Running Away From The Past & Into The Studio To Deal With The Present

"I spent a lot of time pacin' around me studio and stayin' there during the night and muckin' around with machines, really, in this big old factory on my own at five o'clock in the morning under the effects of a lot of sleep deprivation." Johnny Marr's third solo studio album, Call The Comet, is "darker" and "more bombastic" than its predecessors, which is something the former The Smiths guitarist attributes to his new studio called "the Crazy Face Factory" in Manchester. "[It] happens to be on the top floor of an old factory and these places are gettin' few and far between now," he explains. "And it's also an industrial place: it's a building that was built for the industrial revolution around the turn of the last century and [it has] big high ceilings not unlike the kind of lost spaces that pop artists used to work in."

"So the space inspired me and, because it's an industrial space, I was messin' around with the drum machine through a whole load of effects pedals, which is something that you can try and emulate with a mouse on a screen these days, but that process is so borin'."

This scribe's favourite track from the album right now is New Dominions, which has an arresting, robotic intro that calls to mind New Order and is definitely a reflection on the industrial environment in which it was created. When this information is shared, Marr says, "Thank you. That song's going down really, really well live. I mean, I like the recording of it, but it's taken on a whole new life live." This song contains brutal percussive accents that sound like relentless whip lashes. "That's me standin' on a distortion pedal while the drum machine's goin' through it," Marr reveals. "It's very much a performance. And then I had this whole noise track and I just put a song on top of it.

"The narrative of the song, it comes from - I was inspired by this 1960s book called Only Lovers Left Alive by Dave Wallis, which is about an imagined future society where everybody older than a teenager is killed off and the world is completely run by teenagers." (Wallis's book title is actually repurposed by Marr into a lyrical phrase in New Dominions.) "It's quite an unusual story and I'd read it years ago when I was a kid," he continues. "I reread it recently and that kind of all just came together; it's another one of these sci-fi songs on the record."

The beats throughout the duration of Call The Comet are varied and experimental, which makes us wonder whether Marr went into the making of this album with increased percussive interest. "I did," he acknowledges, "because before making the record I was doin' experimental music with the actress Maxine Peake and, because it was experimental and I was breaking away from the regular song structure, some of that approach stayed with me and I decided to bring it into play with my own band. So that's me messin' around with machines through pedals again... There was no grand plan for [the album]; I just like sticking machines through other effects pedals... Maybe I was a little bit more aggressive on this record or a bit more emotional, I think. Also, I didn't wanna be messin' around with mice and software and computers."

Marr has previously stated that he believes some instruments already have music inside them. Did he have any such luck when picking up a guitar during Call The Comet's songwriting sessions? "Ah, no, not really," he ponders, "although when I wrote the song Hi Hello - it came about because I played this old 12-string acoustic that I've had for many years and this tune just fell out from under my fingers. It's often a good sign when that happens and it doesn't happen that often. Some songs you have to kind of work a little harder at and I write songs in every different way: some songs I write from a beat, some songs I get a title or a phrase. Like a lotta songwriters tell you: there's never any magic formula.

"But my inspiration came really from following a certain kind of unsettled and unknown emotion that I had. And I just didn't really know what I had until I was about five or six songs into the record and then I started to see a pattern emerge."

Marr himself has compared the wistful, melodic Hi Hello - another of the album's standout tracks - with There Is A Light That Never Goes Out by The Smiths, telling Uncut magazine that there's also a similarity, in the song's string section, to Patti Smith's Dancing Barefoot. Some, "Woo-woo!" backing vocals in the album's lead single, The Tracers, call to mind The Rolling Stones' Sympathy For The Devil.

Marr's memoir, Set The Boy Free, was published at the end of 2016. When asked whether the process of writing it informed this album, Marr replies without hesitation. "It absolutely did inform the record... I couldn't wait to get into the studio to get away from the past. So, in other words, I didn't have things that I thought about in my autobiography that I then took into songs, it was actually the opposite. When I put the book out and then did the book tour, which was a fairly nice thing, I was kind of burnt out by the whole process of having looked back; I couldn't wait to get in the studio to get away from lookin' back. So, if anything, the album was running away from all that introspection and thinkin' about my past life. The album was very much about dealing with the present, emotionally.

