First, I’m not a cynic – absolutely not. I don’t hate the music business. I am very privileged to have been a working musician for 20-odd years. I’m still a working musician now and hopefully will be for a while, so I’m happy to work and be involved with British culture.

But the British music industry has never, ever created anything, ever, in its history. It has never innovated anything. It’s done plenty of good things – it’s brought plenty of great innovators to light and helped to make great records and events – but nothing of any value was ever created inside the British or American music business. It always came from the outside, from outsiders created in the real world. These people, out of necessity, rejection, frustration and talent, and with vision, built their own ark and sailed it alongside and ahead of the music industry. In doing so they created their own market. They did their own research and development. They did it, and they still do it, in small clubs, playing in front of a few people, supporting other bands, going up and down the country in little vans, they do it in home-made studios, they do it on MySpace, on Facebook. They don’t do it on The X Factor.

They were always people from the outside. Take Les Paul and his innovations for the electric guitar – he was rejected as a crank. The Beatles are the most obvious example – rejected by Decca for their four-piece guitar line-up. No one invented Bob Marley, no one invented the Sex Pistols or Kurt Cobain or Jay-Z – they all invented themselves and were rejected. They were outsiders and they were necessary.

The first outsider object I ever saw was a record by the Buzzcocks called Spiral Scratch. This really was outsider art. I would have been 13 or 14, and I remember that even just the look of it was astounding. Thirty-odd years later, there isn’t anything like it, which is absurd. If you look at it, it’s a Xerox Polaroid of four freezing-cold, skinny, poor boys from Manchester, taken in Piccadilly Gardens. At that time, rock stars, musicians, everybody inside the industry, were made to look like gods. Everything was very reverential. The record itself is quite astonishing: stripped down, no-nonsense, unadorned, direct. It was totally outside of everything that was going on at the time. The sound was one of the very first productions by another legendary Manchester outsider, Martin Hannett.

The Manchester punk rockers were the first outsiders I connected with. The idea we have now of punk rockers is quite cartoony, quite cuddly – the mohican, the bondage trousers and the safety pin. That came a little later – the people I was confronted with were super-hip Manchester lads. These guys were so switched on, they didn’t bother reading the weekly music press, because that was a middle-class conceit. They were working-class, edgy provocateurs. Like the record, they were fast and they were unadorned. They didn’t bother with mohicans and stuff hanging off their clothes – that came a year later.

These guys were from the street and whenever I saw them they were outside. They were outside Virgin Records on Market Street every Saturday. I don’t think they wanted to go in. The next time I saw them was at the Wythenshawe Forum when I went to see Slaughter and The Dogs. I saw them outside there as well. The next time I remember I was hanging around outside a T-Rex concert because I was too young. I wanted to be inside, but I managed to do that without a ticket, by hanging out with these blokes. They were a little older than me, but they made an impression on me that never went away.

Over the years, I’ve started to see that there’s this idea of the inside, a perception of the music business as being a place, or a group of physical spaces. I thought that and particularly people who want to get into it, or think that they need to get into it, think it’s a place. A world that is entirely floored with soft shag-pile carpeting, soft lights, silent, posh, big cars, stylists every day and lots and lots of money, of course, that goes straight in your pocket, where everything’s fabulous. But what I’m describing is Simon Cowell’s house – and I’m not even sure that exists. That’s what people think, that it’s a mystical place where you’re happy. But it’s a world that lasts 12 weeks and stops on Christmas Eve. There’s no doorway to the music industry. There’s the idea that there’s a doorway and there’s a classic idea for aspiring musicians of how you get in there.

One way is to have a connection with the man on the inside, a Svengali. This guy is approachable because he’s got one foot in the world you live in and one foot inside the door, beyond which there’s a big white light. The truth of the matter is that any innovative and incredible manager who’s really made a difference had never done it before. They were doing it for the first time. Malcolm McLaren (some clever dicks might say he managed the New York Dolls for a bit. Well, not really), Andrew Oldham, Joe Moss, who managed The Smiths, and Brian Epstein – they all ran shops. As did, I think, Paul McGuinness, U2′s manager.

