Johnny Marr and James
Warner Theatre, Washington, D.C., October 6, 2024
The Smiths mean basically nothing to me. Individual songs, sure, fine. But as an oeuvre, the work of the Smiths is almost completely inconsequential to me. If I don’t actively dislike it, it certainly doesn’t move me. (Other canonical bands that mean nothing to me: Doors, Pink Floyd, Pearl Jam, Eagles, Cure, even Nirvana. Some I actively detest; others are just personally unimportant.)
So I wouldn’t buy tickets to a
Johnny Marr show, but honestly I was there to see James, whose output I loved in the 1990s but whom I haven’t seen since two shows in 1993 and 1994 — despite multiple tours in the DC area, sometimes in co-headlining sets with artists like Psychedelic Furs and others of a similar vintage.
Having never been to the Warner Theatre before the prior week, I now knew what to expect - but I didn’t expect the vast number of Smiths fans thronging the theater in vintage
Meat is Murder and
Hatful of Hollow t-shirts, and yes, some
Johnny Fuckin’ Marr shirts too. But mostly it seemed like a Smiths nostalgia fest, and it was jam-packed. Every seat was sold and my wife and I were way up in the upper balcony, although the sightline and sound were both very good.
James took the stage around 7:30, and the place was pretty full already, although it filled out in the course of their opening set. To be quite honest the band took a lot of risks in the setlist, playing four track from a record called
Yummy which I’m pretty sure almost no one had heard, and two from 2021’s
All the Colours of You — which, similar. They are touring as a sprawling nonet with two drummers, two guitarists, trumpet, violins, keyboard, bass, and of course Tim Booth’s singing and dancing as the centerpiece. So there is a lot going on! And I know that Trouser Press has been
notably skeptical of James’s entire “a lot going on” aesthetic over the past several decades, but the band meant a lot to me, especially in its series of records in the early 1990s, from
Gold Mother/James through
Seven into the Brian Eno-helmed
Laid, which generated their one brief glimpse of American stardom.
Anyway, back to the tunes! Dauntingly, they opened with
Stutter’s “Johnny Yen,” perhaps because of its hint at the show’s headliner, but more because Tim Booth related that Marr and Morrissey had encouraged the band to select that song as their first single, way back in 1986. Didn’t happen. But
half of the set, and most of the middle of the show, was dedicated to post-pandemic material, a bold choice, since few of their casual fans would know the work. Some were really quite good, like
Yummy’s “Life’s a Fucking Miracle,” but it was hard to get into the new material.
James operates basically in two modes: a) moody, ethereal, and atmospheric, and b) anthemic and orchestral, with trumpet fanfares and Booth’s stentorian singing. In their best songs, like
Seven’s “Ring the Bells,” they slid gracefully from the moody and atmospheric into the orchestral and anthemic, and that’s how I like the band best. They used video projections behind them quite successfully, illustrating the songs’ themes of ecological devastation and emotional upheaval. It was actually quite a bit Peter Gabriel-ish in the approach, not entirely a surprise since James had recorded at Gabriel’s Real World Studios and the first time I saw them in concert was on Gabriel’s WOMAD tour in 1993.
The weight of the climate and biodiversity crisis hung heavily over the James setlist. In “Beautiful Beaches,” a song from
All the Colours of You, the video art depicted the devastation of climate change fires, flooding, and habitat loss. Booth dedicated the song to the people of Asheville and particularly his friends suffering in the flooding of Hurricane Helene. (He also casually noted he is an American citizen, which i didn’t know — the band seems extremely British.)
“Sit Down,” the iconic song of James’ early years, used to be a big moment when the band played outdoor festivals and grotty rock clubs. I remember their 1994 show at the First Ave in Minneapolis when the audience sat on the filthy, utterly disgusting floor of the club as Booth sang its empathetic chorus of comfort and unity. The song had an extraordinary afterlife after it
came out in 1986, going to #2 on the UK charts in a
different version years after its release, charting in multiple versions over time, being used in promotions for
Game of Thrones, and remixed into dance floor fodder at the peak of Madchester dance-rock crossovers. I love the song but it maybe didn’t have the same sense of emotional resolution for an audience already sitting down in the comfortable if sagging chairs of the Warner Theatre. But we still sung along.
