a Cure if it hadn't been for Joy Division." -Johnny Marr

The Headmaster Ritual - The nuts and bolts of The Headmaster Ritual came together during the first album, and I just carried on playing around with it. It started off as a very sublime sort of Joni Mitchell-esque chord figure; I played it to Morrissey but we never took it further. Then, as my life got more and more intense, so did the song. The bridge and the chorus part were originally for another song, but I put them together with the first part. That was unusual for me; normally I just hammer away at an idea until I've got a song. It's in open D turning, with a capo at the second fret. Again, it was heavily overdubbed. It was a very exciting period for me - realising I could hijack 16 tracks all for myself.

I wrote 'The Headmaster Ritual' on acoustic. It's in an open-D tuning with a capo at the 2nd fret. I fancied the idea of a strange Joni Mitchell tuning, and the actual progression is like what she would have done had she been an MC5 fan or a punk rocker. I knew pretty much what every guitar track would be before we started. There are two tracks of Martin D-28, and the main riff is two tracks of Rickenbacker. I wasn't thinking specifically of the Beatles' 'Day Tripper' -- even though it sounds like it -- but I did think of it as a George Harrison part. The Rickenbacker belonged to Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music; I'm told that it was originally owned by Roger McGuinn. All the guitars are in open tuning, except for one of the chorus guitars, which is done on an Epiphone in Nashville tuning, capoed at the 2nd fret.

I've got an Epiphone Coronet with one pickup, and I string it with the high strings from a 12-string set. It's a really zingy, trebly guitar. I used that on a lot of things that people think are 12-string, like the end of 'The Headmaster Ritual'.

For my part, 'The Headmaster Ritual' came together over the longest period of time I've ever spent on a song. I first played the riff to Morrissey when we were working on the demos for our first album with Troy Tate. I nailed the rest of it when we moved to Earls Court.

'The Headmaster Ritual is one of my favorite guitar tracks.I wrote it over a period of two years, always looking for the next section I needed. I saw the Radiohead version, yeah. I showed Ed O'Brien the chords, but maybe he was looking out the window! - Johnny Marr

Rusholme Ruffians - "Rusholme Ruffians came about because my parents used to play 'Marie's The Name' by Elvis Presley and I liked the chord change."

"That was blatantly done. Morrissey said to me, 'Let's do a song about the fair,' and for some reason my association with the fair was to pull out that Elvis riff. We tried, but we couldn't get away from it."- Johnny Marr

Nowhere Fast - "The album 'Meat Is Murder' I still rate very highly but again stuff like 'Nowhere Fast' could have been done better."

"It's not stood up as well as 'Revolver' but there's some great songs on it. 'Nowhere Fast' is a great song." - Johnny Marr

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

"On Smiths songs such as "How Soon Is Now?" and "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore", I turned the 2" tape over and learned to play the parts backward."

"I played the part, turned the tape over and learned it backwards, played the backward part with the tape the right way round then turned the volume up and down. The intro is a Martin D-28 acoustic with Lexicon Reverb on."

"'That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore' was always one of my favorites. It just fell through the roof. It was one of those lovely times when the feeling just falls down on you from the ceiling somewhere and it almost plays itself. It gives an almost esoteric feeling."

"When you go out live you want to give people at least a general impression of the whole thing, but if you're on your own, you end up compromising a lot of the chord inversions and inflections that were there in the overdubs. You generally end up being reduced to playing that big-sounding first position chord. With my one-man band approach I managed that fairly successfully for a while, but other times it didn't really work. From a guitar point of view 'That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore' could have been absolutely incredible live, but in the end it was only good." -Johnny Marr

"'Well I Wonder' I really like as well. It's one of those things that a modern group could try and emulate but never get the spirit of. It's so simple."

"I remember the start of the record because I moved back to Manchester very deliberately- to get the atmosphere right for the instrumental tracks I was writing. And that worked out immediately because 'Well I Wonder' came out of that, with the rain and everything. When we did it I knew it would be popular because it had that real sense of yearning in it."

"I think [the outro] is an A minor shape capo'd, I'd have to listen to it." -Johnny Marr

Meat Is Murder - "That was a riff I'd been playing around with for a few days before. Really nasty, in open D. I didn't know the lyrics but I knew the song was gonna be called 'Meat Is Murder' so it all just came together in the take."

"I think 'Meat Is Murder' is in open G tuning,or open D,it might have a capo on the second fret."- Johnny Marr

Barbarism Begins At Home - "I came up with the riff the day that Troy Tate came up to Manchester to meet with us. It was almost because our first proper producer was about to arrive that I thought we needed a new song, maybe, and it was a sunny afternoon. We played it in the daytime, which was unusual because there were these machinists working downstairs on the floor below, and we wouldn't want to be working stuff out at high volume. There was no drums there, it was just me and

Andy jamming like we used to when we were 14 or 15. I know a lot of fuss has been made and Andy is, quite rightly, proud of that bassline, but, personally, harmonically I don't think it comes anywhere near Andy's other stuff. 'Nowhere Fast', 'That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore', 'The Headmaster Ritual', all tower above it. It was one of those things where it was a good idea at the time, but later, as we played it, I didn't think it really represented the band. The overall thing, all of it, was a little bit corny."

"Barbarism Begins At Home is a bit naff. I don't like the tune - there's no emotion in it."

"With 'Barbarism Begins At Home,' a lot's been made of the funky aspect of the bassline, but that track harks back to what I was doing with Andy before The Smiths. I guess it came out of this love of retro kind of James Brown records, and things like Rip Rig & Panic and The Pop Group. That period of anemic, underfed white funk. It's me and Andy being townies in Manchester, liking a bit of the American No-Wave thing. James Chance, I guess." -Johnny Marr

The Queen Is Dead

"I'd done the rhythm track for The Queen Is Dead, and left the guitar on the stand. The wah pedal just happened to be half open, and putting the guitar down made the guitar suddenly hit off this harmonic. We were back at the desk playing back the rhythm track and I could still hear this harmonic wailing away, so we put the tape back onto record while I crept back into the booth and started opening up the wah-wah, thinking 'Don't die, don't die!' Eventually I opened up the pedal, and 'Wooooohhhhhh!' Kept it going, too. Great accident.

For the frenzied wah-wah section on 'The Queen Is Dead,' I was thinking '60s Detroit, like the MC5 and the Stooges.

The album's title track was partly inspired by The MC5 and The Velvet Underground. A Velvets outtakes album called V.U. had just come out, and I loved 'I Can't Stand It', mostly because it had this swinging R&B guitar. I'd wanted to do something bombastic like that for a while, and 'The Queen Is Dead' was the right place to drop it.

I had The Queen Is Dead, the track, in my mind for a long time. I knew the song had the title, and I knew that was what the album was going to be called. To me, it was the MC5 playing 'I Can't Stand It'. I'd always felt let down by the MC5. When I was younger, people were going 'Oh, the Dolls, the MC5, the Stooges' -but when I first heard the MC5, it felt a little too gung-ho, too kind of testosterone-mad for me. I wanted to deliver what I imagined the MC5 to be - energy, coolness.

It was Morrissey's idea to include 'Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty' and he said, 'I want this on the track'. But he wasn't to know that I was going to lead into the feedback and drum rolls. It was just a piece of magic. I got the drum riff going and Andy got the bass line, which was one of his best ever

and one that bass players still haven't matched. I went in there with all the lads watching and did the take and they just went, 'Wow'. I came out and I was shaking. When I suggested doing it again, they just said, 'No way! No way!' What happened with the feedback was I was setting my guitar up for the track and I put it onto a stand and it was really loud. Where it hit the stand, it made that note of feedback. I did the guitar track, put the guitar on the stand, and while we were talking, it was like, 'Wow, that sounded good'. So I said, 'Right - record that!' It was going through a wah-wah from the previous take, so I just started moving the wah-wah and it was getting all these different intervals, and it definitely added a real tension.

I loved Morrissey's singing on that, and the words. But it was very MC5. Morrissey has a real love for that music as well. I remember him playing the Ramones as much as he played Sandie Shaw.

The record company want to put out some rarities, so we’ve spoken about the longer versions of The Queen is Dead: the eight-minute one and another one where we played for 12 minutes. It sounds like Can or something.

