Johnny Marr has moved on from The Smiths

And there will be no reunion of The Smiths, OK?

Johnny Marr performs in California in March.

It may be the very definition of a high-class problem, but Johnny Marr has spent much of his life trying to escape the legacy of the hugely successful band he left when he was 23. Since the Smiths split in 1987, Marr has written film scores, toured with orchestras, joined and left three other groups and made acclaimed solo albums.

However, a generation of men and women who turned on Top of the Pops in 1983 and witnessed Morrissey waving a bunch of gladioli to the joyful melody of Marr’s guitar on This Charming Man are still struggling to accept the Smiths as a thing of the past.

“I feel I’ve moved on, but not everyone seems to agree with me,” says Marr, fit and youthful at 53. “It’s the British press who won’t let me move on. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to do What Difference Does it Make?. I’m not even looking to make another How Soon is Now?.”

On that note, let’s get the reunion question out of the way. It’s not happening. In 2008 Marr and Morrissey met in a Manchester pub for the first time in a decade and discussed the possibility, but communication between the two fizzled out soon after. Marr told Sky News that Morrissey’s support of Brexit was a “drawback” to a potential Smiths return, but the reasons are broader and deeper than that.

“I presented a guitar archetype and then I wanted to break out of it,” says Marr, referring to the unique, shimmering sound, created by layering tracks to build what he called a “guitarchestra”, that he pioneered with the Smiths in the early 80s.

“To be fair you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be the archetypal guitar player and then be puzzled when people want you to stay that way. But it has been 30 years. Perhaps after 40 years the penny will drop that I’ve moved on.”

Marr has decided to set the record straight on the Smiths, and the rest of his life, with Set the Boy Free. It’s an unpretentious, clearly written memoir recounting his journey from a working-class upbringing on the outskirts of Manchester to his status as a musical polymath and it covers, among many other things, his forming and disbanding of the most intelligent, original and downright funny band of the 1980s.

The Smiths, Morrissey second from left and Marr third from left.

Part of the inspiration for writing the memoir was reading so many books on the Smiths that Marr felt had got it wrong, in particular Johnny Rogan’s Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, which he calls “a cynical hatchet job”. As for Morrissey’s Auto­biography, which displays an unhealthy obsession with the court case successfully brought against Morrissey and Marr by the drummer Mike Joyce for a greater claim of royalties in 1996, he hasn’t read it.

“The various accounts of the Smiths never allow for the ­humanity at the heart of it,” says Marr. He cites the example of Craig Gannon, who joined in 1986 when the bassist Andy Rourke’s heroin addiction got out of control. Two weeks later, Rourke was back and Gannon, rather than being given his marching orders, was moved on to rhythm guitar. “No other band would keep a kid in the band just because we didn’t have the heart to let him go. Biographers have suggested the Smiths were all about subterfuge and manipulation, but it’s completely untrue. We were actually quite nice.”

Whereas so many rock memoirs recount desperately unhappy childhoods, Marr’s doesn’t sound too bad. Countless Irish aunts and uncles were forever throwing parties, and his parents, John and Frances, provided a stable if relatively impoverished upbringing. They even bought him a guitar at the age of five.

“I come from a loving background, but it wasn’t necessarily happy,” he says. “I didn’t like being a regular person. I found it boring — and heavy.

“I needed to work to make sense of life and I think you hear that in the music. What am I doing here, what does it all mean, what’s bugging us?

“The human condition is dissatisfaction, but I didn’t know that when I was 10 or 11 and I didn’t come from a background where you called yourself an artist. I just thought I was a weird kid who was either shutting out this other world I couldn’t stop thinking about, or shutting out the world I was in.”

Marr knew what he wanted to do from adolescence onwards. By 15 he had met his wife-to-be, Angie, whom he is with to this day. Two years later he met his manager and mentor, Joe Moss, a clothes shop entrepreneur who would be instrumental in getting the Smiths off the ground. Inspired by the songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, in September 1982 Marr knocked on the door of Steven Morrissey, whom he had met “for three seconds at a Patti Smith concert”, and suggested they form a band. It must have taken uncommon self-assurance to do that.

“It wasn’t as simple as that. I had Angie and Joe behind me and that gave me confidence, but I wasn’t walking around as I’ve been depicted in all these books, telling everyone I was going to be a star. I wasn’t that much of a prick.”

What were his first impressions of the future Smiths singer?

“I thought Morrissey was intriguing, funny and serious. My overriding impression was that he knew what it was going to take to do this: a lot of work, a lot of rejection, a lot of tenacity and dedication. Since the age of 14 I’d been in bands with people who were often very good, but none of them had all the requirements to tough it out, alongside looking the part, and the talent to write songs that were interesting. And there weren’t many other people in Manchester who knew Heaven Only Knows by the Shangri-Las. Before I even plugged a guitar in or Morrissey had written lyrics we knew it was going to work.”

It worked wonderfully — for a while. Bands are volatile, though, and one led by two driven characters was not going to last. Problems were compounded by managers coming and going, leaving Marr to effectively run the show. The end came in 1987 when Morrissey failed to turn up to a video shoot, Joyce tried to call the shots in the studio and — the final straw — Marr was talked into recording a Cilla Black song called Work is a Four-Letter Word.

“I didn’t like touring,” says Marr. “Life on the road was not happy for me because there was ­always some drama. There were people supposed to be looking after us who were unprofessional, and we were running the whole thing like a little shoestring indie band when the stakes were way higher.

“We were playing in front of 10,000 people with no tour manager, nothing. The Smiths were led by two wilful people, and that wasn’t going to work for 40-odd years. It’s remarkable we got as far as we did.”

The best advice on dealing with the break-up came from Paul McCartney.

After Marr spilt his heart out about the split, the man who walked away from the Beatles told him: “That’s bands for ya.”

From then on Marr didn’t look back. He did stints with Talking Heads and the Pretenders, picked up on the rave culture of late-80s Manchester by forming Electronic with Bernard Sumner of New Order, and launched his band the Healers in the early noughties.

In 2006 he moved to Portland, Oregon, to join the alternative rockers Modest Mouse and in 2008 he slept in bunks on a tour bus for the first time in two decades with the stridently non-commercial Yorkshire brothers the Cribs. In the past three years he has reacquainted himself with his new-wave roots on two solo albums and worked with the film composer Hans Zimmer. He’s about to work on a theatre project with the actress Maxine Peake. His career path suggests a certain restlessness.

“It’s not so much restlessness as wanting to work all the time,” he says. “It’s annoying for my colleagues. When a tour finishes I don’t want to spend six months googling my own name or whatever it is everybody does. I’d rather be like David Hockney, getting up at 5.30 in the morning to paint a Yorkshire landscape when he’s that legendary and that wealthy. I have no interest in luxury. I once made a pact that if I could afford a crappy little house as a guitar player, I would have done OK out of life. On stage I remind myself of that.”

Doesn’t his presumably not very crappy little house outside Manchester have a guitar-shaped swimming pool at least? “I’m afraid not,” says Marr, with a laugh. Then he adds, with the air of a man used to dealing with the expectations of others: “Bernard Sumner was always really disappointed about that.”

The Times