Perhaps taunting their audience a bit, James didn’t do anything from their biggest American record until the close of the set, with the magnificent “Sometimes (Lester Piggott)” illustrated in the videos of a deluge washing away a city. It is such a weird song, from the imagery (a boy trying to get struck by lightning in the midst of a biblical deluge) to the subtitle (a British jockey who had a long and public life in horse racing and betting), which seems completely unrelated to the lyrics. I love it unreservedly. And then they closed with “Laid,” their biggest American hit and perhaps one of their most boring songs, notwithstanding the then-transgressive frisson of the chorus, “she only comes when she’s on top.” The 1990s were a tamer era.
I do want to give James full credit for spontaneity. Genuinely every setlist of their recent tour has been different, sometimes wildly so. A few core songs in each set, but a lot of variety from night to night. I respect that in a band, especially one that could effectively just be a legacy act playing their familiar favorites.
Now, that’s a lot about the opening act. Can you tell I really like James? What of the headliner? Well, first off, Johnny Marr is a legitimate lead singer and bandleader, which is kind of amazing, since he was known as the guitar wizard alongside egomaniacal Morrissey, whose black hole-scaled stage presence would have seemed to absorb all the attention of an audience on stage. I knew the dude could play, of course, but I didn’t know that he sings relatively well, too.
But overall, I just didn’t resonate much with Marr’s set, and my wife was clearly not on board with him. First off, unlike James, his stage show was almost aggressively austere: black stage, black clothing, no artwork except JOHNNY MARR in all-caps on the screen. Second off, compared to Tim Booth’s almost cartoonishly empathetic stage presence, Marr is cool if not cold to his fans. So it was scarcely welcoming to a more casual listener like me.
Anyway, the show! He started with some of his solo work, like “Armatopia” which was … energetic but also kinda boring? Big beats, themes of squalor and regret, OK, fine. Then — “Panic” in the streets of London, panic in the streets in Washington. Predictable audience excitement from everyone in the
Meat is Murder t-shirts, etc. The energy level quickly dissipated with a few more Marr solo tunes, none of which I even knew. And then “This Charming Man,” a song I of course know but never loved. The crowd roared in approval.
[Obscure DC-area reference: there is a street in Prince George’s County in Hyattsville named after Charles Armentrout, a former local politician. For unclear reasons, it’s not Armentrout Street or Drive. Instead, it’s “
Ch. Armentrout Way,” so each time I pass by I start thinking of “This Charming Trout” as a potentially better Smiths title.]
It occurred to me, in all of Johnny Marr’s lengthy career, the stuff I liked most was his work as a remarkably generous collaborator — writing and playing with Kirsty MacColl, PSB/New Order in Electronic, even his weird side ventures with Neil Finn (check out the live
“There is a Light That Never Goes Out” that Finn sings, also cool Lisa Germano violin solo) and Modest Mouse. I just don’t find him that interesting as a frontman. That doesn’t mean that all the songs are bad; plenty of them are fine and some are pretty great. But Marr’s show was overall
pretty dull. And it was also exceedingly predictable. The
setlist ended up pretty much identical each night, which I just find uninteresting in a band.
To my regret, my wife was pretty burned out by Marr’s show, and she asked to leave about halfway through the set. There were other folks who also left - presumably James fans uninterested by the Marr material.
Sadly, though, that meant I missed some of the stuff I might have liked more: not just “How Soon Is Now?” — full credit, one of the greatest and most distinctive guitar songs of its era — but also two songs from the tremendous Electronic self-titled record in 1991, the collaboration of New Order’s Bernard Sumner, Johnny Marr, and Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant. It’s no secret that I like PSB way more than the Smiths. New Order is pretty cool, too, maybe not my favorite. But that
Electronic record has some classic jams, and I would have liked to have seen it. But as a singer, Marr is no Neil Tennant (or even Bernard Sumner, although his singing is clearly diminished over time). As I perused the set list, I did see stuff that would have been cool, including a collaboration on Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” with Tim Booth singing, but to be honest I didn’t want to hear that much of Marr’s singing, and I didn’t wanna hear “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” again.
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2024 10:22PM by zwirnm.
