Johnny Marr is coming to the Palace Theatre in St. Paul on Friday, October 18th hot on the heels of his latest release Spirit Power: The Best Of Johnny Marr. Joining Johnny on this tour are the incomparable James.
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At the beginning of 2023, Johnny Marr had all sorts of plans, but marking anniversaries hadn’t figured among them. Fresh from a succession of rapturously received shows with The Killers, Johnny had already started to gather songs for his fifth album – a successor to 2022’s acclaimed double LP, Fever Dreams Pts 1-4. It was his manager who pointed out that he had now been a solo artist for ten years, a stretch of time comfortably in excess of his tenures in The Smiths, Electronic, The The, The Pretenders, Modest Mouse or The Cribs. And although, Marr’s storied life in music isn’t short of milestones – 2010 Inspiration Award at the Ivor Novellos, an Oscar nomination for his work with Hans Zimmer on Inception; and, lest we forget, an NME Godlike Genius Award in 2013 – he hadn’t stopped to consider that the passing of an entire decade might be significant.
The full measure of this extraordinarily fertile period is captured on Spirit Power: The Best Of Johnny Marr, a major new collection curated by Marr encompassing songs from his four top ten solo albums, a scattering of stand-alone singles and two incendiary new cuts, Somewhere and The Answer. Spirit Power presents a composite portrait of an artist with no less a complete ideology than the celebrated co-travellers who inspired him along the way. It’s a body of work that mirrors Marr’s unquenchable life force, his love of melody and the urge to resist what he calls the “strummy, age-appropriate transition into mid-tempo middle age.” He elaborates: “It’s a conversation I have from time to time with [Pet Shop Boys’] Chris Lowe, about how much harder it is to write songs that you want to listen to in the daytime. It’s easier to do something that’s perceived as cool if it’s a bit moody. But, for me, the mission with these records was to make songs that you could listen to on the way to school, on the way to the gym, on the way back from work – you know, in the way that you had with, say, Blondie.”
The songs that comprise Spirit Power – sequenced non-chronologically, thus giving a flavour of what you might expect if you were at one of his live shows – are an emphatic fulfilment of that pledge. Among the earliest songs included on this collection is sonorous yet yearning uplift of European Me, a song which saw Marr turn the anglepoise on the space that would over time be filled by several more songs, each explaining to their creator something about where he came from and who he had become. “Left home a mystery, leave school for poetry,” he sings on New Town Velocity, “I say goodbye to them and me, mission velocity.”
That liberating sense of simultaneously feeling invisible yet invincible in the big city resonates throughout many of the selections that make up Spirit Power: from 2018’s Spiral Cities (“On the vertical streets / We go up (up up)”) to 2022’s Tenement Time (“A ghost through space / Slipping through the crossfire / Look what’s coming again / I’m beating that street” ); and perhaps most dizzyingly on Dynamo (2015) – where Marr equates stratospheric surge of new love with the mirror-glass skylines of New York and London. For Spirit Power and Soul – the opening song from 2022’s Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 – Marr “really put a lot of energy into making what I would consider an electro banger.” Other songs, such as Easy Money (2014), came to him when he was out running. “I wondered whether it was either the most annoying song I could possibly conceive of or really quite brilliant, and I genuinely couldn’t work it out until I demoed it on the tour bus. And what swung it was the reaction of [guitarist and co-producer] James Doviak and the crew going, ‘Play the new one, play the new one.’”
One of two new songs featured on here, Somewhere sprang into life during Marr’s 2022 shows with The Killers and Blondie. “I’ve played a lot of arenas over the years, and in terms of songwriting, there’s nowhere to hide. For a song to work, it has to be a banger. I know it’s almost uncool to think in those terms, but I grew up in a house where my parents listened to Motown, where you couldn’t get a song released if it wasn’t full of hooks.” The same sense of attack underpins the other new song on Spirit Power. The Answer explodes into life from a spoken word intro delivered by Meredith Sheldon. It’s a song, notes Marr, that, would get the approval of his 17 year-old self, mainlining the “narky energy” of Magazine and Buzzcocks: “It’s taken me a long time to write songs that are led by the singing rather than the guitar, and that’s definitely one of them.”
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