Great, great interview.
Something stood out for me about Johnny in this interview. When he talks about changing his name, I hadn't realized he had done so for show-biz reasons. He says he had a couple of reasons, but the "main" reason is that he wanted to be a glam rock guitarist, like Marc Bolan. The interviewer astutely caught on to this, and (in my reading) slipped in an oblique allusion to Morrissey:
"People who change their names are a certain kind of person, don’t you think?
Yes. People who are aware of their identity. A lot of people don’t care about their identity in that way. They’re not objective about it. Also, a lot of people would never dream of it because they think it’s a disloyalty to their family. None of that ever occurred to me. Everything was just about being a glam rock guitar player, and then later it was about being a new wave guitar player… and I’ve never shut that off."
I've never thought of Johnny and Morrissey as being two people who both chose to change their names when they went into the music business in order to present themselves in a totally new light. And yet here Johnny is saying he just wanted to be a "glam rock guitar player", so in a sense his choice to change his name was similar in spirit to Morrissey's. They were becoming different people.
But Johnny only changed his last name. Morrissey lopped his in half. Interesting contrast. Morrissey vanished into a persona, however genuine and honest that persona may have been, while Johnny only slipped halfway into a glamorous persona. Pretty much falls in line with who they are as people, doesn't it? Morrissey's all in, Johnny gives equal time to "the real world". Morrissey is a single, almost suffocatingly monolithic person containing a multitude of contradictions, whereas Johnny seems to be different people at different times, almost a bit of a split personality.
That split is reflected earlier in the interview. I found it very interesting that Johnny saw pop music as an escape:
"I always wanted to escape.
Escape from what?
I wanted to escape the world. I wanted to escape what I was around and what I was hearing… the conversations I was having with people… people’s personalities — life. I wanted to escape my consciousness, my feelings, what I was seeing. It’s like how Wordsworth wrote The World Is Too Much With Us. I had a love of music and a love of melody and rhythm and sounds and all the things that make up pop music. I needed it to escape normal life. I still do, but I really did then. It’s more of a need than just an attraction."
This is quite different than The Smiths' early ideals, which I recall as being staunchly opposed to escapism. Johnny was very vocal, along with Morrissey, in denouncing peers who wanted to avoid what was going on in the world. Supposedly "Panic" is all about that. Tellingly, the song is a Bolan rip-off, too, so you can hear this weird mixture of facing the world directly, to see it as it really is, but doing so in the context of an escapist pop song. It's all right there: the glam rock guitarist who wants to be of his time and place, making timely music, addressing the world as it is, but couching his mockery of the escapist Lotus-Eaters in the ultimate form of escapism.
Also, he talks about how Manchester is the best city, but he acknowledges it has changed a lot and he's got "mixed feelings". "Mixed feelings" sums it up well. The guy is nothing but mixed feelings, it seems, and I mean that in the best possible way.
You're really seeing the different sides of Johnny's personality in the interview. It's wonderful to read this, because it helps explain why Morrissey and Marr were tight creative partners for five years, and also why they split up.