Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

Joe Foster remembers: ‘We thought, They’re totally weird, they’re from East Kilbride and they’re cut off from the world, let’s have them over! Hell, we’ve given people we don’t even really like very much a chance, so why not Bobby’s pals? And off we went.’

  By this time the group had changed their name, dropping the Daisy Chain for something more dark and controversial. The free-thinking William Reid had come up with the name The Jesus and Mary Chain, which was surreal, confusing and seemed to suit them perfectly. ‘It sounded like a psychedelic punk street gang,’ says Bobby. ‘It conjured up amazing images.’

  Rumours abound regarding the name’s origin; the band later claimed, and then denied, that it was inspired by a line in a Bing Crosby film. Some believe another story, also propagated by the Reids themselves, that they’d spotted an offer for a ‘gold Jesus and Mary chain’ on the back of a cereal packet. Both are believable; the Reids are experts at extracting and transforming the mundane and the everyday, Pop Art-style: the afternoon film on TV, the cereal packet on the breakfast table. But in recent years, William announced that the idea just came to him out of thin air. Maybe he was just fed up of being asked about it, but either way the name remains appropriately shrouded in mystery. All that really mattered was that it worked. As Jim said, it ‘was like Echo and the Bunnymen . . . only better’.

  It subverted the concept of religion, a recurrent theme for the group, not that the Reids or Douglas were brought up in such a religious way that they had to rebel against it in their everyday lives; they’d attended the non-denominational Hunter High, albeit regarded as the ‘Proddy’ (Protestant) school, in the sectarian landscape of the West of Scotland. As a result, they just had to endure ‘some half-hearted RE classes’, Douglas recalls, ‘and a trendy vicar who came to assemblies and who, through his love of Cliff Richard, figured he had some connection with the kids’.

  However, despite religion not proving a prominent factor in their early years it was, as Douglas observes, ‘William’s preoccupation. The themes are universal: love and hatred, revenge. I think William did this very creative rhyming association: Daisy Chain, Mary Chain . . . The name The Jesus and Mary Chain is confounding, but has a real poetry to it.’ It was also reminiscent of one of their all-time favourite band names: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, New York new-waver James Chance’s group with Lydia Lunch. All of the ingredients were right for where the group was at that time.

  In the not too distant future, the Reids would be called upon quite frequently to defend their band name, but William insisted there was never any intention to try to cause a reaction simply by using a biblical reference. ‘I think it’s tasteful,’ he told Interview magazine in later years. ‘If you want to use the word Jesus and upset people, you’d call the band Jesus Erected or Jesus On A Stake. I’m always shocked when people say it’s blasphemous simply to use the words Jesus and Mary.’

  The next step for the band was laden with importance. The combination of their insularity, their supposedly inaccessible music and their location meant that, had they not crossed paths with Bobby when they did, their story might have been very different, not to mention quite a bit shorter. The Mary Chain were serious about what would happen next because it felt, as Douglas recalls, like their last chance. ‘It was like, If we don’t do this, we will die in East Kilbride by the age of 30.’

  Also, as Jim wryly observed, time wasn’t the only thing that was running out. Patience, chez Reid, was in short supply. ‘My dad was sick of having us about the house, because we’d packed in our jobs and were signing on. It was getting to a point where we were thinking, If we don’t get up off our arses, this is never going to happen. And we did it.’

  * There are two versions floating around regarding the Mary Chain’s use of feedback. Alan McGee and Joe Foster, who later would go on to produce The Jesus and Mary Chain’s first single, ‘Upside Down’, claim the band’s first gig was howling with feedback because they didn’t know how to use the equipment and Foster, who was on the sound desk, just turned everything up. But as the Mary Chain remember it, it was deliberate and it was there from the start. Douglas says: ‘William was a master of feedback. When we rehearsed in the scout hut, the whole sound was swathed in feedback and William never did anything to stop it. It always sounded . . . well, like the Mary Chain.’

  Obviously they weren’t the first to use feedback to such electrifying effect, Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend being obvious pioneers. (The Beatles, idols of the Mary Chain’s, weren’t averse to distortion either – the opening moments of ‘I Feel Fine’ and the spiralling, disorientating ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ come to mind.) But to have an unholy scream of distortion wrapping itself around what would in many cases be a simple pop melody, sometimes to the point of wilful sonic asphyxiation, was a new and thrilling way to utilise it.