"Having written the book, I really needed to get back into music and used the studio almost like a sanctuary from the outside world. And so the studio did that to me, really, the new environment had the music in it and I had to just tap into it. You know, I tend to be playin' the same guitars these days and they're pretty good, they're pretty good. I don't really buy that many new guitars these days."

Although Marr "had some notes" going into writing Set The Boy Free, he essentially "started from scratch". "I wrote the whole thing myself, which is something I really wanted to do. One of the reasons I did the book was because I wanted to write a book and so I figured I might as well write about something I know. I also decided that if I didn't do it then, I never would because I'm doggedly anti-nostalgia. But a time came up in my life when I knew I was gonna do it and, well, it wasn't easy because, you know, it was a pretty serious undertaking. It took me nine months, which was relatively quick. A couple of my friends have written similar books and it took them a longer time. Nile Rodgers' book, I think, took 'im three years and so, yeah!

"But I kinda crunched it. I mean, for what it was, nine months was kinda pretty good goin'. But I didn't really wanna spend any longer than a year away from playing live, so I really got down to it and crunched it. But it was satisfying like all things that are sort of difficult and then you finish them [are]. It felt like an achievement, because it was a fairly big undertaking and I got it done. So I'm happy that I got 'round to it and that I did it."

He collaborated with Hans Zimmer on the Inception soundtrack and Marr often performed as part of the film composer's 72-piece band. One such show in Prague was released as a live album, Live In Prague. Having caught Zimmer's set at Coachella in 2016, we could've sworn Marr was up there onstage supplying the guitar wizardry. "That wasn't me, that was my son," Marr corrects. "Yeah, I'm glad you think that I look young enough to be my own son, but that was my son Nile. But I take it as a compliment, because he's a really fine guitar player. I don't know how he'll feel about it, about being, you know, mistaken for his old man, but that's ok [laughs]."

At around the time of our chat, The The are performing a string of shows as part of their first UK tour in 16 years. He's currently in Los Angeles, mid-Stateside tour, but we're tipping Marr - who played in The The before forming The Smiths - was approached for a guest appearance. "Yeah, of course, yeah," he enthuses. "Me and Matt [Johnson] are like family, you know? I played on the The The - we made a comeback single last year called We Can't Stop What's Coming, and it was a really nice thing for me to get back with the band and play on the single."

We Can't Stop What's Coming was originally recorded for The Inertia Variations, a The The documentary. "The song was in a film before I played on it," Marr enlightens, "and, you know, when Matt and I got together he asked me what I thought of it and I told 'im I thought it needed guitar on it. And I actually meant him to play guitar and he assumed that I meant myself, so it was great! Because it meant that then it turned out that the comeback [single] had me on it. And The The is a part of my life story from before The Smiths as most people, or anyone who has followed me, knows so, yeah! It's all family, me and The The."

Last time Marr toured our shores was for Splendour In The Grass 2015 plus sideshows and he included Getting Away With It by Electronic - the band he founded with New Order's Bernard Sumner - in setlists and, from an audience member's perspective, this track was rapturously received. "Well hopefully the new songs will go down just as well so that's something for me to look forward to," Marr chuckles.

So he'll be touring Call The Comet our way? "Oh, yeah, I would imagine so, yeah," he divulges. "I've toured all the solo records in Australia and it's always gone really well. Australia is one of the very first places we went when I put the solo band together and we seem to have a good understanding with the audience. We do well there and I always really enjoy playing with my own band, more so than any of the other tours that I've done there in fact. It just seems to work well, my solo stuff in Australia, and I'm very grateful for that. It's exciting so, yeah, I'd really love to come back. I think that's the plan."

Call The Comet (Warner) is out 15 Jun.