Gig review: Johnny Marr at O2 Academy Leeds

Red and blue lights strafe the stage at Leeds’s O2 Academy before Johnny Marr can make his entrance. An air-raid siren wails forlornly over the public address system, hung there with all of the tongue-in-cheek displacement you might expect from an artist who acknowledges their commercial heyday dates back the better part of four decades, constructed underneath the shadow of Thatcherism and the explosion of British indie credibility; a quasi-anachronistic salvo as scene-setter that shrewdly doubles as a beery call to arms.

Marr is an intelligent musician, one whose continuous quest to be challenged as a guitarist has taken him across the breadth of the musical spectrum since the dissolution of the Smiths more than 35 years ago.

But he is also canny enough to acknowledge that the staying power and commercial success of this solo career that started a decade ago comes in part from nostalgia for the material he cut over a five-year period in the mid-Eighties.

On his biggest tour under his own name yet, behind last year’s greatest hits compilation Spirit Power, he splits the difference between the past and the present – and finds an intriguing snapshot of the future.

Though many are here to see the 60-year-old perform the favourites of his back catalogue, it is in the material he has recorded over four albums that holds up most impressively, a feat all the more commendable given how many fans on the peripheral edge look to be clearly here for him to play Panic, or This Charming Man.

Opener Sensory Street finds a synth-gilt groove and gives requisite swagger to match Marr’s waistcoat throughout; Generate! Generate! is propulsive Top Gear dad rock of the kind that secretly delights.

The highlight might be Somewhere, a wistfully cinematic tune that leaves bearded middle-aged men swooning on the balcony.

But other good things come to those who wait, and this 100-minute show is never far away from a singalong, be it to the industrial chug of How Soon Is Now? through a lively rendition of Electronic’s Getting Away With It.

Even better, Marr throws out a rollicking cover of Iggy Pop favourite The Passenger to open the encore. “There’s not much left to be said, really,” he says before a climactic There Is a Light That Never Goes Out unites all in one final burst of pomp and melodrama. Indeed, his tunes have done the talking.