Johnny Marr on the upcoming auction of his guitars: ‘I’m interested in who they’re going to, because they have been companions to me’

From an early age, Johnny Marr’s journey as a musician unfolded as a series of mini epiphanies: the first time he saw a toy guitar in a shop window — and begged his parents to buy it for him; the first time he saw an electric guitarist at a relative’s wedding, and twigged that music could be a way to earn a living; the first time he heard T. Rex; the first time he saw Patti Smith live… ‘I was on a path, and I think I was aware of it at the time,’ says Marr. ‘It’s just the way I’m wired: if something hits me in a significant way, I understand it has been a bit of a moment. I’ve been incredibly fortunate — I have a life and a job that has actually been a vocation.’

Marr’s Guitars: The Johnny Marr Collection, an auction taking place at Christie’s in London on 17 September 2026, is the outcome of one of those eye-opening realisations. It began in 2023 with Marr’s Guitars, the book that Marr made in collaboration with photographer Pat Graham. ‘Seeing the guitars put back into storage afterwards, it didn’t feel right to me. It felt like I was abandoning them,’ he says. ‘Once I got that idea, I started to imagine people owning these things that have been with me in my life — seeing them every day and making their own moments.’

Marr will go to the auction to take his leave of these instruments, many of which feature on tracks by the bands he has played in — The Smiths, The Pretenders, The The, Electronic, The Healers, Modest Mouse and The Cribs. ‘I’m going to be there, because it’ll be an amazing event in my life,’ he says. ‘I want it to be a celebration, and I’m interested in who the guitars are going to, because they have been companions to me.’ Will it be hard to let go? ‘Yes. Philosophically and emotionally, it’s already become interesting. It’s by no means casual for me. But then I slap myself on the wrist, because I don’t like nostalgia very much. I have a little dream that, in the upcoming years, I’ll meet people around the world who will say to me, “Do you remember the Martin D-28 that you wrote ‘There Is a Light’ on? I now own it.” I think that’s possible.’

Chance meetings down the line are not the only connection that will remain after the sale. There is the provenance, of course; but Marr feels there must be something more, something poetic, that binds him to these tools of his trade. ‘Over the years, I have wondered whether guitars have what I would then have thought of as a “vibe”,’ he says. ‘Around 2008, I went to see an esteemed acupuncturist in Los Angeles. I was interested in Taoism, so before he started sticking needles in me, I asked this guy about chi, the life force that makes a flower want to reach out to sunlight, or a footballer want to run, or a toddler want to jump out of bed. He said, “What is it you’re referring to?” I said, “My instruments, do you think they have chi in them?” And he said to me, “Have you ever left your house to go on holiday, then when you come back the place feels weird? That’s the absence of chi. But within half an hour, you and your family put the chi back. That’s what’s happening with your guitars.”’

Marr has surely imbued all these guitars with enough chi to last for years to come. He played them, and in the process they will have absorbed something of his personality and his musicality. That is what will make them hard to part with, and also what will make each one a magical object for the new owners, whoever they turn out to be.

Gibson ES-355 TDSV, Cherry, 1959-60

Johnny Marr’s most famous guitar was bought for him when The Smiths signed to Sire Records in New York. The story is well known: he carried the guitar from the shop on 48th Street straight back to the Iroquois Hotel, took it out, and immediately played the phrases that would become ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’. ‘I’ve always said that many instruments come with songs in them,’ he says. ‘And I believe that all these guitars still have songs in them. Without a doubt.’

This is the guitar that features in the famous photograph from 1984 that is the cover of Marr’s Guitars. Marr, smoking backstage at a gig in Norwich, leans over the 355. It lies in its open case, which is lined with fuchsia velvet. What advice would Johnny Marr give to the person who buys it? ‘When I got this, I thought of it as a jazz guitar,’ he says. ‘The way I’ve kept it set up made me play those major sevenths and augmented chords. So I would say that it will suit somebody who’s willing to learn some slightly unusual jazz voicings. And I’m going to say to the next owner that they should really try to write some songs with it. Because that, more than any guitar in the sale, is a songwriting machine.’

Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo, 1982

The Rickenbacker 330 was the key guitar of the Smiths years. Marr bought it at AI Repairs in Manchester, because he hoped it would help him write in a way that was ‘not bluesy’. ‘There were a few things that me and my peers absolutely considered no-nos,’ he says. ‘One of them was distortion, believe it or not, and another was the blues-rock pentatonic, because that was from three generations before and was supposed to have been done away with by punk. I considered the punks to be old by that time.’

The black 330 featured in early Smiths gigs and on the recordings of ‘This Charming Man’, ‘Still Ill’ and ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’. ‘You hear the sound of that guitar best on “What Difference Does It Make?”,’ Marr has said. ‘That track is all about the Rickenbacker.’ The design of the Jetglo is as clean as its voice. The neat soundhole looks as if it was made in one swift and sure movement, like the slash on a Fontana canvas. ‘It’s a difficult guitar for me to say goodbye to,’ says Marr. ‘I actually gulp when I think that I’m not going to own it any more. But I’ve always been someone who’s pathologically into moving forward.’

Gretsch Super Axe, Cherry, 1977

All Marr’s early Spector-esque experiments were done with this Gretsch Super Axe and a cassette recorder with overdub. ‘I’d work on a chord sequence until I was happy with it and then record a second guitar part on top,’ he wrote in his autobiography, Set the Boy Free. ‘I could build up the tracks by bouncing and overdubbing and create my own wall of sound.’

A wall was almost the end of this guitar, and its sound. When The Smiths played their first gig at The Ritz in Manchester, Marr accidentally whacked the Super Axe against a wall as the band made their way on stage. No harm was done, and Marr chose to see the incident as a good omen: get all the bad luck out of the way with one swift blow to the headstock.

This is a strange and beguiling instrument. The colour is more blood-orange than cherry, which makes the decorative cream binding on the edges look like pith. The almond-shaped black plate, like a cyclops eye on the face of the guitar, contains the controls for the onboard phaser and sustain — features that the Super Axe is known for, but that Marr never used.

Fender Stratocaster, black, circa 1978

Marr bought this freaky-looking Strat on a trip to Doncaster with Noel Gallagher, in the early days of their friendship. Its outstanding features are the nine pickups, lined up like sleepers on a railway track, and the 18 switches that control them. ‘It’s amazing, because obviously you can switch the pickups off, but just to add absolute torture to your guitar tech, you can also switch each pickup either in or out of phase. You’d need a calculator to work out the permutations.’

The guitar features on Marr’s song ‘Spirit, Power and Soul’, and in the accompanying video. ‘I wanted to write an electro-pop song, and as it turned out, that was the first song I wrote for Fever Dreams Pts 1-4. A guy in the band, James, had a sequencer groove going. I got him to put it out through the PA, then I stood in front of the speakers and just kept moving all the switches until I got a tone that I liked. It was so harmonic, it started sounding more like a Moog than a guitar. Once I had that rhythm, I flipped a few more switches and came up with the topline riff — an epic, standing-on-a-mountain riff like something from The Avengers.’

Epiphone Casino, Sunburst, 1963

The Epiphone Casino has a neck as broad as a boxer’s, and the arch in the upper bout is like a flexed bicep: this is a muscular guitar. Marr bought it because it put him in mind of the great guitar-led bands of the 1960s. ‘The Beatles are never far from your thoughts,’ he says, ‘but I was also thinking about Keith Richards’s rhythm playing on “The Last Time” or “Mother’s Little Helper”. And of course I was thinking of Ray Davies.

‘When I came to do Marr’s Guitars, the Casino was one of the first guitars I pulled out. I stood up with it and held it, and it felt exactly the way it did when I used it on “How Soon Is Now?”. I was transported right back to that time. Over the years since The Smiths, I’ve been invited to play that song with different musicians, but my own band does it better than it’s ever been done live. It’s a tricky one to pull off, but when I plug in the Epiphone Casino, it sounds exactly like “How Soon Is Now?”. The right guitar has a character, the same way people do.’

