Johnny Marr – Powerstation (Concert Review)

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By the time Johnny Marr finished playing How Soon Is Now, the closing song of his main set at The Powerstation tonight, he surely knew that he had played a triumphant show. From the moment he strutted and swaggered onto the tiny stage, looking somewhere between Ron Wood and Liam Gallagher gone mod and joined the Small Faces, the audience were his.

Opening with the title track from his second solo record, Playland, Marr put together a set that took in the highlights of a career that has spanned both decades and genres. His own material comprised the bulk of the show, and, despite being of an age to have been loyal Smiths fans in their collective youth, Marr’s audience (make no mistake; from the young lass with the purple hair to the grey-haired bloke who tried to reach the headstock of Marr’s Fender Jaguar every time Johnny stepped to the edge of the stage, hip thrust forward, to take a solo, to the pillock who climbed the safety barrier to hug Marr at the end of How Soon Is Now, and was last seen being taken away by some rather large security guards for a rather stern and possibly awkward talking-to, this was, undeniably, Marr’s audience) sported, as far as I could see, not a single Meat Is Murder or Salford Lads’ Club T-shirt. They weren’t just there to see a Smith; they were there to see Johnny Marr.

And so the show, heavily weighted toward Marr’s solo material, was an energetic affair. He is, obviously, more a rock guitarist than his work with The Smiths would always have suggested, and it was telling that what Smiths material he did play — Bigmouth Strikes Again, Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before — was delivered with significantly more electricity, both metaphorically and literally, than their original versions were, Bigmouth Strikes Again getting one of the evening’s biggest cheers as Marr thrashed the chords of the intro from his Jazzmaster.

Undeniably a superb guitarist, Marr isn’t the strongest singer, but he made a decent fist of his vocal duties. Generate! Generate! was enough of a chant, its Jam undertones apparent, to allow him to substitute anger for vocal precision, Marr’s Wythenshaw vowels biting through; he managed to sound even more Manc than the Gallaghers he inspired. Given that this is the man who played guitar behind Morrissey, one of the most singular voices in musical history, it’s inevitable that his singing is secondary to his guitar playing, which dominated the show. Even what he claimed was his “big disco hit,” Getting Away With It, fromElectronic, his 1991 Manchester wet-dream team-up with Bernard Sumner, received an electric-guitar makeover, and was the stronger song for it. The song even saw Marr indulge himself in a little guitar noodling, for the only time in what was otherwise a remarkably tight and sharp performance.

Questionable sub-Wyman vertical-guitar posturing aside, Marr has always been an innovative guitarist. You’ll not often see an EBow used on stage, but Marr pulled one out of his pocket for Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before. And, of course, he played How Soon Is Now. A famously complex song to record, it’s essentially one chord — F#, if you’re playing along at home — droning and pulsing in ways that a guitar clearly shouldn’t be able to. It was an astonishing song when The Smiths released it as the B-side to William, It Was Really Nothing, and live it punches hard, Marr working the one chord that drives the song to the powerful and mighty effect. He even, just occasionally, managed to nail the swallowed-vowel deep-falsetto howl of his one-time songwriting partner as he sang the lyrics. And as he picked out the short, tantalising solo, you could hear the blueprint for much of what John Squire would one day turn into The Stone Roses’ epoch-defining first album.

Had he ended the show right there, I suspect that the audience would have gone home happy. But there was time, of course, for an encore, and while Marr and his band nipped off stage for a quick pint, a roadie put an extra microphone stand on the stage. Two songs into the encore, Marr announced that he would be introducing “a good friend of mine, one of the best songwriters in the world.” Having postponed the show some months earlier due to family illness, Marr clearly decided that inviting Neil Finn to play I Fought The Law and There Is A Light That Never Goes Out would make a decent apology.

And he was right – a surprising, and truly outstanding, conclusion to a quite exceptional show.

– Steve McCabe

Click on any image to view a photo gallery by Michael Flynn:

Johnny Marr Set list:

Playland

Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before

The Right Thing Right

Easy Money

My Monster

New Town Velocity

Candidate

Spiral Cities

Generate! Generate!

Bigmouth Strikes Again

Getting Away With It

How Soon Is Now

 

[Encore]

Please Please Please Let Me Get Me What I Want

Dynamo

I Fought The Law (with Neil Finn)

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (with Neil Finn)

 

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