Johnny Marr’s Personal Best
As he releases his fifth solo album, Johnny Marr talks Ed Nash through five of his keystone songs that tell the story of a career of constant curiosity and growth.
Some people, if they’re lucky, can manage to do one thing at a time really well. Johnny Marr does things in threes.
In The Smiths he wrote the music, co-produced the records and often found himself self-managing the band, from dealing with overdue rental van bills to unpaid studios.
That story has been told before, most definitively in his autobiography Set the Boy Free, which gets a tenth anniversary re-issue this year, and is of one of his threes for 2026. The other two are the release his excellent fifth solo album The Age Of Everything and an auction at Christie’s this month, where a host of guitars and memorabilia went under the hammer, with a chunk of the sales going to charity.
“I seem to fall into this pattern of when I put something out, I do three things at once. On the last record, Fever Dreams, the guitar book came out (Marr’s Guitars) and then I did a thing with the orchestra”, he tells me. “It’s 10 years since my autobiography, which is amazing. The record is coming out and there’s the auction. I don't know if it's just me, but these days it's not enough to just put a record out. You have to be in a film or open a theme park. I hope my manager doesn't read this or he'll be getting ideas!”
A few days after we speak, I spend an afternoon at Christie’s, where parts of his story, from amps to harmonicas and a TEAC three-track recording machine (another three) that he used for The Smiths early demos are on exhibition. But the stars of the show are the guitars, two of which are integral to the tale of one of his Personal Best choices, “How Soon Is Now?”, an Epiphone Casino that powered the tremolo riffs and a white 1963 Stratocaster on which he played the lead parts, which would go on to feature on his work with Talking Heads, Bryan Ferry, The The and Electronic.
As an artist, Marr has always kept moving, not in the manner of a dilettante, or a guitar for hire, as he’s occasionally and erroneously been labelled, but as a creative who doesn’t look back. Part of the reason he parted with the guitars - including the red Gibson ES-335 Seymour Stein got for him in New York, when Marr joked that as part of The Smiths signing to Sire, Stein would have to do what he did for The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and get him a guitar - was simply that that he didn’t play them anymore, and wanted other people to find music in them.
In keeping with his creative spirit, when Marr was writing The Age Of Everything he decided to do something he’d always wanted to do but had never gotten around to before; road test new songs before going into the studio to record them.
“We went out and played the songs live and it makes a massive difference. I've been in and around so many bands who all say, ‘On the next album we should play the songs live beforehand, that'd be a great idea.’ And it never happens for whatever reason”, he explains. “You have to get the songs written and particularly with today's technology and the process of making records, your demos are 30% of the way there to being a record, and in some cases even more, and the whole thing morphs into a record.”
Now the record is nearly ready to meet the public, I ask how he’s adjusting to having finished it. The answer is very typical of Johnny Marr, an artist who simultaneously thinks about everything to its minutia, but who has always gone with his instinct.
“Right now, I’m spending most days going, ‘What the hell was all that about over the last 18 months, making this record?’” he laughs. “Not in an antsy way but when you're in it, you're completely submerged. I have to be anyway and unfortunately, I take the people around me with me, and it's all about the record. With this one, I was able to draw a line under it when it was done. For some reason I got the timing right. It felt very purposeful.”
Marr explains that the idea of road-testing songs was part of him trying to get even better at doing what he’s done all of his life, namely writing songs. “Doing what I do, I knew it would really benefit from the age-old adage of ‘get it in front of an audience’”, he says. “To get all the technical things get ironed out - the tempos, intros being too long, intros being too short, the third verse being unnecessary, lyrics not working, titles needing to be improved - which, because I've spent a lifetime doing this, these are things that I love.”
Marr and his band played every song from The Age Of Everything except for two, “That Feeling” and the records’ keystone song, “In and Out of Love”, which features in his Personal Best. “Whether the audience liked it or not, I'm working this shit out and it paid off. By the time that had all been done I really felt ‘job done, I’m able to draw a line under it’, and the overall feeling I've got about it is emphatic. That word has been used by someone who wasn't that familiar with my solo stuff. I think it's a good word to describe the sound and the energy of it.”
