Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  The spell was broken when the bouncers physically threw the band not just off stage, but out of the venue. The Jesus and Mary Chain were getting an early taste of how they could provoke a reaction that wasn’t just negative, but violent. Douglas recalls: ‘One minute we were standing under the warm stage lights and the next we were in the alley in the rain. We’d just played one song the way we always did it, feedback and extreme explosion of energy, and they pulled us off the stage.’

  ‘I remember getting chucked down a flight of stairs,’ adds Jim. ‘It was the guy who ran it, he was going, “You’re useless! That’s the last we’ll ever hear of you fucking losers.” We had a few bruises, but it all added to the legend, I suppose.’

  To end up being hurled into the rainy night mid-set was something of a shock, but the first thing The Jesus and Mary Chain saw as they dusted themselves off was the beaming face of Bobby Gillespie. ‘He was running towards us going, “That was the fucking best thing I’ve ever seen in my life!”’ Douglas laughs.

  With the adrenaline still coursing through their systems, it was impossible to just go straight home on the bus, for Douglas and Bobby at least. They headed into the darkness and drizzle of Glasgow’s West End and talked all night, further cementing their bond. Both Bobby and the Mary Chain felt very much as if they were on their own, and as a result found it hard to open up to other people for fear of being misunderstood. There was no danger of that here.

  Bobby says: ‘It was incredible to make a connection with people who felt the same way about things that we did. I was quite closed off; I was waiting for the right people and they were the right people. It was a major moment in my life, meeting them.’

  *

  Fired up by their landmark Night Moves experience and Bobby’s enthusiasm, Douglas, Jim and William knew they could turn the whole debacle to their advantage if they acted quickly and creatively. In true Sex Pistols style, they sat down and feverishly wrote a stack of fake letters to their local radio DJ, some praising the Mary Chain’s first Glasgow foray and some expressing utter hatred for the racket that had offended their precious lugholes. It was an inspired publicity move that McGee himself, or even McLaren, would have applauded.

  ‘We wrote maybe twenty letters between us,’ says Douglas. ‘Half of them said, “I saw the most terrible band last night, they made me sick!”, and then asked him for a crappy record by someone like Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, and then the other half said, “I saw the best band ever!”, and asked him for The Birthday Party or Subway Sect. And the guy read them all out!’

  Back in London, Alan McGee was making plans for the Mary Chain. After their volcanic appearance at the Living Room, Alan wanted to record a single with the group as soon as possible, and while he might not have predicted how they would soar once their first record was released, it was time to prepare for their first national assault. First off, they needed to organise some press photos. ‘We said, “Well, describe a press photo,”’ says Jim. ‘So he said, “Well, it could be live . . .” So I thought, Ah, OK.’

  Again nothing if not creative, The Jesus and Mary Chain set up their own photo shoot in Jim and William’s heavily disguised bedroom. They didn’t need anyone to show them what was required, and they were already very much in control of how they wanted to be presented. Jim says: ‘We put a big plastic sheet on the wall – this is pathetic, I shouldn’t be admitting this – we got microphone stands and we’d all stand on the bed, and we had this big spotlight shining up. We took these photos as if this was us playing live. And bloody hell, it worked!’

  ‘Jim and I both took photographs and made little collages,’ says Douglas, ‘so when we first had to do artwork for the band, we took all the photographs ourselves. If you look at the inner sleeve of Psychocandy, it’s a kind of ripped collage of photographs that we had. All of our early artwork was done with great joy.’

  In addition to photographs and collages, the Mary Chain also expressed their creativity by customising their clothes – a nod to their early love of punk. At one point Jim had a T-shirt with the words Fuck Fuck Fuck emblazoned on the front, while William’s bore the stencilled message Fuck Cunt Candy Cunt. Plans to market these T-shirts quickly went adrift, as did a later idea to open The Jesus Fuck Café, where the Mary Chain themselves would bring you whatever they felt like serving regardless of whether you wanted it or not, and, as they put it themselves, ‘you’d better bloody well like it.’ Still a viable idea, no doubt, although the scenes in the kitchen might get a bit heavy.

  While East Kilbride – the Reids’ bedroom excluded – might have seemed to the untrained eye to be bereft of potential photoshoot locations, the Mary Chain had another ace up their sleeves. It was time to return to the derelict paint factory, armed with their cassette recorder, a camera, The Jesus and Mary Chain fan club (that is, Primal Scream) and some acid. Jim Reid recalls: ‘We basically did our first ever proper photo session. We took all the Primals, we all dropped acid. A memorable day . . .’

  Acid had a psychedelic lustre that pot-smoking lacked. As far as the Mary Chain and Primal Scream were concerned at that time, pot was a hippie drug. Unlike the Mary Chain, Bobby also avoided alcohol – ‘I’d seen a lot of damage due to alcoholism in my family, I was kind of put off by that.’ LSD didn’t have any of those associations. The associations it did have were cool and poetic. ‘Syd Barrett, Jim Morrison, Roky Erickson and Lux Interior from The Cramps,’ Bobby muses.* ‘The acid thing seemed glamorous, and also it seemed like, if you took LSD . . . there’s got to be something in it. Maybe it helped these guys get some kind of vision or insight. I remember saying to Alan McGee that I was going to go and take acid with the Mary Chain, and his quote was: “Meeting of minds . . .”’

