The Smiths couldn’t have been less like the Stones in most ways—sound and attitude, for starters—but don’t fool yourself about the parallels between guitarists Johnny Marr and Keith Richards. Both are impossibly skinny men of few words (Mick or Morrissey never stopped yammering anyway) but verbose, rhythmically intense guitar playing. Vilified by the press when he abruptly ended the Smiths in 1987, Marr—who many predicted would flourish while Morrissey faded into obscurity—kept a low profile for the next 15 years and became the ultimate six-string sidekick, playing with the Pretenders, The The, Billy Bragg, Neil Finn and Beck. He also put out three albums as Electronic, a dancey superduo with New Order’s Bernard Sumner that never quite equaled the sum of its parts. With the Healers—drummer Zak Starkey (Ringo’s son and current member of the Who) and bassist Alonza Bevan (Kula Shaker)—the prodigal Mancunian returns to rock ‘n’ roll. Yes, he sings, with a voice that’s part Sumner and part Liam Gallagher, and his solo debut Boomslang feels like past and future Marr. His trademark 12-string jangle peacefully coexists with backward-guitar leads and groovy percussion in psych-friendly, four-to-seven-minute tracks. While Boomslang may not be privy to the hyperliterate lyricism of Marr’s past vocal collaborators, it’s got a kind of (Northern) soul that words can’t manufacture.

MAGNET sent its Smiths superfan to meet Marr at a New York hotel. Upon spotting Marr in the lobby, superfan admits to hiding behind a potted plant for a moment to collect whatever cool he could muster.

The general reaction people have had to me telling them there’s a Johnny Marr album is, “Oh, he can sing?”
It’s only been the last week or so that I’ve started doing interviews and therefore getting feedback from people who don’t have a vested interest in telling me that it’s good—no, I’m joking. But 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.

So you weren’t self-conscious or nervous about it?
Not once I started to get my sound together. The band convinced me that I should be doing it. I wrote the songs, I wanted to get the songs together and I didn’t want to hold anything up by going on this interminable search around the world for mister frontman.

Did you seek out vocalists?
I did, because I’ve been doing that since I was 15. I was doing it before the Smiths, you know? Because I was playing with Zak, the drummer, at that time, I had the words, I had the melodies, I just sang on the demos. Then I found a couple of guys who I had CDs of, given to me by friends, and I heard they were nice fellas and they had good hair. And I played it to the band and it was somewhat of a triumph that I found someone. Then they went off to a café whilst I stayed talking to the manager. They came back about an hour and a half later, somewhat conspiriatorially.

I think they may have been talking about you.
They certainly had, but they’d been saying good stuff. They said, ‘Look, we’ve got something to tell you. We think you’re wrong about getting a singer, we think it sounds good as it is.’ They convinced me that what I was doing was not just strong but fairly ... odd. They knew that would be the word that would get me. If they’d said “soulful,” “beautiful” and all that ...

“Johnny, we like your vocal stylings.”
[Laughs] Exactly, exactly. They used words like “ill” and “weird” and “odd” and “white,” and I was kind of like, “OK, I can do that.” Because I trust them. And I know their only agenda being in a band with me is because they believe we can do something to turn them on. They don’t need to be in a band with Johnny Marr for their lives to be complete.

And this is basically Zak and Alonza, you mean.
Right. They wouldn’t put me out on a wire without a net. I started singing the record proper and got a sense of what my sound was. Luckily, I found I wasn’t falling into any -isms of anybody else’s and it’s fairly right with the direction of the band. One of the reasons I formed the band in the first place as well was I had this idea for a rock band that was fairly all-encompassing in terms of the sound. And for the first time since being in my mid-teens, I was getting songs together where I probably would’ve ended up steering the singer in certain directions.

So instead of trying to work the marionette strings, you figured you’d do it yourself.
Yeah, yeah. It just seemed like unnecessary hard work and not the right approach. Then the penny dropped that the record we made could sound like the whole picture that I had without any other colors coming into it. In the past, I’ve loved those other colors, it was a nice surprise. I’d do a backing track, and that’d be 100 percent of my inspiration. The singer, whether it be Morrissey or Bernard Sumner or Beth Orton, they put their 100 percent and you end up with 300 percent, the sum being even greater than the parts sort of thing.

So it used to be that you’d lay down your guitar part, leave the studio, and when you came back there was a vocal there.
Yeah. To use an analogy, it was sort of like doing the background of a painting. You think there’s gonna be a house in the foreground, and instead it’s a child or a ship or whatever. I feel really lucky that I’ve done it with some sort of artistic success, but to hammer this metaphor into the ground, I was getting the whole picture.

Why do a solo album now? Was it about the songs you had, or were you not ready for something like this before?
Two years before I met Zak, I was subconsciously looking for a band and a sound that never came. And was never gonna come unless I did it myself, which was like a wide-awake rock, but without an agenda to be incredibly modern. Not to say I wanted to be traditional or bring back any cause for real rock, but just melodic rock ‘n’ roll, really, with a bit of esoteric, druggy spin on it.

There is a slightly psychedelic texture to the album that hasn’t been on a lot of stuff you’ve worked on before.
It was occurring to me that I was going to make a record that was gonna be not layered and straight ahead. When the band formed, I was listening to a lot of John Mayall. Very sparse blues rock, really. Once the record started to develop, I realized that I had an agenda and I just fucking dropped it. Layering guitars might not be de rigeur, but it’s what I do, it’s what gives me a buzz and therefore it’s genuine. I had to tell myself, “C’mon, Johnny, make the assumption that your audience want you to sound like you. It’s been quite a long time.” And I started to listen to people like Bernard Sumner, who said, “What the fuck is wrong with sounding like you?” Making the Electronic records, I would play things and go, “Oh, that’s a bit Johnny Marr,” and he’d go, “Well, it’s supposed to be a bit Johnny Marr!” For a lot of reasons I felt like I was being boxed or pegged, because I did a lot when I was very young. Bernard would say, “Aw, Electronic’s records, they don’t have enough guitar on them, and everyone’s going to think it’s my fault.”

I think a lot of people did feel like you’d abandoned rock ‘n’ roll—the name Electronic was purposeful in that way, was meant to distance the group.
Yeah, but very simply, I was a 24-year-old guy living in a city that was just exploding with a new culture. And who wouldn’t want to be a part of that? I’d been waiting for my city to do that since punk, because I was too young for punk. Suddenly, the whole place was experiencing new music, new technology, new clubs, new drugs, new fashion.

You couldn’t very well bury your head in the sand.
I was an established musician with a certain place in pop music, but that shouldn’t exclude me from a movement in my own city that I wanted to be a part of, because I was just a young guy, you know? And also with a history of, before the Smiths, all kinds of music and an opportunity to work with someone who: a) I respected massively, and b) was probably the best, most innovative electronic musician in the pop field to come out of the U.K. So I’m very philosophical about the whole thing. It wasn’t about me turning my back on pop music, it was about me being a musician and wanting to make that music at that time.

I think you’re correct when you say that people want you to sound like you. Even the Electronic records, your fans did embrace the guitar-oriented tracks and listened for you in those records.
I think I was a little shy and not that confident. And why I say that is that a lot of the (Electronic) songs that people assume are Bernard’s songs were actually my songs. I did lots of dance songs. I just kind of went nuts with it once I learned how it worked, how the puzzle went together. I was crazy about S’Express in ‘89, you know? I wanted to just play “Superfly Guy” forever.

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