Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  Jim says: ‘Nobody would give us the time of day. There was this cliquey white-soul scene and you couldn’t get inside it, just couldn’t get anywhere. We gave tapes to everybody, tried to get gigs wherever.’

  ‘We were removed from that Glasgow scene,’ adds Douglas. ‘We didn’t live in Glasgow and weren’t part of it. Music had lost its way post-punk, and there was a lot of post-Orange Juice crap on the scene. I mean, I love Orange Juice, but what came after . . . people playing guitar with what I call the “wank” rhythm, like George Formby.’

  One significant beam of light in Glasgow was the presence of a band called The Pastels, fronted by Stephen McRobbie, better known as Stephen Pastel. The Pastels, formed in 1982, shared the Daisy Chain’s independent mindset; they were clearly kindred spirits in what otherwise felt like a rather bleak landscape.

  ‘There weren’t many places to go in Glasgow,’ Stephen Pastel explains. ‘Groups were dropping literary references and trying to play funky, but in a wooden, uptight way. The Pastels’ sound was raw and amateur, but we were already starting to make music like “Baby Honey”. We didn’t feel like we were “the Glasgow scene”, we had become our own thing.’

  The Pastels also connected with Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall, better known as the goth-pop duo Strawberry Switchblade. They were fellow punky, stylish Glaswegians who routinely caused jaws to drop as they strutted through town festooned in tutus, ribbons and fake flowers, and with huge backcombed hair-dos – one bright red (Jill) and one jet-black (Rose). With The Pastels they created fanzines, put on their own club nights and took the DIY attitude to the nth degree. If what you wanted to see wasn’t out there, you didn’t just sit back and get depressed, you worked out what was lacking and created it yourself. Possibly while depressed, or at least in an advanced state of frustration. But still, you were doing it yourself, and that was vital. The alternative was wandering through life not really engaging with anything, because there was nothing you wanted to engage with.

  The first time Jim, William and Douglas met Stephen was after a Pastels show one freezing winter’s night at the Candy Club, a club night that ran for a short time at the Lorne Hotel in Kelvingrove, Glasgow. The Candy Club would soon play an important part in the destiny of the Daisy Chain, but initially meeting the Pastels was another lifeline for them during a period of knockbacks and isolation.

  The Daisy Chain – still just Jim and Douglas at this point – decided to give a tape of demos to the Candy Club promoter, Nick Lowe.* Stephen Pastel helped Nick to run the Candy Club, although the pair had ‘very different tastes’. Stephen wasn’t aware at the time that Jim and Douglas had sent in a cassette for consideration but destiny works in mysterious ways.

  ‘We couldn’t afford a new cassette,’ Douglas recalls. ‘So we had an old cassette with the demo on one side and just a kind of compilation on the other, like Syd Barrett and things like that.’ In his usual unvarnished manner, Jim explains that ‘The guy who was running [the Candy Club] thought it was garbage.’ Ironically, had Stephen Pastel heard the cassette, the story might have been rather different. ‘I was given a copy soon after, and of course I loved it,’ says Stephen. ‘It had a heavy fuzz sound, but great melodies too.’

  As it turned out, this initial rejection would draw a figure into Jim and Douglas’s lives who would be pivotal in turning their fate around. ‘Nick was mates with Bobby Gillespie,’ says Jim. ‘He said to Bobby, “You like Syd Barrett, there’s a Syd Barrett compilation on the other side of this.”’ Nick made a note to himself to send the cassette to Bobby. However, by the time he actually got around to it, it would be six months later – and some major changes had taken place within the Daisy Chain by then.

  * Not the artist of Stiff Records/‘I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass’ fame.

  3

  Gillespie, McGee and a Green Ink Letter

  ‘The whole Scottish scene turns our stomach,’ says Jim.

  ‘The Welsh as well,’ grins William.

  ‘And the Irish,’ shrugs Douglas, dourly.

