JOHNNY MARR CHANNELS “WOOZY PERCEPTION” AS HE PREPS NEW DOUBLE LP AND TEASES STRANGEWAYS BOX SET
“The writing’s pulled me all over the place.” JOHNNY MARR
FOR THE past 18 months, Johnny Marr has been working seven days a week in his Crazy Face Factory studio, housed on the sixth floor of a one-time cotton mill on the outskirts of Manchester. The normally buzzy industrial units surrounding him had fallen silent, with the only sounds in the building coming from his recording rooms. “It was like a ghost town,” he tells MOJO. “I actually started writing the first few songs before the pandemic. I just had some ideas that I’d been percolating, and I wanted to get cracking at it. There’s been no let-up at all.”
The result is his upcoming fourth solo long-player, Fever Dreams Pts. 1-4: notably a double. “I’ve been in lot of groups,” he says, “and I’ve never done a double album, which surprised me, really.”
Marr says he worked even harder in the studio this time around than he did during the intensive sessions for 2018’s Call The
Comet, putting in long days that often bled into the small hours. “If anything, I think this record’s maybe wrung me out a little bit more,” he laughs. “The writing’s kind of pulled me all over the place, musically, melodically and sonically. My idea for it was really quite expansive.”
His plan is to initially release most of the new songs via a series of three EPs – the first, Fever Dreams Pt.1, is due in October and opens with Spirit, Power And Soul, an electro rouser driven by an amped-up vintage Oberheim DMX drum machine (as previously heard on everything from Herbie Hancock’s Rockit to New
Order’s Blue Monday).
“We’ve invited the machines in,” Marr says, “but we’re kicking them around a little bit.” The album’s title, meanwhile, he says represents to him “a certain kind of woozy perception”. If many of the lyrics on his previous albums reflected Marr’s interest in urban psychogeography, this time he’s more concerned with inward-looking mental states. Musically, the first EP’s tracks are punchy and uplifting, though often deal with people moving through heavy weather. The beleaguered narrator of All These Days, for instance, he admits is, “very close to what I am, and I’m hoping that people can relate to it.”
Elsewhere, Ariel borrows its title from Sylvia Plath’s 1965 poetry collection and imagines a troubled character “who could be either someone like Sylvia Plath or someone like Syd Barrett.” Other future tracks to follow on the album proper include the “quite heavy and dramatic” The Speed Of Love and anti-segregated society “call to arms” Lightning People (both featuring Primal Scream bassist Simone Marie). Meanwhile, Marr confirms rumours of a Strangeways, Here We Come box set are not unfounded.
“Yeah, there has been some talk about a Strangeways box,” he says. “Particularly on that last album, what we were after sonically meant that the [work-in-progress] monitor mixes were a really good listen. They didn’t need a lot of bells and whistles. The rough mixes and demos from that period hold up really well. So, yeah, it’d be nice to see them all lovingly curated some-where or other.”
Fever Dreams Pt.1 is released via BMG on October 15.