"Why," says Johnny Marr, amiably, but perhaps more peeved than he lets on – the man himself, at some point during a conversation we are having circling the idea, the word, the music, the story of folk, the way it used to be put before the word "rock", around the time of the Beatles, the Byrds and Dylan, and then Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band and Pentangle, and the way it's lately been put after updating words like "nu" "psych" "alt" and "freak", at a time of Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Animal Collective, and Sufjan Stevens, and a rush of woodsy, wistful acoustica, sat in a room on the ground floor of the MTV studios in Camden Lock, London, formerly home of TVAM, where is he soon to record an appearance with the Cribs, of the top 10, the latest of his jobs/projects/partnerships/collaborations/co-operations that stretch back though Modest Mouse, the Pretenders, Kirsty MacColl, Billy Bragg, Bert Jansch, Neil Finn, Bryan Ferry, Electronic, Pet Shop Boys, Beck, Talking Heads, the Healers to the Smiths, hence the thing he's about to complain about – "is Brian Eno described as a creative catalyst and I am described as a working journeyman?"
The question hangs in the air, and doesn't actually receive an answer, not in the MTV room, so it becomes instantly a rhetorical question. And with a little shrug, Johnny lets it be known the world might never become that kind of world where he routinely gets called "a creative catalyst", although I do decide to myself as we move on to other areas of our conversation that from now on I am always going to describe him as a "creative catalyst", even though – and perhaps this is an answer to his question – it's the guitar he plays, very famously, as he joins imaginative forces with all those others, that makes his presence in pop seem more prosaic than it might otherwise be if he seemed to leave mere significant traces of his thoughts and musical understanding rather than concrete signs of a guitar played the immense, silver and nocturnally vivacious Marr way.
He sits in the interview room, a member of the Cribs, looking good on it, laughing that the group's album is in the charts, jostling among an entertainment, a mop, a mania, an aftereffect, an inventory, an amusement park, a festive remastering, a gravitational antifield, a long haul, a Ringo, a history, a distraction of Beatles albums.
I always invite Johnny into/onto Showing Off whatever the subject, as you can always rely on Marr to talk about music with a fan's passion, knowledge, detail, memory and enthusiasm, and a musician's technical expertise and emotional experience. He's a sort of elegant existential historian of popular music, shining and uncovering links as a participant, but also as a theorist, an analyser of sources, origins, influences. None of the Showing Off subjects done so far quite grabbed him enough, or he wasn't around, off journeymanning, or creatively catalysing. But as soon as this month's subject was know to him – "folk", whatever that can mean, to whoever you happen to be, and when and where you were born, etc – he sent in a list of records that immediately came to his mind. 1971's Stormcock by Roy Harper, Spirit of Love by COB – Clive's Original Band, or Clive's Old Band, Clive Palmer being an ex member of the Incredible String Band – the 1965 debut album of Jackson C Frank and the debut Bert Jansch album. All of them great, tear-stained innocent-primitives with sophisticated instincts, stirring the still air, contemplating beautiful and eerie things and offering tantalising glimpses of how certain genres were invented, or how certain genres never quite got perfected, or how certain genres led to the development of other genres not necessarily so acoustically/traditionally based. The subsequent survival tactics of each of these artists, their tolerance of adversity, their reputations, varies.
1971 was something of a year for albums – Faust, Hunky Dory, Who's Next, Blue, What's Going On, Sticky Fingers, Meddle, Pawn Hearts, Electric Warrior, Meddle, Muswell Hillbillies, Desert Shore, Maggot Brain, The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, Songs of Love and Hate, Septober Energy, John Prine, Brain Capers, Runt, If I Could Only Remember My Name, Led Zeppelin IV, Tago Mago, John Fahey: America – but Harper's ebbing and glowing bold and beautiful four-track masterpiece, is up there with the very best. On certain nights in November, it may actually be the best of them all.
Marr is on the wikipedia page for the album describing it as "intense and beautiful and clever". This page also points out the pseudonymous contribution of Jimmy Page and the record's influence on Joanna Newsom's Ys. I think the album might be a part of Harper's epic investigation into the momentousness of birth and its endured pain.
