Watch Johnny Marr join The Last Shadow Puppets for a cover of The Smiths classic ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’
When Johnny Marr crafted his filigreed guitar parts for The Smiths he wasn’t gunning for a unique sound. He was trying to craft something transcendental; the originality of his wailing tremolo merely came as a result of the emotional alchemy at play. There are hundreds of post-punk bands with mad rig arrangements and likes, but none stand out as instantly definitive mostly because their aim was to conjure originality rather than a sound that has something to say, and as a result, Marr is one of the few that remain immediately recognisable.
As he remarked when breaking down the back catalogue of The Smiths, “I’m often asked what’s my favourite Smiths song,” Marr declared at a Q&A event upon the release of his memoir, Set the Boy Free. “I’ve always been able to say it’s ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ because I think it captured all those things that are transcendent, esoteric, that spiritual quality that means so much to me, that was captured not just by me but by every member of the band.”
Thus, when Arctic Monkeys man Alex Turner gave him a call to play the track live he was enamoured by the request. However, like a Fight Club character, Turner’s call also found him in a very strange place. “Okay – this is what happened,” Marr recalled in a Guardian Q&A. “When I was writing my autobiography and I got to the part where the Smiths were about to break up, I was writing about Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me as not only does it remind me of that time but it’s my favourite Smiths song. I got a call from Alex inviting me to play with the Shadow Puppets and asked if I minded playing a Smiths song.”
“For some reason I assumed they wanted to play Last Night… or something like that,” he continued. “I was in a very weird headspace as I was writing about the breakup – a bit frazzled, slightly burnt out and strangely emotional. Then I got a message that they wanted to play Last Night… We played it in Manchester first and I’d forgotten that the Smiths had never played it live.”
“It was a nice moment and went off okay but when we played it again at Alexandra Palace, and opened the show with it, confetti was raining down on everybody from the ceiling and it was a really poignant moment for me. There’s a good recording of it on YouTube, it was just another one of those weird things that happens in life sometimes.” There certainly is a good recording of it on YouTube and beyond the walloping realisation of just how good camera phones are these days, you can see spiritual forces mingling together.
It all proves fitting of the band who originally spawned it. With lush and soaring melodies, The Smiths managed to couple moody folk introspection with the visceral edge of rock ‘n’ roll and soundtracked a thousand coming-of-ages thereafter. While a doppler slide can be murky, Marr has a unique way of giving it a light flourish that he has been propagating to sumptuous effect ever since. Rarely has such butter-cutting ease of melody been coupled with such mercurial depth. This cover triumphs with the same figurative feat of bringing life to the same empty house it could haunt. And Marr’s work is as mesmeric as ever.
