Johnny Marr’s place in British music was secure long before he ever released a solo album under his own name.
As guitarist and co-songwriter in The Smiths, he helped create some of the most distinctive guitar music of the 1980s, building parts that could be intricate, melodic and instantly recognisable without ever becoming showy for its own sake. After the band split, his career became even harder to summarise. Electronic, The The, Modest Mouse and The Cribs all became part of the story, alongside collaborations, guest appearances and work with artists ranging from Noel Gallagher to Hans Zimmer. Many of the instruments that travelled through those different periods of his career are now part of Johnny Marr’s guitar collection heading to auction at Christie’s, including guitars connected to The Smiths, Oasis and some of the other projects he has worked on.
For years, Marr seemed perfectly comfortable moving between other people’s records and projects. It was not until 2013, with ‘The Messenger’, that he finally released a full solo album under his own name.
Since then, that solo career has developed into something substantial in its own right. ‘Playland’, ‘Call the Comet’ and ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1–4’ expanded the sound, while singles such as ‘Easy Money’, ‘Hi Hello’, ‘Spirit, Power and Soul’ and ‘Somewhere’ showed that Marr had much more to offer than simply revisiting the songs that first made him famous. That story is still moving forward too, with his forthcoming album ‘The Age of Everything’ set to add another chapter to a solo catalogue that has now been developing for well over a decade.
Of course, The Smiths are impossible to remove completely from any discussion of Johnny Marr. Those songs remain part of his live sets, and his guitar playing still carries their influence. But this list is not an attempt to rank ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’, ‘How Soon Is Now?’ or ‘This Charming Man’ all over again.
Instead, these are the ten songs that best represent Johnny Marr as a solo artist: the records that show what happened when one of Britain’s most influential guitarists finally stepped fully to the front of the stage.
It feels slightly strange putting ‘Spin’ into a Johnny Marr Top 10 when it is still such a new song, but that is also part of the reason it is here.
Released in June 2026 as the first single from Marr’s forthcoming fifth solo album, ‘The Age of Everything’, it immediately suggested that he was entering another phase of his solo career rather than simply extending what he had already done on ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1–4’. The album arrives on October 2, with ‘Spin’ also opening the record.
It has an urgency that suits Marr particularly well. The guitars push constantly forward, but the song never becomes an excuse for him to demonstrate what he can do with the instrument. As with much of his best solo work, the playing serves the song's momentum rather than overwhelming it.
Lyrically, ‘Spin’ deals with procrastination and the strange feeling of becoming stuck while everything around you continues moving. That idea fits neatly with Marr’s description of ‘The Age of Everything’ as a record shaped partly by the technological and cultural overload of modern life.
Maybe in a few years ‘Spin’ ends up much higher on this list. For now, it has not had the time that songs such as ‘New Town Velocity’, ‘Generate! Generate!’ or ‘Hi Hello’ have had to become part of Marr’s solo story.
What it has done is make me considerably more interested in hearing where ‘The Age of Everything’ takes him next.
‘A Different Gun’ closes 2018’s ‘Call the Comet’ on one of the most affecting moments of Johnny Marr’s solo career. Marr began writing the song in response to the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice, trying to capture not the violence itself but the collective shock that followed and the way people instinctively came together to help one another.
While he was working on it, the Manchester Arena bombing happened in May 2017, bringing those feelings horrifyingly close to home. Marr later said he questioned whether a rock song could handle something so sensitive without becoming clumsy or inappropriate.
That restraint is part of what makes ‘A Different Gun’ work. Rather than becoming angry or overtly political, it concentrates on empathy, loss and the need to hold onto other people when events become impossible to understand. Musically, it is similarly measured, with sweeping guitars and a melody that gradually rises rather than demanding attention immediately.
Another Manchester connection is buried within it. The day after the Arena bombing, Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew persuaded Marr to join the band on stage in the city. That experience fed back into the song and its sense that, after something terrible, simply going out and being together can become an act of defiance.
Marr has written louder and more immediate solo songs, but few carry the emotional weight of ‘A Different Gun’. As the final track on ‘Call the Comet’, it leaves the album not with a grand statement, but with something much more human.
That is probably why it lingers. Marr never tries to force the emotion or turn the song into something bigger than the events that inspired it. Instead, he lets the guitars swell around shock, sadness, and solidarity, giving the track a quiet dignity that would have been easy to lose with a heavier hand.
It is one of those songs that reveals more of itself the longer you sit with it. The melody is beautiful, the arrangement is patient, and the meaning behind it gives every rise in the music a little more weight.
