It is sad but true that Johnny Marr has never really achieved anything great without Morrissey. I think it was easy to give too much credit to him as the writer of the music, but as some here have already suggested, they vocal melody written to go over a backing track can entirely make the song, and Morrissey has proven immense talent in that area over and over with a lot of other writers. There are a lot of similarities between Marr and Bernard Butler. Listening to both of their solo work, it becomes more and more obviously just how much Morrissey and Bret Anderson added to their respective perceived talent by writing incredible melodies to go over their music tracks. I wonder if Morrissey and Marr worked together again if it would be better than The Tears, which completely failed to measure up to the first two Suede albums. My guess is that it would actually be far better, because Bret seems to have long ago lost his spark of greatness (probably due to too many drugs), while Morrissey still seems to have it.