The song 'The Queen Is Dead' I really like. I used to like the MC5 and The Stooges and it's as good if not better than anything The Stooges ever did. It's got energy and aggression in that kind of garagey way. – Johnny Marr

I Know It's Over - "I'll never forget when [Morrissey] did that. It's one of the highlights of my life. It was that good, that strong. Every line he was hinting at where he was going to go. I was thinking, 'Is he going to go there? Yes, he is!' It was just brilliant." - Johnny Marr

Never Had No One Ever

"On The Queen Is Dead, 'Never Had No One Ever', there's a line that goes 'When you walk without ease/on these/the very streets where you were raised/I had a really bad dream/it lasted 20 years, seven months and 27 days/Never had no one ever'. It was the frustration that I felt at the age of 20 when I still didn't feel easy walking around the streets on which I'd been born, where all my family had lived - they're originally from Ireland but had been here since the Fifties. It was a constant confusion to me why I never really felt 'This is my patch. This is my home. I know these people. I can do what I like, because this is mine.' It never was. I could never walk easily." - Morrissey

"I can never divorce that song from the emotion that inspired it, which is totally personal. It goes back to what I was saying before about where the sadness comes from. It's me, being in my bedroom, living on a housing estate, on a dark night, surrounded by all that concrete and trying to find some beauty through Raw Power and James Williamson. There's a certain kind of gothic beauty in 'I Need Somebody'. I wasn't looking to cop a riff; I was looking to cop a feeling. The atmosphere of 'Never Had No One Ever', and pretty much the whole LP, for everything that can be said about the pressure I was under at the time as Johnny in The Smiths in '85, really that music could have come out of my bedroom when I was 16." – Johnny Marr

The Boy With The Thorn In His Side - "After that I started getting turned on to Chic, The Fatback Band, The Ohio Players and War. If you listen to 'The Boy With The Thorn In His Side', the rhythm part from verse two onwards - that chick-a-chick part - it's pure Nile Rogers.

That was the first time I used a Strat on a record. I got it because I wanted a twangy Hank Marvin sound, but it ended up sounding quite highlify.

Throughout the set, me and Johnny used two tunings: one in F sharp and one in E, 'cos of Morrissey's range. Out of four or five gigs, this guy got it right once. I'd say, Right — There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. Pass me the one in F sharp. He'd pass me the E bass, and I'd be a tone out." -Andy Rourke

"If we needed some songs fast, then Morrissey would come round to my place and I'd sit there with an acoustic guitar and a cassette recorder. 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' was done that way."

"Morrissey was sat on a coffee table, perched on the edge. I was sat with my guitar on a chair directly in front of him. He had A Sony Walkman recording, waiting to hear what I was gonna pull out. So I said, 'Well, I've got this one' and I started playing these chords. He just looked at me as I was playing. It was as if he daren't speak, in case the spell was broke."

"We recorded 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' in 10 minutes. I went on to add some flute overdub and strings and a couple of extra guitars, but really, the essence and the spirit of it was captured straight away, and that normally means that something's gone really, really right. I have a version of that take with just the three instruments and the voice on it – it absolutely holds up as a beautiful moment in time. The Smiths were all in love with the sound that we were making. We loved it as much as everyone else, but we were lucky enough to be the ones playing it."

"I didn't realise that 'There Is A Light' was going to be an anthem but when we first played it I thought it was the best song I'd ever heard. There's a little in-joke in there just to illustrate how intellectual I was getting. At the time everyone was into the Velvet Underground and they stole the intro to 'There She Goes' - da da da-da, da da-da-da, Dah Dah! - from the Rolling Stones version of 'Hitchhike,' the Marvin Gaye song. I just wanted to put that in to see whether the press would say, Oh it's the Velvet Underground! Cos I knew that I was smarter than that. I was listening to what The Velvet Underground was listening to." -Johnny Marr

Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others - "The song, as it was, just faded in, so i thought we had to do something a bit more interesting. Basically, I put all the reverb on the drums up so it sounded like it was coming in from some large hall, then faded it down really quickly. Then I took all the reverb back off and faded it up again. The effect was supposed to be like the musics in a hall somewhere, it goes away, then it comes back and it's nice and clean and dry. A bit like opening a door, closing it, then opening it again and walking in."-Stephen Street

"Other times, I'd drop off a cassette of some music at Morrissey's house. He lived about two miles away, and I'd ride round there on my Yamaha DT 175 and post them through his letterbox. 'Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others' was done that way. All the music for that came in one wave while I was watching telly with the sound down."

"Some things just drop out of the heavens, and 'Some Girls...' was one of them. It's a beautiful piece of music."- Johnny Marr

Girlfriend In A Coma - "Actually, [Strangeways] is my favourite Smiths album. We split after we recorded it and they were good sessions. One or two of the songs are acoustic-led, which I really liked - now that was an organic record."

"Over the last few years I've heard 'Girlfriend In A Coma' in shops and people's cars, and I'm always surprised by how good it sounds." - Johnny Marr

Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before - "I find a blue note whenever I can. I try to find the poignancy in any kind of lick. Not to get too poetic here, but I find a distinct lack of poignancy in most guitar playing I hear. It's as if people feel that by virtue of being a guitar player, they have to have this swashbuckling, gung-ho approach to music, an overblown, vulgar approach. I'd prefer a few notes played in the right place on one string. For example, I liked the melody at the end of "Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before," but it just felt a little too accomplished. I wanted it to sound like a punk player who couldn't play, so I fingered it on one string, right up and down the neck. I could have played it with harmonics or my teeth, or something clever, but the poignancy would have gone out of the melody."

"The stuff that wasn't acoustic was mainly led by my 355 12-string; in fact, a lot of the songs - I Started Something..., Paint A Vulgar Picture and Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before - were written on that guitar. It gave a really big sound. I wanted to make sure my main guitar parts really counted and stayed on the record. Often, before, I had changed the main foundation at a later date, but that didn't happen with Strangeways."

"I'm trying to be open to any ideas, so long as they're fairly melodic and they relate to what the singer is singing. I'll try any trick. With the Smiths, I'd take this really loud Telecaster of mine, lay it on top of a Fender Twin Reverb with the vibrato on, and tune it to an open chord. Then I'd drop a knife with a metal handle on it, hitting random strings. I used that on 'Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before' for the big 'doings' at the start." -Johnny Marr

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me - "Some writing moments you do remember really specifically and that was one. We were coming down from Carlisle. I was sat on the tour bus, with my guitar, unplugged. I'd come up with this figure, I was absolutely ecstatic about it, but I couldn't work out how my fingers were playing it. So I was holding my breath in case I lost it."

"'Strangeways' has its moments, like 'Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Love Me'. Last time I met Morrissey he said it was his favourite Smiths song. He might be right." - Johnny Marr

I Won't Share You - "There was this auto-harp lying around in the studio. I remember it sitting in one of the windowsills as you went down the stairs, and one day Johnny dusted it down. It had been sitting around for ages so he tuned it up and started playing these chords. It sounded absolutely beautiful so we recorded it there and then. A few days later Morrissey came in and put his vocal on top. It was one of those tracks that sent a little chill down your spine."- Stephen Street

"I didn't realise it was the same chords as 'Ask' at the time and I'm glad I didn't because I might not have done it. I was just making a tune that sort of resonated with the day."

"I just heard a really lovely tune first off. I was happy that we had another unusual little 'star in our galaxy' or whatever. That's what it was like, this other little thing that just beamed down. The lyrics were brought to my attention by somebody, even before we got out of the studio. There were raised eyebrows and, 'Whadya think of that then?'. But it was all in a days work for me really, still is. If I was bothered by it I'd say, 'Well I ain't anyone's to fucking share, me" but that's really the truth. If, in fact, that sentiment was directed towards me then quite rightly I feel quite good about it. It's nice."- Johnny Marr

Shoplifters Of The World Unite - "You can hear Nils Lofgren's influence on me in the solo on 'Shoplifters Of The World Unite'. That's all done with false harmonics, which is a steel player's technique: you touch the strings with a right-hand finger an octave higher than where you're fretting, and then pluck the string with your thumb."

"I think of them as guitar breaks. I like the one in 'Shoplifters' -- that was the first time I used harmonizing layering. People have said it sounds like Brian May, but I was thinking of stacked Roy Buchanans."

"Also, you can leave [a wah pedal] on, opened slightly without even touching it -- that gives you a completely different tonal range. The 'Shoplifters' break was the

first time that I really discovered that. And if the filter is open in just the right place, you can get a harmonic to sing like a bird." -Johnny Marr

Half A Person - "I remember Johnny and Craig were both playing acoustic guitars, which we set up separated with one in the left and one in the right speaker. That was put down together, very simply, with just a few overdubs on top."- Stephen Street

"Me and Morrissey would just disappear. Some of my favourite songs came about that way, like "Half A Person". We just locked ourselves away and did it. In the time it takes to play it, I wrote it. Morrissey was great in that respect. He knew when I was going to play something good."

"We officially wrote it on the stairs at Mayfair. Morrissey got his part of it together overnight, and it was amazing. That was probably the best writing moment I think me and him ever had because we were so close, practically touching, and I could see him kind of willing me on, waiting to see what I was going to play. Then I could see him thinking, 'That's exactly where I was hoping you'd go!' It was a fantastic, shared moment."

"One [1963 Stratocaster] I keep constantly high strung in Nashville tuning, which is the top two strings the same and bottom four like a 12-string set with the low strings taken off. It's a good tuning for coming up with new stuff 'cos you kind of feel like you're playing backwards. I used that on loads of Smiths stuff - You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby, Half A Person..."