'A Different Gun’ is not the Johnny Marr song I would necessarily reach for first, but it is one of the clearest examples of how much depth there is in his solo catalogue.
The Speed of Love: Preview of the darker and more hypnotic songs Johnny Marr has released under his own name.
Appearing on 2022’s ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1–4’, it sits apart from the more immediate, driving songs around it. Where much of Marr’s solo work is built around movement, bright guitar lines and melodies that reveal themselves quickly, ‘The Speed of Love’ takes its time. The rhythm feels almost nocturnal, while the guitars create atmosphere rather than simply pushing the song forward.
That mood was deliberate. Marr has described ‘The Speed of Love’ as his favourite track on ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1–4’, explaining that he wanted to use rock music to explore the more intoxicating side of love: obsession, vulnerability, desire and the small element of danger that can sit underneath all of them.
Marr handles the subject with far more restraint than the title might suggest. The song never becomes sentimental or overblown. Instead, there is something slightly uneasy running through it, as though the attraction at the centre of the song could become overwhelming at any moment.
That makes it one of the most distinctive moments on ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1–4’. Marr has written plenty of songs designed to hit immediately, but ‘The Speed of Love’ works because it pulls you further in with every listen.
It is less about the rush of falling in love than the strange, obsessive space that can appear once you are already inside it, and few songs in Marr’s solo catalogue create that atmosphere quite as effectively.
'Demesne Previewre’ arrived in 2023 as one of two new tracks recorded for ‘Spirit Power: The Best of Johnny Marr’, a compilation looking back across the first decade of his solo career. Rather than sounding like a leftover added to justify a greatest-hits collection, it became one of the strongest songs on it.
Marr wrote ‘Somewhere’ while touring with The Killers and Blondie in 2022, and you can hear the scale of those shows in the finished track. He later said that playing arenas had reinforced a simple lesson: if a song is going to work in a room that size, there is nowhere to hide. It needs hooks. He connected that instinct back to growing up with Motown records, where melody had to arrive quickly and stay with you.
The guitars are bright and expansive, the chorus lands immediately, and the whole thing moves with the confidence of somebody who knows exactly how much space a song needs without overcomplicating it. What I like most is how naturally it fits alongside Marr’s older solo material. It does not feel like an attempt to recreate ‘Easy Money’, ‘New Town Velocity’ or ‘Hi Hello’, but it carries the same instinct for melody that made those songs work.
For a track arriving ten years into his solo career, ‘Somewhere’ felt less like a retrospective extra and more like proof that Marr was still writing some of his most immediate songs.
‘Say Demesne’ is one of the songs that stops ‘The Messenger’ from simply becoming a collection of sharp, immediate guitar tracks.
Sitting deep into Johnny Marr’s 2013 solo debut, it slows everything down and creates something darker and far more atmospheric. At more than five minutes, there is room for the guitars to drift rather than constantly push forward, while Marr’s vocal feels more exposed than on much of the record.
Marr later said that ‘The Messenger’ carried a strong North West of England spirit, specifically pointing towards songs such as ‘Say Demesne’ and ‘Upstarts’. You can hear what he means. There is something grey and nocturnal about ‘Say Demesne’, the sort of atmosphere that feels tied to streets, weather and late nights rather than the brighter rush of some of the album’s singles.
At the centre of it is a surprisingly hopeful idea. The repeated promise that love will eventually be found cuts through a song otherwise filled with uncertainty, confusion and people seemingly trying to find their way home. Marr never turns that sentiment into something overly sentimental, though. The music remains slightly uneasy throughout, which makes the reassurance feel earned rather than obvious.
For me, this is one of those songs that became more important the more I listened to ‘The Messenger’. It was not the track that immediately jumped out in the way ‘New Town Velocity’ or ‘Generate! Generate!’ did, but over time I found myself coming back to it more and more. Something about the space in the arrangement, the melancholy in the melody, and the way Marr lets the song breathe makes Cities PreviewDay Preview unusually intimate.
I also think it is one of the best examples of why his solo career deserves to be judged on its own terms. ‘Say Demesne’ is not relying on the kind of guitar part people expect from Johnny Marr, and it is not trying to compete with the most immediate moments on the album. It works because of mood, restraint and the feeling it leaves behind.
That is why it sits this high for me. ‘Say Demesne’ feels less like a hidden gem I admire from a distance and more like one of those songs I have gradually grown into. It is understated, brooding and quietly beautiful, and every time I return to ‘The Messenger’, it seems to reveal a little more.
‘Spiral Cities’ feels like one of the songs where ‘Call the Comet’ properly comes into focus.
