Johnny Marr

The early 1980s weren’t the best of times to be an aspiring guitar player. Twenty years earlier, the head of Decca records, Dick Rowe, had made the biggest A&R gaff in pop history with the legendary clanger "Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr Epstein". But in 1982, Rowe’s apocalyptic prophecy suddenly sounded frighteningly real. After the initial roar and storm of punk, British pop music had succumbed to a synthesizer-driven pursuit of new waves and new romanticisms. In an age of Vienna’s, Tainted Love’s and Too Shy’s, the pure sound of six-stringed, melodic pop - be it as amorous as The Beatles, as lascivious as The Stones or as giddy as T.Rex - was fast becoming a lost cause with few willing to fight its corner.