“I LEFT THE SMITHS WHEN I WAS 24. ANY 24-YEAR-OLD LEAVING ANY JOB WANTS TO NOT BE DEFINED BY THAT” — JOHNNY MARR
THEN Meat Is Murder (1985)
Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 (2022) NOW
FOR JOHNNY MARR, the idea to record a 16-song double album came to him in a flash of inspiration. The title Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 simply popped into his head one day, and that was it. “That title solved a lot of problems for me,” he says. “First off, it’s a great title. If I just called it Fever Dreams, you know, that’s good, but it’s not that good. Fever Dreams Parts 1-4 makes you go, ‘OK, what’s that all about?’ It made me think that — ‘All right, what’s this business of four?’ So I had to work backward from the title, and immediately I realized, ‘All right, it’s got to be a double album, and we can release it in stages.’” He laughs. “The record company thought I was a marketing genius, but it was purely because I had this title.”
From there, all Marr needed was enough songs to match the expansive nature of his concept. Fortunately, the British guitar legend found that he had plenty of time on his hands. After wrapping a 2019 tour in support of his previous album, , he began work on new demos just as the Covid pandemic forced much of the world into lock-down mode. “I had already planned to make the record anyway, so in a funny way I was kind of fortunate in my timing,” he says.