"This is a 1962 Epiphone Coronet. Shortly after I got it I put it in 'Nashville Tuning', which means putting on an electric 12 string set (the bottom four strings are an octave higher than standard). It feels like your playing backwards because the higher strings are at the bottom. I used it to double a lot of the Rickenbacker arpeggios on Smiths records, most notably on 'William It Was Really Nothing', it's also the main guitar on 'Half A Person'."- Johnny Marr

Panic - "The influence of T-Rex is very profound on certain songs of The Smiths i.e. 'Panic' and 'Shoplifters'. Morrissey was himself also mad about Bolan. When we wrote "Panic" he was obsessed with 'Metal Guru' and wanted to sing in the same style. He didn't stop singing it in an attempt to modify the words of 'Panic' to fit the exact rhythm of "Metal Guru". He also exhorted me to use the same guitar break so that the two songs are the same!!!"

"'Panic' came about at the time of Chernobyl. Morrissey and myself were listening to a Newsbeat radio report about it. The stories of this shocking disaster comes to an end and then immediately we're off into Wham's 'I'm Your Man'. I remember actually saying 'what the fuck has this got to do with people's lives?' And so 'hang the blessed DJ'. I think it was a great lyric, important and applicable to anyone who lives in England. I mean, even the most ardent disco fan wouldn't want to be subject to that stuff would they?"- Johnny Marr

Oscillate Wildly

"Initially the very notion of instrumentals was motivated by me. I suggested that 'Oscillate Wildly' should be an instrumental; up until that point Johnny had very little interest in non-vocal tracks. There was never any political heave-hoing about should we-shouldn't we have an instrumental and it was never a battle of powers between Johnny and myself. The very assumption that a Smiths instrumental track left Morrissey upstairs in his bedroom stamping his feet and kicking the furniture was untrue! I totally approved but, obviously, I didn't physically contribute."

- Morrissey

"Morrissey was very, very reluctant to use synthesizers or anything electronic. The only way Johnny and I could get around that was by trapping guitar notes into these extended infinite reverbs that would hold for a long, long time then use the fader to bring it in at the right moment. It sounds like a string-type effect but really it's just guitar notes. That's the way 'Oscillate Wildly' was built up. Johnny was still working with guitars but we were trying to stretch the possibilities and sounds of what we could do with it."- Stephen Street

"There was never any plan for it to have lyrics. It was always going to be an instrumental and Morrissey encouraged me all the way."

"We did it really quickly in just one evening, but it came together so beautifully."

"'Asleep' was another one worked out on the upright I inherited when I moved into to the house in Bowdon, the same piano I wrote 'Oscillate Wildly' on. It had a pleasingly eerie quality about it. You could only play certain things on it. Weird, doomy music, which suited us fine."

"'Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want', I did in a period of about four to five days when I was living in a flat in Earls Court. That was done when we needed a follow-up to 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now'."

"I think the mandolin was suggested by the producer John Porter, I had the tune and he thought the mandolin would be good. The music was written because I was thinking about my childhood in Ardwick Green."

"There's a sad song by Del Shannon called 'The Answer To Everything' that my parents used to play, and it struck a chord in me because it sounded so familiar. That song was the inspiration for 'Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want'. I tried to capture the essence of that tune; its spookiness and sense of yearning." -Johnny Marr

Unloveable - "It was very deliberate. It was right when I got a white Strat. I used it on that and I used it on 'The Boy With The Thorn In His Side'. But 'Unloveable' was the first time I deliberately used that Strat sound for a Smiths song. I remember scratching my chin and thinking, Hmmm ok, Can I get away with this? You can particularly tell on that end. I used it on the outro of 'Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others'. But 'Unloveable' was the first of that whole row of songs." -Johnny Marr

Were you good at sport?

Miraculous. It was the only thing I was good at and I used to love it completely. The 100 metres was my raison d'etre. Yes, I won everything. I was a terrible bore when it came to athletics. I was just the type of person everyone despises so I've carried on in that tradition. - 1985

Are you in love?

If I said no, that would seem too stark. I have to be. I think everybody has to be otherwise where do you get the energy from to go on, in life, and strive for certain things? The things that stir me are schools and buildings and I'm quite immersed in the past and in the history of this country and how things have evolved and I get quite passionate about certain people in desperate situations.

15. Are you frightened of growing old?

No, not to any degree. I was never happy when I was young so I don't equate growing old with being hysterically unhappy. To me old age doesn't mean doom, despair and defeat. There are lots of people I know in considerably advanced years that I find fascinating.

Why did you join the Smiths?

Like Morrissey, I feel that my life was leading up to 'Hand In Glove,' and from then on things began to happen. My life began. That record set the standard. When Johnny played me their first demo tape, I thought it was the best thing I'd ever heard, both musically and lyrically. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity and too good to miss, so I leapt at it as quickly as possible.MJ '84

How good do you think the Smiths are?

We are the best band in the world, there's nobody better. We have potentially vast amounts of status and we're getting better all the time. We are all very good at what we do. I've been plyaing guitar since I was nine, but when Johnny started getting good on it, I switched to bass and now I'm very good indeed. The Smiths are following their natural path... – AR, 1984

We have a very traditional line-up. It's nothing special but it's very special. We are four individuals; we just simply open our hearts and open our mouths. If that isn't enough, we might as well go home. We don't have any metaphysical plan - there is nothing gimmicky that we want to rope people in with. We are four individuals, naked before the world - people will either react, or not. - 1984

"I am quite pleased that we have become successful with Rough Trade, though, rather than any major record company -- it seems to increase the value of snubbing the industry. By not doing videos, by not paying for album promotion, by not taking advertising space... all that's rather unique." - 1984

With all these interviews and media attention, do you feel you've been overexposed?

"It seems I've been extremely overexposed because of the nature of the interviews. They get very personal, even if you do just one big interview where it gets embarrassingly personal, you seem entirely overexposed. It's a dilemma, I don't know quite what to do."

"I always found young people to be uncommonly satisfied and placid. If I ever got angry and dissatisfied as a child it was because there was never any angst from anybody. Personally I was very unhappy but in general, the reason I felt strange was because no-one else was saying, "I'm really miserable, I can't stand being nine years old, when are things going to change?" - 1984

"I can't be interviewed and talk in light, wispy terms. In throwaway interviews where people ask me basic things, I feel an absolute sense of worthlessness. You can do a hundred interviews and explain absolutely nothing about yourself but I tend to get asked very serious questions and to give very serious replies. When I talk about my childhood, it always comes across as being severely humorous or so profoundly black that's it's embarrassing drivel but it always has a strong effect on people. Some unwritten law states that you're not supposed to admit to an unhappy childhood. You pretend you had a jolly good time. I never did. I'm not begging for sympathy, but I was struggling for the most basic friendships. I felt totally ugly." - Morrissey, 1984

How does your real mother feel when you talk about your unbearable childhood?

"She takes it very seriously and reads my interviews religiously. I know it upsets her sometimes but it's not something she doesn't already know about. We have ploughed through it several times, many years ago. But I really can't help it, if somebody asks me a question, I answer it, I can't lie." - 1984

Such as?

Oh, newspaper clippings like "Fish Eats Man". Probably the most important quote was from Goethe: "Art and Life are different, that's why one is called Art and one is called Life." But strangely, whenever I've returned to the house and the room I just couldn't make the remotest connection between how I felt, how I was and the room. It sounds dramatic, but at one point, I thought I could never possibly leave the room. It seems that everything I am was conceived in this room. Everything that makes me is in there. I used to have a horrible territorial complex. I would totally despise any creature that stepped across the threshhold and when somebody did, or looked at my books, or took out a record, I would seethe with anger. I was obsessive: everything was chronologically ordered - a place for everything, everything in its place. Total neurosis. My sister only ever popped her head

around the door. But now, it's totally foreign. It's strange how things that seem to mean so much, ultimately don't matter." - 1984

Do the Smiths like their record company?

I think we're mismanaged in many ways. We haven't had much record company assistance. We're not really in the traditional mold, and I think they find us slghtly problematical. Everything we've achieved we've done by ourselves.

"The Sandie project was a tremendous success. I felt, at that time, that what we were doing was the absolute envy of the entire industry. It was The Smiths, these relative newcomers, and Sandie Shaw at the other extreme. Just the way we came together, the combination was almost perfect; it had virtually never been done before in the history of music. I know that, if it had failed, the failure of the idea would have been given massive publicity, but it didn't fail. For that reason, I'm pleased." - 1984

You told me, last time, that you never wanted The Smiths to milk a formula dry. Weren't "Heaven" and "William" just ridiculously familiar?