Johnny Marr has said it was the one song he already had written when he went into the studio to make the album, and from there he began following the idea of what a modern rock record could sound like. That makes ‘Spiral Cities’ feel important beyond simply being one of the strongest tracks on the record. It helped point Marr towards the world the rest of the album would eventually inhabit.
That world is central to why I like the song so much. ‘Call the Comet’ imagines something better beyond the noise and division surrounding everyday life, and ‘Spiral Cities’ takes that idea somewhere almost utopian. By the time Marr reaches the image of people moving towards the glow of love, the song feels less like escapism for its own sake and more like a genuine belief that another way of living might still be possible.
Musically, it has the sense of movement I love in Marr’s best solo work. The guitars shimmer rather than dominate, while the rhythm carries everything forward with quiet momentum. It never needs one enormous riff or explosive chorus to announce itself.
For me, ‘Spiral Cities’ is one of those songs where Marr’s solo career feels completely separate from everything that came before it. I am not listening for echoes of The Smiths or thinking about the bands he played with afterwards. I am simply listening to a Johnny Marr song that has built its own atmosphere and its own little world.
That is probably why it has stayed with me. There is something hopeful about ‘Spiral Cities’ without it ever becoming naïve, and something expansive about it without it needing to become huge. Five albums into this list, it still feels like one of the clearest examples of what Marr can do when he stops looking backwards and follows an idea somewhere new.
‘Night and Day’ is one of the songs from ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1–4’ that I return to most.
Released in early 2022, it came out of a period when Marr was spending long stretches working alone at his Crazy Face Factory studio. He later said that the strange atmosphere of that time fed into the song, but he was determined not to make something explicitly about lockdowns or face masks. Instead, ‘Night and Day’ deals more broadly with feeling overwhelmed by everything happening around you and trying to make sense of it.
That mood is all over the track. The rhythm has a nervous, restless quality, while Marr’s guitar keeps adding bright flashes around it rather than dominating the whole arrangement. Primal Scream’s Simone Marie also appears on bass and backing vocals, helping give the song a slightly different texture from some of Marr’s more straightforward guitar-led material.
What I like most is how immediate it feels without sounding simple. The chorus lands quickly, but there is enough tension underneath to keep the song from becoming too polished or predictable. It has movement, atmosphere and one of the strongest hooks on the record.
For me, ‘Night and Day’ is one of the clearest highlights of ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1–4’. It is catchy enough to work straight away, but the unsettled details underneath are what keep me coming back.
‘All These Days’ is one of the songs on ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1–4’ that captures the strange feeling of time slipping out of shape. It's also the song on this album I return to most.
Marr has spoken about how the record was made during a period of disrupted routines, strange hours and long stretches working alone, and ‘All These Days’ carries that atmosphere more clearly than almost anything else on it. The song circles around repetition, uncertainty and the sense of one day bleeding into the next, without ever needing to spell out the circumstances that inspired it.
That is what makes it work for me. It is specific enough to evoke that period, but not so tied to it that the song feels trapped there. The idea of losing track of time, sitting with your own thoughts and wondering what tomorrow is actually going to bring is much broader than one particular moment.
Musically, there is a dark, slightly hypnotic quality to it that suits the subject perfectly. The rhythm keeps the song moving while the guitars add texture around the edges, and Marr’s vocal feels more inward-looking than on some of the record’s bigger, more immediate tracks.
I also like how little the song tries to force itself on you. ‘All These Days’ is not built around one enormous riff or a chorus designed to flatten everything around it. Its effect is slower than that. The mood settles in gradually, and once it does, the song becomes difficult to shake. For me, that is why it sits this high. ‘All These Days’ takes a very ordinary feeling, the sense that time is passing while you are not quite sure what you are doing with it, and turns it into something strangely compelling.
It is one of the moments on ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1–4’ where Marr sounds less interested in making a statement than in capturing a state of mind, and that makes it one of the record’s strongest songs.
‘Generate! Generate!’ contains what I think is one of Johnny Marr’s greatest guitar solos, and I do not mean just within his solo career.
That is quite a statement when you are talking about the guitarist responsible for ‘This Charming Man’, ‘How Soon Is Now?’, ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ and decades of work with everyone from Electronic to The The. But the solo towards the end of ‘Generate! Generate!’ deserves to be considered alongside some of Marr’s finest playing.
Appearing on 2013’s ‘The Messenger’, the song is one of the clearest examples of how fully formed Marr’s solo identity already was on his debut. The track has a restless, forward-moving energy from the start, with the rhythm constantly pushing underneath sharp guitar lines before everything eventually opens up.
