BEST FIT: You’ve said that “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” is your favourite Smiths song, why did you choose this one?

JOHNNY MARR: The reason I picked “How Soon Is Now?” is that it's the most arresting song.

If I think about the impression it makes on someone, be that hearing it in the car driving to a mall in Chicago, or coming on a playlist on the train for someone on their way to work in Dundee, or just people listening to music during the day, I do know that it's impressive and quite unique.

All the elements of it really came together, as is the way with almost everything I've been involved with, working with a bunch of people who had a really good chemistry right across the board, which is important in what I do. It’s one of the good things about - for want of a better term - indie rock or rock. It’s not ambient music or acoustic music, it requires a team to do it.

And the guitar shines in it. If you’ve heard that song, you know what it is within three seconds, maybe even quicker. We all know there are records like that. The Beatles had it, Jimi Hendrix had it and those really big records have it, that really distinctive intro. I'm very proud of it.

You wrote this, “Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” and “William, It Was Really Nothing” in a flat in Earl's Court over a couple of days, which I've always found remarkable, but in terms of productivity and creativity, it seemed to set the template for how you've worked ever since, with that idea of doing things in threes.

Yes, a Saturday and Sunday, that was a pretty handy couple of days (laughs). It was an inspiring time, and the writing period of those three songs is a really good example of lateral thinking and the artistic process. The A-side “William, It Was Really Nothing” is so breezy, up-tempo and short and the B-side “Please, Please…” is in waltz time, it’s much more introspective and quite contrasting with “William, It Was Really Nothing.”

But in terms of the artistic process, because I tended to do things in threes, and pretty much still do, I was forced to find something, the third wheel if you like. The artistic process is great when it delivers you limitations to deliver your option.

If I was writing an album over a week and I had 11 slots to fill, I might not have ever written that song, but I remember thinking, ‘It's got to be long, because the other two are short', and also because “Please, Please…” was very pretty, with what I thought of as very Celtic chords and on “William…” the chords move so fast.

So what did you do?

Before I even played the riff, my brain went, ‘. Stay on the one chord.’ These artistic parameters were set up consciously and that's what's great in art. A parallel would be being given a palette and someone saying, ‘You've used predominantly red and blue, what are you going to do with that green?’ It’s as simple as that, the process is really great.

And firing up a big joint was the pièce de résistance, which you can hear in the track. It’s such a good stoner track.

It was one of the first Smiths songs I heard and I remember thinking "What the hell is this?”, being hit by the sound of the bands’ playing, with Morrissey’s words almost like a manifesto for The Smiths aesthetic.

One of the really good things about rock music is when you can read into it and what's being sung matches the worldview of the group. You could say, ‘Well, that's obvious’, but not really. If you listen to “Armageddon Days Are Here (Again)” by The The, which I was on, the sound of Matt Johnson’s singing is perfectly aligned with what you think of The The as being about, it's another great strand of being in a group - the worldview. It’s so interesting.

Was this the start of the Guitarchestra? When you recorded it, you and John Porter put the Epiphone Casino through four Fender Twin reverbs, then added layers on a Stratocaster.

I've since found out that it was two Fender Twins, I've been misremembering that all these years. The start of the Guitarchestra was really “This Charming Man.” The most guitars I put on a track was on Sandie Shaw's “Hand in Glove”, I think there were 15 guitar tracks on that, and it only sounds like nine!

I'd been layering with one guitar and no pedals on a three-track cassette machine before I formed the band. I was always into squeezing as much as I could out of guitars. I've had periods when I've tried to get away from that, but at this point in my life I know you're lucky if you're good at something, and particularly to get credit for it and for people to like it, so it's all right to do what you're good at. But “How Soon Is Now” doesn't have a ton of guitars on it.

Maybe it’s the tremolo that makes it sound like it’s millions of guitars.

The tremolo riff is spread over a few tracks and the two Fender Twins, and there's a DI track going through a pulsing thing. But in terms of layering, there's a lead guitar, a '63 Strat, which does all of the abstract stuff, and the slide, which was the third guitar, which went through an AMS harmonizer.

So there's actually only three different guitars on it. There might be a fourth one in the chorus bits, in the “You shut your mouth” business, but by my standards, it was positively unplugged.