"I don't think the format of the songs became too familiar. Thankfully, The Smiths became familiar through success, but I don't agree that we were exhausting any set formula. Even if we wanted to be that way, I don't think we could, because that's the type of people we are. This goes for every single member of the group, we are not pop stars and we're not in any traditional mould. I find it impossible to be flattered by pop success but I don't know why. Maybe, I just have very high standards and I don't think we've even begun to reach them, so it doesn't mean a thing to me when people come up and shout, "Phenomenal! Number 43!!!". It doesn't mean anything, although it is important to me that we've reached this scale of success." - 1984

"It's not tempting to break my own rules. Once you do that, it's very easy to lose sight of the reasons why you started in the first place. You can slip into the industry so easily. I could turn into an absolute social gadfly tomorrow and be seen everywhere with everybody. I could possibly handle it, but that wouldn't give me enough time to concentrate on the realities of writing. It's easy to get further and further away from the council-estate and you can forget how you felt for twenty-four years before it all happened. You can get quite bedazzled by the lights. Well, we never intend to do that." - 1984

"The lyrics I write are specifically genderless. I don't want to leave anybody out. Handsome is a word that people think is applied to males... but I know lots of handsome women. After all, there is such a thing as a pretty male." (Feb '84)

"I constantly spectate upon people who are entwined and frankly I'm looking upon souls in agony. I can't think of one relationship in the world which has been harmonious. It just doesn't happen." (Feb '84)

"Working with her has been an endless thrill. It's almost like meeting oneself in a former life. She's very down to earth, very humorous, there's a certain veil which she lowers at a certain time of the day..." (On Sandie Shaw, Feb '84)

We seem to have some incredible depth of character. I believe that I have a great deal to say, so I would never shun an interview. Especially now in such desperate times! I think it is crucial to say as much as possible. I hate the way that people shun it all - it just foxes me. – 1984

- Do you not recognise a measure of obscurity in the songs, a kind of ambiguity?

I get very annoyed when the word 'obscure' is brought into the whole context. I feel that I go to great pains to be very direct and precise. I don't want to be misunderstood in anything I say. I think it has been a trend in recent years to be very obscure and very surreal. The Smiths must be understood on every level, in every way. - 1984

"It was more of a restoration rather than remastering, as such," Marr tells Rolling Stone, explaining that he didn't add anything that didn't already exist – he just brought it all out. "I knew there was a lot of music hiding in there," says Marr. All eight remastered Smiths CDs have just been released by Rhino Records, including the first U.S. CD release of the band's 1987 U.K. compilation, The World Won't Listen.

Marr accepts responsibility for disbanding the Smiths, but – perhaps surprisingly – it appears he's not entirely opposed to reuniting with his former bandmates, including lead singer Morrissey. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the guitarist looks back fondly on the Smiths' celebrated career.

As you listened to the catalog for this project, did any new favorite songs emerge? Did any particular album surprise you in any way?

Since I've worked in the United States, in the last six or seven years, I've picked up on the fact that Meat is Murder was the record that was the introduction to the Smiths for a lot of people. Living in Portland meant that I would meet people who heard that record first. I know now that that record is more important to a lot of people than I realized. So I guess I kind of listened to it differently because a lot of my friends know that record best. I always have really liked "The Headmaster Ritual" off that record, and "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore."

I think that overall, during the mastering of it, I kind of connected with the songs that were the most emotional rather than necessarily the ones that are the most well known. So "Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me" and "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" and those things – "I Know It's Over" –

yeah, they sounded quite powerful. When you hear anything in passing, you tend to hear just the radio ones, of course. So maybe there's that aspect to it, too.

At the time of the breakup, you blamed it on a lack of good management and a number of business problems. Do you still stand by those reasons?

Yeah, that's really it. I've said it before, but anybody that thinks that it was a good idea for the 23-year-old guitar player of a really big rock band to go back to being a manager of that band... - JM, 2012

JOHNNY MARR, MAY 2012

The A.V. Club: The Smiths albums have been rereleased before, but never in a package quite like this. How does it feel to have this music that you created when you were so young preserved in such a prestige format?

Johnny Marr: Well, this is the first time since the records were made that they sound right. There was one compilation that I liked a few years back called The Sound Of The Smiths, but up until then, and when they’d been put out in the ’90s particularly, they’d been messed with and sounded terrible. It was a real source of frustration for me. Every time I would hear a CD in a store or something, I would start thinking, “Whoa, I’m sure it didn’t quite sound this thin,” or “Why is everything so bright and happy-sounding?” I fought a real battle for quite a few years to be able to get the opportunity to fix it, and what I did wasn’t so much remastering as—in my mind—restoring. Because I really didn’t put a lot of stuff on; I just took off all of the silly stuff that was put on during the ’90s.

So from that point of view, it’s been very, very gratifying. The process was a lot of work and was more concentrated than I expected, but it was worth it because there’s not one person that’s said it doesn’t sound like the old records. I didn’t put the music on steroids, so to speak. I didn’t jack anything up; I didn’t try to make it the loudest record on iTunes or anything like that. I just wanted it to sound like I remember it sounding in the studio. The facts are that when I got the original tapes and put them put them up on the machine, they really didn’t need very much done to them at all, so I knew I wasn’t that crazy. [Laughs.]

Packaging-wise, I have to be fair and say that I think the label’s done a really good job with the boxes, and really have stayed true to the original designs, not putting anything that doesn’t represent the group on the cover, which is another thing that happens.

AVC: Were there any discussions at any point of presenting the music in any other way than in the form of the original albums? Like, say, a “Complete Smiths” with all the songs in chronological order or anything like that?

JM: No, because the whole point was to be faithful. To represent the body of work with integrity. I’ve had no problem with shouting out and complaining for years about my right to have my records sound the way I made them, and when I started sitting there with Frank Arkwright, the mastering engineer, to go through the songs, the realization came to me clearly that I mustn’t mess this up. [Laughs.] It was quite a task, because I felt a responsibility to the other Smiths members, and a responsibility to the people who love the music.

Come to think of it, that was a lot like my experience of being in the band, and being who I am anyway: feeling a responsibility to the other members of the band, primarily, and then a responsibility to people who already love the music. About three or four songs in, I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, you’ve got to make every song right, and you can’t mess this thing up or else you’re be in big trouble.” My head was on the chopping block from all corners, really. So I’m super-pleased everybody seems to like it and understand why I wanted to do it.

AVC: Those first Smiths albums sounded very different from anything else coming from your part of the world at the time, and yet at least from what we heard about here in the U.S., the band seemed to be pretty well accepted from the beginning. Did you meet any resistance to your sound when you were first starting out?

JM: Oh yeah, sure. The first eight or nine months of the group’s life were just Morrissey and myself trying to find the right other two—which we did, eventually—and trying to find places to practice, and trying to find people who might know someone at a record company, and trying to get some demo time. Because we were really broke, and just had each other, and my then-girlfriend, who is now my wife. Oh, and also our manager, who is still my manager to this day. The few resources we had, we tried to work with, but as I say, we were pretty skint. Because the word in Manchester was that we were just too weird. [Laughs.] Our very early songs, like “Suffer Little Children,” “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle,” and “You’ve Got Everything Now,” which were represented on the first record, eventually, were pretty weird songs to start out with.

So yeah, there was some resistance. We didn’t have to battle for years like some groups do, though, because people saw the good in us essentially quite quickly—say, after a year of performing. Which could’ve been worse. What really happened was that our first set of songs went into an aborted version of our first record that never came out—which actually is a more faithful document of where the band really was. They were what we playing, and what were people’s introduction to us, in terms of people on the street and the people that would come see us opening up for other groups and all that. But when we signed to Rough Trade and got some support from people like John Peel after our

first year, which is relatively soon, we quite quickly found our songwriting feet, and Morrissey and myself were able to sound like the band that people know. I guess we got slightly more listenable and more commercial.

AVC: You mentioned John Peel, and some of your recordings from John Peel’s show later made it on to your actual albums. Did you prepare for a John Peel session the same way you would for a regular recording session?

JM: Absolutely not, except for one occasion when we needed an extra song and I wrote “This Charming Man.” There was great pressure, and something really helpful came out of adversity. [Laughs.] I had no idea what a John Peel session even was when we did our first one, other than that we’d heard that the engineers were all these grumpy, old, stuffy engineers, and that turned out to be true. You’d get in there at 10 in the morning, so in our case we’d have to take off from Manchester at like 6 a.m. And you’d have to have four finished songs by 9 or 10 o’clock at night. Our first session was so popular that it got repeated quite quickly, and then we got invited back to do, I think, three more. So obviously it wasn’t so much of a surprise on our subsequent sessions. We just played what we were playing live.

I think the answer is that we were always working and always writing new songs, so we played whatever new songs we had at that time. Luckily for us, we seemed to always have new ones. But in the case of “This Charming Man,” we had a John Peel session at the end of a week, and I had a vague idea of what songs we were going to do, but I felt like we needed a cheery one and a kind of commercial one. So that just got me to do the hard work and get it together. I leapt out of bed one morning, and the kind of pressure of it made me come up with that riff. There was also a little bit of competition in the case of that moment, because Aztec Camera, who were also our labelmates at Rough Trade, were starting to get on the radio, and I wanted to get on the radio too, or at least give it a try. Luckily, I was feeling pretty chipper that day, and the sun was coming through the window at 11:30 a.m. or whatever time it was, and I just put that riff down. But essentially, we needed a certain kind of song for the John Peel session, and that’s how that happened.

We never rehearsed for anything though, The Smiths. We never needed to because we were always playing. From when Morrissey and I first met to the last days of the group, we were The Smiths every day, all day, and didn’t need any reason to not be. I think Mike went on holidays, but aside from that, it never occurred to us to take a break because we were doing what we loved, you know? Every day.

AVC: What about the packaging of the band? Your records had a very distinctive look. Was that something you all agreed on as well?

JM: Same as with the above. We were all fans of what we were doing. Morrissey did all the artwork, and it was always a surprise, and a great sense of anticipation of what was going to happen next. I loved the sleeves, and I still do. Obviously you have your favorites or some you like over others, but I like them all. That was there from day one as well. Even when we were making little cassettes, Morrissey would do little photocopied ideas on the cassettes. Just like the music, it’s like, “This is what we’re going to do today, and here it is.” There wasn’t stuff laying around on the cutting room floor, musically or aesthetically. We didn’t try stuff that didn’t work. Everything we did, we put out. Every song, every sleeve.

AVC: You mentioned the early version of the first album that you scrapped. Did you consider including that in the box set? Or any other kind of rarities, like live tracks or alternate takes?

JM: I would’ve liked to, but the label’s got some kind of legal issue there that I never want to talk about, so that’s unfortunate. There are monitor mixes and instrumental versions and slightly different versions of songs. When I said that nothing ended up on the cutting-room floor and nothing ever didn’t come out, I meant songs. There aren’t any songs that didn’t come out. There were versions of the songs, though, where I put keyboards on it, or before some strings went on, or extra guitars. I went through everything, and there were a lot of nice things, like unplugged kinds of things, that are valid and do have integrity and that I would like, at some point, to see the light of day. I think they’ve come out on some bootlegs over the last few years, and fans really like them and they’re good. But I can’t say why they won’t go out.

AVC: You mentioned earlier that radio kind of had to play you because you were already popular. Was there any hesitation, do you think, in the mainstream culture because of Morrissey’s sexuality? Was there sort of a homophobia of some kind, maybe?

JM: Oh, I wouldn’t know about that. I think we just weren’t Tears For Fears or Fine Young Cannibals.

AVC: You talked about your Rough Trade labelmates Aztec Camera. The UK pop scene has a reputation for bands being very competitive, much like you mentioned. Did you have colleagues in the scene that you were friends with? Or was it all sort of every man for himself?

JM: Well, I played on Billy Bragg’s records, and he came on tour with us and we had a respect for Billy, because he was a great songwriter and he was politically aligned with us. There was Kirsty MacColl of course, who I went on to write some songs with and had a very strong friendship with. We respected Kirsty. I personally liked a number of things that New Order did, even before The Smiths. They were like the new band around when I was a kid, or in my teens anyway, in Manchester. So I had a respect for New Order, and Bernard Sumner, which I guess was the main reason why I went on to work with him all through the ’90s. There was a band called James that we took out on the road with us. Everything But The Girl were around. I thought the Bunnymen made some good records. But I can only speak for myself.

We detected a slight feeling of resentment from The Fall when we started getting popular, I guess because we made the label very busy. [Laughs.] But you know, what’s new? Mark E. Smith has kind of made a career out of being resentful, so it didn’t bother us too much. It was a little bit of a shame for me because I was a fan of The Fall when I was a kid, so that kind of disappointed me at the time, I remember. But I don’t think there was too much competition. You know, we were bumping into bands on TV shows, and I liked just whoever was making good music. There were plenty of bands that were kind of dominating the airwaves and MTV who we didn’t like. The usual culprits, you know—the kind of major label, very, very straight groups.

AVC: What has been your take on the bands that have come after The Smiths that are very plainly inspired by The Smiths, like The Wedding Present or Belle & Sebastian? Do you take that as an honor?

JM: Well of course it’s an honor—absolutely. There’s no bigger honor. Occasionally, though, there’s a sound from some of those groups that is, shall we say, quite fey. I’ve heard some records by bands that came after us who had their music been any more fey and lightweight, then I’d expect petals to come out of the speakers. [Laughs.] That’s kind of missing what we were about, because The Smiths were not all “Oscar Wilde at 3:30 in the afternoon” and feyness. The truth of it is, if you were to see any songs from any of our shows, we were, what I would say, quite heavy. Even the ballads were intense. We were a rock band, really, that played a type of pop music, if I care to analyze it. I don’t know very much about The Wedding Present’s music, but what I’ve heard of Belle & Sebastian was often quite fey, and light in a very deliberate way. I think they have their own thing, which is absolutely fine. But I don’t actually think they sound like The Smiths.

AVC: There seems to be a lot of current American independent bands trying to recapture the sound of your first album. I keep thinking that they should listen to The Queen Is Dead or Louder Than Bombs. Get a little more muscle into it, you know?

JM: [Laughs.] Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. I wasn’t aware that bands were trying to sound like the first album. I became aware over the years that Meat Is Murder was the main introduction to The Smiths for many people in America, I guess because “How Soon Is Now?” is on the American release. And that’s quite gratifying, because we made that record without any singles on it as such. We didn’t care about singles on that record; we just made what we thought would be a great album, or as good an album as we could make. It’s not trying to be a radio-friendly record—though we were always fairly melodic. I’m really happy that most people’s introduction to this unusual group from England was actually called Meat Is Murder. [Laughs.] You know, I’ve been a vegetarian since then.

AVC: You mentioned the albums versus the singles, and you recorded lots of singles that were not ever released on a proper album, only on anthologies. How did you decide that, say, “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side” would go on The Queen Is Dead, but “Shakespeare’s Sister” would be a single?

JM: We were fans of the 45, and we always thought like fans. It didn’t occur to us that it would be much more profitable and business-savvy to wait to record these songs when we had another nine songs to sell off the back of it. It was really when we got to America that the label had to deal in those terms, because the 45 culture was even less in the States than it was even in England at that time—and it was fairly non-existent in England. When we got over there, they didn’t really know how to deal with us, because we had these very strong tracks that were very popular, but they just existed in isolation. And this was at the start of video culture, and the idea was you spend massive amounts of money on the one lead song that then sells your album. Well, we didn’t want to make videos, and we had these songs that weren’t even attached to the albums. [Laughs.] We just thought the 45 was really valid. It was just being led by our love of the culture, and being fans, and an acute disregard for business.

AVC: There’s a documentary about The Clash, made when Joe Strummer was alive, in which he talks about all the little things that led to the breakup of The Clash, and how he wishes he could go back to that person he was in his 20s and say, “None of this matters. The addictions don’t matter. The personality conflicts don’t matter. You are in one of the greatest bands of all time. Don’t fuck it up.” Do have a similar feeling about the end of The Smiths? What’s your take on how and why everything fell apart?

JM: Well, I don’t think anything was fucked up. I don’t have that kind of perspective at all. I think it’s sad that four guys who were so tight went through such bitterness, that was encouraged by the behavior of some members of the band. Obviously, it was very emotional. The band was incredibly dramatic, and I’m philosophical about that because I think without that dramatic element, some of the music wouldn’t sound the way it does. Not all, but some. I think the only regrettable thing is that as adults, only Andy and myself get together and give each other a hug and make fun of each other and like seeing each other. To be honest, it’s unfortunate that The Smiths don’t have the relationship where they can sit around and even get complaints out, or philosophize. That’s unfortunate for four

adults who are always going to have a tie to each other. And unfortunately lots of water’s gone under the bridge, you know? But I can only speak for myself, and say that I don’t have any negative thoughts about the times back then or the times now, or the people in it. I just personally feel a sense of pride, and an incredible degree of luck. All I want to say about that, on behalf of the other three members of the group, is that we worked very, very hard and we really, really cared.

AVC: Once the band was over, you worked on a lot of different projects: Electronic, The The, The Pretenders. On a lot of those, you seemed to be purposefully not using your sort of Smiths-y guitar sound.

JM: Yeah, I think that’s right. One of the reasons why I wanted the band to end anyway was because I wanted to try to learn to be a different kind of guitar player, which I saw as progress. Because at 24, you really hope that you haven’t learned all you’re going to learn. I mean, that’s the way I feel even now. For someone like me, that would be very disappointing. So for me, that was the reason for the band ending. It wasn’t just all personal, or business. It was musical. Who wants to be put in a box at 25 years of age? Throughout my career, I’ve had an agenda not to rely on a “signature sound,” and to try not to repeat myself.

Things change somewhat when you get older. You get a slightly different perspective. By some weirdness, I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve played a Smiths song in front of an audience. That’s partly because plenty of other people have done it, and because the songs are mine. And as a more mature person, I’ve had the realization that when I play these songs in front of an audience, there’s a great feeling in the hall. Things have become much more simple, really. I don’t look at it any more deeply than that. If I play “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out,” and it’s a song that I feel okay singing, there’s a fantastic feeling in the room. That’s it.

But as a musician, I wouldn’t change a note that I’ve played, because I’d hate to think of just years and years of playing the same way. All I can say personally is that I feel like I’m a better musician through everything I’ve done. It’s been hard-fought, but worth it. And I think after a while, people started to understand what my motivation was and go with me on it. So people now know that I change when I do something like Inception, or when I play with a band like Modest Mouse. And then I’ll do something else. But really I was that way before I formed The Smiths anyway.

AVC: Do you have a favorite from the non-solo, non-Smiths projects that you’ve worked on?