  (from a Sounds interview with Sandy Robertson, 1985)

  Bobby Gillespie, a skinny, young, politicised Public Image Limited fan, came from the incongruously named Mount Florida area near Glasgow’s Hampden Park football stadium. He had already formed his own group, Primal Scream and, like the Daisy Chain, there were just two members at this point: Gillespie and his friend Jim Beattie. Both were dissatisfied with the state of what music had become, describing themselves as ‘hateful, angry punk kids’.

  ‘The scene in Glasgow was mostly white-boy funk neds trying to be David Bowie, Station To Station era, and failing miserably . . . it was just alien to us,’ Bobby explains. ‘They wanted to be part of the establishment and we were anti-establishment. For us, punk was a platform for expression, we talked about how we felt and described it in real terms that other people could relate to.’

  Even before the Daisy Chain had entered Bobby’s consciousness, it was clear that they would, eventually, meet somehow – they were expressing themselves in almost the same way and feeling very much the same confusions, cultural ennui and frustration. They loved the same music – the Velvets, The Doors, The Stooges, The Cramps, The Birthday Party and The Gun Club – and had also found a place to make a lot of noise and burn up some of their rage, transmuting it into something more positive and, dare I say it, fun. It was only a matter of time until their paths crossed.

  Bobby says: ‘Primal Scream, at the start, were kind of experimental; we used a two-track tape recorder, drum machine, for percussion we used bits of metal, like dustbin lids. Public Image’s Metal Box, we put that through the echo . . . but it was very primitive. We were just making noise. We didn’t know about expressing ourselves because it was beyond our frame of reference, being from a working-class background, but that’s what we were doing.’

  By the time Candy Club promoter Nick Lowe sent the Daisy Chain’s demo tape to Bobby, William had joined his brother’s band. It was obvious that the Reids would eventually join forces. Difficult as it could often be, that friction would be as necessary as it is with all of the most interesting artistic partnerships, the grit in the oyster.

  The addition of William, of course, meant the addition of William’s material. ‘Suddenly we had eight songs!’ recalls Douglas, who was utterly intrigued by William’s demos. They were crammed with surreal imagery and almost Dadaesque lyrics, reminiscent of automatic writing and free association. The Reids have always been keen to retain the mystery around their lyrics, and are rightly reluctant to explain what they mean not least because they feel the listener should be allowed to decide for him or herself. Douglas says: ‘I remember reading the words for “In A Hole”. How could something crawl within my rubber holy baked bean tin . . . amazing! Both Jim and William are really good at creating lyrics.’

  One of the most interesting things about so many of the Mary Chain’s songs is the contrast between the lyrics and the melodies – a storm of dark, brooding, even threatening words frequently interlace with a sugar-sweet melody; from William’s point of view, this is because the melodies and the lyrics come from ‘different places’. Lyrics would be written sober, melodies developed while drunk or high.

  ‘Writing lyrics is like tracing the outline of your own soul and it’s a mental task,’ William would later explain to Japanese magazine Rockin’ On. ‘I’d say melodies are like meeting a girl and finding her pretty, and lyrics are like getting to know her better . . . and maybe you don’t like her, or maybe you get irritated because you are not getting to know each other at all . . .’

  Jim was still quite keen to slink out of the role of lead vocalist and let someone else do it, and William stepped in briefly, but William admits his ‘nasal’ voice just didn’t sound as strong as Jim’s, which was throatier. Even so, persuading Jim to sing was not easy. ‘Eventually everybody was like, “Come on, you fucking bastard, you must do it,”’ remembers William in an interview with friend Dimitri Coats. ‘So he relu
ctantly became the singer.’

  Rehearsals were rare, and relatively unproductive; the group would, according to Jim, ‘get there, argue for half an hour and go home’. Which, with the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge of the combative quality that would come to define their live act, sounds about right. Jim would, rather unwillingly, sing; he and William played guitar (Jim’s later becoming famous for being deliberately kept out of tune, for ‘kicking’ purposes) and Douglas would play a bass never burdened with more than three strings. Add to this William’s broken Shin Ei fuzz pedal, bought for a tenner, and you had the essential elements of The Jesus and Mary Chain. About that famous pedal: William only realised it was broken when he tried to sell it to someone else, but ‘the noise it made . . .’ he said. ‘It was almost as if another member had joined the band.’

