By Bernard Zuel
JOHNNY MARR
Enmore Theatre, July 20
No panic on the streets of Sydney for Johnny Marr.Credit: Jon Shard
★★★★
Comparisons are odious, no doubt, and a cheap shot one way or another. But it's too hard to ignore, two months after Morrissey – Johnny Marr's partner in the Smiths and his tetchy rival in the 30 years since – played in these parts.
Both have far longer solo careers than their brief, if storied, time in that great Manchester band of the 1980s, yet never is a word written about them without reference to the Smiths, often suggesting that no matter how good their subsequent work is, it will never match what they did then.
Of course, that's unfair and not automatically right, as the dull Smiths' songs What She Said and Meat Is Murder proved in May. And, of course, that's never going to change.
But if it is true that Morrissey and Marr unfairly carry the weight of those six years of oft-brilliant songwriting and recording, it's also true both are lifted by the deep emotional legacy of that band. Put it this way, at both shows, while the best of their solo years earn strong cheers, any moments of the Smiths are greeted with roof-rattling roars of recognition, connection and satisfaction.
The test is how do they build around it and how do they bring us to the "best of the rest"?
Morrissey, a stage natural, this year failed where he had succeeded in 2012, resting on his charisma and loading the set with the fruits of a dull recent record.
Marr, an inferior singer, by contrast built on the explosions of joy that were his 2014 Australian shows, helped not just by a better choice of Smiths songs (the thrill of a long unheard The Headmaster Ritual; the glorious pleasures of There Is a Light That Never Goes Out) and a better grade of non-Smiths material, but a better grasp of how to enjoy the moment.
A slowish start, even when including the cocky little swagger of Panic, was built around a '70s theme of a bit of T-Rex, a bit of Kraftwerk, a bit of Moroder and even a bit of Joy Division (imagined as a pop band) in newish Marr songs such as Easy Money and 25 Hours. But, by the time Marr amped up the energy – imagine a 10-year-old boy let out of school early and running all the way home with his head thrown back – for Back In the Box and the Simple Minds-like Euro travelogue of Spiral Cities ("that was intense," he said as that song gasped its end), we were deep into a multidecade spread of influences.
If the later inclusion of Depeche Mode's I Feel You was a surprise, then reprising his deceptively light turn in Electronic (Getting Away With It), pulsing through a sleek sports car of a song (Dynamo) and being both sweetly delicate (Please Please Please, Let Me Get What I Want) and sexily sad (How Soon Is Now), was exactly what we had asked for.
Marr was revelling in it, too: showmanship dialled up a tad, complacency wholly absent and a sense of comfort with his past and present. In the language of his hometown's two football teams, one of whom is also enjoying Australia at the moment, this was a clear away win, by a healthy margin.
Johnny Marr plays Adelaide's the Gov on July 21; Melbourne's Forum Theatre on July 22; and at the Splendour In the Grass, Byron Bay, on July 24.