Mind if I rattle off a few names of people you’ve worked with?
We’re going to be here all night but, yeah, sure.

Either just give a spot impression or something you learned from working with them.
Yeah, sure.

Bernard Sumner.
I knew you’d say that. Complicated and simple at the same time. Simple in the best possible sense. Almost Zen-like detachment. Great guy with a real sense of what’s important in life. He deserves everything that’s come to him because he put the work in. Had it not been for punk rock, Bernard would have been completely lost and constrained and stifled because of what punk rock was supposed to be like: freeing up people who were really imaginative and genuinely artistic. Bernard is a real punk. Invented his own thing, you know? Really overlooked. Electronic is one of the rare examples of a band that split up with no acrimony whatsoever. We were too smart and our friendship was too important to let that happen. Did you want me to keep these brief?

That’s up to you—say as much as you like. I’ve got hours, you know?
I learned a lot about singing from Bernard. It’s the approach: leave your insecurities and neuroses at the door ‘cause we’ve got a job to do. Be subjective when you write a song and when you’re getting your melodies together be as emotional as you like, but then when you’re doing the thing, just drop the shit and do the job.

Matt Johnson.
Matt’s an amazing guy. Incredibly misunderstood. He’s very, very funny. A great example of the value of self-education over taught education, because he’s a very interesting guy and didn’t learn any of it in school. He became incredibly worldly against the odds. He’s a real fighter. Matt’s someone who will constantly be looking for the answers to things and will put himself through all kinds of difficult experiences in pursuit of it. Noble guy and a friend. He was the first person who told me I should do my own record and sing, and that was in ‘87.

Well, it just took you a while to get around to it.
Shows you how much stock I put in his opinion. [Laughs]

Just say you didn’t get the memo.
Exactly. I was drunk and I didn’t hear him, yeah. “I thought you were joking.”

Beck.
Beck reminded me of David Byrne in the best possible way. He can get on pretty much anyone’s sense of humor and sense of the absurd. A good listener, that’s what I find from Beck. A very perceptive person, and one of those guys who likes to hear people talk. I saw him play last night, it was really good. His new record’s great, I really rate it.

Sea Change. I think that was a risky thing for him to do.
I think he’s the real thing because he’s not afraid to go down some necessary sideroads rather than just take the main highway. When all’s said and done, I think he’ll be able to be discussed in the same way as Neil Young. Obviously, Bob Dylan comes to mind, but Dylan is so mythical and legendary, but I can see Beck’s doing the same kind of thing in a way. And David Bowie.

Chrissie Hynde.
Chrissie’s a fascinating person. Incredibly complex. Really funny. And this amazing mixture of all things people assume that she is: ballsy, no-nonsense sort of balanced with this incredible femininity. She smells amazing. All the time. Chrissie is to England what I am to the States. It’s like she was born in the wrong place. Super attraction to England and English culture, as I did America and American culture. When she makes a pot of tea, it’s in a beautiful china teapot with great cups and it’s all a bit of a ceremony. Whereas I just can’t wait to get to Denny’s. But for me, she was really important. One of the things that people don’t know about Chrissie and myself is that my part in the Pretenders is 10 percent about the band and the music and 90 percent about my relationship to that woman. I met her at a time when I was fairly battered by the Smiths split and the things going on in my world with the media. And the manipulation of the media by certain people to make me look like the bad guy. I suddenly found myself hanging out with this person and I’m going, “Oh, things are tough. I’m bruised. Oh, I left my band. Oh, it’s really raw.” And her vibe was, “Well, two of my fucking band died. And plus, I don’t even really know who your band are. Let’s go see some life.” It was an amazing thing to be around.

Morrissey.
[Long pause] What can I say Morrissey is like, genuinely? I’ve never been asked to sum him up. Because there was so much emphasis placed on the differences between Morrissey and myself, most people haven’t stopped to wonder what it was that made us so close. The thing that brought us really close together is the essence of why he lives his life and why I live my life. And that is that without what we consider to be the art of pop music and pop culture, life doesn’t make any sense. And that understanding: He needed it like I needed it. It was a pretty serious, deep need. It wasn’t just the need to escape our social situation, because underneath it all, one of the things that makes us the same is that we’re both incredibly sensitive. There was this serious burden with serious mental problems that were taken care of by records.