  The Reids spent hours watching films and reading books, poring over retro pop culture imagery, and they immediately recognised the power of the slightly ravaged style of the Beatles-in-Hamburg look: rock’n’roll era, black leather, big hair, bristling with sleazy energy and an irresistible sense of destroyed innocence. ‘Yeah, I was always into The Beatles in Hamburg,’ Jim muses. ‘But when we dressed in black leather in the mid-1980s, people just assumed we were goths, which was not the case. The big hair, well, everybody had that haircut in the 1980s. You’d go to the doctor and he’d be sitting there with a fucking silly big hairdo.’ Echo and the Bunnymen were probably to blame.

  As shy as the Reids were, everything they did to further the Mary Chain cause was anchored by a real faith in their own ideas, and this would carry them through. They might not have been self-assured in everyday life, but when it came to their songs, they knew what they had and what they could achieve.

  ‘Jim, deep down, had confidence in it,’ says Douglas. ‘It wasn’t a swaggering confidence though. If a person is just out-and-out confident, those are the people you avoid. You know, the people you fantasise about getting knocked over at school or being killed by some kind of poison . . .’ Indeed. But back to the Mary Chain.

  Bobby Gillespie, meanwhile, had received that fateful package in the post. He ripped open the envelope and listened to the Syd Barrett compilation. When he turned the cassette over, what he heard sent him into a rapture. The Daisy Chain’s demos were confounding and dark, but with a simplicity and extreme energy reminiscent of the first wave of punk.

  ‘“Upside Down” was on there, “Never Understand” and “Taste The Floor”,’ says Bobby, instantly animated at the memory of it. ‘I played it about six times. I thought it was fucking incredible.’

  The fact that there were supposedly only two of them excited Bobby beyond measure; his first thought was that he and Jim Beattie could join forces with Jim Reid and Douglas. However, William was firmly ensconced by now, and Bobby’s hopes would be dashed – temporarily.

  During those early months, for Gillespie and the nascent Jesus and Mary Chain it was often a case of so near and yet so far. A month before Bobby listened to the tape, he and Jim Beattie had sent an advert to be read out on Billy Sloan’s show on Radio Clyde. ‘It was for Primal Scream,’ Bobby explains. ‘We were looking for a psychedelic punk-rock vocalist, because at this point I was going to be the guitarist – I wasn’t even a guitar player. Jim had heard it and was going to apply.’

  After being stunned by the strength of the Daisy Chain’s demos, Bobby knew these were people he had to meet. Bobby took out the cardboard insert from the case, found Douglas Hart’s phone number and called it. Douglas’s mother took a message.

  ‘Apparently,’ says Bobby, ‘she said “Are you famous?”, and I said, “Not yet, but I will be.” Yeah, I’m quite pleased with that one. Anyway, I called Douglas again later that night. We spoke for what seemed like three hours. We spoke about The Seeds, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, films like If . . ., the Sex Pistols, Subway Sect, Love, the Velvets, the Banshees, The Slits, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Johnny Thunders . . . a lot of films, a lot of music.’

  The conversation was an important one for both Douglas and Bobby, an ‘incredible meeting of minds,’ as Douglas put it. ‘It was an amazing feeling to find him.’ It was only at the end of this telephone conversation that Bobby mentioned a friend called Alan McGee, who was based in London. McGee had gone to school with Bobby in Glasgow, and they shared a love of punk rock, briefly forming a band called The Drains. The line-up included Andrew Innes, now the guitarist in Primal Scream.

  McGee and Innes, uninspired by their surroundings and desperate to make their mark on London’s seductive, transient music scene, soon left Glasgow and formed the band The Laughing Apple, named after a Cat Stevens song. To support himself and pay the rent on his small Tottenham flat, Alan McGee worked at British Rail as a clerk, which at least meant travel was cheap and easy. This, when he made his first foray into music management, would come in handy. Money was scarce, but McGee and others like him already had a productive DIY, cottage-industry mindset, starting bands, fanzines (such as McGee’s own Communication Blur) and labels.

