At the beginning of 2023, Johnny Marr had all sorts of plans, but marking anniversaries hadn’t figured among them. Fresh from a succession of rapturously received shows with The Killers, Johnny had already started to gather songs for his fifth album – a successor to 2022’s acclaimed double LP Fever Dreams Pts 1-4. It was his manager who pointed out that he had now been a solo artist for ten years, a stretch of time comfortably in excess of his tenures in The Smiths, Electronic, The The, The Pretenders, Modest Mouse or The Cribs. And although, Marr’s storied life in music isn’t short of milestones – 2010 Inspiration Award at the Ivor Novellos, an Oscar nomination for his work with Hans Zimmer on Inception; and, lest we forget, an NME Godlike Genius Award in 2013 – he hadn’t stopped to consider that the passing of an entire decade might be significant.