These are all people who changed the music business. Without them you wouldn’t have heard of the bands. Most notably, Rob Gretton [manager of New Order and Joy Division] was a DJ and had never managed a band before. So this idea of the Svengali popping his head out of the music-business doorway, discovering people and making them stars and creating the Sex Pistols, The Rolling Stones or The Beatles is absurd. Do you think Epstein created John Lennon? But without these guys, who were outsiders easily as much as the musicians themselves, it wouldn’t happen. They had their own agendas. They were able to see something in the band and outside of them that was worthwhile and of worth.

Oldham was a formidable character who managed The Rolling Stones early on. He was younger than them and he took this bunch of very earnest blues aficionados and created the anti-Beatles. The Rolling Stones are officially my favourite band but they weren’t really that good at the start. I’m sure it never would have occurred to those guys that they could be the anti-Beatles, as big as they are now, 40 or 50 years later. But that was down to the manager and his own agenda and vision. Epstein obviously had to be an outsider because of his personal life, but he had his own agenda, too, in that he had theatrical aspirations and some flair for presentation. Sadly, he was such an outsider, it probably spelled his demise.

Like a lot of people, Joy Division were inspired to take up their guitars by the Sex Pistols. Salford sons, they were pretty ordinary at first, they hadn’t found their sound. They’re an interesting example because early on, they got an opportunity from an insider, from the establishment. They were given some money to make a record with RCA before they were ready. It was never going to work and it never does work. The Smiths had a similar scenario. You need money, you need a break and you want to get on the inside. But if you’re going to subvert and do something that’s truly great, you can’t do it from the inside.

RCA gave Joy Division the money to make a record and it sucked. All the pieces had to be in place; they had to wait for the right drummer, as did The Beatles. What they had that the other bands around didn’t have was the ultimate Manchester outsider-manager – Gretton. Taking his own very sharp outsider aesthetic, aspirations and sense of cool, he made the band what it was in the early days and became the fifth member. He was an outsider until the day he died. If you don’t just do it with the money in mind then you can stay on the outside and concentrate on being great. As soon as u o money becomes a serious concern for you, you’re compromised.

One of the things I’ve learnt as I’ve got older, about movements and working with other people, is that in pop culture particularly, but in any of the arts, it’s almost more important to define yourself by what you’re against than by what you’re for. If you can say what you’re against, as Factory Records did, what you’re left with is what you’re for. Tony Wilson was against quite a few things but as everyone from the North knows, the main thing he was against was London. He practically led a 30-year movement against the perceived cultural superiority of London over Manchester. A fantastic outsider. And he totally championed the outside, not slick, naff music that was going to make him a lot of money really quickly. He championed rough, dangerous, messy outsiders, such as Happy Mondays from Salford. They had great poetry, great confrontation and took what was happening into the suburbs and on to television screens. They were proper outsiders. I can’t really imagine that we would have known about them without Wilson but no one else could have related to them. God bless him.

The outsider label is not just a post-modern concept. Outsiderdom (is that a word?) is now a profitable and massively exploitable commodity, and a valid commercial position. Just look at Tamla Motown records – a corporate brand and a household name. And it was started by one lone songwriter. What is exciting to me about getting involved with Salford University is the idea that someone I might come across may form a label one day. They could be a producer or start their own label. Why not? These people have to come from somewhere.

More relevantly, more significantly, and certainly more recently, look at Def Jam Recordings. It was started in a dorm at New York University in 1984 by Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin. Now it’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But if you’re doing it to make hundreds of millions of dollars, it won’t happen. A lot of people outside of the music business, who aren’t musicians, think you do it for the money. No one I have mentioned so far, and lots of other people I could mention, does it for the money. It just happens. If they did it for the money they would be castrated, because they wouldn’t have had the guts to go out and make all these audacious, wacky moves, moves that work. If you do it for the money you’re screwed, it won’t happen. According to me.

