Photo by Jon Shard

**5-10-15-20 features artists talking about the songs and albums that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time.

When the Smiths broke up in the summer of 1987-- after having produced five full-lengths and a host of singles-- Johnny Marr was only 24; Morrissey had recently turned 28. That they had accomplished so much in so little time was a testament to both their deep well of creativity and the fact that they were both committed students of pop history. They knew exactly what kind of music they wanted to make and they made it, quickly and brilliantly. And then they called it quits. The Smiths have never really gone away but they've returned to the musical conversation in a big way since the release of The Smiths Complete, the box set from last year that saw their proper albums and assorted singles collections returning in remastered form (the new transfers were overseen by Marr). Originally available only in the box, the remasters have now been issued individually.

So what do you do when you finish your tenure with one of the greatest bands in pop history and you're only 24 years old? For Marr, who's now 48, it's been a matter of trying new things. He's never been one to repeat himself. His long list of projects and collaborations since includes Electronic (his group with New Order's Bernard Sumner) and his band Johnny Marr and the Healers, along with a couple of years as a full member of Modest Mouse. Listening to him talk about the music in his life, it's clear that, like a lot of us, his favorite songs are an important component of his memory, transporting him to specific times and places where the details are still vivid and the tunes sound as good as they ever did. (Listen along to Marr's picks with this Spotify playlist.)

Dusty Springfield: "I Only Want to Be With You"

My parents were in their teens when I was born and they had just moved over to Manchester from Ireland. They were absolute lovers of pop music and really avid record collectors, and I was the first-born, so I grew up around young men and women having a great time. They all played instruments-- accordions, guitars, harmonicas-- and there was a lot of dancing. There was a sense of liberation around.

When you come from a first-generation Irish family, the assumption is that Irish music was around you. But my parents were kicking against that, and they never really went near the traditional stuff. There was a real sense of freedom and progression going from their lives on the farm to the city. They all had new jobs in construction and building roads. There wasn't a lot of money around, but there was more money than there was where they'd come from, so there were a lot of wild times. I was pretty much treated like an adult.

They played other music, but Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want to Be With You" was the soundtrack to all of the 60s to me, really. It played at pubs and christenings, there would be cover versions on TV shows, or if you went to parties, people would play it on a 45. That sound was very evocative of my early childhood and it never went away. I always thought a person would have to be made of stone to not react to that record. I still love it; I never didn't.

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T. Rex: "Jeepster"

____The first 45 I ever bought with my own money was a T. Rex record, which, luckily, is very cool. It was a fluke, though-- it was in a bargain shoebox in a furniture store, and I didn't know what it was. But I bought it because it had a picture of Marc Bolan on the B-side label, and I figured I was getting more bang for my buck! I fell in love with that image. The song was "Jeepster", and I didn't have to learn to love it because those thunking guitar riffs were so great.

After that, I spent every bit of money I had on 45s, and it's a habit that's not really left me. When "Metal Guru" from T. Rex's The Slider came out, I was knocked sideways, too. Hearing it for the first time was one of those things that can only be described as transcendent-- people who've had those moments with rock music will know what I'm talking about. It's not something you can get from anything else. Seeing "Metal Guru" performed on "Top of the Pops" was a life-changing moment for me-- I got on my pushbike, aged 10, and rode and rode for miles until I got lost in this park in the early hours of the morning. It really affected me that deeply. That feeling was something I wanted to create in music.

By this time, I was already trying to hold some chords down on the guitar. I was very serious about it. I had a crummy acoustic that took a lot of love and dedication to play, but I never had to be told to practice. I never had a lesson.

____Iggy and the Stooges: Raw Power

____All I cared about was my records, my guitar, my girl, and rolling joints. I'd moved to a neighborhood in the suburbs where everybody was a guitar player. I was playing this riff around my friend Billy Duffy, who went on to form the Cult. I said, "It's my superb new masterpiece that no one else can play!" He said, "Johnny, that sounds exactly like 'Gimme Danger' from Raw Power." I was intrigued-- and a little bit pissed off-- so I checked it out.

I fell in love with it before I even heard it: staring at this amazing Mick Rock picture of Iggy. I've never really found an entire LP that I like better, really, and that's regardless of nostalgia. Just looking at the sleeve, you get a whole story of not only that record, but what rock'n'roll should be in a 15 year old's life: sexy, illicit, uncommercial, exciting, druggy. I wanted to sign up for all of that.

"When we did The Queen Is Dead, I was trying to

evoke Raw Power's overall feeling of beautiful solitude:

It was OK to be broke and not have much but your records."

