THE JOURNAL
Johnny Marr performing in Hyde Park, London, 9 July 2022. Photograph by Tom Rose via Alamy
In the last month, Johnny Marr parted ways with the guitar heard in “This Charming Man” and many other songs by The Smiths. The 1982 Rickenbacker 330 Jetgo was among the star lots in an auction of more than 70 instruments hosted by Christie’s. And while it was key to Marr’s signature sound, he won’t be losing any sleep over selling it. Clothing, however, was notably absent from the sale.
“I’d actually find it harder to get rid of some of my jackets than I would some of my guitars,” Marr tells MR PORTER. “Oh man, I’m getting a visceral reaction even thinking about it.”
Not that his jackets would likely fit anyone else. “Everything I wear, I get tailored,” he says. And he has a hoard of vintage flowery blouses, bought in bulk from American thrifts stores or eBay and turned into bespoke shirts by the same guy in Manchester. “They look great on stage in photographs,” he says. “I want to take those to the grave with me.”
The way he dresses has always been a big part of his life. “Growing up in the inner city in the 1970s, me and my sister were clothes freaks,” he says. “It’s like the way some families like football. It’s part of the culture. Before the Smiths, the only job I’ve ever had was working in a clothes shop.”
The shop in question, X-Clothes, off Cross Street in central Manchester, was integral to the origin story of the Smiths – it’s “pretty much” where the band was formed, Marr says. “I was a sales assistant then. But the reason I got that job was that me and my girlfriend [now his wife, Angie] would make what bits of money we could by jibbing on the train from Manchester to London, coming down to King’s Road and buying shirts and jackets, bringing them back up to Manchester. That’s how I made enough to buy my guitar and amp.”
“I’d actually find it harder to get rid of some of my jackets than I would some of my guitars”
The job had other perks, too. “[It] was the first shop to have Wayfarers in for 25 years,” he says. “I made sure I was going to nab that first pair.”
Despite a thriving music scene at that time, Marr says his first style influences weren’t his contemporaries – and especially weren’t the obvious ones. “I was super into Stuart Sutcliffe, who was the guy who didn’t make it with the Beatles. At the very, very start of the Smiths, I had a quiff, a V-neck sweater and a white polo neck, and that was deliberately inspired by Stu Sutcliffe.”
He also wore a lot of “girls’ clothes”, he says. “In a way, I was looking like how I remembered some of my sister’s friends.”
He’s kept as much of his wardrobe as he can, reusing old pieces decades later. He mentions digging out specific sneakers, worn with no socks, when he joined the Cribs in 2008. “Because that was the way it was done in the original punk days,” he says. “Those little details are really important. I get the sleeves on the T-shirts made shorter. All these things look right on a guitar. Now, that’s just my bag. When I see Fontaines DC, Sam Fender, Wet Leg or Lime Garden, I understand what’s going on with their shape and their aesthetic choices.”
Over the years, Marr has honed his look. “I know what works for me and I have some strong, strong feelings about what you really can’t wear while you’re playing the guitar,” he says. “Anything that makes the guitar look like a fucking banjo. That’s the problem with baggy stuff. It makes your guitar look too small.”
Ahead of the release of his new album, The Age Of Everything, Marr takes MR PORTER through his career – and his wardrobe.
The Smiths
Photograph by Gered Mankowitz
Photograph by Andrew Catlin
Marr formed The Smiths in 1982 with Morrissey (vocals), Andy Rourke (bass) and Mike Joyce (drums). “To a generation of music fans, they were the only band that mattered,” the BBC reported. “Marr’s guitar style was a huge building block for more Manchester legends that followed.”
“The jacket I’m wearing in this picture, this is my girlfriend’s coat,” Marr says. “It was like a cape. I knew that if I was sitting down, I could get away with it. I wore it on a TV appearance, but I had to sit down. Just for the coat.
“And then the obvious thing with that picture is I’ve got a haircut that belongs on a woman in 1965. Deliberately. It just evolved. That is a point parting that looks like the centre of a whirlpool. Or a black hole. It just grew and grew – that was purely out of audacity in seeing how far I could push it.
“I’ve got loads of eye makeup on as well. I wanted an exaggerated feminine look. For a straight boy that was par for the course where I’m from, but it did surprise Americans. I had the idea, and then I saw Estelle Bennett from the Ronettes. Being an elitist and a smart ass, it wasn’t enough for me to pick Ronnie Spector, the lead singer, I had to pick one of the others.
“Very broadly speaking, you’ve got this class system in England. Rock fans, they would look like students. They looked scruffy. And people who liked Motown and disco and chic looked really smart and quite feminine, right? I wanted to play rock music, but I wanted to bring those elements of [soul and disco] music. A big part of that, again, is having a sister who was only 11 months older than me. And coming from that background, I was trying to bring that into student culture.”
Johnny Marr and the Healers
Photograph by Jon Shard
Marr left The Smiths in 1987 and went on to play as a guitarist with a string of bands and artists, including Talking Heads, the Pretenders, the The, Pet Shop Boys and Bryan Ferry. He also formed Electronic with Bernard Sumner from New Order. In 2000, he formed Johnny Marr and the Healers with Zak Starkey (son of Ringo Starr), Lee Spencer and Alonza Bevan, with Marr fronting the band.