As well as creating The Rolling Stones, Oldham started a label, Immediate Records, in the Sixties. He did it as an anti-Establishment thing, showing them how it could be done with class, style and success. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, who managed The Who, also outsiders, did the same thing with Track Records. Lambert is another one of those managers who had never done it before. Older outsiders can help bands because they’ve got the strength, the wisdom and the capability to work from an outside position. Even if it is just because they have a couple of credit cards. It really makes a difference. So Oldham inspired me as much as any musician when I was getting The Smiths together. I learnt from reading about him and from his interviews that no one was going to discover us. Once again, it’s the idea of forgetting the inside, staying in your own ark and concentrating on being great. No one discovered Bob Marley. Sure, he signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island. But Blackwell was an outside label boss. He started a little label selling Jamaican records over here. He might have brought Marley to the world but Marley wasn’t discovered. You can say that Kurt Cobain was on Sub Pop when they found him. But Sub Pop was also an outside label. The Beatles were on EMI. But the reason they got on to EMI was because of the producer George Martin, who within EMI was considered something of a crackpot.

With The Smiths, a mate of mine got a temporary job at EMI and convinced his bosses that we were worth spending a little bit of money on. We got the money to go into the studio but we knew it wasn’t going to work, that the place wasn’t for us. The irony is that one of the three songs that we got rejected with was “What Difference Does It Make?”, which went on to be a Top 20 hit for us. So I know from personal experience that it doesn’t work from inside. We needed to stay on the outside and to be on an outsider label. We knew we needed to be on Rough Trade Records. We were very, very specific about that. Rough Trade started off as a shop, run by Geoff Travis and set up to sell records that were outside of the mainstream. Rough Trade was outside of the underground – that’s how outside it was.

Thanks to Rough Trade we came to the attention of John Peel. If you consider the history of broadcasting in this country, you quickly realise that the most innovative and significant person was Peel, the ultimate broadcaster-outsider. It is remarkable that he was able to operate in the way he did, championing outsiders and being an outsider for 40 years in an environment that, apart from Parliament and Buckingham Palace, is about the most inside, insider establishment this country has. He played really weird, great, cutting-edge music that didn’t want to be on the inside.

After all of these names, I’d like to mention just one song. The song is by Lou Reed. Obviously, he was always going to be a legend because of his work with The Velvet Underground. But the reason Reed is a household name is because of one song: “Walk on the Wild Side”. It’s incredible: an evergreen, a staple, a classic song. But it’s actually a roll-call of outsiders – Candy Darling, Joe D’Alessandro et al – and the world it describes and celebrates is exclusively a world of wilful, social-misfit outsiders, transvestites, transsexuals, druggies, subversives. Reed got his start through another great outsider manager – in fact, probably the biggest outsider of the day – when he hooked up with Andy Warhol. Warhol had no idea how to manage a band. He hadn’t managed a band before and didn’t manage a band afterwards. His MO was to make art that was derived from outside the existing art world, which took some doing in the 1960s. Now we’re used to it. He had learnt as a youth from the inside, in his training in fine arts, but he couldn’t ultimately change what he was – a born outsider. Everyone in Warhol’s created universe was an outsider, and stubbornly so. Did any of these people, the Velvets or the other people who were in that song, care about anyone from inside the film industry? Did they want to be in those regular films? No. Did anyone in the industry care about them? No. But that doesn’t matter. What they did was cross their fingers and hope they’d make some money. They didn’t. But they also crossed their fingers and hoped they would make a difference. Which they absolutely did.

