(JUST LIKE) STARTING OVER

Michael Leonard - GUITAR MAGAZINE – 1993

 With The The’s first album in four years, Dusk, Matt Johnson has attempted to return to the songwriting and production values of 20 years ago.  He tells Michael Leonard about his love of Lennon, Robbie Krieger’s guitar and why Johnny Marr’s getting scared of him.

‘I love this job!’ Matt Johnson smiles.  ‘It’s tough but I wouldn’t want  to be anyone else.  A lot of artists don’t like doing interviews but a lot of artists are thick as shit. A lot of them have a problem explaining their songs because their songs are nonsense!  It might seem like I’m being a bit hard here but a lot of them can’t write songs – their words are just gobbledygook and they just do it to get their face in the papers.’

In his 14 year  musical career so far,  Matt Johnson has earned himself a dual reputation – the first, rightly so, as one of the best songwriters of his generation; the second, less justifiably, as a grumpy old sod. Still, a new The The album is a rare and rewarding occurrence so his playful opposition-baiting can be forgiven.  His new album – for The The is to all intents and purposes solely Johnson’s vehicle – is called Dusk and again features ex-Smiths Johnny Marr partnering the singer-songwriter on guitar. Despite being one of the first people to investigate the potential of  drum loops and samples (on 1981’s Burning Blue Soul), Dusk represents a return to basics for Johnson. Their recent single, Dogs Of Lust, is a loping, R&B influenced track (with some mean harmonica from Marr) and tracks such as Slow Emotion Replay and True Happiness This Way Lies showcase a stripped down sound that wouldn’t normally be associated with a man who once used 62 musicians on one album.

I wanted the production to be transparent on this album. We’ve emphasised the songs and the performances.  I got a bit bored with production to tell you the truth, bored with trying to stay ahead, because I have done things in the past that were very much on the cutting edge.  Things like the distorted megaphone vocals, all most my trademark things, I started to hear on other people’s records so I’ve just left them to get on with it.  There’s so much technology coming out now I think a lot of it is just like an obstacle between the emotion you’re trying to express and the audience. I wanted to clear away a lot of the clutter and go back to very classic and simple song structures, almost like 1971 with Neil Young’s Harvest or John Lennon’s first solo album. There’s an elegance in simplicity. Doing the tour in 1990 I realised that a lot of the arrangements of my previous songs were flawed because they’d never been played live – four albums worth of flawed material right, heh heh!

‘For many years I was just getting musicians into the studio  and telling them exactly what to do but to get a band response going again was really good.  When I was writing this album I was thinking in terms of keeping it very simple with only five people playing at any one time.  On stuff I’ve written  in the past I never took that into consideration and ended up with scores of people playing on one single track and it’s not always best for the song.’

Although not a writer in the technical sense – he can’t read or write music – Johnson has been a self sufficient songsmith all his professional life.

‘I’m not a great musician and I’ve never really practised as such, it’s songwriting that really interests me.  I like things simple and I’ve found that ‘real’ musicians have a tendency to over-elaborate.  They’re always wanting to add in a few jazz chords here and there or a few bass slaps and I hate all that! It’s funny, but when I was on the tour and the others would be sound-checking and I’d just hear this bloody awful Jazz Funk band and think, ‘Oh my god, this is MY band! Ha ha! We couldn’t have any of that, it’s just got to be in service of the song so I try and chop all the fat out and get to the essence.’

Despite Johnny Marr’s reputation as writer in his own right, he seems happy to leave the spotlight to Johnson in The The.  Marr’s influence can be heard clearly on tracks like The Beat(en) Generation and Slow Emotion Replay (from Dusk), but Johnson says one of the most vital things the ex-Smith brings to The The is encouragement.

‘He understands what I’m trying to do and he believes in it.  I don’t want to be just another member of a band because I had it earlier on when I was a kid and remember all the egos getting in the way.  I think you have to have a benevolent dictator  with a vision otherwise you get everyone bickering and arguing.  I know so many bands who are really good but they can’t make a decision because they are too busy arguing.  The people involved in The The were interested, I guess, because they liked what I do but a lot of bands seem to stay together solely for business reasons – y’know, they all have a stake in the name or something.  Situations like that can’t be good for the music.’

With a love for the direct, particularly when it comes to lyrics, it’s not surprising that Johnson’s big songwriting hero is John Lennon. In the East End pub where he grew up, the only LP his parents owned was The Beatles White Album which he played constantly.

‘But because you’re young, you tend not to analyse your influences so with The Beatles, I never realised at the time how awful Paul McCartney’s lyrics were ha ha!  Some of those songs, Rocky Raccoon and stuff, are nice for little kids – and I actually like the atmosphere on that – but as you get a bit older you kinda think, ‘Oh shit, this is children’s music!’ With Lennon, I think I grew to like him more the older I got.

