Johnny Marr, The Duchess, York, March 5

York will have the very earliest chance to hear how Marr sounds on The Messenger when the former Smiths guitarist launches his March tour with a sold-out gig at The Duchess on Tuesday.

“It’s late in the day to be making my debut album,” says Johnny. “But it feels like the early days again, which people might be surprised to hear. That’s one of the advantages of making your first record under your own name after having made so many with other people; it’s all fresh again.”

Since leaving The Smiths in 1987 – an exit that triggered the Manchester band’s break-up three weeks later – Johnny has since been a roaming guitar-slinger for hire. He briefly joined Chrissie Hynde in The Pretenders and Matt Johnson in The The, before creating Electronic with New Order’s Bernard Sumner.

Subsequent years would see him form his band Johnny Marr + The Healers; team up with Crowded House’s Neil Finn for the New Zealander’s 7 Worlds Collide project; and become a fully fledged member of American indie band Modest Mouse and Wakefield’s finest, The Cribs.

“I just reached a point where I didn’t want to be in another band – or someone else’s band – any more,” says Johnny. “The ideas for the record started to haunt me, in a good way. I’m always led by my musical hunches, that then become strong ideas and concepts that sometimes lead to being in someone else’s band, but this time led to my own songs.”

He never had the inclination to make a solo album previously, maintaining that the timing would not have been right. Now, however, The Messenger is a result of working with so many others and drawing different things from each set-up.

Johnny also realised that over the years, with each project that involved him, he had his own fans following him.

“I’d say that’s been 80 per cent of the motivation for making this album, to play music to people who like what I do. It sounds like such an obvious thing, but it was an incredible revelation to me,” he says.

Coming from a former member of The Smiths, a band with an obsessive fan base, this confession of surprise that people were prepared to attend gigs especially to see him says plenty about Marr. He is seemingly devoid of ego and uninterested in the trappings of his work environment.

“I prefer philosophy, really,” he says. “Mostly German. Pretentious, maybe. So shoot me. I want to read about interesting things about the human condition. And as much as I love rock’n’roll, I stopped reading rock biographies in my 20s when they became less crazy than my own life. Since then it’s been poetry, books about art, and philosophy. Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche are my rock stars, which I think is pretty amusing.”

One track on The Messenger is inspired directly by his love of philosophy. Generate! Generate! is Marr’s tribute to 17th-century French philosopher Rene Descartes, most famous for writing “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am”.

“It might sound like a stupid pop song, that one, but it’s me turning Descartes on its head. As a tribute, I wrote the line ‘Cogito ergo dun’ which means ‘I think, therefore I am stupid’. The song’s basically for all the people who say they think too much, but empowering them. It’s a celebration of hyperactivity.”

Otherwise, Marr finds inspiration in cities. Growing up in Manchester, he has long been fascinated by metropolitan centres, what the architecture says about a place.

“I guess it’s called psycho-geography,” he says. “The most important thing for me is to get out into the world and get the wind in my hair.”

In going solo, is Marr following in the footsteps of The Jam’s Paul Weller and Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, having defined the Eighties with The Smiths in the way their respective bands defined the Seventies and Nineties?

“I can absolutely relate to Paul and Noel for obvious reasons, but it’s good not to analyse these things too much,” says Johnny, cautiously. “When I was starting out I might’ve analysed the hell out of that comparison, but I know when to leave well alone now.

“I’ve learned over the years from some great people – Bernard Sumner and Chrissie Hynde being just two of them – that there are things that other people would dwell on, but you shouldn’t consider them.

“Comparing yourself to another is one of those things, and how inspiration strikes is the other. Follow Picasso’s dictum, that inspiration does exist but it has to find you working, and leave it at that.”

The Messenger, written and recorded in a Salford barn, is a melodic, guitar-driven album that pulls from each facet of Marr’s career and is marked by immediacy, making the songs fresh but instantly familiar.

“It’s nice to have made a record and not hear people say it’s a grower,” says Johnny. “It’s very important to me that the songs had energy. I can’t wait for the first live shows.

“It’s not been easy being a fan of mine, with me going in different directions. This record is for the fans. Well, if not for them, it’s for us, me and them together. It’s most definitely time to get into a venue, big or small, and for us all to just enjoy ourselves and have fun.”

• Johnny Marr plays The Duchess, York, on Tuesday, Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, on Thursday, and Leadmill, Sheffield, March 18.

Andy Welch and Charles Hutchinson

• Did you know?

Johnny Marr – or John Maher as he was born – had football trials for Nottingham Forest and Manchester City.