Nostalgia

I can't listen to Bruce Springsteen any more. His voice is on the wane. It's age, I know, and soon there'll be "the only end of age". It makes me sad. But it's here, I think, that one has to acknowledge a difference between your attitude to the performer and your feelings about his stuff. I like Bruce. If he ever wanted to pop over and discuss the finer points of Phil Spector or Gary U.S. Bonds I'd be delighted to make him a cup of tea. But I reserve the right to treat his art – to treat all art – as though it doesn't belong to the person who makes it. To love it, if it merits it, as fiercely as I can. But to hate it too.

Which reminds me of Johnny Marr. This, the picture above, is the the way that I want to remember him. I saw him in 1984, at a rally for what was then the Greater London Council. We (I was tempted to write "I") had been attacked by the National Front and now I was limping. Worse: I had cut my finger on a can of coke. I mention this because if I try to look back objectively what I remember is working so hard to ignore it that the effort was getting in the way. Of course, this is not what I normally tell people. I tell them that the Smiths were great (they were); that people were stripping off, up on the ledge of the council building, and that listening to Marr was like listening to four guitarists all at once. That stripping off thing seems, if I'm honest, to be more like one's own private version of an urban myth. Because, of course, people should have been taking their clothes off; it would have been appropriately Dionysian. As for the four guitarists, I've checked out live performances on YouTube and Marr is (was) definitely one man. What he produced was a raw, sometimes slightly feverish, approximation of the guitar lines that you hear on record. He's a wonderful guitarist – fluid and graceful and tougher, too, than you expect – but he isn't Paganini.

Still, I wanted to be him. I was never sure about Morrissey – his misery was often so italicised that it could be a little off-putting – and now, of course, his views are tricky to say the least. But Marr was always cool. On record, it was as though he was skimming the riffs at you. He seemed to be spinning them in the air, like plates. That effortlessness has largely disappeared. He sounds diligent on record now and even, sometimes, slightly lost. It reminds me of Hemingway's cruelly superior comment about F Scott Fitzgerald, that:

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did [but] ... later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more."

To overthink, I think he means. There's something a little, um, methody about Marr's recent work. It's like he's trying too hard to inhabit a persona. It's as though rock – both the music and the lifestyle – is too big for him. What do you need to be an effective front man? The ability, I think, to present yourself so distinctly that a version of you is communicated to just about everyone. Great frontpersons are sui generis. Think of Thom Yorke. Or Björk. Or Jack White. White prowled the stage at Glastonbury like Ted Hughes' jaguar. He seemed constantly to be explaining things to the people around him, but silently; it was as though he could see, and hear, things that they couldn't. Jack White is Jack White. Jack White, moreover, seems to have an overwhelming need to be Jack White. Ditto Nick Cave or P J Harvey or David Bowie or even Adam bloody Ant. Fitzgerald again, on Gatsby: "an unbroken series of successful gestures". You can will yourself to do this to some extent – you can add props, like Morrissey used to do – but not entirely. The last time I saw Marr he was making promiscuous use of rock iconography: his hair was a mid-90's birds' nest; he wore badges; he flaunted what appeared to be silver nail varnish; he jumped up and down; he bobbed and weaved and pointed at his own lapels. But it wasn't enough. He managed to look tired and over-eager at the same time. It was the equivalent of rubbing two sticks together and failing to make a fire.

In other words, it was a depressing sight. A depressing sound, too: four people loudly treading water. But then they played a Smiths song, and then another one. By the third, I was down at the front. By the fourth, I was waving my arms around. I was singing "there is a light that never goes out" and, what's more, I was singing it to him, like he was... I don't know. Aneurin Bevan. The light itself. It's a spurious business, this, because what you're waving at is a memory. It wasn't Marr that I was responding to. Nor was it necessarily the songs. It was my memory of them; the way that I felt when I first heard them. Or (and I grant you that this is convoluted) the way that I've decided that I want to have felt when I first heard them. I wasn't only reliving my youth, I was making it more dramatic; more coherent. That's why being in the mosh pit is so enjoyable. It isn't only the pushing and shoving. It's the gestures; the unequivocal expression of a feeling that, just at that moment, seems unequivocal. It's as though you're a performer; as though you're your own front man. So. No, I wouldn't want to see him again. But this is the paradox: that I can't bear to see him (to hear him) age but it was worth going just for those moments when I felt as though I hadn't.