Johnny Marr reveals the esoteric inspirations behind his 2003 album Boomslang, now given a deluxe reissue

Twenty-one years ago, Boomslang, the first and only album by Johnny Marr + the Healers, was released. To celebrate its “coming of age”, a special edition is now available, featuring the album in its entirety, plus unheard recordings and new extended mixes. Here we present exclusive quotes from Johnny discussing how the album came about and what his influences were at the time – a literary melange including Colin Wilson, Madame Blavatsky, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff…

Q: Where did the name “the Healers” come from?

Johnny Marr: I got the name the Healers from a book I was very into at the time called The Secret Doctrine, by Madame Helena Blavatsky. The only word for it is esoteric. Secret knowledge. It’s really interesting. The whole story of Madame Blavatsky and people like her is an interesting area. The book was written in 1923. It’s all quite cosmic. Ancient texts. Seancey. Otherworldly. It suited where I was at, at that time. In the book, the word “healers” keeps coming up. I kept seeing it. I’ve been in bands since I was a kid, and I know a good band name when I see one. It just fitted. All the people that I was pulling in as band members loved it straightaway too. That’s always a good sign, when all the band are enthusiastic about it. I still think it’s a really good name.

Q: You talk in the album liner notes about delving into esoteric books and ideas. What impact did esoteric culture have at that time?

Johnny Marr: The Healers was so much about esoteric culture and experiences. I was at a point in my life where I was revisiting a lot of stuff that I did as a teenager. Nothing to do with being nostalgic, just because I’m interested in it. A lot of psychedelicised experiments, behaviour and reading. So writers like Colin Wilson, Madame Blavatsky. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous was a really big book for me at the time. Gurdjieff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men. Esoteric philosophy. It’s a million miles away from the culture that has happened 20 years later. I still think it’s really interesting. I was drawn to it when I was a kid. Then I met our percussion player Liz Bonney from Sydney. She’d come from Byron Bay on the eastern tip of Australia. She told me about Lee Spencer, and he became our synth wizard. They were very much part of a movement of, I say with affection, the glitter hippies from eastern Australia. It was definitely a mindset. If anyone knows the band Gong, the Healers were maybe closer to an early 2000s Mancunian Gong! A lot of children running around. Very strong female presence in the band. Very percussive and very out there, but still making music that hangs together.

Q: What led you to people like Gurdjieff and Ouspensky?

Johnny Marr: What led me to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and those kinds of people and that kind of thinking was getting into Aldous Huxley when I was a teenager. I used to bunk off school and go to the central library. One of the things that frustrated me as a schoolboy was the stuff we were taught in history and the stuff that we were taught in English Literature. I’m glad that I was taught a little bit about Shakespeare, by no means enough, and Dickens and those kinds of areas, but I was frustrated that I wasn’t being taught about American literature. I was waiting for us to be studying Brave New World, but that didn’t happen. So I got into it myself. That was kind of life changing then. Then, around the time of the Healers, I just felt that I needed to go back to Aldous Huxley. When people know about Aldous Huxley, his reputation is such these days that obviously Brave New World is the thing, The Doors of Perception, psychedelic experiences, which is absolutely valid and incredible. But I became such a fan of Aldous Huxley, and I know there’s so much more to him than that. I would recommend that people get into his essays, essays on transcendence, essays on music, essays on religion, essays on silence. All of those things, philosophically, were really exciting to me around the time of Boomslang. That almost became this super doorway, through reading Aldous Huxley, for picking up new ideas about other sorts of philosophies.

Q: The philosophers and authors you were reading were talking about raising consciousness. You were doing that through your music.

Johnny Marr: What you’re hearing in some of those songs on Boomslang are me editing down really long jams. “Caught Up” was this sort of super jam. “You Are the Magic” was originally a really very, very long song that went through all these different sorts of moods. “Bangin’ On” is along the lines of electro blues grooves. I had to try and make sense of them and make them just five minutes long, instead of 12 minutes long. I was very, very into percussion, which Liz Bonney was just masterful at doing. There was a lot of really original synthesizer played by Lee Spencer.

I said at the time that my ambition for the Healers was to eventually have a setlist that had just five songs on it, and be lucky if we got through three! I had this ambition for the songs to be really stretched out live, really out there. Not a million miles away from the band Goat. That was where I wanted to go. I think it was a bit of a hard sell for people to get on board with, the guy who had done “This Charming Man” playing 90-minute freak outs, but that was where my heart was at the time. That was the atmosphere around the Healers. A very open, expansive, and psychedelic sort of philosophy.

Boomslang (2024 Delux Edition) is out now. Find buying options here.

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