​Johnny Marr to return to Roadmender in Northampton as part of eight date UK tour

​Johnny Marr will return to the Roadmender in July as part of an eight date UK tour.

Marr, who last played at the Northampton venue in 2017, will headline on Thursday, July 20, and tickets go on sale this Friday at 10am.

The acclaimed guitarist and songwriter is playing gigs at Holmfirth, Lincoln, Northampton, Tumbridge Wells, Wrexham, Frome, Plymouth and Middlesbrough as well as a host of summer festivals.

He will return to the Roadmender the day before playing Pennfest in Buckinghamshire.

Marr released his fourth solo album Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 last year.

The double album was preceded by two EPs which featured the first half of the record.

He said: “I wanted this album to sound classic and universal. That’s how I felt. I wanted to look inside, but make really outward-facing music.

“And now I’ve finished it, I think it’s the most ambitious solo record I’ve done.”

Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 follows 2013’s The Messenger, 2014’s Playland and 2018’s Call The Comet.

Some of its songs are introspective, exploratory pieces that take advantage of the project’s emphasis on space. Others are anthemic, rousing creations whose mood is almost the opposite.

However, running through everything are two key elements - echoes of the wildly diverse music Marr has made in the past and lyrics that are direct, emotional and full of musicality, and thereby true to what Marr calls The Language Of The Song.

“There’s a set of influences and a very broad sound I’ve been developing - really since getting out of The Smiths until now,” he explains.

“And I hear it in this record. There are so many strands of music in it.

“We didn’t do that consciously, but I think I’ve got a vocabulary of sound. And I feel very satisfied that I’ve been able to harness it.”

Marr may be best known for his role in The Smiths, but in the last 30 years, he has played in Electronic with New Order’s Bernard Sumner, in Modest Mouse and The Cribs and collaborated with other huge names from across the music industry.

The songs on Fever Dreams were recorded during a coronavirus enforced lockdown period.

Marr’s last appearance before the start of the pandemic was at the BRIT Awards ceremony in 2020 where he performed the James Bond theme No Time To Die alongside Billie Eilish and his long-standing collaborator Hans Zimmer.

“I just found myself, like everybody, with this open vista of time and uncertainty, so I set about doing what I’d normally do if I wasn’t doing gigs - which was to make a record,” he said.

“And the phrase ‘fever dreams’ just seemed to chime with the way my life immediately felt.

“My dreams were affected in a weird way. Time didn’t seem to really mean anything. Some people I was talking to were saying, ‘The days are going really quickly’. But other people said, ‘Time’s passing really slowly.’

“I was feeling both of those things simultaneously. I found myself with a feeling of suspension.”

While not a record about the details of the Covid-19 experience, Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 is rooted in its time and what he sees as “the confusion and the torpor and the entropy of the way we’ve been living.”

There are allusions to insomnia, disorientation, and - as Counter Clock World evokes - a cycle of “sleeping, dreaming, wanting and wishing”.

In a song titled Night And Day, there are glimpses of the heady, angry summer of 2020, and the way the pandemic intersected with the murder of George Floyd and the arrival of Black Lives Matter: “Fuse burns up / The world stirs up / The news shakes up / The mood blows up.”

As well as evoking the past and present, Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 also looks to the future,

something glimpsed in mentions of new dawns and beginnings, and the idea that even in the most trying times, hope endures.

“I’m trying to be positive, for me and my audience, really,” he explains.

“My personality is such that it occurs to me to think that way anyway, so I’m not just writing with positivity for the sake of a song. It’s real, and it’s also very necessary.”

These are self-consciously big themes and Marr’s music has the scale and ambition to carry them.

“I’ve realised that I’m a rock musician,” he says. “Rock music delivers something that pop music doesn’t: putting yourself in that space of darkness and being kind of epic.

“It’s why I relate to people like Nick Cave and Siouxsie Sioux and Depeche Mode.

“Over the last 10 years, there’s been this name ‘Darkwave’ and my solo stuff has started to pop up on those kind of Darkwave playlists. And I’m absolutely OK with that quality.”

Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 was recorded with Marr’s long-standing band, producer James Doviak, bassist Iwan Gronow and drummer Jack Mitchell.

There are backing vocals throughout the album from the Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter Meredith Sheldon and three songs feature bass from Primal Scream’s Simone Marie.

The four chapters of the album work as distinct passages of music with their own shape and flow.

But as a single piece of work, the record also has a deliberate beginning and end.

The opener is Spirit, Power And Soul - a song Marr describes as “electro gospel”, and which works as a kind of mission statement.

“That was one of those times when you fancy writing a banger and it actually happens,” explains Marr.

“I don’t do it very often, but when I had the riff I thought, ‘Maybe I can turn this into one of those that gets a tent absolutely rocking.

“Lyrically, I wanted to paint a picture of a psychedelic Friday night, and a surreal sort of journey - which I used to experience on many Friday nights as a teenager in Manchester.”

The record ends with Human, a redemptive piece which insists that “better’s got to come”, and brings the album’s sense of intimacy and raw humanity to a closing peak.

“When I was getting towards the end of this record, it felt like a journey, and I wanted the ending to be Deliberate,” explains Marr.

“So, the idea of something intimate - which an acoustic guitar suggests to me – and melodic, and almost classic, for want of a better word, was in my mind.

“I came back to this idea of The Language Of The Song, and something very direct.

“So I thought, ‘Who’s the best exponent of that? ’70s John Lennon.’ I’d set myself the task of writing this song by the end of the day and I’d opened this book about John Lennon in the early ’70s.

“I wanted a sense of that direct language that’s in Working Class Hero and Imagine and all of those songs.

“And then the doorbell went at eight o’clock at night and I got a card from Yoko Ono - who I’ve only ever met once.

“It was from her and Sean [Lennon]. They’d sent me a copy of the new Plastic Ono Band album as a gift. And inside, on a card, Yoko had written something like, ‘At that time, we were trying to free up the artist to brave, and drop whatever hangs-up they had and just be really honest.’

“And if that’s not a sign, I don’t know what it is. It helped me go along that line.”

Tickets for July’s gig at the Roadmender will be available via https://www.theroadmender.com

Johnny Marr interview by John Harris.