Johnny Marr Read Free Page A

said, “until I discovered pop music. Music made me understand.”
    Like so many children whose imaginations were taken over by pop in the early Seventies, Maher would obsess over certain bands or albums for a while, and hungrily lap up every new influence as it came along. His music-crazy parents gave him a role model; “I learned the art of playing the same seven-inch twenty-seven times in succession from my mother,” said Johnny. His love of music was intuitive and instinctive, and Johnny has always preferred that to any academic route into music. “It seems to me there are two ways you can go, and neither would include musical school,” said Johnny when asked by author Martin Roach, in The Right To Imagination And Madness , whether a formal musical education would have helped his own development. “You can either come from the genetic thing, like I did, or you come from a completely non-musical situation… I don’t know anyone who’s had success frommusic school.” Tuition in a formal sense, was the last thing the young Johnny Maher needed, preferring to rely on an understanding of music “on a spiritual level… a purely spiritual connection” for his impetus. “I would play records at really deafening volume at eight o’clock in the morning, just playing the same song over and over again,” he admitted to one interviewer. Patti Smith, Television, The Stones, Rory Gallagher – they all came under his learning gaze and were gathered together one by one to appear by degrees in his playing as he matured.
    From the age of ten, Johnny’s future was almost pre-ordained. “I had always had guitars, for as long as I could remember,” he recalls. “I thought once that maybe my parents were pushing me into it, but I soon realised that I was obsessed.” One of the earliest influences on John were what he later called “crappy Elvis movies.” The Beatles movies Help and Hard Day’s Night were regularly on the television, and US Beatles cartoons were often repeated. Late night radio – John Peel in particular – had a huge influence. For Maher, pop music took him outside the ordinary life of school, family and friends, outside of the real world of rainy old Manchester.
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    Manchester is a tough town. It raises its musical children almost without kindness. In the early Sixties, the city’s mills were indeed dark and satanic, its huge, brick-built warehouses foreboding and claustrophobic. Compared to its limestone cousin along the East Lancs Road, Manchester was sooty and dotted with Second World War bomb sites, while Liverpool was shiny and romantic: anAtlantic city, not a northern town. From the early Sixties and the rise of Beatlemania, it seemed that when something happened, it happened in Liverpool first. Liverpool was on TV every time you switched it on. The Beatles, Jimmy Tarbuck or Cilla, for example, as well as being professional entertainers were professional Liverpudlians and celebrity scousers.
    But by the time Johnny Maher was entering his teenage years, Manchester’s inherent delights had become obvious to all. For the kids of the north-west in the early Seventies, it was often in Manchester that they saw their first gigs, in Manchester where they bought their first records, posters and books. Manchester was the harder town, but it was cool: it might have lacked a famous and iconic bronze parrot on the town hall roof, but it worked hard, got its jobs done, then went down the pub and rocked. It had the best record shops, the best bookshops, the best venues for gigs.
    In fact, the Manchester music scene had already shone brightly, both nationally and internationally. Though often eclipsed by the city some forty miles to the west, Manchester’s innate competitive relationship with Liverpool meant that some of Britain’s finest bands emerged from its environs over the years. In both Manchester and Liverpool, a huge influence came from the American airmen who flooded the region during the