‘I’m probably in the minority view, but to me John Lennon dwarfed Bob Dylan.  I think Dylan has done a few good albums but I’ve generally found him to be incredibly overrated. 30 or so albums and lets face it the majority have been crap!  But he did some absolutely great stuff in the ‘60s and the pressure that the guy was put under was so immense that I don’t think anyone could’ve lived up to his reputation.  I think he’s said himself that he envies certain songwriters that didn’t have that pressure, and I think he could have been much greater.   I feel sorry for him in a way, because I think it ruined him.  You look at some of the lyrics of that free-form word association and it’s just gobbledygook.  At the time I reckon it was a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes with everyone too embarrassed to say they didn’t like it.  With John Lennon, it was plain, simple, and direct – you knew straight away where he stood and you either agreed or disagreed, you either responded to it or you didn’t.  Also, the tone of both his voice and the music he created was such that you didn’t even have to hear what he was singing, you could just hear it on the radio and it would give you goosebumps.

‘He’s probably the only British songwriter that I like as most of the others are American – like Tim Buckley, who I adore as a singer rather than a songwriter.  Then Lou Reed, I think Magic and Loss was the best album he’s made since Berlin and although he made some abysmal stuff during the ‘80s his earlier stuff with the Velvet Underground is still great.  I also listen to Hank Williams, Robert Johnson – stuff which is simple and direct yet has an intensity and a reverberation beyond its time, stuff that transcends fashion.’

Johnson and Marr plan to hit the studio later this year with just guitars in hand to record two EPs in tribute to the latter two artists – The The Play Hank and The The Play Bob!  With both peers and Johnson himself having a reputation as tortured souls, he must surely be an advocate of the old Blues axiom that great art is born out of suffering?

 ‘Yeah I suppose, but it’s a bit of a cliché, the old suffering artist isn’t it?  All human beings suffer in their life, we all lose people dear to us, we all suffer from emotional anxiety, and people who are artistic don’t suffer anymore than people you are not artistic.  I do think that suffering deepens you though – you become more sensitive to other people and the world around you and it makes you more compassionate.  The problem is, people tend to just apply it to arty types and that’s just…bollocks, ha ha ha!

But aren’t artists assumed to be suffering types because they emotionally open themselves up much more willingly than the average person?  Does that mean Johnson deliberates a lot over what he actually commits to tape?

‘For the camp that I’m in, where the lyrics tend to be confessional and mostly autobiographical, then I think so.  You’re putting your balls on the line and some things are even too close to the bone to say because everyone has secrets, even people who’ve been married for 20 years, so you can’t give away everything in a song.

‘Even so, I find the process very therapeutic.  Of course, when I’m away from music I’ll be out with my mates having a few drinks and a laugh, but it’s hard to write about happiness.  The thing is, name me your favourite three lyricists who write happy songs – that’s a good quiz!’

‘The subject matter of my songs is very much like what Blues singers would sing about – lust, love and loneliness  - and also some political things.  I think every generation of songwriters should bring something new to the form so instead of pretending you’re the Rolling Stones or the Velvet Underground – which, unfortunately, a lot of bands still do -  why not react to the world that’s around us now, utilise the technology and also bring in a new subject matter?

‘You had people as talented as Hendrix and the Beatles since the’60s but they haven’t had the same global impact because everything then was relatively new.  So now people have got to try and write about male sexuality in a non-macho way, try and write about relationships in a different way, write about things like religion, about affairs of the human spirit, political things.

‘My reputation for being miserable might be my own fault but if one journalist writes that you’re a depressed person then before you know it you’re being portrayed as the new Leonard Cohen.  It’s limiting because as soon as your name comes up, people put you in a box – you’re put in the miserable, depressed songwriter box, or the inane innocuous box.’

‘I think songwriting as a form of expression is art,’ he concludes. ‘The best of it stands alongside poetry, painting and filmmaking.  It might sound pretentious but I think at its highest form it’s beautiful and can have more power than a poem – more people certainly relate to it.  The term Pop has become a derogatory term it’s true but people like Neil Young, Lou Reed and John Lennon will be remembered as classic artists. In that way,  I’m optimistic about the future of music.’

Despite the epic, sweeping quality of much of the music on The The’s last two albums, Infected and Mind Bomb, Johnson is writing more simply now than every before.  When he’s got the bare bones of a song etched out on acoustic guitar he demos it with a drum machine and maybe a sequencer part.  ‘Increasingly though, it’s just about me and an acoustic guitar.  I think if a song sounds good on just acoustic guitar then it IS good. That’s a song as opposed to a track.  A lot of modern records are just tracks and if you take away the production then they cease to exist.

‘The guitar I use most is this lovely Gibson 345 which used to belong to Robbie Krieger from the Doors. The tone is wonderful, really creamy and warm.  I bought it in America a couple of years ago but had a lot of trouble getting it back here.  They gave me a bill in America for less than it’s worth – they said that everyone did that – but it got confiscated at customs and I had to get a lawyer down to the airport.  It was so embarrassing I had to go back and say sorry to the customs people, heh heh!  I’ve also got an electric Fender 12-string which Johnny gave to me after he’d worked on Mind Bomb which was a lovely gift.  Then I’ve got a Takamine 6-string acoustic, a naff 12 string, a couple of strats and a casio MIDI guitar which I never use….Johnny’s got about 80 guitars so I’ve not got much by comparison!

Johnny’s been encouraging me to play more guitar and funnily enough – I hope he won’t mind me saying this – but he’s actually got a bit worried recently about my playing.  With this album, a lot of people can’t actually tell who’s who when it comes to the guitar parts.  Am I gonna tell you?  Nah, you’ll have to guess.  But he’s worried, ha ha!’