  4

  The Living Room

  Britain in 1984 was fucking boring. I like ABC, but that was as exciting as it got: Martin Fry and his gold lamé suit. Then we found the Mary Chain.

  Alan McGee

  The Jesus and Mary Chain were booked to play Alan McGee’s Living Room on 8 June 1984, supporting Microdisney in the upstairs room of the Roebuck pub on Tottenham Court Road. The Roebuck already had some significant musical history: it was the site of David Bowie’s audition for manager Ralph Horton in the summer of 1965. He was still Davey Jones at that point, but not for much longer.

  There was little danger of the Mary Chain over-rehearsing their set, which was at this point mainly covers, including Syd Barrett’s ‘Vegetable Man’ and Subway Sect’s ‘Ambition’, but their overall image and concept was becoming more honed by the day. However, they were still in need of a permanent drummer; Norman Wilson might have helped out on the demo of ‘Upside Down’, but he wasn’t right for the group and, to be fair, he didn’t seem particularly bothered himself.

  To say they were cutting it fine would be an understatement, but during the early summer months of 1984, the Reids scribbled a homemade advertisement for a drummer on a scrap of paper, slunk into town and pinned it on the notice-board at Impulse, the record shop in East Kilbride. Like many record stores, it was something of a hub for young music fans, but no one ever saw this enigmatic trio in town, or at least a local goth called Murray Dalglish certainly hadn’t – although, as he observed, they must have gone in at least once to put the notice up.

  ‘They were quite insular,’ Murray remembers. ‘I would walk about in town for two or three hours at a time, go into Impulse, never saw them. And you definitely would have noticed them.’

  Dalglish, a raven-haired sixteen-year-old fresh out of school, was a dedicated drummer who had picked up his skills in the Boys’ Brigade. He revered the impressive chops of Rush’s Neil Peart over the simple playing of The Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker. However, he also loved The Stooges and the Sex Pistols, and that was enough to make him answer the ad, which was just as well, because no one else did.

  A date was set for a try-out at the local scout hut where the Mary Chain occasionally rehearsed, but when the time to audition arrived and William wandered in, he couldn’t hide his displeasure at the sight of Murray’s kit. It was hardly a 22-piece Neil Peart number, but equally, a minimal Moe Tucker set-up it was not.

  Murray recalls: ‘I could see William’s face kind of . . . you know . . . There’s too many drums there! I had the full kit. They just plugged in, played a couple of songs, I just bashed at the kit and that was it.’

  It was a big ask for anyone to fit in with The Jesus and Mary Chain. They existed in their own hermetically sealed bubble that rarely allowed anyone else in. But while the age gap was significant and their tastes differed, Murray did his best and he got the job. If the Reids had their reservations about Murray, it wasn’t because they found him lacking in competence; if anything, he tended to add nifty little rolls and flourishes where, in the Mary Chain’s collective opinion, there should have been none. For them it was more important to have attitude and a dir
ect, no-frills style, and Murray would occasionally get a dirty look (or even a kick to the kit) if he threw in a fill where there shouldn’t be one.

  On the night of 7 June, the first complete line-up of The Jesus and Mary Chain made their way to the bus station on Churchill Avenue, East Kilbride. So began a sweltering, cramped, ten-hour overnight bus journey to London. ‘This bus would show up and everyone piled on it,’ remembers Murray. ‘Those were the days when people would pile on to go down to their squats, claim a Giro [benefit cheque] down there and then come back and claim a Giro up here.’

  The bus finally reached London at around 9 a.m., so the Mary Chain had an entire day during which the increasingly irascible and drunken Reid brothers had to try not to kill each other. It quickly became an unbearably sultry summer’s day, and the combination of heat, nerves and Dutch courage* meant the feeling in the Mary Chain camp was far from relaxed. At least they were able to travel relatively light – Micro-disney were allowing them to use their equipment, which may or may not have been wise.

  The Reids did use some of their time to venture into the NME offices, then in Soho’s Carnaby Street, to drum up some music-press support. For any group, let alone one this shy, this was a brave and important move. But they’d loved and read the NME for years, and the opportunity to at least try to attract their attention was too good to miss.