  It was a hot day, 12 July, the day the Orange Order was marching through town. But inside the safety of the paint factory, the tape recorder was switched on with one of the Mary Chain’s compilation tapes inside it, photos were taken, and acid was dropped. The factory practically pulsated with heat, sound and energy. The UK charts were dominated that summer by Wham!, Phil Collins and Nik Kershaw, pop stars whose music would obviously never trouble the Mary Chain’s ears, at least not deliberately, anyway. Garage rock, punk and psych provided the sound-track for them.

  ‘I remember listening to The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and smashing things up with bits of metal,’ says Bobby. ‘We were trying to make a psychedelic connection. The connection was listening to The Stooges on acid and smashing up the factory. We weren’t violent people, but there was a lot of anger and violence there. I remember playing “Primitive” by the Cramps and using branches as drumsticks on the hot ground. I wasn’t in the band yet, but I might as well have been, in a way.’

  The first hour was sheer euphoria. ‘We were all coming up together,’ Douglas remembers. But for some, things took a turn for the worse. ‘Bobby and I were having a great time, but a few people had freak-outs. Jim and William had to go and there were all these other strangers.’ It didn’t help that some had spotted the Orange Order stumbling up the road towards them after a hard day’s marching and drinking. ‘Not what you wanted to see,’ says Bobby.

  Because Douglas was the only one left who knew the area well, he took the lead and, like a psychedelic Pied Piper, led his charges out of the glaring sunshine to a quiet glade in a nearby wood where they were less exposed. Or so they thought. ‘Suddenly I heard this “Pyow, pyow!”, the weirdest noise I’d ever heard,’ he says. ‘I looked up and there was the biggest ned from school, with an air gun, shooting at us! I was like, “Ah, no!” I don’t know why I did this, but I just walked up the hill towards him and said, “Me and all my friends are on acid, can you stop doing that please?”, and he goes, “All right,” and just walked away. I thought he was going to kill me.’

  Occasions such as this naturally strengthened the friendship between Bobby Gillespie and the Mary Chain. Drummer Murray Dalglish was significantly younger than the rest of the band, and had his own set of fr
iends with whom he preferred to spend time. ‘It wasn’t like there was any friction, he’s a nice guy,’ says Douglas. ‘But he was younger, you know? It was just different.’

  Alan McGee wasted no time in organising more gigs for The Jesus and Mary Chain down south. The group might have viewed the English as an obnoxious bunch who did little other than ‘watch Terry and June and say ‘Crikey!’ a lot, but London was where they had to make their mark if they wanted to get anywhere; so roll on more cramped Stagecoach journeys, more nights sleeping on McGee’s floor, more drinking to oblivion to numb the nerves. ‘They did a bizarre set of gigs,’ McGee remembers. ‘There was a gig in Mayfair where the audience was literally me and Joe Foster, and we ended up just playing our favourite records. It wasn’t like “the next big thing”. Nobody out there could give a fuck.’

  Another occasion saw them supporting Five Go Down to the Sea at the Thames Polytechnic. Music journalist Kevin Pearce recalls the gig, which was slightly unusual as Jim was suffering from a sore throat, and vocal duties were taken care of – sort of – by William. ‘It was lovely,’ remembers Kevin. ‘William read the words from a notebook, but if I remember rightly he gave up and just screamed ad libs.’

  One of the most memorable gigs of that period was at a club night called Alice in Wonderland at Gossip at 69 Dean Street, Soho. The club night was a psychedelic 1980s extravaganza if ever there was one. It was run by Christian Paris and Clive Jackson, better known as the Doctor from Doctor and the Medics. McGee had persuaded Jackson to have the Mary Chain on one Monday night, and the Doctor gave them a slot on 17 September 1984, supporting Green On Red, a tough country-punk band from Tucson, Arizona. Once again, they would be using the headlining band’s gear.

  Unlike their stage debut at the Living Room in June, the Reid brothers managed to keep it together during the soundcheck. The problem was that while the soundcheck was at 7 p.m., stage time was closer to midnight, by which time, unsurprisingly, many a tincture had been imbibed. To make matters worse, Jim’s sore throat showed no sign of abating, and McGee, clearly a man with excellent contacts, managed to find a doctor willing to give him an injection to dull the pain. The combination of a local anaesthetic and five hours of dedicated boozing promised an interesting result. The band staggered onstage and proceeded to wreak musical havoc. It was impossible to hear what they really sounded like, and Jackson was not happy.

  Clive ‘The Doctor’ Jackson casts his mind back to that fateful night: ‘It was absolutely . . . well, it wasn’t even music, it was such a shambles. Green On Red had a lot of gear, and one of the concerns was that the Mary Chain were tottering about on stage and we were thinking, Some of the gear’s going to go any minute. Murray was trying to hold it together, but Jim was just kicking his guitar around on the floor. People were complaining.’