I put "Gimme Danger" on first and couldn't believe it was exactly like the way I was playing. I'd never really followed particular guitar players, but the way James Williamson played that riff, and then subsequently every riff on that record, made me think, "I should really find out more about what this guy's doing." I spent almost a whole year learning that record; I would turn all the lights off in my bedroom and leave a little crack in the curtains so the orange street light would come through the window and create a super atmosphere. It was great on the rare times I could afford a little bit of pot and, for the times I couldn't, it still did the job.

James and I became friends a couple years ago, and I think he's somewhat bemused by my passion for his playing. When we did The Queen Is Dead, I was trying to evoke Raw Power's overall feeling of beautiful solitude: It was OK to be broke and not have much but your records.

But the most important thing that happened to me at that age was meeting the girl who I wanted to be with, and who is still with me to this day, Angie. When we met in '79, I was just 15, she was 14. My hormones were not so much of a distraction because Angie and I went full-time straight away. She wanted me to be who I wanted to be and she wanted to be with me to do that. And she was like, "Hey, I like Johnny Thunders and Iggy Pop and the good bits of the Rolling Stones a lot." Of course we're still together! I'm not an idiot.

And my best friend at that time was [Smiths bassist] Andy Rourke. He was another bad boy and a lot of fun-- and a great musician. He started off as a really good guitar player, but as I progressed, he got really interested in playing the bass. The two of us had this musical chemistry that everybody can hear in the Smiths. To this day, I've never met a bass player who isn't super impressed by the way Andy Rourke plays. He's a real one-off.

The Rolling Stones: "The Last Time"____

____I was moving around the city, being very groovy. In a way, it was Year Zero for me because I cut loose from some of my friends from the suburbs who were getting into habits that were too nasty for me. Luckily, one of my friends worked in a record shop and took off for Europe for a few months and left the contents of the store in my tiny little attic. I had all these albums at my disposal. I hooked onto mostly old records, Motown particularly, early Marvin Gaye-- none of that lover man nonsense. I always really liked the Rolling Stones from the mid-70s onwards, but I started to refine my Stones tastes and check out what they were doing in the 60s. I remember being a little kid and absolutely loving "Get Off of My Cloud", which my mother used to sing to me.

I didn't like the late-70s music that was being made for my age group at all. I really didn't care for the faux new wave groups that my friends were picking up on like the Stranglers and the Boomtown Rats. I did like the stuff that came out of New York-- Talking Heads and Television-- but I really clicked with the Rolling Stones.

"When Angie and I first got together, the first thing we did was make each other a mixtape-- that's what you do with people you love."

"The Last Time" was on constantly during that period, and the Stones became one of the blueprints for what I wanted to do with a group. What I picked up from Keith Richards was this certain kind of nobility in being the guy at the side, this idea of being the engine: "Thou shalt support the singer offstage and on. Be appropriate to the song, be interesting, and be a great guitar player-- but none of that showboating shit." I took a lot of that into the Smiths.

My relationship with records intensified during this period, partly because my partner had exactly the same relationship, and we both encouraged each other's passions. It was one of the fundamental things that made us really tight friends. Sometimes between soundcheck and the show, we'd go off to secondhand record shops and rifle through 45s. When we first got together, the first thing we did was make each other a mixtape, which we continue to do because that's what you do with people you love. It was about passion, imagination, escapism, idealism, desperation.

David Bowie: Low

When the Smiths split in 1987, Bernard [Sumner] from New Order and myself had the idea to start a new group called Electronic, which we did in '88. We were both looking to do something that was very different from the constraints of a Mancunian four-piece rock group. Some eyebrows were raised when we got together, from both sides of Manchester, but we really had some great things in common. Musically, we both really liked David Bowie, the Pet Shop Boys, Kraftwerk, Ennio Morricone, and the Kinks. He was surprised that I knew quite a lot about electronic music, and I was surprised that he knew how to play all these Kinks songs. We weren't interested in modern 90s rock music-- until Nirvana, there's still not a lot from that period that interests me much. But we were together for nine years, which surprised a lot of people, mostly because we only made three records.

The one constant [inspiration] for us was David Bowie's Low and the track "Warszawa", a semi-instrumental on the second side. Bernard and I wanted to be an anti-group but we still wanted to be who we were, so Low was a real touchstone because it had a European sensibility within a rock record, and it was also away from the group format. We picked up the fact that it was a record made in the spirit of collaboration, and that it was essentially anti-rock, which we could relate to. It was beautiful music, and from a rock artist we really loved and grew up with. We were trying to be something new for ourselves, and we thought David Bowie was a very brave artist.