I ask if it crossed his mind that The Age of Everything, his fifth solo album, is more than he’s ever done with anyone. There were four Smiths albums, three with Electronic, two with The The and one each with The Cribs and Modest Mouse, but Marr, who doesn’t think about chart positions and stats once a record is finished, says he hadn’t thought about it. “Oh wow! Well, I've learned something today. That feels about right, and there'll be a few more.”
Having worked with an incredible range of artists, including The Pet Shop Boys, The The, Hans Zimmer, Billie Eilish, Billy Bragg and Kirsty MacColl, Marr can’t tell the story of all of them across his five song choices - we’d need about one hundred songs to do that - but the stories he tells are of an artist who loves doing things in threes, and who never looks back.
“How Soon Is Now?” by The Smiths (1984)
BEST FIT: You’ve said that “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” is your favourite Smiths song, why did you choose this one?
JOHNNY MARR: The reason I picked “How Soon Is Now?” is that it's the most arresting song.
If I think about the impression it makes on someone, be that hearing it in the car driving to a mall in Chicago, or coming on a playlist on the train for someone on their way to work in Dundee, or just people listening to music during the day, I do know that it's impressive and quite unique.
All the elements of it really came together, as is the way with almost everything I've been involved with, working with a bunch of people who had a really good chemistry right across the board, which is important in what I do. It’s one of the good things about - for want of a better term - indie rock or rock. It’s not ambient music or acoustic music, it requires a team to do it.
And the guitar shines in it. If you’ve heard that song, you know what it is within three seconds, maybe even quicker. We all know there are records like that. The Beatles had it, Jimi Hendrix had it and those really big records have it, that really distinctive intro. I'm very proud of it.
You wrote this, “Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” and “William, It Was Really Nothing” in a flat in Earl's Court over a couple of days, which I've always found remarkable, but in terms of productivity and creativity, it seemed to set the template for how you've worked ever since, with that idea of doing things in threes.
Yes, a Saturday and Sunday, that was a pretty handy couple of days (laughs). It was an inspiring time, and the writing period of those three songs is a really good example of lateral thinking and the artistic process. The A-side “William, It Was Really Nothing” is so breezy, up-tempo and short and the B-side “Please, Please…” is in waltz time, it’s much more introspective and quite contrasting with “William, It Was Really Nothing.”
But in terms of the artistic process, because I tended to do things in threes, and pretty much still do, I was forced to find something, the third wheel if you like. The artistic process is great when it delivers you limitations to deliver your option.
If I was writing an album over a week and I had 11 slots to fill, I might not have ever written that song, but I remember thinking, ‘It's got to be long, because the other two are short', and also because “Please, Please…” was very pretty, with what I thought of as very Celtic chords and on “William…” the chords move so fast.
So what did you do?
Before I even played the riff, my brain went, ‘Long. Stay on the one chord.’ These artistic parameters were set up consciously and that's what's great in art. A parallel would be being given a palette and someone saying, ‘You've used predominantly red and blue, what are you going to do with that green?’ It’s as simple as that, the process is really great.
And firing up a big joint was the pièce de résistance, which you can hear in the track. It’s such a good stoner track.
It was one of the first Smiths songs I heard and I remember thinking "What the hell is this?”, being hit by the sound of the bands’ playing, with Morrissey’s words almost like a manifesto for The Smiths aesthetic.
One of the really good things about rock music is when you can read into it and what's being sung matches the worldview of the group. You could say, ‘Well, that's obvious’, but not really. If you listen to “Armageddon Days Are Here (Again)” by The The, which I was on, the sound of Matt Johnson’s singing is perfectly aligned with what you think of The The as being about, it's another great strand of being in a group - the worldview. It’s so interesting.
Was this the start of the Guitarchestra? When you recorded it, you and John Porter put the Epiphone Casino through four Fender Twin reverbs, then added layers on a Stratocaster.
