The first gig of this break was Johnny Marr playing the main room of the Brudenell in Leeds. I’d only been home about 3 hours after working offshore Africa for the previous month before I was heading down to Leeds for the gig, still tired and jet lagged.
The gig was in fact a two night residency as the first night sold out in about 10 minutes when the tickets went live, the second night lasted a little longer – about two hours before all the tickets were sold. It went ahead against all the odds as Johnny fell while out running and broke his hand so playing the guitar was a challenge to say the least. He announced on his twitter feed a few days before the gig was scheduled that both the Leeds gigs would go ahead so I travelled down hoping for the best but still prepared for the worst with a back up gig from the Young Knives if the dreaded scenario happened and he had to cancel at the last minute. These two gigs were the last of the tour to promote his first solo CD “The Messenger”.
It turned out my fears about the gig being cancelled were unfounded and the venue filled up rapidly once the doors opened. There was no support and the band took to the stage at 9pm with Johnny on stage last of all to a huge roar from the crowd. They opened with a couple of tracks from “The Messenger” split with an old Smith’s classic; ‘Upstarts’ first then ‘Panic’ followed by the excellent ‘The Right Thing Right’. Johnny took time out for a bit of banter about how they love the venue (it’s one of my favourtites as well) and how they were finishing the Messenger tour here before recording the new CD, a track from which was next; ‘Boys Get Straight’, then it’s back to the Messenger with ‘The Crack Up’.
It’s getting hot on stage now and he takes his jacket off, someone in the audience shouts out ‘how’s your hand’ and he replies “Alright, lets get all the running jokes, all the tripping jokes and all the falling jokes out of the way, It really bloody hurt actually. If you hear any really weird noises coming out of my guitar or amplifier it’s because I’ve broken my hand, not because I’m messing up.” He then takes the piss out of everybody waving their phones around and launches into the fantastic ‘New Town Velocity’ followed by ‘The Messenger’ and it’s back to another classic Smith’s track, ‘Stop me If You Think’, the ridiculously good ‘Generate! Generate!’, yet another Smith’s track ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ and ‘Word Starts Attack’. They stop to introduce another new song ‘Little King’ then it’s a brilliant version of ‘Getting Away With It’ by Electronic and finishing off the main set with another Smith’s track ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ which he dedicated to everyone in the building and no one else which had everyone in the audience singing along.
The band left the stage for a few minutes, just long enough for Johnny to change out of his soaking wet purple shirt into one of his “Johnny Fuckin Marr” T-Shirts, and came back on to the crowd chanting “Johnny Marr, Johnny Marr”. First encore was another Smith’s track ‘Good Times For A Change’ then they picked up the pace with ‘Sun & Moon’ followed by a cracking version of The Clash’s ‘I Fought The Law’. It was time for the band introductions now, Doviak on “guitar and all kinds of shit”, Hugh Gronall on “Bass, vocals and overall badness” and Jack Mitchell – “The best drummer ever to come out of Manchester”. A last new song no one had heard before called ‘Candidate’ preceeded another classic Smith’s track ‘How Soon Is Now’ to finish off an excellent gig.
The second night was very similar to the first, with more or less the same set list and even similar banter at the same time between songs. After ‘The Crack Up’ the setlist got shook up a bit with ‘Stop Me If You Think’ followed by ‘New Town Velocity’ and ‘The Messenger’. The setlist then followed the previous night until the end of the gig. Johnny was more relaxed on the second night and was more talkative with more general banter.
After playing ‘Getting Away With It’ Johnny mentioned that one of his mates had come up to him at the end of the first night and said that it sounded like he had backing tracks playing during some of the songs, he didn’t like that and followed up with “The day you see this band with a laptop on stage, you can just come up on stage and take all my guitars. One of the reasons why we sound so good is this guy over here, Doviak. He plays everything!”
After the end of the main set he was drenched in sweat again and in the encore break he changed out of his sodden orange shirt into a Generate! Generate T-Shirt, giving his merch another plug 🙂
A really encouraging sign for everybody going to see him in South America is that for the first night he had a heavy duty black Velcro bandage on his hand but on the second night it had gone and was replaced by just a few wraps of a thin lightweight bandage.
This would have been a great couple of gigs if Johnny was 100% fit but when you take into account he had a broken hand they were both phenomenal, an outstanding couple of gigs.
There was very little downside to these gigs, no support band for either night which meant an early start and subsequent early finish even though both sets were a full 90 minutes long. Johnny’s guitar playing was excellent, his bad hand not really troubling him either night, the crowd were appreciative and there weren’t many of the idiots that tend to plague gigs nowadays that talk right through the bands set. Merch seemed expensive with T-Shirts at £28 and signed tour posters at £30 but money raised was going to support The Teenage Cancer trust so full marks to him for that.