On sale Friday, 11/21 at 10am ! $59.50 General Admission | $99.50 Balcony Seating Doors 7 pm | Show 8 pm Johnny Marr Website | Instagram | X/Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Spotify Johnny Marr started his career with The Smiths, beginning an amazing history as one of the most influential songwriters and guitarists in British independent music. His subsequent creative journey has seen him at the heart of The The, Electronic, Modest Mouse and The Cribs, as well as working with such names as The Pretenders, Talking Heads, The Avalanches, and the musician and composer Hans Zimmer - with whom he recorded the score and soundtrack for the most recent James Bond film, No Time To Die, including the Oscar-nominated title track created with Billie Eilish. Since launching in 2013, Marr’s solo career has given rise to four UK Top Ten studio albums - The Messenger (2013), Playland (2014), Call The Comet (2018), Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 (2022) and a career-spanning book, Marr’s Guitars (via Thames & Hudson). The full measure of this extraordinarily fertile creative period is captured on his latest offering, Spirit Power: The Best Of Johnny Marr, a major new collection curated by Johnny encompassing songs from his first ten years as a solo artist, a scattering of stand alone singles and two incendiary new cuts, Somewhere and The Answer. It’s a body of work that mirrors Marr’s unquenchable life force, breadth of musicality, and above all, his love of melody His Lordship Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Spotify His Lordship staked their claim to rock ‘n’ roll domination with their explosive, no-frills 2024 self-titled debut. And a little over a year later, the duo are back with another album that feels like a cold-water jolt to the system, their second full-length Bored Animal. On the opening title track, clanging guitars and drums rattle the speakers before the song takes off like a screaming bottle rocket, while the fiery lead single “I Fly Planes Into Hurricanes” combines hotrodding riffs and shambolic drums with a fuzzed-out guitar solo. From there, guitarist/vocalist James Walbourne and drummer Kris Sonne race through ferocious songs with clever lyrics, which lean into scorching rock ‘n’ roll (the abrasive “Old Romantic,” needling “Downertown”), distorted punk (the ramshackle “Marc-Andre Léclerc”), tornadic noise rock (“Weirdo in the Park”) and even psychedelic fantasias (“Derek E. Fudge”). Mixed by David Wrench, Bored Animal crams multiple ideas into its concise songs—like the sub-three-minute “The Sadness of King Kong,” which starts in a burst of throttling garage-blues riffs and feral howls before slowing down into a sludgy denouement that ends with a deadpan stinger: “It’s a jungle out there.” As with their debut, Bored Animal makes room for an instrumental (the album-closing Western noir “Gin and Fog”) and Sonne contributes lead vocals to a track. But His Lordship decided to streamline their sound—forgoing things like harmonies, a rockabilly influence, and songs over four minutes long—and didn’t worry about making the music perfect. “To leave something that's a mistake is quite a hard thing to do, but we've realized that that's where the magic is,” Walbourne says, while Sonne adds: “You don't have to have all the bells and whistles on it. The listener can imagine what it could be. There’s something beautiful to that limitation.” And while Bored Animal’s songs take cues from vintage rock ‘n’ roll, the album is decidedly not a retro rehash or homage to the past. When His Lordship make music, their mighty, rambunctious roar emerges naturally. “We realized early on that whatever we played would come out this way,” Walbourne says. “It was a natural state for me to be sort of a madman. That sort of music brings it out of you.” Adds Sonne: “It was always the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll coming into our sound, not so much the style of it. We took the spirit of that rebellious wildness. We were never like, ‘Oh, we need an old microphone.’” His Lordship formed in 2020, during a time when Walbourne was off the road and feeling restless. “I felt a need to play some old rock ‘n’ roll songs in a pub, just to do something,” he says. “I didn't want it to mean anything, or have to think about a record label. It was purely to go in and get drunk and play loud rock ‘n’ roll.” He recruited Sonne, who was a kindred musical spirit. Both had played with the Pretenders; in fact, Walbourne still plays lead guitar for the band. Between them, the pair had also worked with Ray Davies, the Pogues, Son Volt, Jerry Lee Lewis, Linda Thompson, Brett Anderson, Klaus Voorman, Soulsavers, and more. Walbourne and Sonne worked up a repertoire of obscure 1950s covers and took up residence in the tiny Boogaloo pub in north London. These incendiary gigs quickly attracted a loyal crowd of admirers; at one point, gig attendees included members of the Sex Pistols, Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats, and Chrissie Hynde. Walbourne and Sonne realized that they were having so much fun playing music together that it made sense for His Lordship to evolve into something else. “It built up to this thing that people loved,” Walbourne says. “We built up an audience before we had many original songs. And then Kris and I talked and it morphed into the idea that we didn't just want to be a rock ‘n’ roll covers band. We knew we could take the nucleus of this rock ‘n’ roll thing and turn it into something else. We wanted to be a new, fresh band with lots of energy.” Sonne was more than prepared; in fact, he had actually played in a 1950s rock ‘n’ roll band in Denmark that wrote their own music, and was thrilled to find someone else who shared his appreciation for that era. When the men began writing original His Lordship music, they naturally fell into a songwriting groove. “Without having talked about it, we have quite clear lines of who does what,” Sonne says. “James comes up with the construct and melody, and I try to make it exciting rhythmically. I'll also go in and change the structure of it and send it back to him—basically, just mess with it a little bit.” Adds Walbourne: “Kris is so inventive in what he comes up with. He's very inspirational; I really respond well to that. It's a whole different way of coming up with rhythms. And the good thing, which is a relatively new thing for me, is I'm a lot less precious and guarded over my ideas, which makes working like this a joy and easy.” As His Lordship began to play more gigs, they started adding more and more original songs into the setlist and de-emphasizing covers. The duo recorded their 2024 self-titled debut in a similarly piecemeal fashion, snagging borrowed studio time for several days at a time. But as they approached Bored Animal, they knew they wanted to work fast; in fact, none of the album’s songs existed when 2025 began. “The first album came together gradually,” Sonne explains. “We wrote one song, took out a cover from our setlist, wrote another one, took out a cover. We wanted this album to be a moment in time. We had all the songs, and then went and did it quickly, setting the feel of an album.” His Lordship spent two weeks knocking out Bored Animal in Edwin Collins’ idyllic seaside studio in the Highlands of Scotland, a secluded place full of vintage analog gear. They kept things simple, working with just an engineer, Sean Reed. “We realized there is something to recording an album live in a room with two or three people, because it has this energy that you cannot recreate any other way,” Walbourne says. “That's what made the rock ‘n’ roll spirit come alive. It's a moment in time, and it's out, and that's that.” More than anything, His Lordship embraces the idea that everything is fleeting, so the best way to live—and make music—is to seize the day and trust their instincts. This ethos is reflected in their brisk creative pace, their succinct songs, how quickly they recorded the album, and their urgent live shows. “His Lordship started off as a vehicle for the live show, so we could go out and play,” Walbourne says. “But then as we progressed, we got way more serious about the songs and what it is we're trying to do. Now this album represents that a little more. We know what we're talking about a little more. We had a better idea of where we were going with it. And I think the album reflects that really well. I hope it does. We did it as good as we could, in terms of what we believed it should be.”