So what do these people do if it feels like they’re not going to make a difference? All of them do it for other outsiders. Which really means, initially anyway, doing it for your friends. Jay-Z says that he made his first album entirely to impress his friends. I understand that completely. When The Smiths had their first bout of success, we found it necessary to go to London. I got no end of stick from Wilson for it. We wrote some good songs in London but I knew that I had to get back [to the North-west]. That was where music was going to come from. It was because I was missing my friends, I was missing that terra firma.

First off, I made that music for the other three guys [in the band], because they were my best friends. I trusted them, I trusted their taste. I made it for them first and then for the fans. It’s very important that, as an artist, you aspire to being as great as the things that are influencing you and your friends. Not be like them, not be nearly as great, but as great.

That’s the first rule of thumb for any artist. If your friends like it, then you’re on the right track. The second rule of thumb is that if you’re going to follow the first rule, then you’d better make sure that your friends have got pretty good taste, or else you’re scuppered. And I suppose the third rule of thumb is to make sure that none of your friends work for insider record companies. I know you can be mavericks within the music industry. I don’t want to say you have to do this, you must do that, the gospel according to me is… What I mean is that all the greats did it from the outside. And that’s a very, very inspiring thing. We live in an age of such conformity and uniformity and stifling conservatism. I don’t know how that happened, but we do. This idea of the outsider has to be identified and celebrated, cherished, encouraged and theorised over. I want to see more people, and I know there are people, waiting to be like those I have described: the McLarens, the Oldhams and the Lydons.

To finish, the title, “Walk on the Wild Side”, came from the 1956 novel by Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side. Algren said of his book, “[it] asks why lost people develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives.” That song explains it all, that title explains it all – it might as well have been called “Walk on the Wild Outside”.

This is an edited version of Johnny Marr’s lecture at the University of Salford, entitled Always from the Outside: Mavericks, Innovators and Building Your Own Ark

Johnny spoke to the Guardian about his favourite music venue. Johnny told them his favourite is the Manchester  Apollo, you can read why here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jan/27/my-favourite-pop-music-venues?newsfeed=true

Johnny was given 3 limited edition blank EASTPAK Padded Pak’rs for him to apply his creative designs to.

All The Proceeds from the sale of the bags go to the charity program, Designers Against AIDS. To help raise awareness for HIV/AIDS and promote prevention as the only cure for this insidious disease.

Check out his creations below.

THE INTERVIEW

What has been your inspiration for the EASTPAK Artist Studio Bag(s)?
Living in a European city for a while, and 45′s; Trojan, Motown etc…

Which city do you live in – can you tell us what it’s best kept secret is?
In Europe I live in Manchester, England. It’s best kept secret ? That a lot of the men there are not in fact “Lads”.

When was the last time you did something for the first time?
I just performed the Inception soundtrack with a 90 piece orchestra. That was a first.

Can you name three major things on your ‘bucketlist’ – three things you want to do before you ‘kick the bucket’…
Travel the world more. See the release of my own Fender Johnny Marr guitar. Meet David Hockney

The proceeds from the sales of your bag will go entirely to Designers Against AIDS – What are your views on safe sex? Do you personally think it’s still important?
Sure, I think society needs to be reminding itself of all our shared dangers. We’re all in it together.

They spoke with Johnny, his tech Bill Puplett and designer John Moore to discuss what makes the Johnny Marr Signature Jaguar so different – have they finally ‘fixed’ this notoriously temperamental design?

Read the full story bellow.

Patrick Doyle: “How did you decide who was going to join you in the line up of The Healers? And are there any original members aside from you?”

Johnny Marr: “I’ve been working on and off with Doviak, the other guitarist and keyboard player. He played with me at the Royal Festival Hall in 2005 and helped me out on the soundtrack I did for the Big Bang movie. The drummer is Andy Knowles. We met when he played keys for The Cribs at Reading and Leeds in 2008 and we struck up a friendship. I knew we could work together again. Max James on bass came in recently and he was recommended by Doviak, so I knew he would be cool, personality wise. I usually hang out with musicians and artists, not exclusively but it’s turned out that way for most of my life. I put my antennae up when I was about 13 and it’s just stayed that way.”