Clive Palmer was a founding member of the Incredible String Band and made two albums as COB. Spirit of Love never made it out of the murky mist and shadows of 1971, and it sounds like tobacco-brown English hymns being sung in space; there's a furtive, fractured ancient core to the music I can definitely hear travelling through various enigmatic presences into the Smiths. COB may well make the Fleet Foxes seem a little New Seekers. Clive also taught Billy Connolly to play the banjo back in the early pre-comedy 1960s, which gives me the unique chance to mention Johnny Marr and Billy Connolly in the same sentence.
I think Johnny might prefer their second album, which added a little light-within-light eastern flame to the scrambled cosmic gospel, but I couldn't remember the title (Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart), seeing as how he was about to be all MTV with the Cribs. COB's Wade in the Water, from Spirit of Love, has 1,281 views on YouTube. The stark, sinister and softly mad Solomon's Song sung from a medieval outer space that is now deep under the ocean from Moyshe McStiff has 900 views.
Johnny the creative catalyst should turn the desperately epic and tragic story of the shy, distraught and cruelly discarded Jackson Carey Frank into an opera – born in Buffalo, New York in 1943, badly burnt in a traumatic classroom accident at 11, which triggered lifelong depression, catching the boat to England at 21 using the insurance cheque he finally received for his injuries, recording his self-titled debut album in England, with Paul Simon producing while he was recording Songbook - and you can hear his mournful, noble drifter influence on the Simon and Garfunkel side of gentle, soft-limbed self-expression as well as the more intense and mystical Nick Drake side. (Both Nick Drake and Simon and Garfunkel – on Sounds of Silence – recorded Blues Run the Game: "Wherever I go. wherever I have been. the blues remain the same/ The blues run the game.")
Jackson and Sandy Denny were an item for a while; his spirit is scattered throughout Sandy's singing life, and Denny and Drake sang Frank songs, including Milk and Honey, the original of which appeared in Vincent Gallo's film The Brown Bunny. Years of decline into wretched, unkempt, vagabond loneliness and deepening paranoid schizophrenia see him trying to track down Paul Simon in the 1980s and being blinded in one eye in a random shooting incident in New York. If you fancy a decent, purging weep, hear I Want to Be Alone (Dialogue), used on the soundtrack for Daft Punk's Electroma film, and detect how much an impact the scrupulous, starry intimacy and discreet opulence of the guitar playing must have had on the teenage Marr. Jackson C Frank died of pneumonia and cardiac arrest in 1999 aged 56.
Bert Jansch also recorded Frank's Blues Run the Game, and it appears on his 1996 Live at the 12 Bar official bootleg album. Bert's luminous, strangely self-possessed 1965 self-titled debut was recorded using a borrowed guitar in a Camden flat on a reel-to-reel tape for -£100 after he'd hitchhiked from Edinburgh. He was 21.
You can hear whole new practical and dream-like sonic landscapes start to take shape, and the very crystallising beginning of a kind of precise but uncanny guitar playing that we now take for granted - Jansch and the likes of Martin Carthy, John Renbourn and Davey Graham were hungrily mixing up grainy, distressed and earthy techniques found in exotically romantic out-there country blues playing with a free-form, jazz-inspired spice and their roughed-up post-skiffle evocation of tranquil, agitated traditional English daintiness. The end result was a politicised, poetic, technically daring and fascinatingly inventive reshuffling of the angelic and the devilish, the dark and the light, the melodic and the rhythmic, the ancient and the modern - and the guitar, acoustic or electric, could be used in ever wilder, weirder, suggestible, significance-seeking ways, as, first, in his way Jimmy Page detected and developed, and then later, in his way, with half an awakening imagination on lusty local and remote punk disturbances, Johnny Marr recaptured and reshuffled. The guitar used as a charged personal way of getting to some kind of emotional and intellectual truth.
Meanwhile, here's Johnny, sat in a room a few minutes before he MTV stars with the Cribs, a quarter of a century after the Smiths, which is a whole other pop story, containing a few others, and as always he's in the mood to talk about music, as though he's still on his way to finding out what it's all about.