I Want The One I Can't Have

"The Housemartins! 'Happy Hour' was a complete rip-off of 'I Want The One I Can't Have', and they've nicked others too..." 

 - Johnny Marr

Another one of my favorites from Meat Is Murder, this song is one of the reasons why the album is such a guitar masterpiece. The seamless combination of fast rhythm guitar and serpentine riffs is a huge inspiration to me. I have posted a Guitar Pro tab file for this song here. Here are the scans from the Complete Chord Dictionary: Here are the scans from the Meat Is Murder piano songbook with guitar chord boxes. Thanks to Ted Maul for these scans.

My friend Peter Weldon does an incredible multi-guitar version here:

   

  

 And here's Oscar80lt on an acoustic in standard tuning:

   

 cdwheel does an awesome, full length version to his own backing track:

   

 Here's another great version by johnnymare, playing with a backing track:

 

Shoplifters Of The World Unite

"You can hear Nils Lofgren's influence on me in the solo on 'Shoplifters Of The World Unite'. That's all done with false harmonics, which is a steel player's technique: you touch the strings with a right-hand finger an octave higher than where you're fretting, and then pluck the string with your thumb."

"I think of them as guitar breaks. I like the one in 'Shoplifters' -- that was the first time I used harmonizing layering. People have said it sounds like Brian May, but I was thinking of stacked Roy Buchanans."

"Also, you can leave [a wah pedal] on, opened slightly without even touching it -- that gives you a completely different tonal range. The 'Shoplifters' break was the
first time that I really discovered that. And if the filter is open in just the right place, you can get a harmonic to sing like a bird."

-Johnny Marr

I have uploaded a Guitar Pro tab file here(right click to save).



Here is the complete score from the "Louder Than Bombs:Off The Record" book:
















Here are the scans from the Singles tab book:










Here are the scans from the Complete Chord Dictionary:





Oscar80lt has a cool acoustic version of this here:




Here's The Smiths playing on The Tube. There's a couple of shots of Johnny's positions that might be helpful:

The Boy With The Thorn In His Side

"After that I started getting turned on to Chic, The Fatback Band, The Ohio Players and War. If you listen to 'The Boy With The Thorn In His Side', the rhythm part from verse two onwards - that chick-a-chick part - it's pure Nile Rogers.

That was the first time I used a Strat on a record. I got it because I wanted a twangy Hank Marvin sound, but it ended up sounding quite highlify.

Will the new stuff be radically different? Yes. There is the single which will probably be 'The Boy With The Thorn In His Side' and then the album which we have pretty much got in hand and which will undoubtedly shock a lot of people. Well, let's hope so. From a purely personal point of view there will be a move away from the old jingly-jangly guitars of old. Everyone knows I can do that.

'The Boy With The Thorn In His Side' is about us. Well, Morrissey specifically. The thorn is the music industry. If you listen to the words, 'how can they hear me say those words and still they don't believe me'... By the time we'd written that song, we'd been put down so much for our beliefs, in the music industry, we'd been put down for all these things that we said were dead. And then we did 'The Boy...' and it was a real pleasure that people who were actually responsible - people who were the 'thorns' in our side - were actually buying this record and championing it in the music industry. It's about all the bigotry and idiocy in the music business really. And how a lot of people who are in a responsible position actually don't know squat."

- Johnny Marr

I have uploaded two Guitar Pro tabs here:

Here is a tab from the Play Guitar With The Smiths book:









I have uploaded the accompanying backing tracks here(right click to save).


Here are the scans from the Singles tab book:








Here are the scans from the Smiths Best Complete Score:











Here are the scans from the Complete Chord Dictionary:





Here are the scans from the Queen Is Dead piano songbook with guitar chords:







Jahnli does a great version on acoustic 12 string, using a capo at the 5th fret. I don't know if this is exactly how Marr played it, but it sounds really similar. He also posted the chords he used in the comments section on Youtube:

D Am7
C D
G Am
D Am7 C D

G Am D
Am7 C D
G Am D
Am7 C

D G Am D
Am7 C
D G Am D
Am7
C D C D C D C Cmaj7 Dsus4 C D




Another great version from KintrickPinch:




Here's Oscar80It:




Here's nicknoh69:




Here's johnnymare:




Here's dhowellbassist:




Here's davidguitarist91 on his Les Paul: