Johnny Marr

Live Music Hall : Cologne

Oct 26 2025

Live Review

This Chiming Man Johnny Marrvelous is doing what he does best as he peals off those dancing guitar lines in a packed dancehall in Germany. His guitar is one of pop culture’s iconic sounds, and he makes it look so effortless as the notes cascade, giving the songs new and old a familiar and iconic flavour. Tonight, the past is revered whilst the future is already getting written with a couple of great new songs. John Robb was there to celebrate the creative fast forward for a nostalgia for an age yet to come.

Playing a mix of Smiths classics, solo career highlights and a couple of new songs, Johnny Marr is curating his own career whilst still being restlessly creative. From the Shangri La’s to electronic future music, this was always the way from the start for the restless teenager running around town with his guitar whilst managing the only shop you could buy black drainpipe jeans in the city known as Johnny X Clothes before hitting the big time after constructing his perfect band. 

It’s been a mighty long way down rock n roll since then but somehow post Smiths Johnny has kept it fresh. He has grown into the frontman role that he never asked for but owns in his own way. Like all guitar heroes, he recognised that the person at the front was a special kind of lunatic that had the factor X that drew people in like moths to the six string flame. Steeped in rock n roll and its iconography, he didn’t crave that certain fiercer spotlight but that deep knowledge saw him carve his own niche on that stage space that he now owns.

His post-Smiths songs culled from his 2013 launched solo career of four top ten albums, ’The Messenger’ (2013), ‘Playland’ (2014), ‘Call The Comet’ (2018), and ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1-4’ (2022) match this new now and are linear post-punk takes on guitar classic. They balance between the trad and the future and that’s the sweet spot as they both sound timeless and sound like the future. Johnny songs like set opener Generate! Generate! or the melancholic chimes of New Town Velocity mix a Smithsonian cool with a sci fi futuristic Bladerunner sheen. Johnny solo stands proud next to the hallowed back catalogue and it threads into a perfectly balanced set of old and new.

Of course, the long shadow of the Smiffs stretches across the evening and those songs are deeply embedded in a generational psyche and welcomed like old friends. Every time the familiar chords slip out, the audience singalong to the idiosyncratic words and are lost in the unique tumbling chord structures. There is the glamtastic shiver of Panic. Whilst This Charming Man sends the audience into raptures and a monolithic brooding stretched out twelve inch mix of guitar overload on What Difference Does It Makes Yet is immersive and shiveringly genius but that’s only a part of the story and the post Smiths songs hold their own and thrillingly brand new songs like Its Time have all the hallmarks of a future classic as the impatient Johnny keeps on moving.

His set is full of nods from giving key influence Iggy a nod on a cover of The Passenger – one of the key songs in his home town’s and his own clubbing history and closes the set with a dust down of his Bernard Sumner Electronic collaboration Getting Away With It that meshes the late eighties Manc dancefloor with the magic guitars.

With those Oasis brothers sauntering round the stadium worldwide as the biggest current band on the planet, these Manchester troubadours are truly international these days. Johnny is sat in the middle as the chairman of the board – the prime inspiration for Noel, his slightly younger musical brother-in-arms. He is the redefiner of guitar action time vision who reimagined the six-string possibilities and whose influence echoes around the city and its brace of great new bands to this day. As the set ends with the Smiths classic ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, the joiner of the dots between all the bands, the bridge between Buzzcocks and the future grins whilst still defining the Mancunian cool creative of busy bee future pop.