Gibson ES-295, gold, 1952

The Gibson ES-295 is one of the oldest guitars in the sale, and it looks like a genuine antique. There is a tremendous patina to it, centred on that bald patch of wear. A kind of crazed craquelure radiates from the curlicues at the top of the f-holes. ‘That guitar was definitely around during The Queen Is Dead,’ says Marr. ‘It was mostly like that when I got it. That patch on it is oxidisation over time. When the gold paint oxidises, it goes green. I’m imagining that whoever had it from the 1950s onwards played it in such a way that their arm rested there — so what you see is just the result of their sweat. It wasn’t damaged, that’s just ageing. It’s completely authentic, that guitar.’

Marr has said that he bought the ES-295 from a shop in the King’s Road in London — and that, at the time, he always felt he had to get a song out of a new purchase to justify the expense. So what song did this Gibson give him? ‘Well, “Vicar in a Tutu” — which will be no surprise to people, because it’s a very rockabilly sort of song.’

Gibson Les Paul Gold Top, 1957

This guitar was one of several that Marr lent to Ed O’Brien when Radiohead were working on the album In Rainbows. Their resources were limited at the time, so Marr’s loans became part of the sound of that record. He also gave them the use of his 1964 Gibson SG Standard.

Marr is a serial lender and giver-away of guitars. His book Marr’s Guitars contains a laugh-out-loud account of how he gave a 1953 Gibson Les Paul Sunburst to Noel Gallagher, and how that friendly deed has become a sword-in-the-stone myth in the retelling. ‘I’ve always been all right about different people using my guitars, particularly people I respect and I like,’ says Marr. ‘If someone with technique and a really good vibe plays your guitar for a couple of hours, it comes back feeling loved.’

Giffin Guitars ‘Telecaster’ Custom, green, early 1980s

This guitar is an object of beauty, and caused quite a stir when Marr played it on Top of the Pops in 1984. The mesmerising green colour of the bird’s-eye maple top and back is set off by the brass fittings, which slot together like cogs in the movement of a Victorian clock. ‘So pretty,’ says Marr, ‘but it weighs an absolute ton.’

Marr has owned this Tele since the early days. ‘The Smiths were busy, so it’s on a lot of that run of singles: “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” and “William, It Was Really Nothing”. Telecasters are very practical guitars — there’s not a lot of things that can go wrong. They don’t have tremolo bars or anything like that, so they’re reliable. But that one, being so solid, operates like an industrial machine. It’s great for putting in tunings, because it’s so robust. I recorded “The Headmaster Ritual” on it [which is in open D tuning].’

The guitar came as a gift. ‘Myself and my girlfriend Angie — now my wife — had been together since we were kids. This was the first time we felt like we’d made any money. I turned up at a Smiths session, and she’d gone behind my back and acquired it for me.’

Martin D-28, 1971

‘I remember Keith Richards saying that if you can’t play acoustic, you’re only half a guitar player,’ says Marr. ‘Or maybe I came up with that — because, to me, acoustics are 50 per cent of the guitar world.’ Marr’s special fondness for Martins is linked to his admiration for Rory Gallagher, who played a D-35 in concert (‘You take your cues from your heroes’). But he also uses them because ‘the sound of a Martin suits my playing’. This D-28 was his main acoustic for many years and can be heard on a vast array of songs, from ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ and ‘I Know It’s Over’ to ‘Panic’, ‘Ask’ and ‘Money Changes Everything’.

Marr has recently released a signature Martin. One version of it has a double-course G, making it a seven-string, to ‘simulate the effect of a 12-string’. His own longstanding 12-string Martin is also in the auction. ‘From a technical point of view, I go through periods at home where I restrict myself to playing the 12-string, because it just makes you a better player,’ he says. ‘If you apply yourself for three or four days, your capabilities go up pretty quick. So I try to be good enough to treat a 12-string like a six-string. It’s making sure that I can always climb my Everest.’

Marr’s Guitars: The Johnny Marr Collection is on view 9-16 September 2026 at Christie’s in London. Entry is free and open to the public