A few years ago, Johnny Marr picked the three guitarists who influenced his playing the most: Bert Jansch, Nile Rodgers and James Williamson. The first thing I thought when I read the list was, ‘Hold on, Johnny Marr doesn’t sound like any of them’. The second thing I thought was, ‘Actually, maybe he sounds like all of them, at once.’
There are loads of other six-stringers who The Smiths co-founder has saluted over the years too, from Pete Townshend to Johns McGeoch and Lennon to Marc Bolan and more, and he sounds like none of them either. The only guitarist Johnny Marr sounds like Johnny Marr, his distinctive style making it sound like he has six hands with 14 fingers on each, a mix of cascading arpeggios, warm melodic strumming, spatial atmospherics, jangly chord patterns and riffs that so sound satisfyingly simplistic you want to lie down in them and then you listen closer and realise you’re relaxing in the middle of labyrinth you have no way out of. It’s a lot.
You could say (I’m going to say) that he's the most influential guitarist of his generation, his presence felt far and wide. He’s most certainly the only man who has ever played with both Pearl Jam and Girls Aloud.
Identifying a track where the guitarist has been influenced by Johnny Marr is a different matter entirely. You can hear it from the off, like a reassuring banner flying through a song going ‘This one is for Johnny Marr!’. There’s a lot of them out there, so much so that the song that made me think of this list – Beautiful Alone, a lovely headrush of a song by moody Britpop crew Strangelove – doesn’t make the cut. Here’s ten of the best...
Radiohead – Knives Out
Amnesiac cut Knives Out arrived at a time when a section of Radiohead's fanbase were pining for the band to give them ‘a guitar song’, so naturally Thom Yorke & co. delivered them this, angular, minor-chord jig about cannibalism. They let a little light in with its instrumentation though, a dynamic layering of guitar lines that were pure Marr. Such was their nod to the great man that Ed O’Brien was apparently nervous about playing it to him. He needn’t have worried – Marr approved.
Suede – Metal Mickey
Marr and The Smiths cast a huge shadow over Britpop, so it makes sense you can hear echoes of his intoxicating playing in the band that started it all. Their original guitarist Bernard Butler played in the same manner – let’s call it busy minimalism – whilst delivering the sort of memorable licks that could be choruses off their own back, a Marr speciality. The guitars on Suede's 1992 single Metal Mickey sounds like Johnny gone glam.
Blur – Barbaric
As a guitarist, Blur’s Graham Coxon is very much a spiritual successor to Marr in the way he can both anchor a song and add flourishes to it at the same time, a player who pinballs between pop traditionalist and innovator. There’s some standout Coxon-does-Marr moments across 90s landmarks Parklife and Modern Life Is Rubbish – Badhead, To The End, This Is A Low, Clover Over Dover, For Tomorrow, Blue Jeans, Chemical World – but none as quite so hat-tipping as the melancholic picking that elevated Barbaric, from 2023’s The Ballad Of Darren.
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Dosed
Chili Peppers on-off-on-off-on guitarist John Frusciante is such a Marr aficionado that he enlisted the Manchester native for two songs on his 2009 solo album The Empyrean. Before that he’d made his feelings clear on a few cuts across RHCP’s career, most notably on the warm, jangly arpeggios of this song from their eighth album By The Way.
Interpol – Say Hello To The Angels
A decade after Britpop, a new wave of bands emerged drawing on varying facets of The Smiths. NYC quartet Interpol honed in on the doleful moodiness and did it best on this early single, a standout from their masterful debut album Turn On The Bright Lights. The jaunty, rhythmical guitar sounds like a dance-off at a brawl, like The Smiths’ This Charming Man getting grimy in a New York club.
The Killers – Mr Brightside
The guitars on many of The Killers’ best songs sound like Marr’s intricate hooks melded with the grandiose scale of U2’s The Edge – Marr guitar with added Las Vegas showmanship. There’s a lot of example of that across their career but let’s not beat around the bush, here’s the big one, their breakthrough hit and one of the biggest indie anthems of modern times. From the off, you’re thinking, ‘Oh, that guitarist likes Johnny Marr…’, which made it all the sweeter when Marr performed the song with them at Glastonbury a few years ago.
The Stone Roses – I Wanna Be Adored
Marr also made a big effect closer to home. The Stone Roses picked up the mantle after The Smiths split and you can hear a Marr-ish sound in John Squire’s more expansive, psychedelic approach. His riff on this iconic opener to their era-defining debut basically sounds like a Johnny Marr guitar part dipped in acid.
New Order – Academic
New Order preceded Marr’s emergence, both as Joy Division and their fresh start as New Order after the death of Ian Curtis, and Marr is a sometime-bandmate of frontman Bernard Sumner (the pair formed Electronic in 1988), so you can’t really say Marr inspired New Order. But in the case of their 2015 gem Academic, let’s have it. A tightly-wound little banger, like post-punk getting some sun on its face, its main riff sounds like an homage to Marr, a hypnotic and repetitive guitar line that doesn’t sound like its doing very much until you realise it’s the thing everything else is pivoting around.
Turnstile – Underwater Boi
There’s a couple of moments on the Baltimore hardcore crew-turned-alt-rock experimentalists’ 2021 album GLOW ON that hint at a Smiths fandom within Turnstile, and the riff to Underwater Boi sounds like a Marr part in 80s pop gladrags, a riff that gives the song its boisterous swagger.
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Fontaines D.C. – Favourite
The brilliant closer to the Dublin quintet’s Romance album is drenched in wistful nostalgia, the perfect bedfellow to which is an uplifting Marr-esque guitar line that snakes in and around frontman Grian Chatten’s yearning vocals. An absolute beauty.