I've since found out that it was two Fender Twins, I've been misremembering that all these years. The start of the Guitarchestra was really “This Charming Man.” The most guitars I put on a track was on Sandie Shaw's “Hand in Glove”, I think there were 15 guitar tracks on that, and it only sounds like nine!
I'd been layering with one guitar and no pedals on a three-track cassette machine before I formed the band. I was always into squeezing as much as I could out of guitars. I've had periods when I've tried to get away from that, but at this point in my life I know you're lucky if you're good at something, and particularly to get credit for it and for people to like it, so it's all right to do what you're good at. But “How Soon Is Now” doesn't have a ton of guitars on it.
Maybe it’s the tremolo that makes it sound like it’s millions of guitars.
The tremolo riff is spread over a few tracks and the two Fender Twins, and there's a DI track going through a pulsing thing. But in terms of layering, there's a lead guitar, a '63 Strat, which does all of the abstract stuff, and the slide, which was the third guitar, which went through an AMS harmonizer.
So there's actually only three different guitars on it. There might be a fourth one in the chorus bits, in the “You shut your mouth” business, but by my standards, it was positively unplugged.
“Get The Message” by Electronic (1991)
I remember when this song came out, the blend of acoustic guitar and the beat was something I’d never heard before.
I love this song and it's always been one of my favourites. It's got a real atmosphere to it and that atmosphere was there right from the off. And because I wrote it, I can't divorce it from that atmosphere, which I think is the sound of what was yet to be called Madchester and was not yet called Rave, but it was a movement in music which was brand new.
It was almost intangible; I wrote it on a late morning in my house in a bedroom I'd set up as a little studio when I was writing my bits of the last Smiths album. The breeze was coming through the window, and Bernard Sumner had gone away for a week.
In your autobiography, there’s a story of the first time you played it to him, at a party at your house when he got back and he said, ‘What? That's us?’
That's exactly what happened. I said to him, ‘What do you think of this?’ I snuck it on, I put a DAT of it on between these house records, we were listening to Technotronic and whatever was going on in house music at the time. We were all sat around, ready to go out and we were coming up on MDMA, which is a very discerning frame of mind to be in, in spite of what people think. I know the idea is that you run around with no shirt on, hugging everybody, but it's quite interesting to make music on.
How did "Get the Message" come together as you were writing it?
The bare bones of that song, like most great songs, came together very quickly and it had a vibe to it. I got a beat up and played the bassline, which is the basis of the song, and then put those dramatic, almost cinematic breaks in the middle of it, and then the slide solo. The acoustic riff was the last thing that went on it musically.
I was inspired by a record called “Ghetto Heaven” by The Family Stand, which had just come out, so that was the atmosphere, I think that was in the back of my mind when I wrote it. When I look back on it now, it was of house music, but it is nothing like house music.
Your wife Angie brought you the finished version with Bernard’s vocals, and you listened to it on the bullet train in Japan.
I'll never forget that. I’d just played a gig and when you play in Japan, you're often on really early and it's a dead cool thing, people go to a gig straight from work. We’d done The The gig by 8.30, I was out of the venue and sat on the bullet train, on the way to Osaka. It was very atmospheric - this beautiful, high-tech, muted train was stationary and ready to go.
Angie had come over with the recording of Bernard’s vocal; I put it in a portable DAT machine and played it as we took off, having played the gig, sat on this beautiful smooth ride and I couldn't believe how great it was.
It's one of the many examples of Bernard Sumner being entirely singular. The only person who could have sung that vocal was Lou Reed in his prime - late ‘60s, early ‘70s, Lou Reed. It's abstract, but there's meaning behind it, there's imagery in it, and crucially I knew we'd done something that was not The Smiths and not New Order, that I thought was really good.
It was quite hard at the time, we were subconsciously trying to fight that off. People might think that we’d be revelling in it, but we were doing everything in our power to avoid being an amalgamation of The Smiths and New Order, because we were young and foolish. If you gave me that opportunity now, I would have gone, ‘Come on, let's cash in!’ I’m joking!
