Well, I should say I was looking forward to this. Mancunians are used to making the best of rainy days and here, honouring a commitment after a cancelled gig in February for a short tour culminating with the Splendour in the Grass festival, Johnny Marr sparkles. There may be better ways of spending a drizzly weekday evening in Sydney than 90 minutes in the company of the Mozart of indie, but I haven’t found it yet and don’t really expect to.
The oldest newest hand on the block, two surging solo albums suddenly under his belt after three decades of sharing the stage, the Smiths co-founder now has such a swagger, it seems very natural that he is visually, as well as musically, front and centre when he plays. My friend Martin, new to this, observes that Marr is both tiny and also somewhat reminiscent of Ronnie Wood. The gurning and guitar shapes evoke those other Stones too. Marr has spoken reflectively about how the Smiths deliberately disavowed anything “rockist”, that he set himself a challenge of playing within what he regarded as a very narrow, tight aesthetic. Somehow – or because of that – he became a guitar hero anyway.
Perhaps the drums were a little too loud early on, as Marr has liked them to be lately, on Playland, from the LP of the same name, and live. This audience needed warming up, and for that you could be forgiven for blaming the externals. Vocally he is, if one had to be fierce, located around adequate, and some of the newer, hoofing songs can sound a little like an upmarket Cast.
But between the limited but persuasive intersong chat – somewhere before “This next song goes exactly like THIS” and after “Thanks for coming out on a Monday”, even the most flint-hearted sceptics succumbed. If I had to locate the point of no resistance exactly, it would be in the midst of Bigmouth Strikes Again – not the tingly acoustic intro, but the bit where it sounds like a F1 car going round a tight bend. It often is that way.
As has been observed before, New Town Velocity, from The Messenger, is as beautiful and affecting a tune as he’s ever written. Easy Money, the other standout solo track, bounces along to the evident delight of the first few rows. Much to my surprise, the song I couldn’t get out of my head the morning after was Candidate, a kind-of familiar tune with an imitable guitar surge that you never heard until he wrote it.
Perhaps what is most endearing about Marr 2.0 – or 10.0, whatever – is that he is both passionate about the new material and utterly unabashed about the old stuff. The cynical may think, and they may be right, that that’s about reminding people these were his songs too, as well as Morrissey’s. But it may be a little about reconciliation to his past, a sense of refound communion with fans who still hang on his every note.
The setlist is both calculating and thrilling. Getting Away With It – “a disco song” from the Electronic years with Bernard Sumner – has been magically reinvented, Marr’s guitar now vying with the synths for supremacy. And I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him play There Is A Light That Never Goes Out with such evident pleasure. That extraordinary collective moment brought the show into the final straight, before an encore which sandwiched Dynamo and a cover of Depeche Mode’s I Feel You between Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want and How Soon Is Now? What a way to go home.