JM: I really had a great time working with Modest Mouse, just because of the people. I loved writing songs with Isaac Brock, and Jeremiah Green is probably my favorite musician that I’ve worked with.

So that was really fantastic. And being in The The was a really, really great time in my life. I have a very close friendship with Bernard Sumner; he’s the coolest person I’ve ever met. And what I’ve just done with The Cribs has been a reconnection with the person I was, and wanted to be when I was 18 or 19, that is to say: playing in a UK street group, making a run of singles. So I feel very fortunate.

AVC: Have you kept up with Morrissey’s solo career at all?

JM: Not really, but I don’t really keep up with anyone specific anyway. So the answer’s “no,” but it’s not really that big of a deal.

AVC: One last question, and I don’t know if this is something you care about, but would you like to see The Smiths in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame?

JM: Uh… [Pause.] Not really, no. I mean, I don’t mean to be ungrateful, and if the opportunity came I would never be ungracious. I hope this doesn’t sound ungracious, but I don’t think awards mean dick. I’m a musician; I’m not in the television business.

Johnny, 1984

"One thing I wasn't expecting were the leeches diving in. People like my mum kept saying 'everybody will want to cash in on you if you make it big'. I didn't believe them but it's true. At the moment everybody we meet wants to be our manager! But we're just organising ourselves at the moment and not listening to anybody.

"The other thing that's weird is this phenomenon called fans. They keep saying to me 'Don't you get pissed off 'cos Morrissey's always in the papers'. I don't know why they think that because I never do but they expect the rest of us to be mad about the publicity Morrissey is getting."

Johnny is clearly only just getting used to the Smash Hits/Number One fan mentality. But is this really the first and last Smiths tour? "Well, it is, sort of. Because of our status and the new album we were expected to do this tour but then I started thinking that we're just doing what other bands do.

"We're proud of our records and sleeves because they're different from everybody else and it should be the same with the gigs too. But there's no way we're going to stop playing gigs. We're not going to do the Marc Almond bit! We'd like to play two dates a week or something but we're not that keen on doing traditional tours because it can become a bland circus. I'd hate to get sick of playing gigs but I'm worried that by this time next year we'll have played so many that we won't want to play again.

"I'm on a massive high again with the Smiths. Not that I was ever very low but there was a period after 'This Charming Man' came out and we played loads of gigs and appeared on Top Of The Pops

and I started wondering 'well, there must be more to it than this.' And now I know there is so I'm back up again."

The rumours of them leaving Rough Trade are not true, but at least Johnny knows how that one got started.

"We didn't like the dance mix of 'This Charming Man' which they put out as a 12-inch and we told them so but we're certainly not going around saying 'Rough Trade have screwed us up'.

"I know we're at the stage where people are looking for the smallest blemish, any little differences between us and Rough Trade or between ourselves but I still think it's daft."

With the usual Smiths blushing modesty, Johnny thinks the album is "phenomenal". "All the elements of the Smiths are there. There's nothing lost, I'm sure of it. Our producer John Porter was the perfect studio technician for us. He got some amazing subtleties but at the same time we were putting some things down in just a couple of takes.

"We did some recording beforehand with Troy Tate but it didn't really work out. It meant so much to him, he's thought about it all so much that I felt really bad about saying 'no' to some of his suggestions, particularly as I'd got really friendly with him. But it was a weird period for us. We were going into the studio for a lengthy spell for the first time and we were a bit worried about what might happen to our sound.

"The new songs we've got are just as good as the old ones but I don't want the next album to be the first album part two, I want it to be unexpected.

He's not even phased when I suggest that the idea of being successful is perhaps too expected for the Smiths and maybe they should do something about that?

"We want to be universally successful but what's more important to me - and I realise it more as we get more popular - is that we are the people who have to live with our records. I'm into a Muddy Waters trip, which sounds really corny, but I want to be influential over the next few generations. Pop music is such a powerful force and I want to stand out in that force."

But is it still? Aren't kids buying video games rather than records these days? "Only because there has been nothing of any real significance lately. I don't like video games but if it was a choice between that and the new Visage LP I'd get the video game.

"We're just trying to get back to some of the original notions about what a group is really about."

"The pursuit of the beautiful track is what was going on 95 percent of the time without either of us discussing it. Probably the other five percent of the time is what we remember most, which was us trying to be innovative and new, not trying to be New Order or the Smiths, just trying to do something that had the spirit of our influences."

--Johnny Marr, BBC.com interview, 2006

"Well I still believe Johnny Marr is the greatest guitar player of our generation, of our time... I think he’s still burnin’. It still burns in him in a very profound way, and I’m glad that he’s following his own muse. He’s not out there, doing Smiths-lite like Morrissey, you know? So I respect that."

--Billy Bragg, 2006

"[Jansch's music] really sounded like a challenge to me. It was a yardstick for me by which to raise my game as a player... Bert’s stuff was the only music by a specific guitar player that I would try and work out. And like a lot of things when you’re influenced by people, you find your own way of doing it and it’s normally wrong but it helps you along your own road. And I ended up being lucky enough to play with Bert a few times and last year he and I were playing in my kitchen and when he’s two feet away from you, playing guitar, it’s more confusing when you’re looking at his fingers than listening to the records. Having played with him, I’m more confused than I ever was."

--Johnny Marr, Harp Magazine, 2002

what I realized pretty quickly was that people were asking me about other stuff rather than singing, so I took that as being a really good thing. People were listening to the record and talking about the sound of it, or the words or how it related to the old stuff I’ve done. No one was making a big deal of the singing, and that’s a good thing. It’s a real tricky one, because when you’re known for something else—especially singing, and me being a known guitar player—it’s a bit of a leap for people. It’s a bigger deal to everyone else than it is to me."

--Johnny Marr, Magnet Magazine, 2003

JM interview:

"I think there's a certain type of person who my music resonates with, and ultimately that's people like yourself," Marr continues, after I confess to having been a ridiculously, stupidly huge Smiths fan back in the '80s. "Most musicians, whether they realize it or not, are really making music for people who are like them. That's what you start out doing and, luckily for me, I've always been aware of it... so I kind of got it right," he laughs. "I've always assumed that there are people -- outside of my own country, outside of my own city -- wherever, who like a bit of passion. Also, with Boomslang, I made the assumption that people who like what I do aren't afraid of major chord changes and a bit of rock & roll as well."

I know you're a big Rolling Stones fan, what's your favorite Stones song?

Well, when I've been asked to name a favorite-ever record, it's always been "Gimme Shelter." I heard it [for the first time] when I was off school one day, goofing off with a couple of my friends. The first time I heard it, it wasn't actually on Let It Bleed, it was from a weird Decca cut pressed album called Gimmie Shelter -- which I've never seen since, but which I still own. Amazingly, for me, the song was the last track on one of the sides and therefore I was able to keep playing it continuously on my

parents' record player, just by lifting up the tone arm. If I left the speed at 33 RPM, and left setting where the arm dropped for a 7", then it would drop right on the last track on that side, which was "Gimmie Shelter." When my parents went out, I would turn all the lights off, lay down in the dark on the floor and take the speakers from off the shelves and put them next to my ears -- like the world's biggest headphones. I'd press them up against my head and just leave the arm off the turn table so the record would play continuously until I just completely zoned out. That's transcendence for you, and no one's gonna tell me any different [laughs].

Oh yeah, I had a ritual like that with Led Zeppelin Four, where at Christmas time when I was a kid, I'd listen to it in the dark with headphones on and our Christmas tree all lit up. It was like magic. Like an acid trip before you even knew what acid was.

Wow, it's incredible isn't it? That kind of obsession and being drawn into that world, whether that was even intended by the people who made the records, it was so important to me, and people who are like me. It's something you can't get from anything else. You can't get it from religion, you can't get it from drugs and you can't get it from sex. You can get all sorts of other things from that stuff, but that escapism and that kind of visit to a kind of place that's mysterious, but yet familiar, can only happen through those kinds of records and those kinds of experiences, for me. That's what I'm trying to do myself, when I play, primarily, because ultimately now I know that when I had those moments [which are] rare in your own stuff, they do translate and people pick up on it and have the same sort of experiences.

The Smiths' song that would have had that kind of effect on me would be "How Soon Is Now." From the very first bit of the staccato guitar feedback through to the very last words Morrissey sings, that whole song just takes you on a kind of journey. It's just brilliant.

That song was kind of a bit of inspired luck, really. Although I know John Porter, who is the producer of that song, who I love, had said that he steered us towards this direction or that direction, I heard recently that he [claimed he] was trying to get us to play "That's Alright, Mama" by Elvis Presley. I totally disagree with that and somewhere I've got the demo that I brought in, when the song was called "Swamp." I did it on a Porta-studio and it was my idea of what I'd heard that Creedence [Clearwater Revival] was supposed to be about [laughs], hence the working title of "Swamp." It had that kind of swampy feel. So, I would argue with John, because I know he said recently that he'd suggested that we make it sound like "That's Alright, Mama." If that was the case then why does it sound nothing like it [laughs]? But it was very much a team effort and it was a magical night. There was myself and John Porter and the engineer, Kenny Jones left to our own devices, as usual.