“The Messenger” by Johnny Marr (2012)
I read that you had this riff for ages and played it with The Cribs, but it took a while for you to put it into a song.
I did jam it with The Cribs at a couple of soundchecks, but for whatever reason, only I took a lot of notice of it.
I knew I was onto something with that riff, but the reason I've picked it is because I think of all of these songs as being unusual, and I've got enough about me to know that if you play “The Messenger” it's an unusual track. It's the combination of the guitar riff, the environment, with some backwards elements in there, but it's got an almost New Romantic, early ‘80s soundscape.
The vocals were unusual, when I sang it, it was like someone else was singing it. I thought, ‘Should I change the pitch a bit, should I change the key?’ because I'm singing really up there. That adds to its sense of otherworldliness, and that's before you even get into the meaning of the words. But overall, as a sound, I was really happy with the vocal.
And it's really early, being from the first solo record I put out. I've done hundreds of gigs since then, so my singing has changed somewhat but there's something really untutored and amateurish I hear in the vocal that I really like. It’s naïve in a way, it’s like it's not me singing it.
The hook to me is where it just goes (sings) ‘aahhhhhh,’ in other words, it’s wordless. I still call certain kinds of music pop, as in commercial, but eccentric - and I like that about pop music.
The first time we spoke you said that in hindsight with The Healers you didn't quite embrace being the frontman and your singing was timid on Boomslang. But this song sounds like you, it’s super confident. It's like, ‘Ah, that's a Johnny Mar record.’
Thank you. I was really led by the songs on The Messenger and that's why the album came to be. It wasn't that I didn't want to be with The Cribs anymore, and it wasn't that I was being led by an ambition to have a solo record. The six songs I'd demoed sounded really basic, but unlike in The Healers' days, I was older for start, with more experience, and I was so sure the songs had to come out.
I remember saying to James Doviak, my co-producer, who's still with me to this day, “I'm going to do this band, we might only play to 300 people”, and for some reason I had it in my head that we may end up just playing in art galleries. I don't know where that came from.
In a way, that was my get out strategy. I genuinely didn't have any massive ambition but I knew that “The Messenger” was pretty solid, “European Me” was commercial and eccentric, and with “Word Starts Attack”, I really loved the title of it.
Now I think of it, it was a very inspired time, and all the other attendant considerations - getting a new record deal, taking some time away from The Cribs, forming a new band - were just circumstantial.
If I've got songs in my sight, I'll move mountains to get them done, but how they survive in the world remains to be seen. But we're talking about it 13 years later, so I was right to follow that vision.
“Dashboard” by Modest Mouse (2007)
I listened to this last night and I’d forgotten how powerful this band were and are, and how tuneful the song is.
As a guitar player and also as a fan of guitar music, any song that’s propelled by a riff and becomes a hit is always good in my book. You've got a hit that's built on a riff, which is great, there should be more of that in the world.
I immediately jumped on to what Isaac was singing. He's such a great writer, really phenomenal. If people don't know that they should take 10 minutes to Google a load of his lyrics, they're just phenomenal. And he's a really, really good rock singer, because he has this incredible sense of rhythm.
With so much of “Dashboard”, again it’s that word propulsion, being propelled by the rhythm of his vocal and then you get into the narrative. We'd only just met when it was written.
Didn't he sit down with a huge Fender Six amp, three inches from your face and asked if you had a riff?
He was by no means sat down. He was stood up with flying goggles on and a flying cap and in my memory, there was a mask. He'd gotten half the way down a jug of wine, I mean, a jug. I'd never seen a jug of wine before, I was thinking, ‘Is this like the 1930s or something? Where the fuck do you get a jug of wine?’ I was sat down and he was stood up, he was pretty well lit, and he was bouncing around in front of me. Then he said, “Have you got any riffs?”
This was after about 25 minutes of fairly futile noodling at very high volume, and I did actually have the riff. It was slightly different and the circumstances made me play it a little bit livelier. I'd arrived in Portland with a few different ideas that I'd prepared but I played it differently, and then he ad-libbed almost everything you hear. “Well, it would have been, could have been worse than you would ever know / The dashboard melted, but we still have the radio.”
