“The thing with those old grounds is you have that tie to the past – you’re in the environment where you witnessed all these highs and lows. In the case of Maine Road, it was too many years of lows in the end. At the Etihad, it’s a very different scenario. It’s where the modern era for Manchester City is taking place, so it’s where we have memories of Sergio’s goals. It’s about Mario Balotelli, David Silva, Vincent Kompany, Roberto Mancini and on and on and on. It’s mindboggling for a City fan who’s been around for a while.”

Best known as the genius guitarist and songwriting partner of Morrissey in seminal British band The Smiths, the 58-year-old had spells with groups including The Pretenders, The The, Electronic, Modest Mouse, The Cribs and Johnny Marr + the Healers, before striking out on his own with 2013 solo debut The Messenger. Set to support Blondie on their UK arena tour next spring, Marr also played guitar on Billie Eilish’s 2020 chart-topper No Time to Die, the theme song to the smash James Bond film of the same name. 

The track marked a continuation of his work with Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer; the pair have previously collaborated on film soundtracks such as Inception and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. “The two of us went into it with an agenda to put the guitar back on the Bond theme, because it had maybe been a little bit diluted over the past 20 years,” says Marr. “Traditionally, on the classic John Barry themes, the guitar was to the front, so I was keen to bring that back into it. And when you see the movie, the first thing you hear is my guitar.

“To be asked to do the Bond theme is a dream for anyone who grew up in the era I grew up in. And then to have a number one with it, with Billie Eilish, was just the icing on the cake. I’ve never been that bothered about chart positions but you kind of are when you have a number one, conveniently! I’ve been making records for almost 40 years now and then I get a number one, so that was great. And I thought it was a good film. I enjoyed working on it.”

“On the James Bond Movie, the first thing you hear is my guitar”

The singer-songwriter’s new EP, Fever Dreams Pt 2, has just dropped, with his forthcoming double album Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 to follow in February. “I had the title before lockdown and it just looked like the title of a double album in my mind’s eye,” he says. “Once you have an idea that’s good, it’s hard for me to ignore – whether it’s sticking in Modest Mouse for a few years, or joining The Cribs, or doing a movie, or whatever. And I realised I’d never done a double album with any of the bands I’d been in before.”

The onset of the pandemic last year helped dictate what happened next. “The world started to feel like we were in a fever dream and I built that into some of the lyrics. Like all of us, I found myself in a strange science fiction-like world where all kinds of weirdness was going on. It was an interesting space to make a record in.”

Key single Tenement Time, from the second EP, is inspired by his experiences growing up in the Manchester neighbourhood of Ardwick. Marr elaborates on how the city shaped him both as a musician and a man. “My parents migrated from Ireland in the early 1960s and they loved Manchester, so I was brought up with an appreciation of it that some of my mates who came from English families almost took for granted,” he says. “That gave me a certain kind of civic pride. I always regarded myself as Mancunian-Irish, so it was particularly working class and a big part of working-class culture was music and football. The classic cliché was that young boys of my generation wanted to be either a footballer or a musician, and one of those happened for me.”

The mainstream emergence of Buzzcocks from the Manchester scene in the mid-1970s was a pivotal moment for Marr, who was 13 when the legendary punk band put out their first release, Spiral Scratch, in 1977. “You can’t underestimate how important Buzzcocks were to my generation of musicians, because they were on Top of the Pops every week and you saw, right then, that it could be done,” he says. “And then, of course, [Manchester indie label] Factory Records started in ’78, so there was an alternative, stubborn, defiantly anti-capitalist, anti-London sort of attitude. That fed into my belief, when I formed The Smiths, that I didn’t have to jump on a train and move to London. I knew I could do it from my city.” 

Marr’s relationship with football took a different course when his burgeoning career in music went stratospheric in the early 1980s. While he still looked out for their results, the band’s intensive recording, touring and promotional duties prevented him from seeing his beloved City week in, week out. “Let’s put it this way: nowadays my band is my band, so I get the schedule and if I want to go to a game, that’s what we’re doing, fellas. But when The Smiths happened, my life completely changed in every way. For a start, a lot of it was spent in London. I was 19 and I just put 100% of my heart and soul into it.