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Lot Essay
Another classic beat group guitar that I got from Denmark Street for its Beatles, Kinks and Stones connections. It looks great and has got a unique Sixties sound. I wasn't able to use it very much live because it would feedback quite easily at high volume, but I did use it at Glastonbury in 1984 and wrote 'Nowhere Fast' on it. The main thing about this guitar is that it's the one I used for the tremolo riff on 'How Soon Is Now?'
JOHNNY MARR, MARR’S GUITARS, 2023
JOHNNY MARR’S 1963 EPIPHONE CASINO, USED TO RECORD THE TREMOLO RIFF ON ‘HOW SOON IS NOW?’
Johnny Marr purchased this 1963 Epiphone Casino from Andy's Guitar Workshop on Denmark Street not long after The Smiths first moved to London in early 1984. Writing in his 2016 autobiography Set The Boy Free, Marr remembers: I moved into a second-floor flat in Earl’s Court with Angie… Our flat quickly became the full-time hang-out and HQ for the band, and for me it was a sanctuary where I could write songs, listen to music, and hide away from the day-to-day business that I wanted to get away from… Getting into the charts and making some money meant the band could all indulge ourselves a bit, and I discovered the guitar shops in west London. I had dragged the rest of the band into my beat group period by continuously viewing a Beatles documentary that had become available on VHS and obsessing over a Hollies Greatest Hits album, and it inspired me to buy an old Gibson J-160 acoustic like the ones used by both bands… [and a 1963] Epiphone Casino, the same guitar that Keith Richards used on the classic Stones singles. Marr told us: It seemed like there were a lot of really great guitar players in the early to mid-60s who were using the Epiphone Casino. It was uncanny that all those bands that I liked – the Beatles, Keith Richards, the Hollies – were all using one of these, so I thought, well… I'm going to have to get an older one. The idea was that I would write some songs that were like the Hollies or the Beatles, and in fact, I didn't write anything of the sort.
To swiftly follow-up the chart success of The Smiths’ May 1984 single ‘Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now’, Marr set out to demo a new single and write its two B-sides over what would turn out to be an incredibly productive four-day period in June 1984. Having already worked up a song for the A-side that would become ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, he would lay down the demo and write its first B-side ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ with his new Gibson J-160E (lot 12), and afterwards enlist the Epiphone Casino to come up with the 12-inch B-side that would become the band’s most recognisable recording, ‘How Soon Is Now?’
WRITING ‘HOW SOON IS NOW?’
Marr went on to reveal how the three songs came about: [I had developed] a song that I thought would be good for the next single. Angie had gone back to Manchester for the weekend and the band had a rare couple of days off, so I found myself alone in the flat. I’d upgraded my early Teac cassette recorder (lot 3) for a four-track Tascam Portastudio and a Roland Drumatix drum machine. I decided that after I’d demoed the next A-side I would try to come up with the B-side and then the extra track for the 12-inch while I had the opportunity. The A-side was fun to put down. It was a fast rush of a tune done on the acoustic, and after working on it for a while it felt complete… [I remembered] a song that my mother liked, and I strummed around the chords and tapped into a feeling of melancholy until I had channelled the right spirit and came up with a very pretty tune and the B-side was done.
After completing the two songs by Saturday, recalls Marr, I hung around the flat on the Sunday, listening to what I’d done and thinking about writing the third track for the 12-inch. I thought that because the A-side was short and fast and the B-side was short and waltzy, I should try to write something long with some kind of a groove. I rolled a joint, plugged in my new Epiphone Casino and started playing a rhythm. I’d been a long-time fan of The Gun Club and I liked their style of swampy blues, and with that in my mind I kicked around a trancey kind of riff that after a while morphed into a slowed-down Bohannon. As I went around and around, the tune started to get psychedelic in my headphones and I knew I was on to something. I programmed a simple beat on the drum machine and recorded the hypnotic rhythm guitar, and then came up with a two-note phrase that I put on top. What I’d done was nothing like the other two songs, and nothing like anything the band had done before either… I took the cassette of the three songs round to Morrissey’s, having written ‘Fast’, ‘Irish Waltz’ and ‘Swampy’ on it. He worked on it for a few days, and when he’d finished the lyrics the songs became ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ and ‘How Soon Is Now?’
RECORDING ‘HOW SOON IS NOW?’
