(Credits: Far Out / Man Alive! / Shervin Lainez)
Wed 6 August 2025 8:00, UK
I actually think Johnny Marr‘s approach towards crafting a music career is wildly underrated.
OK, I understand calling one of Britain’s most beloved musicians underrated isn’t exactly cutting-edge journalism, but what I specifically mean is how he has operated across multiple bands. In the same way athletes use their careers to play sports in different countries, Marr has used multiple bands to explore the different parts of the musical globe.
He’s been somewhat lambasted for his journeyman approach to music, but actually, I think he’s onto something. Music is a lucid concept, and with no league table to worry about, who cares if he plays a central role in more than one team? It only benefits his individual skills as a musician and, by proxy, the music he releases with his next band.
It is largely because fans feel an understandable romantic connection to The Smiths. That was and always will be the band Marr is remembered for. At the tip of his fingers were melodies and licks that ultimately changed the course of indie forever, particularly in the UK.
But those outside the realms of our home country could appreciate the genius of the band and, particularly, Marr. Which is why band offers came flooding in soon after. But just one year after the dramatic and premature break-up of The Smiths, a seismic call came that may have sparked his open-minded approach to collaboration.
While The Smiths were arguably Britain’s biggest band in the 1980s, Talking Heads were America’s. Similar to The Smiths, they were an important band of transition, bridging the gap between rock traditionalism and innovative alternative music. While pop was booming in the age of the video star, both Marr and David Byrne showed the way for bands wanting to maintain their authenticity.
So when Marr became a free agent, it was only natural that Byrne tapped him up and involved him in the recording of a Talking Heads song. Together, the pair worked on ‘Cool Water’, the penultimate track of their 1988 album Naked. Lyrically, it was the perfect song for the pair to collaborate on, as it finds Byrne musing over working-class life. Through the lens of a labourer doing backbreaking work tirelessly, Byrne questions the entire structure of social class; something Marr was perfectly in tune with, making him the perfect man to craft the song’s melody.
“That was something David [Byrne] and I built up one afternoon. I was playing and he was encouraging me, and egging me on to try different things, mic-ing up a semi-acoustic 12-string without putting it through the amplifier and putting it into weird tunings and drones. That in itself was really invigorating,” relayed Marr.
It certainly gave Talking Heads a somewhat darker, grittier sound that fans may have been used to, the sort that Morrissey would hastily grab and elevate with lyrics of cutting social analysis. Luckily for Marr, without Morrissey on hand to do that, he had one of America’s best frontmen fill in.
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