PD: “What made you decide it was time to start The Healers again?”

JM: “I started getting ideas for songs and gigs and records. The bands I’ve been in over the last five or six years required my guitar playing and personality but the aesthetic is a shared one; collaborative. It was time to put all my own ideas together for a group. The other thing is that my guitar is more to the front.”

Roxanne Clifford: “From what I’ve heard, you seem to be a very humble and down to earth person. Has it been hard not to let your ego run wild when you have such an important musical legacy?”

JM: “Well, I think the work, whatever that is at any point, is the most important thing. Secondly, most of the people I’ve known with gigantic egos are pretty miserable.  I also have always had good people around me who wouldn’t really put up with too much nonsense. I do have my moments though.”

RC: “What do you like to do when you’re not playing music?”

JM: “Reading (David Hockney’s A Bigger Message, Freidrich Schiller’s An Aesthetic Education Of Man). I put my hood up and run around cities listening to pop music and soundtracks as much as I can.”

RC: “I saw you do a surprise guest appearance with [cult folk singer] Bert Jansch in Manchester once. Do you have any favourite memories of playing with him?”

JM: “My best ever memory of playing with Bert was in my kitchen one Friday afternoon. It was probably on the day of the Manchester show we did, which was magic – the music just melded together. He was unique and totally definitive. Recording the tracks we did together for the Crimson Moon record was quite a thrill too.”

RC: “What is your favourite place to play in Manchester?”

JM: “What’s now very boringly called Academy 2 was called The University when I was in my teens and I saw so many great bands there; The Only Ones, Cramps, Furs, so that is my favourite. It’s also the best sounding room. The Healers just played a couple of nights at The Deaf Institute and that was cool. I picked that venue because everyone likes to go there.”

RC: “I used to play in a band with Andy Knowles who plays drums for you now. Does he still turn the drum kit upside down when you’re not looking?”

JM: “What ?…He does what ?…probably…”

PD: “In your interview with Fantastic Man you cited Brian Eno as a fellow collaborator. Have you heard the new Coldplay album? And how do you feel about his input?”

JM: “I liked Eno’s albums ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’ and ‘Another Green World’, also his collaborations with Talking Heads and Bowie, of course. I don’t know about the Coldplay record. I doubt that I’d like it, unless he’s made them sound nothing like they usually do.”

PD: “Will anyone you’ve collaborated with (eg. Modest Mouse/The Cribs) be returning the favour and appearing with The Healers any time soon?”

JM: “I’m looking forward to pushing some friends onto the stage for the odd encore or two. I love Ryan’s [Jarman] guitar playing and I love Gary’s [Jarman] singing. Isaac Brock is a great performer and cool guitar player, so who knows.”

PD: “You’ve been playing in America with Best Coast, are you a fan of the band?”

JM: “Yes. I thought the Best Coast record was really good. I like their songs and it’s good that they sound like where they come from. Not everybody does.”

PD: “Are there any other bands around at the moment that you follow, or would like to tour with in the future?”

JM: “Deerhunter are very good I think. The Horrors have good things going on. There’s a new band called Box Codex who I like. All these bands keep me interested until The Marvelettes reform.”

PD: “Have you got any new tattoos? Which one/ones are your favourites and why?”

JM: “I’m designing a new one, the last one I think, which is an atomic explosion and therefore pretty tricky to draw. I usually like my “45″ tattoo best, maybe because it’s so simple and has a lot of significance for me. It’s religious, believe it or not.”

RC: “Everyone seems to have an opinion on The Stone Roses reunion. How do you feel about it?”

JM: “I’m pleased for them because I think a lot of it is about friendship.”

RC: “Will you join our band?”

