Johnny Marr - Wedgewood Rooms Portsmouth 27th June 2013
It could so easily have been a booty call. Revered music legend turns up, mutters platitudes, does his stuff for half an hour and then fucks off. A couple of whispered sweet nothings and poor, simple, sure-shag Portsmouth would happily take a mouthful of pillow and let the star go in dry. He promised to love us but in the morning he's gone and all we have left is a rather bad taste in our mouths. And not from the pillow.
But it wasn't like that. It wasn't like that at all. Like an omnipresent, high-class gigolo, Johnny Marr coaxed long-forgotten pleasures out of several hundred middle-aged bodies. Sensations and excitements buried for 20 years returned, breathless, frantic and sweaty.. We shared a cigarette afterwards.
It could so easily have been a Smiths cabaret act. He could have played the whole back catalogue and we'd have loved him for it. But no. Smiths songs were sparsely distributed in a 90 minute set packed with strong 'new stuff' that held it's own in exceptional company. We had "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" and later on, my karaoke favourite, "Bigmouth Strikes Again". However, most of the set was from Marr's surprisingly rocky 2013 album "The Messenger". Influences from New Wave, through Krautrock to Alex Harvey and Synth Pop - Marr plucked the best bits and improved on them. His young band - the target demographic when This Charming Man was aired to bemused pre-teens on Cheggers Play Pop in the early 80s - laid a tight foundation for Marr to casually torture melodies out of his guitar. Even standing next to a man who knew all of the words but none of the tunes couldn't dampen the rare pleasure of hearing songs for the first time and really liking them.
Marr took us shandy-drinking Southern Jessies to his heart - defending Portsmouth's 'Crap Town' reputation and dedicated 'How Soon Is Now?' to the audience - "To those on the inside not those on the outside." Or something like that.
A middle-aged man needs a bit of rest after playing on stage for an hour or so and after a long comfort break, Marr and the band returned in new shirts and let rip with a faithful cover of the Clash's "I fought the law". Unexpected and delightful. This segued into Electronic's "Getting away with it", played almost dub and heavier than a fat monks ballbag.
Finally, the Smiths back catalog got a look in. "How Soon Is Now?" took me back to a frankly shitty time in the 80's when I wasted my youth reading sci-fi and lying around being miserable when all I needed was a double-dose of St John's Wort and a firm kick up the arse. I went through an existential moment of thinking was a gloomy little shit I was back then and what I would have thought back then if I could see me now with my Talking Heads wife, house, car, kids and middle-aged spread (that wasn't in the song but it's there alright). I'd have probably hated me.
Maybe the rest of the crowd also felt pangs of regret for those wasted years and tedious melodramatic adolescent emotions - but they didn't seem to. Instead they were singing along and having far more fun than any Smiths fan should rightly have. Only the girl in the cloakroom seemed to get into the proper Smiths spirit - sitting quietly reading throughout the gig. But when I spoke to her, she wasn't reading Oscar Wilde or Keats - she was reading the Zombie Survival Guide. Youth of today... *sigh*
The show finished with a lengthy and lovely "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out". We sang along, we took over, we grinned, we cheered, we went home happy. If that was a booty call then Johnny Marr can go in dry anytime he wants to.
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