“I’m pathologically someone who doesn’t really look back,” Johnny Marr told the BBC last month. The legendary guitarist’s entire musical life has been characterised by restlessness. He left The Smiths in 1987, after five years and four classic albums, and his path since has been one driven by wanderlust: the collaborations, the stints in other bands, the late-blooming solo career.
And yet, last night, during the biggest solo show of Marr’s life at Castlefield Bowl, he seemed to be in unusually nostalgic mood; there were no fewer than eight Smiths songs in the set, from the relatively obscure – ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ is a treat for the hardcore, containing some of his most brilliantly intricate work – to the hits, like “Panic”, “Bigmouth Strikes Again” and “This Charming Man”.
The Smiths’ catalogue is rare in its near-perfection; four wonderful albums, at least another record’s worth of singles and B-sides of similar quality, and a breakup before they had the chance to go off the boil. It is something to be cherished, which Marr himself increasingly seems to understand.
Johnny Marr, Morrissey, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke of The Smiths on the 1985 Meat Is Murder Tour (Photo: Ross Marino/Getty Images)