When the band assembled at Jam Studios in London’s Finsbury Park to lay down the three new songs with producer John Porter in July 1984, Marr recorded the A-side and B-side of the single on the J-160 before commencing work on ‘How Soon Is Now?’ with his 1963 Epiphone Casino. We recorded the backing track as a three-piece, writes Marr, and we spent a couple of hours playing alongside a LinnDrum drum machine in the background to get the feel right. My basic guitar track was done on the Epiphone Casino without any effects. The rhythm was steady and catchy, but I was worried that the song might not turn out as I hoped, as I thought that we’d lost the hypnotic quality and psychedelic atmosphere that I’d liked on the demo. It was a long instrumental track when Morrissey came in to do his vocal… I turned to Mike and Andy, who were sitting at the back of the studio, and we all knew we had a great track in the making… It was already late when I started doing my guitar overdubs, and as I listened I was still bothered that something was missing. Since I was very young I’d loved the sound of tremolo… and for years I’d been looking for an opportunity to feature it somehow. I knew immediately that the effect would work, and we decided to take what I’d already played from the tape and send it out through the tremolo on my [Fender Twin Reverb] amp (lot 16).
It sounded like a good idea, Marr told us, and then John suggested that instead of using one Fender Twin amp we could use two for stereo, one left and one right [each equipped with a tremolo switch]. John and I went out into the live room to manually control the speed of the tremolos for them to stay in perfect time with the track. We crouched in front of the two Fenders, John on the right side and me on the left. The engineer fed the straight guitar track through the amps, and we turned them up, really, really loud. It was a mighty sound, and the song was becoming everything it should be. It took us a long time to get the whole thing done, as every time one of the amps went out of sync we’d have to go back a few seconds and drop in. Marr then layered a howling two-note slide on top of the tremolo riff with a Telecaster and improvised a wild lead solo on his white Strat (lot 23) to finish it off. By the early hours of the morning, Marr recalls, the song took on a life of its own and the whole building was pulsing.
Somewhat hidden away upon its original release as the 12-inch B-side to ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ in August 1984, ‘How Soon Is Now?’ began infiltrating the mainstream when it was featured on the 1984 compilation album Hatful of Hollow and the US edition of Meat Is Murder in February 1985. Although irked by the song’s inclusion on the US release, Marr admits that ‘How Soon Is Now?’ became a big alternative song and introduced a whole generation of American music fans to our new album and to the rest of The Smiths’ music after that. Belatedly released as a UK single in 1985, ‘How Soon Is Now?’ has since been recognised as a modern masterpiece, consistently ranked among the greatest songs of all time. This sounds incredibly egotistical, Marr confessed to Guitar Player in 1990, but I wanted [to write] an intro that was almost as potent as ‘Layla’ – when that song plays in a club or a pub, everyone knows what it is instantly. "How Soon Is Now' is certainly one of the most identifiable songs I've done, and it's the track most people talk to me about.
GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL, 1984
In between writing and recording ‘How Soon Is Now?’, Marr enlisted the Epiphone Casino when The Smiths played a historic set at Glastonbury Festival on 23 June 1984. Initially reluctant to participate in a relic from the hippy era, the band were persuaded by the festival’s political agenda and allegiance to the CND anti-nuclear campaign. Whilst their inclusion in the lineup was seen as a marked departure from the mellow folk and blues acts that regular festival-goers had come to expect, their lively set would ultimately win over the Glasto crowd and lead to a full-on stage invasion - the only time that the Pyramid stage has ever been stormed en masse. We started our set to a half-empty field, but it soon started to fill up, recalls Marr. After playing a few songs to a crowd seeing us for the first time, it occurred to me again just how different we were from most of the music that was around. In those surroundings we suddenly seemed very fast and very intense, and a lot of our songs were quite short. Glastonbury was our first experience of playing across a huge divide between the band and the audience, but it didn’t deter one young fan, who took it upon himself to scale the steep iron barrier and invade the stage… Admiring his guile, I moved in to help him up… and before anyone could do anything about it there was a whole mob dancing with us. We finished playing and left the stage having showed Glastonbury what we were about. Much later the consensus in the media was that The Smiths’ set at Glastonbury was a turning point in the history of the festival and helped usher in a new era. Festival organiser Michael Eavis similarly asserts that The Smiths’ 1984 appearance changed the face of the festival. When they started playing people started rushing towards the stage, recalled Eavis for BBC’s 6 Music in 2009. Morrissey was actually beckoning them up onstage and when I saw that, I knew then the whole thing had changed into something else. There was no place for the Santana audience any longer, we'd gone into pop. Marr is seen wielding the Casino in photographer Paul Slattery’s shots of the band in the dressing room before going on stage, one of which features on the gatefold sleeve of 1984 compilation Hatful of Hollow. Photographs indicate that Marr used the Casino on the band’s opening and closing numbers ‘Nowhere Fast’ and ‘Hand In Glove’, the latter of which reportedly set off the mid-performance stage rush.