JM: “You never know…”

http://www.loudandquiet.com/2012/01/leftovers-4/

U.S Hit Comedy TV show Portlandia returns for Series Two on January 6th on one of the shows there will be a guest appearance by Johnny Marr

The first episode is transmitted on IFC Channel January 6th 10pm/9pm Central Time:

The episode that Johnny appears in details are below

A crying infant’s father escalates his attempts to soothe his thrill-seeking baby; Fred and Carrie get the Mayor of Portland’s (Kyle MacLachlan) blessing to create a grassroots campaign to prevent the Olympics from ever coming to Portland; A creative canoe dancer turns what seems to be a mistake in his routine into a triumphal finish; A pair of bike valets have trouble finding a disgruntled customer’s (Johnny Marr) bike.

http://www.ifc.com/shows/portlandia/episodes/season-2/no-olympics

Fender is very proud to introduce the Johnny Marr signature Jaguar® guitar, which puts the inventive ringing sounds and highly distinctive design mods of one of the U.K.’s greatest modern-era guitarists in your hands.

Marr is best known, of course, as the strikingly dynamic and influential anti-hero guitarist-arranger-all-around-musical-wunderkind behind Manchester quartet the Smiths, which virtually redefined and ruled U.K. pop throughout the 1980s. A master of melody, layering and texture, Marr has always brought his own instantly identifiable ringing, jangling genius to the proceedings, as he has done in post-Smiths stints with The The, Electronic, the Pretenders and Johnny Marr and the Healers, and right up to the present with Modest Mouse, the Cribs and innumerable guest appearances.

Johnny Marr

“Primarily, I was attracted to the Jag by the way it sounded – this big, clear, ringing sound. My first proper experience playing one was with Modest Mouse in 2005. I had this riff kicking around that ended up becoming the song ‘Dashboard’, and it went from there really. The Jag suited the way I’d evolved as a guitar player, but at the same time my old stuff sounded absolutely right on it. It sounds like I’m supposed to sound.”

“Aesthetically, I think the Jag is beautiful. I love the body shape and chrome; the early-‘60s idea of space-age design. When Fender approached me to make my own signature Jaguar, I wanted to iron out some of the flaws that I felt the guitar had, and spent months on the road going through as many as fifteen old Jags working out what I liked and didn’t like about each one. I wanted to prove the naysayers wrong about the Jag and my world became the guitar and the length of my guitar lead!”

“I love the chrome panels on the Jag and didn’t want to change those as I felt they were a crucial part of the design. I did want to simplify the guitar’s switching system, as I always found that over-complicated and soon figured out why players often covered the switches with duct tape so they wouldn’t turn the guitar off by accident!”

“I replaced the original three switch design with a single four-way Telecaster® style switchblade. The first three positions are standard, bridge, both on and neck pickup selections, but when pushed forward into the fourth position it puts the two pickups in series where they act as one big humbucker, giving a darker, thicker sound that you don’t normally hear on a Jaguar. To give that circuit more possibilities I added a filter switch to the top panel that gives it more high end. By contrast, I always liked the high-pass filter switch from the original Jag design and repositioned it on the upper control panel where the ‘jazz circuit’ switch is normally found. It was another way of keeping things simpler. We also lowered the height of these switches so they are less likely to be activated by accident. The pickups on my Jag are copied from vintage ’62 pickups – I experimented with a lot of different setups but decided to change things from the original Jag design and had the pickups wound so that the polarity is the same on both instead of opposed. This definitely gives the pickups a more focused sound. We went through tons of different magnets and pickup wire to get the balance between the two just right.”

Pete rifles through Johnny’s vinyl, spotting tracks from Iggy Pop, David Bowie and The Animals. Johnny reveals how he first bonded with Morrissey over a box of 7 inches, the start of a great songwriting partnership that would create many classic songs. Throughout his music career, Johnny has challenged his skills as a player and a composer and drawn on a diverse gallery of influences. Broadcast  Sun 18 Dec 2011 12:00 BBC Radio 6Music.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b018gr8j/Vinyl_Revival_Series_1_Johnny_Marr/