Everyone else had gone and we just stayed up through the night doing the vibrato thing and then that slide feedback-y thing. That was where all the inspiration really came into it. I was able to reach back and pull out an idea that originally -- weirdly enough -- came from when I was about twelve or thirteen and I was absolutely crazy about "Disco Stomp" by Hamilton Bohannon. He was an American, late '60s/early '70s artist that pioneered the kind of four-on-the-floor thing. He had a big chart hit, which was an unusual sound in '75 for the UK, called "Disco Stomp." It went [sings call and response] "Everybody do the Disco Stomp/ Everybody do the Disco Stomp," and it had this overstated, choppy rhythm. It wasn't this vibrato as such, but I found the rhythm totally infectious and I was nuts about it. Then obviously, some time later I discovered Bo Diddley through my love of the Stones and John Lee Hooker.

I knew there was something that we needed on the track; I just adjusted the whole overstated vibrato thing. It was always something of a dream to be able to do a song that was recognizable within just a few seconds, because of the guitar riff. A lot of my heros and influences did that. I mean, you know it's "Brown Sugar" as soon as you hear it. You know it's "All The Young Dudes" as soon as you hear it. Luckily enough, that one floated by. I was really, really pleased with it, but there was a little bit of a battle with the label to put it out. They were just happy to have it as the extra track on the B Side of "William, It Was Really Nothing."

The first time I heard "William, It Was really Nothing," I was in a Woolworth's in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Really, wow. And it wasn't even the regular B Side, it was stuck on the 12".

Which I own.

Nowadays of course, the label is more than happy to pontificate about what it all meant at the time, but as I remember it, the record company didn't really like it very much.

Well, they're nuts.

Yeah, they're totally nuts.

The Smiths career really took off right on the cusp of the compact disc's first introduction to the marketplace, so most of your recordings were also initially released on vinyl, but the first album and Hatful of Hollow and The Queen is Dead were some of the first compact discs ever manufactured. Do you know if there are any Smiths records that are especially collectible because they are only available on vinyl?

Over the years, I've found quite a lot of promo things that I didn't even know existed. There are things like vinyl versions of "The Headmaster Ritual," which was a European single, not a British single. It was like a European Benelux single -- you know Benelux, they were distributors. And there's a really rare promo single of "Still Ill," which I imagine has never made it officially to CD. Of course the lines get very blurred now, with people being able to burn their own CDs. It's become a bit of a grey area. There are people who are far more qualified to talk about Smiths' rarities than I am. I don't even own all of our records [laughs]. There was this picture disc, some sort of horrendous French thing that was an interview interspersed with little bits and pieces from radio sessions, I think. I do seem to remember that, but I don't know if it was a photograph of just Morrissey, or Morrissey and myself. So it was either really horrendous or... just horrendous. Please put "laughs" in brackets after that. [Laughs] I'll be head-hunted for that one.

What kind of an impact did the Beatles have on your early musical development?

The first Beatles record I bought was the Red double compilation album (The Beatles 1962-1966). You know, one was Red and one was Blue (The Beatles 1967-1970). It was quite unusual at the time to be buying music by groups who had ceased to be. The rest of my friends were buying music by bands like The Jam and Boomtown Rats and The Stranglers and all those crappy, so-called punky

bands. That music seemed lame to me. I took my sister's lead, really, and started to troll backwards. Retro was new when I invented it [laughs]. Then this entire ocean of amazing music opened up. I then started to hunt down as many of the original Motown singles as I could. At the same time, I was reading Patti Smith interviews and I bought a bootleg where she did "Be My Baby" by the Ronnettes. I heard [Patti] talk about Phil Spector and the Rolling Stones so that just spurred me on to travel through the past, really. All that music was, to me, far more happening than the so-called British new wave, and "Turning Japanese" and all that kind of stuff. It's also kind of cool, when you're a teenager and you like stuff that no one else is into. There's a little bit of elitism in that. But lucky for me it was all about something good.

But to get back to your question, I remember "Love Me Do" from my parents playing it, and the harmonica on it. But my favorite Beatles record has got to be "I Am The Walrus." To me, it's Hieronymous Bosch and Salvador Dali set to music.

You're only the second person I've ever interviewed who's brought up the name Hieronymous Bosch in an interview.

Oh really? Who was the other?

Do you know the band The Dandy Warhols?

Sure.

They're disciples of yours, I would venture to guess.

Well there's some talk of us going out and playing with them this year. So, he mentioned Hieronymous Bosch, did he?

Yeah, Courtney is really into his artwork.

Well, that's what "I Am The Walrus" sounds like to me. That is completely and utterly beyond what we think of as pop music. It could only have come out of popular culture. It's completely anarchic and beautiful. I very rarely would use the word 'genius' but it's a genius piece of work, and genuinely trippy, you know? I don't think anything's really quite surpassed it in terms of pop music. Not even "See Emily Play" or anything like that.

You're a Syd Barrett fan, then?

Yeah! What you really hear in that sort of genre of music, even the American band's which were on a slightly different tip, it really doesn't get much better than Syd Barrett, for me anyway. I've got recordings of "Scream Thy Last Scream" and "Vegetable Man," which didn't come out, but were the last things that he recorded with Pink Floyd. "Scream Thy Last Scream" is just insane. It's interesting because, if you compare Syd Barrett solo records to, say, Oar by Skip Spence, which is another album that I really like... Skip Spence was in Moby Grape and he famously went off and did this legendary album in two or three days in Nashville. There was a tribute album out a couple of years ago with all different acts doing versions of it. Beck was on it. There's a track called "War In Peace" on it, you should check it out. It's incredible. But if you compare his solo record with Syd Barrett's, what's interesting is you've got two unhinged psyches there; both around the same age, with amazing talent. And you hear the difference between an unhinged American psyche and the unhinged British

psyche. Syd Barrett's music is very claustrophobic and concrete and intense and, to me, Skip Spence's album is very open and, for all its confusion, it's very vast. It's the difference between Kensington and... Ohio [laughs]. It's just a very interesting difference between the American and British psychedelic psyche, I think.

What's your take on the claim that it's harder today to find good music -- quality rock music that possesses that transcendent quality we've been discussing -- than it was 20 or more years ago?

It's not on the radio, but I wonder if it was ever on the radio. I'm often asked the rhetorical question about how I feel about the charts and modern radio, and there's a certain answer that's expected. But when I think about it, it's very easy for people who are idealists about music and the way the radio should be and [how] the charts are, and [there's a tendency] particularly for people in the media to take cultural snapshots. Life isn't like that. The '60s weren't all Ray Davies and Steve Marriott and the Beatles and The Stones and Pink Floyd. For every one of those bands, there were five Englebert Humperdinks. I personally have a very strong affection for the early '70s because that was the time when I was buying all of these gems. Therefore, to me, the charts were nothing but The Sparks, Roxy Music and David Bowie, when in fact there were the New Seekers and Gordon Lightfoot or [Tony Orlando &] Dawn and the Osmonds -- "Crazy Horses" aside, which of course is a work of genius (laughs).

The charts were predominantly for 12 year olds, and 12 year olds with pretty bad taste, to boot. The function of the charts and the radio is probably not that much different, essentially, [than back then] except that, it being in line with the modern world -- and the modern world being even more corporate these days, with advertising rules -- everything is complete baby food. But it always was that way, to an extent. All I know is that if I talk to someone about Godspeed You Black Emperor, most people know who they are. And a lot of people know who Sigur Ros are -- and their last album didn't even have song titles! Maybe I can't be objective, but all I'm saying is it's the journalists and the musicians who are asking the rhetorical questions. I'm almost playing Devil's Advocate. We all know about Sigur Ros and Godspeed You Black Emperor and Boards of Canada, so it can't be that bad. If anything, it goes back to making a difference. Another way of looking at it is that the underground is underground and the overground is way overground. That's better than the stuff we love being [slips into American accent] hijacked by "The Man."

I'll never forget seeing Anthrax play a small club in NYC about ten years ago and the singer saying "Remember that the underground is the best place to be."

Right, it's a beautiful thing when the underground infiltrates popular culture, there is nothing better. Whether it's The Rolling Stones or Roxy Music or The Smiths or New Order or Pet Shop Boys. Getting onto national television and into suburban households with an obviously alternative agenda...[is amazing]. It's almost like when you have a breakthrough single. You know that, for instance, when The Smiths were on Top Of The Pops almost weekly, you know that those kids who sat there who were clued up, and were sussed, realize that you're not living a straight lifestyle. And they're in there watching it with their parents! For Brian Jones and people like him, and John Lennon, to have loomed so large in straight suburbia -- particularly in the U.S. -- is a very powerful thing [laughs]. That's one of the great things about pop culture. The absence of that channel or opportunity is, obviously, a shame. You do have to go out and look for it. Once in awhile, somebody always breaks through. Kurt

Cobain obviously comes to mind. They've got to have a good way with a tune and some charisma, though, to do it.

It does happen, obviously, but when you're inundated with so much dreck, it's harder to see.