Then Marr lets go.
What I love about the solo is that it never sounds like technical showing off. Marr has always been capable of playing far more complicated parts than he sometimes gets credit for, but his greatest strength is knowing what a song actually needs. Here, he allows himself more freedom. The guitar climbs, twists and becomes increasingly urgent as the solo develops, while still remaining completely melodic.
For me, it is one of those moments where I stop listening to the song as a whole and wait for that particular section to arrive. Even after hearing it countless times, the solo still gives ‘Generate! Generate!’ an extra surge just when the track could easily have started winding down.
There might be better-known Johnny Marr songs, and there are certainly more famous guitar parts across his career, but very few solos excite me as much as this one. For a musician whose reputation was built as much on intricate rhythm playing, texture and arrangement as traditional lead guitar heroics, ‘Generate! Generate!’ is also a reminder of just how devastating Marr can be when he decides to take centre stage.
That is why it lands at number two.
Leaving ‘Easy Money’ outside the Top 10 feels slightly ridiculous.
Released in 2014 on ‘Playland’, it quickly became one of the most recognisable songs Johnny Marr has released under his own name. The riff is immediate, the chorus is simple and direct, and the whole track has a sharper, funkier feel than much of his earlier solo material.
Lyrically, the song takes aim at greed and how money can distort everything around it, but it never gets weighed down by the point it is trying to make.
Where ‘Easy Money’ has really grown, though, is live. It has become one of the genuine anthems of Marr’s solo shows, getting an immediate reaction and holding its own in sets that also include some of the most famous songs he has ever been involved with.
That is probably the strongest argument for its importance. ‘Easy Money’ doesn't need a Smiths connection or any sense of nostalgia. It has become a live favourite entirely on its own terms.
So why is it only an honourable mention?
Mostly because the ten songs above it mean a little more to me personally. ‘Easy Money’ is still one of the first tracks I would play somebody who wanted to understand Johnny Marr’s solo career, but this list is not simply about the biggest songs.
That does not make leaving it out feel any less harsh.
New Town Velocity’ is the Johnny Marr song that means the most to me.
Released on ‘The Messenger’ in 2013, it is one of the few songs on the album Marr has described as being directly autobiographical. He wrote it about the morning he decided, at 15, that he was not going back to school. Instead, he persuaded his then-girlfriend Angie, now his wife, to bunk off with him and spent the day walking around Manchester, already beginning to imagine a different life for himself. Marr later described the song as being less about the literal story and more about the feeling behind it: that rare moment when you realise you might actually be able to shape your own future.
That idea runs through the whole song. ‘New Town Velocity’ is reflective without becoming nostalgic, and hopeful without pretending that leaving one version of your life behind is easy. There is a sense of movement in it, of somebody standing between what they have been told they should do and what they actually want to become.
Musically, it is Marr at his most melodic. The guitar does not need to dominate because every part seems to serve the song, from the chiming opening to the way the arrangement gradually opens out around the vocal. It has the kind of simplicity that makes it feel effortless, even though you know how carefully Marr builds those parts.
What I love most is how much of Johnny Marr seems to be contained in it. The teenager leaving school for music, the fascination with cities and movement, the belief that pop songs can change the direction of a life and the refusal to accept that the obvious path is necessarily the right one. It feels like a song about the moment before everything started.
Maybe that is why I keep coming back to it. If you were ever foolish enough to write a book about British and Irish guitar music, and somewhere in that book there happened to be a chapter about Johnny Marr, ‘New Town Velocity’ would be a pretty difficult title to resist. For me, though, it was never really a contest. ‘New Town Velocity’ is not just my favourite Johnny Marr solo song. It is one of the songs that best explains why his music has mattered for so long.
Johnny Marr’s solo career can sometimes be overshadowed by everything that came before it, which is understandable when that history includes The Smiths, Electronic, The The and decades of collaborations. But more than a decade after ‘The Messenger’, there is now a catalogue under his own name that deserves to stand separately from all of that.
What I like about these ten songs is how many different versions of Marr they contain. There are immediate guitar songs, slower, more atmospheric moments, tracks built around melody, and others where he lets himself properly loose. ‘Generate! Generate!’ contains one of my favourite guitar solos he has ever recorded, while ‘New Town Velocity’ remains the song I return to more than any other from his solo career.
And this list probably is not finished.
‘Spin’ has already found its way into the Top 10 despite only arriving in 2026, and with ‘The Age of Everything’ still to come, there is every chance something else from the record eventually forces its way in too.
For a musician whose place in British music was settled decades ago, Johnny Marr still sounds remarkably interested in what comes next.