  By 1983, McGee was at the helm of a label of his own called Creation Records, releasing records ad hoc by artists such as The Legend (alias music writer Everett True), The X-Men and his own band, Biff Bang Pow! He also ran a club night on Conway Street, later moving to Tottenham Court Road, called the Living Room. The Living Room gave vital exposure to artists including The Pastels, the Television Personalities and the Jasmine Minks as well as his own group. McGee was clearly like-minded, and was bound to give Jim, William and Douglas a gig at the Living Room at the very least.

  Alan McGee founded and ran Creation, the Living Room and Biff Bang Pow! with two other creative reprobates, Dick Green and the Television Personalities’ Joe Foster (alias Slaughter Joe). The operation was ramshackle but it worked, and it snowballed into something that would become well regarded by tuned-in music lovers. McGee says, ‘We weren’t just accomplishing our dreams, we were accomplishing everybody else’s dreams. We were overthrowing the statues.’

  ‘And bizarrely enough,’ adds Joe Foster, ‘we actually started to make money doing it. After initially putting the whole investment into . . . well, drink, basically, we thought, We should make better use of this. We were still living in that world where, if you wanted to get some shit out there, you just strolled over to Carnaby Street, met people at the NME or Melody Maker, bought them some drinks, and something would get in. They had to put out a paper every week, so you had a fair chance of something getting in.’

  NME took notice of Creation Records, even if it was initially just because McGee would hound them until they did. This was also a powerful era for the music press. A few lines in NME meant a lot. If Jim, William and Douglas could tap into this, it had the potential to steer them firmly in the right direction.

  A Daisy Chain cassette duly arrived on the doormat of McGee’s flat in Tottenham, featuring the same demos Bobby Gillespie had heard. Bobby had already insisted to Alan that they deserved his attention, but after hearing the tape Alan initially had reservations. He was intrigued, but he needed to hear more.

  Bobby remembers: ‘Alan said, “I’m going to put them on a compilation.” I said, “You’ve got to make a single with them, they’re so good. You can’t just put them out on a compilation with all these loser bands who play at your club!” And he’s going, “Nah, I don’t think they’re ready.”’

  McGee clearly heard potential, however, and took the time to write the group a letter – in green ink, no less. ‘We’d always read that letters written in green ink were written by psychos,’ Douglas laughs. ‘He said, “I like the demos, but maybe go into the studio and record something.”’

  It was certainly encouraging that they were being even tentatively considered by a London-based label – albeit a relatively underground one with no money. The compilation was going to be titled Are You A Car Or Are You In Love? (although, as it turned out, it would never materialise). The Mary Chain had to act quickly, and it wasn’t easy to find a
drummer in East Kilbride. ‘Believe me,’ says Douglas, ‘not only did we not know any musicians there, but cool people who would have fitted in with us? No fucking chance!’

  After much racking of brains, Douglas Hart remembered a boy from school called Norman Wilson who had a drum kit. He might not have been on the same wavelength as the Daisy Chain, but not many were. It was something of a desert out there. Douglas paid him a visit. ‘We said, “We’re recording next week, do you want to come?” I don’t even know if we rehearsed. We went to a studio on the edge of East Kilbride (Even-lode) and tried “Upside Down” but it didn’t turn out so great; it was rushed and the engineer couldn’t get his head round the feedback.* The song was there, but it was more Ramones-like.’ No bad thing, perhaps, but it wasn’t the sound they wanted.

  Time was running out and they had no choice but to send what they had to McGee. As Jim packaged up the tape, he slipped a note inside explaining that the ‘bastard engineer’ didn’t understand what they were trying to achieve. If nothing else, this provided a neat little preview of the future; the Mary Chain and studio engineers did not always mix well.

  McGee’s memory of the tape was that it was ‘OK’, but Bobby had faith in them, and there was clearly something there. Why not invite them down to play at the Living Room? There was nothing to lose. ‘That was it,’ Jim shrugs. ‘Alan wasn’t that excited about it, but he gave us the gig anyway.’