Boomslang (2024 Deluxe Edition - Remastered) Johnny Marr & The Healers

• 1 The Last Ride (2024 Remaster) 04:29
• 2 Caught Up (2024 Remaster) 04:27
• 3 Down on the Corner (2024 Remaster) 04:24
• 4 Need It (2024 Remaster) 05:47
• 5 You Are the Magic (2024 Remaster) 07:09
• 6 InBetweens (Zak Starkey) (2024 Remaster) (Zak Starkey; 2024 Remaster) 03:39
• 7 Another Day (2024 Remaster) 04:58
• 8 Headland (2024 Remaster) 01:34
• 9 Long Gone (2024 Remaster) 04:38
• 10 Something to Shout About (2024 Remaster) 04:21
• 11 Bangin' On (2024 Remaster) 05:09
• 12 The Way That It Was 05:29
• 13 All Out Attack 04:42
• 14 Get Me Wrong 05:24
• 15 Don't Think Twice, It's Alright 04:27
• 16 A Woman Like You 05:08
• 17 You Are the Magic (Union Mix) 08:49
• 18 Get Me Wrong (Instrumental Version) 05:20
• Total Runtime 01:29:54

Info for Boomslang (2024 Deluxe Edition - Remastered)

Released in 2003, Boomslang was Johnny Marr's first solo studio album. After his departure from The Smith in 1987, Marr spent a number of years with the likes of The Pretenders before recruiting Zak Starkey (drums), Alonza Bevan (Bass) and more to form The Healers in 2000. Recorded at Clear Studios in Manchester, with James Spencer (New Order, The Charlatans).

Seven previously unreleased recordings appear, including: The Way That It Was, Get Me Wrong, A Woman Like You, a cover of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, plus an extended mix of original album track You Are The Magic (Union Mix), Get Me Wrong (Instrumental Version) and the expansive, swirling desert jam All Out Attack.

Boomslang represents a unique snapshot of Johnny Marr’s creativity at the dawn of the 21st century. Leaning into new technology, experimenting with new ways to write, record and think.

After becoming a member of The Pretenders, The The, Electronic, Neil Finn’s 7 Worlds Collide, and writing and performing with Pet Shop Boys, Bryan Ferry, Kirsty MacColl, Talking Heads, Beck and countless others, Johnny Marr + the Healers formed by chance.

Marr first met drummer Zak Starkey following a Who concert at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1999. Former Kula Shaker bassist Alonza Bevan joined the pair later, following a recommendation from Noel Gallagher. Percussionist Liz Bonney emerged from Byron Bay with Lee Spencer’s rainforest synth wizardry in tow. Adam Gray summoned his slide guitar for the ‘Electro-Cosmic-Blues’ and, united by chemistry and cosmic energy, the Healers came into existence.

Reflecting on Boomslang, Johnny Marr said: “We holed ourselves up in our own otherworld and experimented with different ways to write, record and think; guitars and percussion all together in a room, and programming with new technology from the electronic scene. Everything was about discovery.

“Twenty years on, I’m pleased we created the music and this new release of Boomslang has given me the opportunity to revisit it and present some songs that we weren’t able to include the first time around. The Healers was something special that happened to me and I’m grateful that it did. A special group of people in a special moment in time.”

Johnny Marr + The Healers:
Johnny Marr, vocals, guitar; synthesizer (tracks 1, 10, 11); organ (track 6); melodica (track 10); producer
Alonza Bevan, bass; electric piano, recorder, backing vocals (track 7)
Zak Starkey, drums; percussion (tracks 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11)
Additional personnel:
Lee Spencer, synthesizer (tracks 1, 4, 5, 11), effects (track 11)
Liz Bonney, percussion (tracks 4, 5, 11)
Jonni Musgrave, piano (track 3)
Dave Tolan, percussion (track 7)
Damien Foster, backing vocals (track 5)
Denise Johnson, backing vocals (track 5)

Digitally remastered

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Johnny Marr
At the beginning of 2023, Johnny Marr had all sorts of plans, but marking anniversaries hadn’t figured among them. Fresh from a succession of rapturously received shows with The Killers, Johnny had already started to gather songs for his fifth album – a successor to 2022’s acclaimed double LP Fever Dreams Pts 1-4. It was his manager who pointed out that he had now been a solo artist for ten years, a stretch of time comfortably in excess of his tenures in The Smiths, Electronic, The The, The Pretenders, Modest Mouse or The Cribs. And although, Marr’s storied life in music isn’t short of milestones – 2010 Inspiration Award at the Ivor Novellos, an Oscar nomination for his work with Hans Zimmer on Inception; and, lest we forget, an NME Godlike Genius Award in 2013 – he hadn’t stopped to consider that the passing of an entire decade might be significant.

The full measure of this extraordinarily fertile period is captured on Spirit Power: The Best Of Johnny Marr, a major new collection curated by Marr encompassing songs from his four top ten solo albums, a scattering of stand-alone singles and two incendiary new cuts, Somewhere and The Answer. Spirit Power presents a composite portrait of an artist with no less a complete ideology than the celebrated co-travellers who inspired him along the way. It’s a body of work that mirrors Marr’s unquenchable life force, his love of melody and the urge to resist what he calls the “strummy, age-appropriate transition into mid-tempo middle age.” He elaborates: “It’s a conversation I have from time to time with [Pet Shop Boys’] Chris Lowe, about how much harder it is to write songs that you want to listen to in the daytime. It’s easier to do something that’s perceived as cool if it’s a bit moody. But, for me, the mission with these records was to make songs that you could listen to on the way to school, on the way to the gym, on the way back from work – you know, in the way that you had with, say, Blondie.”

The songs that comprise Spirit Power – sequenced non-chronologically, thus giving a flavour of what you might expect if you were at one of his live shows – are an emphatic fulfilment of that pledge. Among the earliest songs included on this collection is sonorous yet yearning uplift of European Me, a song which saw Marr turn the anglepoise on the space that would over time be filled by several more songs, each explaining to their creator something about where he came from and who he had become. “Left home a mystery, leave school for poetry,” he sings on New Town Velocity, “I say goodbye to them and me, mission velocity.

This album contains no booklet.