‘NOWHERE FAST’
Marr wrote the music for ‘Nowhere Fast’ on the Epiphone Casino at his Earl’s Court apartment around the same time that he wrote ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ in June 1984. Speaking to guitar historian Tony Bacon in 2022, Marr noted that the Casino's Bigsby vibrato inspired a very ‘50s kind of thing. Driven by a rollicking American railroad rhythm on the Casino, the definitive studio version of the song was recorded at Liverpool’s Amazon Studios that October as the opener for side two of The Smiths’ second studio album Meat Is Murder, which would be released in February 1985. I was trying to draw on American music in a way that had been forgotten, Marr told author Daniel Rachel in 2013. [I had a] very deliberate and keen interest in finding rhythms that other bands around me were not using, that I liked hearing my parents play: Eddie Cochran; Elvis Presley; and because I was such a Stones nut, Bo Diddley. I always was obsessed by that beat. ‘Nowhere Fast’ has that rockabilly rhythm.
Reflecting on the process of writing Marr’s Guitars and, more recently, preparing his collection for auction, Marr told us: One of the first guitars I pulled out was the Epiphone Casino, and when I stood up with it and held it, I felt exactly the way I felt when I first bought it, and when I used it on ‘How Soon Is Now?’ and on ‘Nowhere Fast’. I was transported right back to that time. It really does put me back in that place: who I was, what I’ve done on that particular guitar. Over the years, I’ve been invited to play ‘How Soon Is Now?’ with a few different musicians, and it’s always a very challenging song to do right, technically. My own solo band do it better than it’s ever been done live, but it’s a tricky one to pull off. But when I plugged that Epiphone Casino in, it sounded exactly like ‘How Soon Is Now?’, because the right guitar has an absolute voice and a character, in the same way as people do. If this guitar has a voice, it is of course the instantly recognisable tremolo pulse from ‘How Soon Is Now?’ Speaking to Stereogum in 2021, Marr mused: The sound that was going around my head that night – I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard. I’m glad that all these years later, the sound of it blows people away.
JOHNNY MARR, MARR’S GUITARS, 2023
JOHNNY MARR’S 1963 EPIPHONE CASINO, USED TO RECORD THE TREMOLO RIFF ON ‘HOW SOON IS NOW?’
Johnny Marr purchased this 1963 Epiphone Casino from Andy's Guitar Workshop on Denmark Street not long after The Smiths first moved to London in early 1984. Writing in his 2016 autobiography Set The Boy Free, Marr remembers: I moved into a second-floor flat in Earl’s Court with Angie… Our flat quickly became the full-time hang-out and HQ for the band, and for me it was a sanctuary where I could write songs, listen to music, and hide away from the day-to-day business that I wanted to get away from… Getting into the charts and making some money meant the band could all indulge ourselves a bit, and I discovered the guitar shops in west London. I had dragged the rest of the band into my beat group period by continuously viewing a Beatles documentary that had become available on VHS and obsessing over a Hollies Greatest Hits album, and it inspired me to buy an old Gibson J-160 acoustic like the ones used by both bands… [and a 1963] Epiphone Casino, the same guitar that Keith Richards used on the classic Stones singles. Marr told us: It seemed like there were a lot of really great guitar players in the early to mid-60s who were using the Epiphone Casino. It was uncanny that all those bands that I liked – the Beatles, Keith Richards, the Hollies – were all using one of these, so I thought, well… I'm going to have to get an older one. The idea was that I would write some songs that were like the Hollies or the Beatles, and in fact, I didn't write anything of the sort.
To swiftly follow-up the chart success of The Smiths’ May 1984 single ‘Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now’, Marr set out to demo a new single and write its two B-sides over what would turn out to be an incredibly productive four-day period in June 1984. Having already worked up a song for the A-side that would become ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, he would lay down the demo and write its first B-side ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ with his new Gibson J-160E (lot 12), and afterwards enlist the Epiphone Casino to come up with the 12-inch B-side that would become the band’s most recognisable recording, ‘How Soon Is Now?’
