Johnny Marr at Meltdown - The Songs That Saved Your Life

Johnny Marr at Nile Rodgers' Meltdown was a splendid way to spend a Thursday evening.  First of all, though, let's talk about apprehensions over 'He Who Must Not Be Named'.  Or Morrissey, if we're to avoid the kind of quip, laced with faux-victimisation, that he would use.  Whenever I've gone to watch Morrissey in the past, there's always been the wistfully unrealistic daydream that Johnny may well rock up onstage and the greatest band ever will partially reform.  Prior to last night's gig, that desire was entirely and unequivocally absent.  Morrissey is now beyond the pale, a bitter and deluded controversialist who's unfettered racism can no longer be denied (I did deny it, right up until around eighteen months ago, when the scales dropped heartbreakingly from my eyes).  Indeed, that I would rather have seen Nile Rodgers jump onstage and treat us to some funked-up Andy Rourke basslines, than Morrissey's quiff suddenly appear and lean lovingly into Johnny's cool Dickie Davies black and white bouffant, is telling.

"Take me out ... tonight" (Photograph by Victor Frankowski) 

Yet, with the introduction to one of Johnny's newer songs - "This is for everyone who loves someone!" - the slightly anaemic and, ostensibly inoffensive 'Hi Hello', I started to feel wistful.  Johnny Marr's latest album Call The Comet is not a classic, but I have given it a good run out.  Johnny Marr is a god and deserves nothing less.  And, let's be honest, some of the tunes on this album are certainly superior to the likes of, say, 'Oboe Concerto'.  'Hi Hello' - and I've seen other people hint towards this – could well be about Johnny's erstwhile friend and former bandmate.  Listen to those occasional strings that drift over the song, dreamy and undoubtedly alluding towards the motif in 'There Is A Light'.   And those lyrics, innocuous, but then suddenly pulling you into the realm of the earlier masterpiece: 'And I'll find you when the lights are blinding / And you can't get home'.  Oh, I'm almost certainly wrong about the song, but as it progressed, I felt guilty about how adamant I was that I had no desire to see Morrissey darken the stage.  And when Johnny launched into 'Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want' I just could not square that the man who wrote these lyrics, was now way to the right of Nigel Farage, and that no residue of sensitivity or kindness or decency – to his fellow human-beings anyway – were still part of his make-up.  Yes, I know, there's an argument that Morrissey has always been something of an arsehole.  Reading his incredibly entertaining and outrageously purple-prosed Autobiography five years ago provided a very good case for his meanness and lack of self-awareness.   Incidentally, if you want a character study to compare Morrissey with, pick up a copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions.  The parallels are astonishing, particularly regarding grudges and money and how almost everyone has wronged him. 

Stephen Patrick Morrissey ... probably

And then, by the time that I'm swaying along to 'Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me', which came complete with that magnificent sonic monolith of an intro (shouts from the audience providing the insurrectionist cries), I caved.  I would have loved Morrissey to have strolled nonchalantly onstage, given us one of his casual quips, and then bathed in the paradoxical adoration that the song demands.  It's not that Johnny can't pull off the vocals – particularly on The Smiths songs his voice comes close to echoing Morrissey's baritone, but it never attempts the quirks – jumping into outrageous falsetto, delivering asides that allow you to zoom in, University Challenge style, and see the wry arching of an eyebrow.  Maybe it's best exemplified in 'This Charming Man'.  The song that Morrissey sings and the song that Marr plays are completely different.  And yet it works in a way that is just magnificent.  Here, Johnny is required to bring these strange bedfellows together, and as I dance along, I find myself feeling awkward and exposed (I'm not a good dancer, but I can effortlessly achieve a Strictly '7' when dancing to The Smiths).

He's earned it, baby! (Photograph by Victor Frankowski) 

All this is churlish though.  It was a magnificent gig.  Besides, an evening that features seven songs by The Smiths needs an absence and a sense of melancholy, chances missed and bridges burned.  Incidentally, that we got fantastic reworkings of 'Get The Message' and 'Getting Away With It' from Johnny's Electronic days was another highlight.  The latter, introduced with Johnny’s edict "Let's go to the disco Manchester style" was just perfect.  And, less we forget, that song's opening lines of "I've been walking in the rain just to get wet on purpose!" is the perfect skewering of Morrissey (I think we might just be able to bank on Neil Tennant never praising Britain First).  'How Soon Is Now' closed the main set and Johnny's guitar more than made up for lost friends.  And, inevitably, the final encore was 'There Is a Light': euphoric, peerless, and life-affirming.  By the way, imagine having those two songs in your armoury and choosing not to play both of them every single time that you step onto a stage.  Unforgivable, petulant and contrary.

Final thoughts.  One of the two coolest guitar players alive, Nile Rodgers, introducing onto the stage the other coolest guitar player alive.  What wasn't missing though was the man who spent most of the 1980s proclaiming himself to be uncool and in the process becoming - for a few years anyway - the coolest lead singer alive.  Not anymore.  Without equivocation and outside of most of his songs, he is a vile human being.  It's just that within those songs – and this is my answer to whether or not it's right to listen to those songs – 'the songs that saved your life' – there is equivocation.  And for the three and half minutes or so of their duration, you can forget and dream.