Marr notes that the shirt he wears here came from the same thinking as the bespoke shirts that came later. “I hadn’t yet developed my own mini blouse industry,” he says.
“There was a shop on Melrose [Avenue] in Los Angeles in the late 1990s called Lords. The customers were usually the real glammy people like Tommy Lee and the Guns N’ Roses guys. You know, 99 per cent of the stuff in that store, I wasn’t able to pull off. But that shirt… I’ll never get rid of because it’s utterly beautiful. It’s handmade, it’s sort of mesh, vaguely see-through with the beautiful roses hand stitched. And man, that was expensive. I bought maybe three or four shirts from them and an amazing suede jacket, which I wore on the Conan O’Brien show. Man, that was hot. I was really sweating.
“I guess the best way to describe it was the boho movement – boot-cut jeans, all of that. There was a thing that me and Oasis were doing around the early 2000s. We were bringing flares back.
“I learned shitloads [about fronting a band] from Chrissie [Hynde, who Marr played with in the Pretenders]. I learned a lot about singing from Brian Ferry. He gave me loads of tips about what happens before you go on stage, getting yourself in the zone, not speaking too much, wearing scarves on airplanes, doing your warm-ups…
“If it was a career decision for me, I’d just be the famous guitarist – just worry about playing the guitar and wearing sunglasses.”
Modest Mouse
Photograph by Wendy Lynch
In 2006, Marr joined the American indie rock band Modest Mouse.
“It seems like I’m a serial leaver of bands. But I’m actually a serial joiner of bands. That experience, to me, was exactly the same as when I was 15 and I got asked to be in a band. Everyone – especially in England – was like, ‘What’s Johnny Marr doing joining this band of a load of guys with beards?’ Disregarding the fact that they were one probably the biggest and most important counter-cultural guitar band in the US at that time.
“The brotherhood we built up; you become like people working on an oil rig. You see each other every day, you want to kill each other, you have arguments, you get this really close bond. And, frankly, it would just have been just too weird to bail.
“I’ve never felt more English in my life. Every time I opened my mouth, it was like ‘Austin Powers is in the building’. [Puts on mock-English accent:] ‘Oh, really? Is that right?’ Is that really how I sound? Like Mary Poppins. But being English, British, my role is a little like Ocean’s 11, like the bomb disposal expert. I come in and I try to make sense of it. And I dressed appropriately.
“As you can see in that picture [above], they were the forerunners of the hipster, Filson outdoorsy [look]. And what I’m doing there is a British guitar band in 1979 – in this American band in the 2000s. I thought, ‘Right, if you’re going to take the piss, then I’ll be as British as I possibly can be.’ Brilliant.”
Solo
Photograph by Pat Graham
After leaving the Cribs in 2011, Marr began recording material under his own name. He also worked on the scores for Inception and No Time To Die, recording the latter with Hans Zimmer and Billie Eilish.
“I was coming out of the Cribs and me and a mate were getting into British psychedelia,” he says. “Not painting flowers on our faces, more like [1960s rock band] John’s Children and the beat group era. I dug out those Birkenstock desert boots – that was what I was wearing in the Healers. I went to loads of thrift stores, bought these old jackets and then got them modified and made really, really small. Mod meets new wave – there’s a lot of Subway Sect in there, too.
“I was let off the leash and I could write whatever inspired me. I was bringing those bands and architecture into it quite a lot. The first album cover, it was taken in Berlin and that’s very deliberate. I’ve got a mac on, which comes from really 1980s new wave. A lot of what I was doing was really influenced by the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s. Very non-rock’n’roll.
“I was wearing a lot of [badges and buttons] at the time. One of them would have been How To Draw A Bunny, Ray Johnson, the New York conceptual artist. The other one would have either probably a Northern Soul badge or a Buddhism badge, because, you know, I’m a card-carrying teetotal, meditating new-age wanker.”
Today
Johnny Marr performing in Hyde Park, London, 9 July 2022. Photograph by Tom Rose via Alamy
Marr has just released his fifth solo album, The Age Of Everything, and appears on four tracks on the latest release by Gorillaz, The Mountain.
“The gilet is mostly connected with the outdoors,” Marr says. “But I was seeing it completely differently. I was seeing it looking like a Hindu [Nehru jacket] – that’s what I’m doing there. You know, how a kurta shirt is quite long. To try and look as Indian as possible because that suits my lifestyle. It informs a lot of the work and the cover of Fever Dreams [Marr’s 2022 album]. Where I’ve been at recently, just by pure coincidence that Gorillaz’s latest album was informed by Vedanta and India – that was a total fluke.
“I do like periods being defined. I’m not wearing a completely different vibe every night, but with each period, I feel like I want to change it up for myself, including my guitar. I have my signature guitar, but every few years, I want to look down and feel like it’s a different part of my life. Marking out periods of my life – and your aesthetic comes into that, I think.”
The Age Of Everything is out now