Marr still exploring and evolving
Marr releases his finest post-Smiths album with latest solo effort Call the Comet
It comes as some surprise that Johnny Marr has only three solo albums to his credit. The Smiths disbanded in 1987 and the guitarist has plied his trade continuously since. He just didn’t do it as a frontman, preferring to be a hired gun in groups as varied as Electronic, The The, Modest Mouse and the Cribs.
Call the Comet is Marr’s third solo album and his first since 2014’s Playland. It showcases everything that makes the musician one of the most influential guitarists in pop music and positions him in opposition to his former bandmate Morrissey, who seems dead set on burying his legacy every time he opens his mouth on issues of race, politics and culture.
Marr doesn’t comment directly on this.
Call the Comet, which imagines a utopian alternative society free from what he described to the Independent as “the ridiculousness of the past few years,” seems to make the point perfectly.
The musician appears to be on the other side of almost any debate his former colleague wants to comment upon; even around art. He stresses that music has been where he has always turned for solace and freedom.
“It’s a good story for everybody, but none of it has anything to do with my world, I’m all about playing music and taking refuge in it more and more as every year goes by,” said Marr. “I try to be a responsible citizen and I have a family and have always been socially concerned and try to do my bit. But when people try to pull me into some non-creative sensationalism and whole showbiz pop star nonsense, I go back to being what I am — a card-carrying bohemian and musician.”
His playing has taken him all across the world from his hometown of Manchester. He admits that his choices of post-Smith projects have always been about exploration and evolution. So is a tune such as the quietly grand Walk Into the Sea a result of the years that he spent living in Portland? The tune has a vibe one could easily assume was West Coast in origin.
Marr admits he loved his time in Oregon, and appreciated the beauty of the coast. But the tune really has its origins where the vast majority of his work does, in the old bricks and mortar of Manchester.
“Walk Into the Sea was about the fourth or fifth song I wrote and, if any environmental aspects came into it, it would be my new studio in a very old warehouse outside the city,” he said. “I started it in the winter and was kind of commenting on how that aspect of light can make the place look, but then sat on it until the spring when I did the vocals. That time frame gave it a sense of being about rebirth, which worked out really well.”
Call the Comet was recorded with Marr’s long time band at his Crazy Face Studios facility. Together for the past seven years, the group has gelled into a proper band that can propel each song along with the right feel. When Marr sings “Here they come/It’s the dawn of the dogs” on the opener Rise, the group digs in like they feel the fear rising all around us and appears to directly reference recent changes in the United States and the U.K. He admits that we are all “feeling it.”
“I came up with that opening line the day after the presidential election on the way to the airport in New York flying to Los Angeles,” he said. “Having been through Brexit months earlier, I recognized what that feeling was and how it would develop over the next coming months. At the time, because I’m a songwriter, I felt that would be the opening line for the record.”
Call the Comet is being analyzed for its loosely tied concept of characters living in an alternative society in the near future where they search for new ideals. Songs such as Jubilee Street, Spiral Cities and the potent closing track, A Different Gun, follow a speculative line. Elsewhere, songs such as New Dominions find influences as odd as Krautrock crew Neü meeting a mutant funk band.
“A lot of people have commented on a number of the songs having those sort of influences, but that is what shaped a lot of my generation who were listening to groups like Neü, Cabaret Voltaire and others who had this kind of futuristic sound to me,” he said. “Not to get too technical about it, but messing about with pedals and amplifiers and wires to come up with new sounds seems a great deal more ‘futuristic’ to me than dragging a laser pointer across a screen to generate a pre-recorded sound.”
This same sense of exploration is what led him to developing a guitar style copied by so many.
When This Charming Man announced the Smiths to the world, music media went on about Marr’s use of African highlife music married to vintage jangle pop to arrive at his propulsive picking technique. Nothing could be further from the truth, he says.
“I did listen to King Sunny Ade and such, eventually, but what really arrived at that sound was me not coming from the previous generation of guitar players,” he said. “People before me like Stuart Adamson (The Skids, Big Country), John McGeoch (Magazine) and Marc Riley (the Fall) were all guys who could play Sunshine of Your Love and Purple Haze and all that and then they had to get their hair cut and apply their chops to a new paradigm. My generation were discarding as many things from classic rock and punk as possible and, in these genre-obsessed times, were probably the original indies.”
So pursuing a “non-rock” style that Marr says was deeply shaped by his adoration of girl groups became a defining style of the modern day. He says he was lucky to grow up at a time when there was so much great new music exploding out of Manchester and Call the Comet looks back to that while also looking towards the future.
When people try to pull me into some non-creative sensationalism and whole showbiz pop star nonsense, I go back to being what I am — a card-carrying bohemian and musician. Johnny Marr