Johnny Marr Read Free

émigré Irish – carried the tradition of Irish music with them to England, and Johnny’s father was an accomplished accordion player. While he described his father’s occupation as “digging holes in roads”, Johnny’s parents were actually soon to be involved in promoting country music themselves. “Because it was a big family,” recalls Johnny, “there were always christenings and weddings, and there was always what seemed like this same band playing at these functions.” John Snr taught his son to play the harmonica and the accordion, and before he hit his teens, Johnny was experimenting with the guitar. “My parents had Beatles records, but they were more into the Irish stuff, country music, which spilled over into the Everly Brothers – who were really popular in my household.” ‘Walk Right Back’, by The Everlys, is the first record that Johnny can remember being played around the house. Jim Reeves, and what Johnny came to refer to later as ‘bad country’ – the music of people like Hank Williams and Chet Atkins – was popular around the house too. Even the music Johnny didn’t like influenced him. He still claims not to enjoy country music, saying that “no matter how much you believeotherwise, your upbringing indelibly affects your development.” “It gives you your musical personality,” says Johnny, “and in some cases your entire musical vocabulary.” Even when he was ten or eleven years old and getting into glam rock, the influence was still there. Deliberately and unwittingly, Johnny’s family shaped his early musical aspirations, and though he still retains an aversion for country, “the influence remains.”
    Johnny would spend long periods back in the home country, sometimes enjoying as much as four months of the year in Ireland. Alongside his immediate family in Manchester, Ireland itself influenced him strongly too – the atmosphere and the people. “The Irish connection is a big one,” he has said during a webchat on jmarr.com. “There is a sensibility that affects your life… passion, humour, irreverence.” Johnny was aware of the poetic nature of his Irish-ness, of its occasional surreality, and of the darkness in the Irish soul that is sometimes hard to ignore.
    As a kid though, most of Johnny’s earliest influences were most certainly poetic and occasionally surreal, but rarely dark. His first musical heroes were amongst the most incandescent of all. One of the first was Marc Bolan, and T. Rex was one of his earliest and most abiding influences. Bolan epitomised all that was fine about post-Beatles pop, his guitar playing ballsy and rooted in the electric blues of Howlin’ Wolf, his image glamorous and elusive. “If it hadn’t been for Marc Bolan, Roxy Music and David Bowie,” Marr recalled in Designer magazine in 2001, “kids of my generation would have been completely screwed.” Glam gave access to pop that more sophisticated acts such as Little Feat denied the ten-year-old Maher. Sparks was another of the bands that turned Johnny on, at a time when the Bay City Rollers were perhaps the ghastly,inevitable alternative. At the same time, Keith Richards was one of Johnny’s earliest icons. For the young Johnny Maher, pop music soon became a major preoccupation and took a complete hold on his imagination. It was the perfect time to be growing up in pop, and to be heavily influenced by the music of the early Seventies was to be introduced to a thousand different sounds, such was the diversity of the material around: The Beatles, Stones, Neil Young, Motown, blues, rock and soul – the wealth and the breadth of Sixties and early Seventies pop was astonishing. Throughout these years, Johnny soaked it all up, his appetite for the next cool band enormous. As it was for so many born in the early Sixties, it was a route outside of the formal education system via which we learned about the world. “I didn’t really think the world made very much sense,” Johnny has