  Jim Reid remembers: ‘We’d said to McGee that we were going to the NME to give them a tape and invite them to the show, and he was laughing at us, saying, “For Christ’s sake, they’ll never come.” But we went down and said, “Anybody’s welcome.”’

  As it turned out, their leap of faith paid off – David Quantick attended the gig after work, giving the Mary Chain their first few lines in the NME, hailing their sound as reminiscent of a swarm of bees in an elevator shaft. Not bad for their first gig. Quantick remembers: ‘They were very tinny, hence the “bee” line, but very intense. I’m still quite proud I was at their first gig, because they turned out to be a great band.’

  When the time came to set up at the Roebuck for a sound-check, the Mary Chain’s tension – and inebriation – had reached new heights. They were not drinkers in the sense that they would regularly sit in the pub boozing, nor did they drink at home at that point. The alcohol was simply a necessary emboldening elixir, not to mention a vital social lubricant – they were about to meet a whole raft of new people, after all. The only person who steered clear of alcohol that day was Murray. He had to hold it together on the drums. An intoxicated drummer is not generally a recipe for success.

  By 6 p.m., Jim and William were in an extreme state of anxiety, and Douglas was feeling pretty blue himself; apart from anything else, he had a vision of what a cool London club was supposed to be like, and this wasn’t it.

  ‘I was imagining something out of The Avengers,’ admits Douglas. ‘Patterned wallpaper, little tables with red lamps on them . . . When we turned up at this pub, I was a bit, “Oh!” Slightly deflated.’

  Instead there were two shabby striped beige curtains behind the stage and a bare green light bulb dangling disconsolately above it.

  The band waited, bickering all the while, but there was no sign of McGee, whom, up to this point, Jim had only spoken to over the telephone. Finally he arrived, a symphony in paisley. But again, they had visualised a certain type of person at the helm of the Living Room/Creation operation. And again, this wasn’t it, although arguably this was better. Jim says: ‘We were all looking out of the window wondering who this Alan McGee was. We saw a smart kind of Andrew Loog Oldham type and thought, That’s probably him there. Then this maniac with big red hair and a patterned shirt came in. “Jim! Is that you, Jim?”’

  To be fair, Alan didn’t exactly think the next big thing had just rolled into town. In time, McGee would describe the three key Mary Chain members severally as ‘charismatic, a natural rock star’ (Jim), ‘a genius guitar-player, the original talent’ (William) and ‘the most striking, like a film star’ (Douglas), but his first impressions that day were that, while ‘they looked cool’, he insisted in his autobiography Creation Stories, ‘there was something wrong about it, a small-town version of a movement that was dead’. He recalled in an interview for this book that ‘Douglas looked about twelve, and Jim and William were screaming abuse . . . I thought they were going to be shit, to be honest. Because I’m Scottish I could pick up what they were saying, basically calling each other a bunch of cunts. They were just swearing away there.’

  Jim recalls: ‘We were supposed to be doing a sound-check, but in the end we started swinging at each other. McGee’s standing there thinking, These guys are fucking mad.’

  Actually McGee thought it was ‘fucking great’, and it was only going to get better. ‘We did the sound-check,’ Jim continues, ‘and I don’t think we played any musical notes, but Alan was going, “Genius! We’ll do five albums!” We were like, What’s going on here?’

  There were, by Jim’s admission, about six people in the audience by the time they had to play, and William stood resolutely with his back to them while the Mary Chain sound unfurled into a devilish spiral of chaos. Alan McGee remembers: ‘They played three cover versions. The first song was “Vegetable Man”, the second was Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody To Love”. They never recorded it, but what a version.’ The third, of course, was Subways Sect’s ‘Ambition’.

  The fact that the band only just avoided outnumbering the audience didn’t matter to McGee, who was, in Jim’s words, ‘frothing at the mouth. Literally, I think.’ It was the legendary night that The Jesus and Mary Chain were signed, and the course was set. They would walk away with a one-off deal with Creation Records and a passionate, maverick manager. And tinnitus.

  ‘We had a vocal PA system that Joe Foster was on the controls of,’ McGee remembers. ‘Now the Joe Foster of today has produced lots of records, but the Joe Foster of 1984 didn’t know the backside of a mixing desk, so he just turned everything up to ten, which is logical when you’re 22, but basically everything fed back. Most other bands would stop and turn down. Not the Mary Chain. Being insane, they just played on.’