Interestingly enough, I don't think I'm that untypical or dissimilar from a lot of people who are into what I do. All I know is that I purposefully set out a few years ago to create my own sort of filter. You start off with ignoring certain television news and then certain magazines -- because we are totally inundated. I think that overload of information, and essentially feeling like a target and part of a demographic -- which is what my album and a lot of my lyrics are about -- results in building up a certain kind of filter, if you like. Mine's becoming more and more reliable now. If I go into a news agent, my eyes go to one place, and if I go into a town, there's a certain record store that I'm looking for. On the Internet, there's a certain thing I'm looking for. All the other stuff, I just avoid. Ultimately, the good stuff just floats to the top. It's just riding that wave of technology and the things that you can do and whether that be the sounds that people make in the studio or the kinds of websites they go to or the way they use computers, or whatever journeys they're on. You kind of go, "Alright, this new thing is only good for this." I think the same can be said for a lot of magazines. It's just media overload now, so I just don't even bother reading most of it. If I want to know about the news I just find out what Noam Chomsky's up to at the moment.

[Warning: second wave of blatant ass-kissing approaching] I hate to be such a fanatic but I really want you to get how important your music is and how significant it has been in the lives of so many fans, and how important Boomslang is to people who really love what you, specifically, do.

Coming over here, I've been looking out for that message, and that's made the whole thing worth it, Gail. I really mean it, because it would be kind of easy for me to go out on stage and really have the comments that certain albeit-well-meaning journalists who have interviewed me ringing in my ears, hearing, "Do you think Smiths fans are going to like it? Do you think Smiths fans are going to like it? Are your old fans going to like it?" These people are actually talking about themselves. I've started now to ask them, when that comment's made, to explain exactly who are these people that they're describing who are afraid of a major chord change? Who are, at this moment, as we speak, standing on a bridge with their pockets full of rocks and clutching their journal, and ready to jump? They don't exist. They're talking about themselves. Because people who are into me, and what I do and interested in what I do, I assume are big enough and open-minded enough to like all kinds of music, and to have really gotten the celebratory and obsessive and humorous aspects of The Smiths down. That whole sort of stereotype is totally grubbing the shadow and missing the substance of what the band was about.

Honestly, a lot of Morrissey's solo stuff --with the exception of "Suedehead" -- I just can't take, because I think, "Oh Jesus guy, get over yourself." You know what I mean?

Yeah, right.

But when it was in the context of The Smiths, I think it was a combination of him really, lyrically, putting his finger to the pulse of a certain angst and misery and sadness that no one was really

addressing at the time, and then your musicianship -- and I'm talking about you, Mike and Andy -- just lifting it all up. The Smiths were such a special band. You should be so proud.

I am, I'm absolutely proud. I sometimes feel like the lone defender out of all four of us really, because unfortunately they appear to be bickering about issues that don't really matter. They should be defending what the band was really about and getting rid of this silly, stereotypical idea. But to get back to your comments, I don't have that agenda. Some people might expect that, oh, I'm trying to 'lay some rock on some delicate wallflowers.' The people in my audience have always been able to rock out and they know the world's a big enough place to like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada and Electric Six and The Vines and whoever else there might be, and like me as well. - (JM, Healers era)

What got you into playing the guitar? What were you early experiences of it? What first attracted you to it?

When I was really young, I think it was seeing people like Roy Orbinson and Johnny Cash and Glenn Campbell, all of which my dad listened to. That was my earliest memories of it. I just remember sorta big guitars and semi accoustics and stuff, from when I was really small. I mean, specifically, what got me into playing guitar was Johnny Marr. It’s just the truth. - Bernard Butler, 2012

"I happened to be very good at certain sports. I was really quite a fine runner, for example. This in turn made me act in a somewhat cocky and outspoken way - simply as a reaction against the philistine nature of my surroundings. This the masters simply couldn't take. It was alright if you just curled up and underachieved your way into a stupor. That was pretty much what was expected really. Because if you're too smart, they hate and resent you and they will break you. When I found out that I wasn't being picked for the things I clearly excelled at, it became a slow but sure way of destroying my resilience. They succeeded in almost killing off all the self-confidence I had." – Morrissey, 1985

"When I first heard Johnny play, that was in a sense almost irrelevant. The awakening had occurred days earlier with the meeting. I'd reached a stage back then where I was so utterly impressed and infatuated that even if he couldn't have played it didn't matter somehow because the seeds were there and from those seeds anything could sprout.

"Johnny had grasped the thread of all that was relevant and yet he was - and remains - a very happy-go-lucky, optimistic person who was interested in doing it now. Not tomorrow, but right now!

"Now this was truly extraordinary because in a musical sense I'd only just met people who were total sluts, who'd rather sit around at home night after night talking about picking the guitar up instead of just grabbing it and saying 'What about this?' – Morrissey, 1985

"He is painfully shy," emphasises Johnny Marr. "You've got to understand that. We all look out for Morrissey. It's a very brotherly feeling. When we first rehearsed, I'd have done anything for him. And

as a person Morrissey is really capable of a truly loving relationship. Every day he's so open, so romantic and sensitive to other people's emotions.“ – Johnny Marr, 1985

„The thing that makes the Smiths so unique, is the fact that in certain territories we have reached a stadium level. And on reaching that level, the temptation to be respectable and just sail along is very great, and I don't think the Smiths have acknowledged that in any way.“ – Morrissey, 1987

„The sad obsessive loner... No, obviously it wasn't a mistake, as such. It might even have been fated. But it is difficult to describe how really insular I was. Especially when I was 21, 22, 23... I was entirely on my own. The very idea of me becoming what I have become was unthinkable. I found life unbearable at times. It's very hard when you don't really like people (chuckle). There should be a union formed to protect us... I was a very deep, to say the least, teenager...“ – Morrissey, 1988

Why do you care so much about pop music?

„The answer is probably simpler than we both imagine. If you keep yourself quite isolated within it, you tend to hit out against the music industry. If you make lots of friends and get invited to loads of parties, you might not want to think about all the thoughtlessness, you may well enjoy it all and you would tend not to be so over-judgemental. Even now I keep myself isolated, and so I hate what goes on.“ – Morrissey, 1988

„I suppose popular music is now engineered by careless people who never had the imagination to spot or desire the true nature of pop and why it could be so special. The wrong people, as far as I'm concerned, are in control. Lawyers and accountants have become too important. The right stuff is not being encouraged, and the wrong stuff is not being suitably condemned.“

You're saying that the resolution to do what you do is, under the circumstances, heroic?

„Yes. Very heroic. Very solitary. People are always looking at me sideways and saying, "Well, do you really want to do that? Don't you really want to that?... Are you really serious?" But also in a sense I do have the ability to laugh at myself, even though amongst the people who consider me overwrought this is also apparently sinful. I have always had to laugh at myself. If I hadn't found my social position when I was a teenager so amusing, I would have strangled myself. The fact I am doing it at all I find incredible.“ – Morrissey, 1988

You were forced to construct your own reality?

„Yes. This took me a long time. But more importantly, I think that when someone is not at all popular, for whatever reasons, one tends to develop certain forms of survival. A survival which excludes friends, which excludes social activities. That in a sense is how I organised my life. If you cannot impress people simply by being part of the great fat human race, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you don't impress people by the way you look, then you really do have to

develop other skills. And if you are now going to ask is everything I did just a way to gain some form of attention, well that's not entirely true. It is in a small way, but that's in the very nature of being alive.“ – Morrissey, 1988

„When certain people criticise me, I get the point. I can nod and smile when I'm attacked more than when I'm given wonderfully favourable reviews. It's not necessarily useful to a person that people are so keen to give you five star reviews, and who miss the point. There have been people in the past who cannot stand me whose views I find totally interesting. It's not very useful to have someone sat next to you nodding all the time... and you purposefully give them a foul idea, and they continue to nod, and you reverse their view of you back on them, and still they nod. But, yes, I think there is more credit due to me. I have done things that if most people had done them it would have narrowed their audience considerably. I have played against traditional audience sympathy. And it did inspire me when I first started that I couldn't think of anyone who was remotely like me.“ – Morrissey, 1988

„People seem to really look for quite staunchly philosophical edges in what I write, and certainly they're there. But "What Difference Does it Make?" just struck me as a very necessary little term, I don't know...what difference does almost anything make? I just wanted to have a very easy attitude, and that's what the lyrics imply. People get so neurotic about themselves: their lives, their hair, their teeth...what difference does anything make, really?“ – Morrissey, 1984

„The American music press is not something that can be relied upon. It's very scant, and it never really seems to be there, and one has to wait months and months and months for an issue of a particular magazine. So really, we just simply rely on good reviews and simply the distribution of Sire records. But I really do feel in a way that it's completely open over there. Even though many people see it as a completely locked door. I don't really think that anybody anywhere can actually understand or fathom the American market. People all have their theories but they're always wrong. People say, "Now, in order to break America you just have to do this, and you must be like this," but it never really seems to stick to any particularly rigid guideline. I don't think anybody really understands it.“ – Morrissey, 1984