Studio sessions tend to work best when the outside world is kept firmly at the door. Around eleven in the morning during work on his fifth solo album, The Age of Everything, Johnny Marr watched his phone light up with an incoming call from Noel Gallagher. Marr suspected immediately that something had gone wrong, simply because Gallagher was placing a voice call rather than sending a routine text. When he picked up, Gallagher broke the news that their mutual friend and fellow Manchester musician Gary Mani Mounfield had passed away.
Mani died on November 20 at 63 years of age, succumbing to respiratory complications linked to a longstanding battle with emphysema. The loss shook the wider British music community, drawing tributes from his Stone Roses bandmate Ian Brown as well as New Order, Peter Hook, Richard Ashcroft, Tim Burgess, Liam Fray of Courteeners, and Elbow. For Marr and his studio band, the grief was immediate and deeply personal. Everyone in the room had known the bassist for decades, and the sudden bulletin brought their creative momentum to a dead stop.
With their headphones off, the musicians stood around wondering whether they ought to pack away their gear and call time on the day. Marr made up his mind by considering what the Stone Roses and Primal Scream bassist would have expected of them. Convinced that Mani would have told the group to get on with it and keep rocking, Marr rallied the players. Rather than abandoning the session, they picked up their instruments and tracked the song they had started, Beyond The Rain.
The emotional jolt carried straight into the vocal booth the following day. Beyond The Rain, sequenced as the second track on the album, had not originally been written about Mani, but the grief inevitably seeped into the performance. Marr revisited the lyrics, removing a line about the sun breaking through and replacing it with the line, "I shine like a northern son, back to where I once belonged." As Marr later noted, that small revision lent the track a deeper, more poignant message, keeping the memory of his friend close while the tape was rolling.
Mani left behind plenty of reasons for such affection. He joined the Stone Roses in 1987, anchoring both of their landmark studio albums before the group disintegrated in 1996. Rather than slowing down, he walked straight into Primal Scream, providing their rhythmic spine until the Stone Roses reunited in 2011. For peers of Marr and Gallagher, Mani remained an essential presence whose career linked two major chapters of northern guitar music.
The Age of Everything arrived in shops on October 2 courtesy of BMG, serving as Marr's first collection of original solo songs since the 2022 release Fever Dreams Pts 1 to 4. The period between albums had been dense with activity. Marr issued a retrospective compilation in 2023 and the concert collection Look Out Live! in 2025. He also contributed to the Gorillaz album The Mountain, joining the group on stage in London in June. In early April, he performed rarities with Pet Shop Boys in London, and contributed studio work to the War Child charity release Help(2).
While an album title like The Age of Everything might easily be read as frustration with modern digital noise, Marr approaches the phrase from another direction. He views it through a more peaceful, contemplative lens tied to Buddhist thought. Finding a way to meet painful moments with durable optimism has long been one of Marr's creative instincts, and steering Beyond The Rain to completion on a difficult morning shows that habit in action.