N.F. Porter: "Keep On Keeping On"

Bernie and I were still working together and we had a shared love of a song called "Keep On Keeping On" by N.F. Porter. A mutual friend of ours, the writer Jon Savage, came up to the studio one day and played it; Bernard remarked that Joy Division tried to do a cover of it in their very early days. I think it's an open secret that it inspired their song "Interzone", which is one of my favorite Joy Division riffs. It's so great when you think you know a lot about music, but you still go through those periods where you want to be turned on by something that goes "bang."

The song is from this genre known as Northern soul, and very few records in that genre are built on guitar riffs. So this is a rarity and something of a classic: sort of garage-y, kind of naughty. I still go to a lot of Northern soul all-dayers, and I love hearing those old obscure records coming through PAs that they were never designed to go through: these really measly-sounding records that have piano and brass parts that do the riffing job that electronic guitars do on modern rock records. I just find that sound more powerful than what I hear around and about. I don't care whether it's old, it just kicks me.

"No one cares whether I can make a high-art electronic

sound out of a square wave. I had fun doing it,

but there are people who can do it better."

Electronic was my main creative outlet at the time. I was very lucky, growing up obsessed with the process of how records were made and then getting the opportunity to pursue that and own my own studio. I built a couple of studios and dove into all the technical aspects of making records. I lived in there. At the same time, I became a dad, so I was bringing up my family while spending 14 hours a day in the studio, with the kids running around. But I now know that no one cares whether I can make a high-art electronic sound out of a square wave. I had fun doing it, but there are people who can do it better. But the many other things I learned about making a record-- how to be a proper producer and arranger-- stay with me to this day. In Electronic, we had too good a time learning the technicalities of our own studios, but I wouldn't change it for the world; whether it was worth all the money I spent on the recording studio, I don't know.

Faust: BBC Sessions

____By the late 90s I was starting to get the idea of going back to a regular group. I was sort of done with machines, but I wasn't interested in regular rock songs, either. Over the years, I've got to know about German music from the 60s, and that all let me to the band Faust and their song "The Lurcher". It made me think that most of everything else that was around at the time was useless and twee. I remember playing it with my engineer in the studio and thinking it was perfection. Interestingly enough, there are no words on it. It's [centered] around a groove but it's not trying to be American R&B; it's experimental, but not so avant garde that it's meaningless. I liked the space it put me in. It wasn't trying too hard to catch my attention with hooks. It was sexy. When I discovered it, I thought, "I want to form a group that sounds like this."

I was having a well-earned break from pop-- I did not like what was called Britpop in the UK. For the longest time, I was really anti-song, which has changed. You come right around in a circle when you have been around for a while.

Mina: "Se Telefonando"

Once you've been touched by something that really elevates and inspires you melodically, you can't pretend it hasn't happened. Because my love of Ennio Morricone spanned from my 30s onwards, I would trawl all of his stuff-- and there was a lot of it. I came across this single called "Se Telefonando" by Mina, which came out in 66-- you are going to flip when you hear this record. I put it on my iPod and would listen to it all the time when I was in my bunk in the tour bus with Modest Mouse.

Mina is interesting because she was a really big Italian TV star in the 60s, but she was a really feisty, strong-willed, and rebellious woman. From what I heard, she was banned from Italian TV because she got pregnant out of wedlock and had a relationship with a famous actor. She was very forthright, a provocateur. I really like characters that are big in the mainstream but kicking up a fuss. You can hear that attitude in her voice, but this song in particular is just so beautiful. I have no idea what she is singing about, nor do I care-- music is one of the only things that can be that way. The sound of her voice and the particular melody: it's just audacious, full-throttle.

"I would hate the idea that I would be the same person with the same likes two years from now. Even maybe two months from now."

I had got away from song structures and pretty guitar melodies-- the stuff that I was known for-- but I was falling back into that around this time. At a certain age I became totally OK with dropping the agenda I was once right to have-- in your 30s you should have some kind of agenda. But you shouldn't still carry that stuff around when you get beyond that point. I often feel like [I'm experiencing] new cycles of my life. I really like change-- I like it personally, I like it professionally. I would hate the idea that I'd be the same person with exactly the same likes two years from now. Even maybe two months from now.

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__The Animals: "It's My Life"

Me and my band have been covering this song. When I put my own band together and I'm back out front singing and having a different kind of connection with the audience, I have to be saying something real vocally and lyrically. I started playing "It's My Life" a year or two ago, the message really got to me. I wondered what it would be like to sing something as straightforward as that. It's not particularly clever-- and you'd think, "It's my life and I think what I want" would be a bratty teenage sentiment-- but it's as meaningful for someone my age as any philosophy that I can think of aside from "don't be a dick," but that doesn't have the same ring to it.

It's not like I'm on some nostalgia trip. If there was a record that came out today that did all the things I just said, I would pick up that record. Retro, modern, I don't care-- when you're a kid, you relate to people who are singing like real grown men, and now I am one.