Another fantastic gig courtesy of the brilliant Johnny Marr, Jack Mitchell, Iwan Gronow & Doviak. Great small venue in Notingham - The Rescue Rooms. Such energy; The Messenger, Playland and new songs - fab night - great gig.Loved it.
'In 2015, he's a man reborn. The new songs are sharp and memorable, his guitar playing as plangently melodic and sharply inventive as ever and his band - James Doviak on guitar and keyboards, bassist Iwan Gronow and drummer Jack Mitchell - is a disciplined powerhouse. He's popular enough to play bigger rooms - he's currently playing festivals - but seemed to relish the night's intimacy.
The crowd certainly lapped up the Smiths flashbacks: The Headmaster Ritual (powerful and sinuous), a glorious Bigmouth Strikes Again and, to close the main set, a magnificently emotional There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, during which Marr's smile shone brighter than the spotlights as he shamelessly drew out the chorus. In the encores, he delivered a lovely, quieter Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want, before a gallumphing How Soon Is Now? brought proceedings to an epic close.
Those songs would have crowned any setlist but the real power lay in the fact that all the other stuff was great as well. From Playland, Easy Money was the first tune to get the crowd really dancing, Back In The Box rocked the room sideways, and Dynamo was good enough to be saved for the Smiths-packed encores. All sounded better than on the record and Marr seemed totally engaged, whether posing for the phone photos of the front row or stopping to take the mick out of Kanye West and Ricky out of the Kaiser Chiefs. From his previous solo LP, The Messenger, Generate! Generate! was as exciting as anything played all night.
Then there were two even newer, unrecorded, songs. The excellent My Monster is the kind of intense stomper already familiar from his most recent records, but Spiral Cities was something else again, a haunting melody lit up by the fairylights of some classic Marr guitar figures, ever rising in intensity but with far too many brain cells to become an anthem. It went down a storm.
And then there was the rest - a pounding, version of his Electronic hit Getting Away With It and, a complete surprise, a superb, grinding cover of Depeche Mode's I Feel You. It was certainly a packed 90 minutes'.
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SETLIST
1 Playland
2 Panic
3 The Right Thing Right
4 Easy Money
5 My Monster
6 25 Hours
7 Candidate
8 The Headmaster Ritual
9 Back In The Box
10 Spiral Cities
11 Generate! Generate!
12 Bigmouth Strikes Again
13 New Town Velocity
14 Getting Away With It
15 There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
ENCORES
16 Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want
17 Dynamo
18 I Feel You
19 How Soon Is Now?
Read more: http://www.nottinghampost.com/Johnny-Marr-Nottingham-s-Rescue-Rooms-Review/story-26882528-detail/story.html#ixzz3fyE60w2L
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