In the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll equation, rock ‘n’ roll has always eclipsed the other two for you. And that applies to Morrissey as well.
I guess I’m being flowery about it, but as kids we both felt absolutely crazy until we discovered pop music, and we’re not alone in it. And I guess that’s why people can relate to us. People think that I’m the antithesis of Morrissey. If that’s the thing they relate to me for, well, they’re wrong. Maybe it’s just my aesthetic that they don’t truck with; and I’m cool with that, ‘cause I don’t truck with theirs, either. The thing that they get from him, he got from me as well, and I get from him. As people, I was probably as dysfunctional in my own way as he was until I immersed myself in pop culture. The thing about the two of us is we heard and saw things in records that weren’t even there.

What kinds of things did you imagine or find in records?
Worlds. When he met me, he knew we were different in the way we expressed ourselves, but the most important thing to him spiritually was the most important thing to me spiritually. You can’t be that close with someone for that length of time and go through what we went through on a minute-by-minute basis without having the ultimate connection. I know it sounds very poetic, but that’s what kept us together. Only he and I know that something like a fight or a difference in lifestyles or court cases or who said what in the press about who, or what fans might say, is pretty small change compared to the connection we have. It’s very deep. In short, there’s a very big part of him that I understand. And he knows it.

To condense all that flowery shit and get to the point—it’s not your point, but whatever, right?—he’s got a great voice. He invented things in pop music. Brought things into pop music after 25 years of all kinds of stuff being there. Aesthetically, he’s a true innovator. What an innovator is, to me, is someone who can bring together what on the face of things seem like totally disparate elements, put them through their own funnel and then present the thing that is identifiably his in a new genre. And the Smiths sleeves are the perfect example. You see something that looks like a Smiths sleeve? It’s a Morrissey sleeve. You try to tell someone who can’t see what those elements are and they would think you were nuts. You’ve got film stars, sports stars, some kind of graphic. Those things should never work together, but they did. That’s what Miles Davis did.

Well, your role in the Smiths aesthetic was huge. If you don’t mind a bit of flattery, I think that the way you played guitar two decades ago—and a couple other people, as well—changed what people thought good guitar playing was. At the time, it was mostly about Eddie Van Halen, big solos. You brought it back to a level of...
Melody, rhythm and getting to the point. Emotive. There’s no musicality in technique for technique’s sake, as we all know. The thing about Smiths records and some other bands like us—some of the best Joy Division records and some of the real sad New Order records—is that they were emotive. I love playing guitar and I like guitar players, but I didn’t like anyone in particular because they, as just guitar players, weren’t saying as much to me as “All The Young Dudes” by Mott The Hoople.

You wouldn’t separate the guitar from the whole song.
I didn’t so much listen to these records as study them. When I was learning to play, I wouldn’t listen to the guitar player and then try to play the guitar part—I’d try to play the whole record. That was the thing that set me on fire. The guitar solo didn’t set me on fire like a kickass chorus with some strings in it and some high backing vocals. I wanted to do things that hit me—those sections of records that would explode for me. That’s why I played super-melodic and quite dramatic and tried to get some sadness out of it. I purposely bought a Rickenbacker so I wouldn’t play like a blues player. Obviously I appreciate Jimmy Page, but that wasn’t what it was about. I wanted to hear a whole Phil Spector record when I played the guitar.

And there’s no better way to do that than with a 12-string guitar and 16th notes.
It was a big sound. And it was only when the press started mentioning the Byrds that I went and checked the Byrds out. It’s kind of nuts to talk about this stuff. I only know about these things because people have told me.

Well, you’ve probably had to analyze guitar playing to death. People probably think you have a giant guitar tattooed on your back.
It’s not on my back. [Laughs] [Morrissey and I] felt like we could make it magical at the time. We were both getting the buzz out of our records that we would get out of the records that touched us when we were kids. That’s a highly emotional state to be in. That’s hard on the nervous system. You know, when the Beatles talk about their experiences being hard on the nervous system, that’s obviously because they were stuck in a hotel with 10,000 people outside. But what was hard on me and Morrissey, and why there was a certain resentment from us toward the other members of the band, was they didn’t have that. We were trying to set ourselves on fire all the time in what we were doing. It really takes it out of you.

As the Smiths went on, did the pressure just continue to get greater to achieve things, musically?
We were in an incredibly emotional state all the time because of what we were doing in the studio. He’d be going, “Oh my god, I don’t believe this piece of music that he’s brought to me.” And then when he’d sing on it, I’d go, “Oh my god, I don’t believe what he’s just sung.” And before we knew it, we had another one. It was pretty good going, you know?