And you thought Morrissey had problems escaping his past associations...

Link to an article in the Independent posted by Benton in a comment in a previous story.

Marr's Attacks - by Fiona Sturges, Jan. 10. Excerpt:

The in-fighting reached a head in 1996 with a highly publicised court case over royalties during which Morrissey and Marr were ordered to pay the drummer Mike Joyce £1.25m in back earnings by a judge who, it was reported, had never heard of Top Of The Tops, let alone The Smiths. However, Marr accepted the judgment but Morrissey appealed against it.

"It tied me up for a couple of years while I was trying to make a record," remembers Marr. "It's really hard because it weighs you down and puts you off the whole business of making music. I had no respect for the court case at all including my own side. Morrissey kept fighting it and fighting it and the consequences are still affecting me to this day. The drummer has now decided that, since Morrissey won't pay, he can exercise his legal right to get me to pay Morrissey's debt. It's a struggle to be positive with that hanging over me."
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booboomja writes:

www.magnetmagazine.com has recently posted an excellent interview with Johnny Marr. Senior Editor Matthew Fritch asks Johnny to give a "spot impresssion" of several luminaries with whom Marr was worked over the years. Surprisingly enough, he asks about Morrissey, to which Marr responds (excerpt):

[Fritch] Morrissey.
[Marr][Long pause] What can I say Morrissey is like, genuinely? I’ve never been asked to sum him up. Because there was so much emphasis placed on the differences between Morrissey and myself, most people haven’t stopped to wonder what it was that made us so close. The thing that brought us really close together is the essence of why he lives his life and why I live my life. And that is that without what we consider to be the art of pop music and pop culture, life doesn’t make any sense. And that understanding: He needed it like I needed it. It was a pretty serious, deep need. It wasn’t just the need to escape our social situation, because underneath it all, one of the things that makes us the same is that we’re both incredibly sensitive. There was this serious burden with serious mental problems that were taken care of by records.
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jtang writes:

In New York Magazine,

Johnny Marr & the Healers
Speaking by phone from his home in London, Johnny Marr may be “nursing a typical British cold,” but there’s little else about him that hints at his mopey past as the inventive guitarist for the Smiths. He takes shots at the Smiths’ vaunted catalogue (“we were good, but not that good”), wittily dismisses any notion of a reunion (“leave the corpse alone, please”), and even offers self-deprecating remarks about his psychedelia-prone new band, the Healers (“I’m cool with being labeled psychedelic, as long as it doesn’t conjure up film of people dancing naked around a muddy pond”). Truth be told, Marr never was a sullen Smiths soldier; in fact, pairing up with Morrissey wasn’t even his first choice. “The band I really wanted to be in was The The,” he confesses, “but I couldn’t afford the train fare from Manchester to London.” (Marr did eventually get his wish; he joined The The in 1988 for its album Mind Bomb.) Marr, however, isn’t fixated on the past; he’s more interested in the future with the Healers. “Rock’s at a weird place right now,” he says. “The British bands are too emotional, and the American bands are so concerned with attitude that they forget to write good tunes. I want to make big, loud rock that isn’t clichéd.”
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