It was improvised verse after verse, “Well, the windscreen was broken / but I love the fresh air, you know.” And I was thinking, ‘Is he really doing this? Is he coming up with this now?’ This tale of a car that’s falling to pieces, going down a mountain, but we've still got the radio. It was amazing and the proof of it is there in the record, which turned out to be really, really good.
You loved being in Modest Mouse didn't you?
The chemistry between those six members of Modest Mouse at that time was really special. Everybody brought something to the party, including both drummers, one of whom, Jeremiah Green, sadly is no longer with us, but I can say is the most creative person I've ever worked with bar none, and I don't say that posthumously, I said that in my book 10 years ago.
There was no one like him and you hear it on the record. Again, it’s eccentric, accidentally eccentric. I'm very proud of it. It's full on.
“In and Out of Love” by Johnny Marr (2026)
This is my favourite song on The Age Of Everything. I first listened to the record when I’d gotten back from a music festival in Europe and I was completely knackered, but when this song came on, it was so moving listening to it.
That's made my day, thank you. I've only done few interviews so far, but no one's mentioned this song to me yet and I’ve not talked about it. Everyone's talking about “Spin” and “It’s Time”.
Why did you choose it for your Personal Best?
I picked it because there are more commercial songs on the record that will hopefully land on the radio and will be really good live, but hand on heart, I think “In and Out of Love” is probably the best song on the album, precisely because - and I’m very happy to hear you say it - that it’s moving and it's dramatic.
What's the story of the song?
It's the true story of a breakup, and unusually for me, it's a story song. It's something that I saw two people I really care about go through and I really enjoyed finding a way to tell the story. There's a lyric in it, “Paradise and old times / Lou Reed and Perfect Days”, I think there's a literary term for that, of being specific and finding a way of mentioning Lou Reed's "Perfect Day” as being a special song.
It's a sad song, but I always try and find some hope in it. I'm very proud of it, “Rush the night into the day / Catch a ride onto the wave”, but essentially, it's that line, “Catch a ride onto the wave”, which is a positive resolve to the story of a breakup, because life goes on, see where the tide takes you my friend, that's what that’s saying.
It's the first heartbreak song you've written as a solo artist?
I think that's right. People who know anything about me know that I've been very fortunate, to say the least, in having a steady relationship with Angie. And it wasn't just a good subject for a song, I felt like I was trying to put my arm around the shoulder of someone who I care about and write it almost as a present for them. Seeing someone hurting, even if we've not been through it ourselves, all of us know about it.
It seemed to suit the drama of the music. The thing with being a songwriter, and I remember talking to you about this before, is that part of the craft is that sometimes you have to set things up in opposition. With “Easy Money” the lyric is pretty political, it’s about the student tuition fees, and because it was such an upbeat, almost annoying, catchy tune, I couldn't put an upbeat lyric in it, it would have tipped it over the edge.
In the case of “In and Out of Love” - and I had the same thing with “Hi Hello” - the music demands something so pretty, or so dramatic, or moving - which is a really lovely word - that you have to honour it with a lyric that is doing the same thing. It sounds very highfalutin, but it would have been disrespectful and a cop out to the beauty of that tune to have built something trite and disingenuous, and it certainly would have been a cop out if I'd done something abstract.
So how did you approach it?
With “In and Out of Love” it demanded I did something that matched the emotion, and then it's the task of setting about doing it and I was determined to do it in one sitting. That's not to say it was done in minutes, but it was done throughout a night. I was determined to get most of it down because I was inspired by the situation. I knew the job that had to be done, but then it’s making sure you've got it right, that you’ve got some decent rhymes in there and trying not to make it too obvious. It's a real balancing act.
How does that make you feel about being a songwriter?
All of these things interest me as a songwriter, and on some songs, it demands doing something abstract because you can tip it over the edge. That contrast between what a song requires and the process, I love it, I love even just talking about it. Being a songwriter is so intriguing, there's never a formula to it.
The Age Of Everything is released on 2 October via BMG
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