  ‘It was completely chaotic and a total hail of noise,’ adds Joe Foster. ‘The people immediately around us, our friends, they’d have been amazingly enthusiastic about the Mary Chain sounding like utter chaos. They were loving it. The Mary Chain must have thought, We’ve obviously come to the right place.’

  Douglas’s memory, admittedly, is a little different. ‘Half the people at the gig hated us. Actually, I’d say less than half liked us.’ Which, going by Jim Reid’s maths, would leave about two people: Alan McGee and Joe Foster, no doubt.

  Douglas continues: ‘People were saying, “Alan, you’re mad. You’re mad for wanting to put a record out with them.” It was coming out of that twee era. We thought, or certainly I did, that punk changed the world and all the bores and jobsworths had been wiped off the face of the earth, but everywhere you went it was: You can’t do that . . .’

  On that hot London night, however, McGee felt that the Mary Chain could, and should, continue exactly as they were. The whirlwind of sound that they’d managed to manifest was, by accident or design, startling, scary and magnificent, and it didn’t matter that hardly anyone else could see what he saw in them. McGee wanted to be Malcolm McLaren, and in his eyes he’d just found his very own Sex Pistols. The Mary Chain might not have expressed it particularly ebulliently, but they were just as thrilled, relieved even, to find McGee.

  ‘It was straight after that first very short, very extreme thing,’ Douglas remembers, ‘that he came up to us with a huge smile on his face and said, “Let’s make an album.” We were like, Fucking hell! Great! We loved McGee’s energy, and we loved his love for us. We liked his oddness and, compared to us, he was experienced. To us he was like a saviour.’

  McGee says: ‘I just went, me being me, “I can sell 20,000 of this.” I didn’t think, This is a band that will last thirty years. When I went, “Can I sign
you?” they looked at me as if I was bonkers. But that was the beginning.’

  * Murray recalls that Douglas, who was working at a bar at the time, had managed to snaffle away ‘four beers’ for the journey, a rather modest amount of alcohol considering the band’s reputation but, as Murray puts it, ‘they just couldn’t take their drink. They were falling all over the place.’

  5

  Night Moves, More Acid and Disaster In Wonderland

  The reaction to the way we were was instant. People would want to kill us or throw us off. No one was being two-faced about it, I guess.

  Douglas Hart

  Two days after their live debut at the Living Room, The Jesus and Mary Chain were booked to play a venue closer to home for the first time. The gig was at Night Moves in Glasgow and the promoter, Tom Coyle, had been persuaded by chief Mary Chain cheerleader Bobby Gillespie to give the band a chance. He agreed to let them play a mid-week show, rather than risk a packed Friday night on the band.

  The Reids duly hosed down their insides with alcohol and, within moments of them staggering onto the stage, chaos ensued. It’s fair to say it went down quite badly, not least with the group the Mary Chain were supporting, whose gear was in serious jeopardy.

  ‘We were totally pissed. I could hardly stand up,’ says Jim. ‘I think we played for about fifteen minutes, but it wasn’t one of those legendary fifteen-minute shows – we got pulled off after fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Night Moves,’ Murray shudders. ‘That gig was a disaster waiting to happen. Jim and William were drunk, and we just made this almighty racket. They were falling about on top of the amplifiers. The other band were standing at the side of the stage raging.’

  Bobby Gillespie was in attendance that night, with Jim Beattie by his side. Their reaction to what they were witnessing was at odds with the rest of the crowd. It was messy, drunken madness, but it radiated a rock’n’roll spirit that was 100 times more exciting and direct than anything else that was happening at that time. ‘I remember them smashing into each other,’ says Bobby. ‘William, the fuzz pedal, it was just total carnage, really metallic, really sexy. They were all young, skinny guys, good-looking, especially Jim and Doug. I don’t remember them playing any songs that related to the tapes that I had, but the first time I saw the Clash, I don’t remember the songs sounding like the album, it was just noise and attitude and colour, sound, attack. The Mary Chain were an attack. They were really confused and the sound was confused, but it was really sexy. It was the best thing I’d seen since punk rock.’