WRITING ‘HOW SOON IS NOW?’
Marr went on to reveal how the three songs came about: [I had developed] a song that I thought would be good for the next single. Angie had gone back to Manchester for the weekend and the band had a rare couple of days off, so I found myself alone in the flat. I’d upgraded my early Teac cassette recorder (lot 3) for a four-track Tascam Portastudio and a Roland Drumatix drum machine. I decided that after I’d demoed the next A-side I would try to come up with the B-side and then the extra track for the 12-inch while I had the opportunity. The A-side was fun to put down. It was a fast rush of a tune done on the acoustic, and after working on it for a while it felt complete… [I remembered] a song that my mother liked, and I strummed around the chords and tapped into a feeling of melancholy until I had channelled the right spirit and came up with a very pretty tune and the B-side was done.
After completing the two songs by Saturday, recalls Marr, I hung around the flat on the Sunday, listening to what I’d done and thinking about writing the third track for the 12-inch. I thought that because the A-side was short and fast and the B-side was short and waltzy, I should try to write something long with some kind of a groove. I rolled a joint, plugged in my new Epiphone Casino and started playing a rhythm. I’d been a long-time fan of The Gun Club and I liked their style of swampy blues, and with that in my mind I kicked around a trancey kind of riff that after a while morphed into a slowed-down Bohannon. As I went around and around, the tune started to get psychedelic in my headphones and I knew I was on to something. I programmed a simple beat on the drum machine and recorded the hypnotic rhythm guitar, and then came up with a two-note phrase that I put on top. What I’d done was nothing like the other two songs, and nothing like anything the band had done before either… I took the cassette of the three songs round to Morrissey’s, having written ‘Fast’, ‘Irish Waltz’ and ‘Swampy’ on it. He worked on it for a few days, and when he’d finished the lyrics the songs became ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ and ‘How Soon Is Now?’
RECORDING ‘HOW SOON IS NOW?’
When the band assembled at Jam Studios in London’s Finsbury Park to lay down the three new songs with producer John Porter in July 1984, Marr recorded the A-side and B-side of the single on the J-160 before commencing work on ‘How Soon Is Now?’ with his 1963 Epiphone Casino. We recorded the backing track as a three-piece, writes Marr, and we spent a couple of hours playing alongside a LinnDrum drum machine in the background to get the feel right. My basic guitar track was done on the Epiphone Casino without any effects. The rhythm was steady and catchy, but I was worried that the song might not turn out as I hoped, as I thought that we’d lost the hypnotic quality and psychedelic atmosphere that I’d liked on the demo. It was a long instrumental track when Morrissey came in to do his vocal… I turned to Mike and Andy, who were sitting at the back of the studio, and we all knew we had a great track in the making… It was already late when I started doing my guitar overdubs, and as I listened I was still bothered that something was missing. Since I was very young I’d loved the sound of tremolo… and for years I’d been looking for an opportunity to feature it somehow. I knew immediately that the effect would work, and we decided to take what I’d already played from the tape and send it out through the tremolo on my [Fender Twin Reverb] amp (lot 16).
It sounded like a good idea, Marr told us, and then John suggested that instead of using one Fender Twin amp we could use two for stereo, one left and one right [each equipped with a tremolo switch]. John and I went out into the live room to manually control the speed of the tremolos for them to stay in perfect time with the track. We crouched in front of the two Fenders, John on the right side and me on the left. The engineer fed the straight guitar track through the amps, and we turned them up, really, really loud. It was a mighty sound, and the song was becoming everything it should be. It took us a long time to get the whole thing done, as every time one of the amps went out of sync we’d have to go back a few seconds and drop in. Marr then layered a howling two-note slide on top of the tremolo riff with a Telecaster and improvised a wild lead solo on his white Strat (lot 23) to finish it off. By the early hours of the morning, Marr recalls, the song took on a life of its own and the whole building was pulsing.
Somewhat hidden away upon its original release as the 12-inch B-side to ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ in August 1984, ‘How Soon Is Now?’ began infiltrating the mainstream when it was featured on the 1984 compilation album Hatful of Hollow and the US edition of Meat Is Murder in February 1985. Although irked by the song’s inclusion on the US release, Marr admits that ‘How Soon Is Now?’ became a big alternative song and introduced a whole generation of American music fans to our new album and to the rest of The Smiths’ music after that. Belatedly released as a UK single in 1985, ‘How Soon Is Now?’ has since been recognised as a modern masterpiece, consistently ranked among the greatest songs of all time. This sounds incredibly egotistical, Marr confessed to Guitar Player in 1990, but I wanted [to write] an intro that was almost as potent as ‘Layla’ – when that song plays in a club or a pub, everyone knows what it is instantly. "How Soon Is Now' is certainly one of the most identifiable songs I've done, and it's the track most people talk to me about.
GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL, 1984
In between writing and recording ‘How Soon Is Now?’, Marr enlisted the Epiphone Casino when The Smiths played a historic set at Glastonbury Festival on 23 June 1984. Initially reluctant to participate in a relic from the hippy era, the band were persuaded by the festival’s political agenda and allegiance to the CND anti-nuclear campaign. Whilst their inclusion in the lineup was seen as a marked departure from the mellow folk and blues acts that regular festival-goers had come to expect, their lively set would ultimately win over the Glasto crowd and lead to a full-on stage invasion - the only time that the Pyramid stage has ever been stormed en masse. We started our set to a half-empty field, but it soon started to fill up, recalls Marr. After playing a few songs to a crowd seeing us for the first time, it occurred to me again just how different we were from most of the music that was around. In those surroundings we suddenly seemed very fast and very intense, and a lot of our songs were quite short. Glastonbury was our first experience of playing across a huge divide between the band and the audience, but it didn’t deter one young fan, who took it upon himself to scale the steep iron barrier and invade the stage… Admiring his guile, I moved in to help him up… and before anyone could do anything about it there was a whole mob dancing with us. We finished playing and left the stage having showed Glastonbury what we were about. Much later the consensus in the media was that The Smiths’ set at Glastonbury was a turning point in the history of the festival and helped usher in a new era. Festival organiser Michael Eavis similarly asserts that The Smiths’ 1984 appearance changed the face of the festival. When they started playing people started rushing towards the stage, recalled Eavis for BBC’s 6 Music in 2009. Morrissey was actually beckoning them up onstage and when I saw that, I knew then the whole thing had changed into something else. There was no place for the Santana audience any longer, we'd gone into pop. Marr is seen wielding the Casino in photographer Paul Slattery’s shots of the band in the dressing room before going on stage, one of which features on the gatefold sleeve of 1984 compilation Hatful of Hollow. Photographs indicate that Marr used the Casino on the band’s opening and closing numbers ‘Nowhere Fast’ and ‘Hand In Glove’, the latter of which reportedly set off the mid-performance stage rush.
‘NOWHERE FAST’
Marr wrote the music for ‘Nowhere Fast’ on the Epiphone Casino at his Earl’s Court apartment around the same time that he wrote ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ in June 1984. Speaking to guitar historian Tony Bacon in 2022, Marr noted that the Casino's Bigsby vibrato inspired a very ‘50s kind of thing. Driven by a rollicking American railroad rhythm on the Casino, the definitive studio version of the song was recorded at Liverpool’s Amazon Studios that October as the opener for side two of The Smiths’ second studio album Meat Is Murder, which would be released in February 1985. I was trying to draw on American music in a way that had been forgotten, Marr told author Daniel Rachel in 2013. [I had a] very deliberate and keen interest in finding rhythms that other bands around me were not using, that I liked hearing my parents play: Eddie Cochran; Elvis Presley; and because I was such a Stones nut, Bo Diddley. I always was obsessed by that beat. ‘Nowhere Fast’ has that rockabilly rhythm.
Reflecting on the process of writing Marr’s Guitars and, more recently, preparing his collection for auction, Marr told us: One of the first guitars I pulled out was the Epiphone Casino, and when I stood up with it and held it, I felt exactly the way I felt when I first bought it, and when I used it on ‘How Soon Is Now?’ and on ‘Nowhere Fast’. I was transported right back to that time. It really does put me back in that place: who I was, what I’ve done on that particular guitar. Over the years, I’ve been invited to play ‘How Soon Is Now?’ with a few different musicians, and it’s always a very challenging song to do right, technically. My own solo band do it better than it’s ever been done live, but it’s a tricky one to pull off. But when I plugged that Epiphone Casino in, it sounded exactly like ‘How Soon Is Now?’, because the right guitar has an absolute voice and a character, in the same way as people do. If this guitar has a voice, it is of course the instantly recognisable tremolo pulse from ‘How Soon Is Now?’ Speaking to Stereogum in 2021, Marr mused: The sound that was going around my head that night – I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard. I’m glad that all these years later, the sound of it blows people away.