  Jim Reid admits: ‘I was just out of my brain again, steaming. We didn’t do set-lists back then. I would just shout out a song and we’d play it. We usually started with “In A Hole”, so we played it, and then I was like, “Er . . . ‘In A Hole!’” – “We’ve just played that, you idiot . . .” “Oh no . . .”’

  Clive Jackson was unable to watch either the chaos onstage or the mass exodus of punters any longer. Not that that would have bothered the Mary Chain. As Jim said some months later, ‘People who walk out of our concerts don’t deserve to be there. They’re stupid.’

  Clive recalls: ‘I just looked at Joe, Christian’s brother, and said, “Shall we get them off?” I just picked Jim up and carried him off. He’s not a particularly big bloke. Joe grabbed another one. You’d normally expect bouncers or crew to do that but, “Hang on, the DJ’s carrying me off!”’

  Murray kicked at the drum kit in frustration, knocking a cymbal to the floor. Then he remembered whose gear he’d just kicked – Green On Red’s. A bunch of ‘six-foot-six brick shithouses’, as Murray puts it. While his bandmates were being hoisted off-stage, Murray was frozen to the spot, anticipating the rearrangement of his face at the hands of someone rather larger than him. ‘This guy walked up to me. I’m preparing for it and I’m preparing for it, I thought he was going to thump me right in the face, and he just said, “Hey man! You were just like the goddamn fucking Sex Pistols!” I really thought I was going to get my arse kicked.’

  ‘So that was that,’ Jim sighs. ‘We got chucked into the dressing-room. Christian, the guy who used to run it, I threw up on him. “You’ve let me down!” “Oh, fuck off. Bleurgh.” I remember puking on his purple velvet trousers. I think that’s what made me puke, actually.’

  While the rest of the group came to in the sleazy, neon-lit murk of Monday-night Soho, Murray managed to wheedle his way back inside, and he was glad he did. One of the people who had stuck around for the gig was none other than Murray’s goth-punk drum hero Rat Scabies from The Damned. ‘He came up and said I’d played well, and I was like, “Rat Scabies!” I was only sixteen and I thought this guy was a god on the drums. I also met Razzle from Hanoi Rocks. About six months later he was in a car with Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe and died in a car crash.’

  The Jesus and Mary Chain might not have had the best gig of their lives that night, but Alan McGee was rubbing his hands together – he knew how to get the best out of any situation, and the more controversial or downright disastrous the better, in publicity terms at least. Months before ‘riots’ at Mary Chain gigs were reported, this was an early seed planted in the consciousness of any avid reader of the music papers, a seed that would ensure that as it grew, the Mary Chain’s name would soon be inseparably linked with trouble, unpredictability and general bad behaviour, even if they did only get drunk to drown their stage fright. The readers of Sounds didn’t need to know that.

  ‘Alan just jumped on this,’ Jackson grins. ‘The next week in Sounds it was “Band Thrown Off Stage”, all of that. When I saw that I thought, Oh Alan, you cute little so-and-so! Alan didn’t care if they got chucked off stage. It added to the whole story, it became part of it – it was edgy. Alan created a legend within about six months.’

  * Bobby Gillespie remained a devoted fan of the late Lux Interior, drawing inspiration from him as a frontman in Primal Scream’s later years and also naming his son after him.

  6

  Upside Down

  Everything hasn’t been done. No one has ever made a record remotely like ‘Upside Down’.

  Jim Reid to The Face, June 1985

  Soon after their brief but memorable appearance at Alice In Wonder-land in September 1984, The Jesus and Mary Chain prepared to cut their first disc. Alan McGee booked two midnight sessions at Alaska Studios in Alaska Street, Waterloo. Studio owner Pat Collier’s least favourite time to record was through the night, but it was cheaper for McGee, who estimates the Mary Chain’s sessions, funded by the Living Room club night, cost ‘about £172’. There were also fewer distractions, and the idea of the Mary Chain recording ‘Upside Down’ and ‘Vegetable Man’ in a studio under a grimy railway arch at the dead of night does seem somehow fitting.

  The day before the first session McGee and Joe Foster listened to a very specific clutch of records for inspiration and to be ‘surrounded by the right kind of noise,’ Foster recalls. ‘“Be My Baby”, “Nag, Nag, Nag” and all that kind of thing, to get into the right atmosphere.’ They also attempted to get some rest in during the day, which wasn’t easy. ‘Upside Down’ couldn’t have been a more appropriately titled debut.

  ‘I was at my mum’s place,’ says Joe. ‘I said, “Tomorrow I’ve got this recording at twelve and I’ve got to get up for that, so don’t wake me up early.” But she dutifully woke me up at 10 a.m. to start work at midnight. Right, OK, thank you . . . She was like, “I can’t believe Alan would make you work at midnight. He’s a good boy, he doesn’t do weird stuff like that,” and I was thinking, For God’s sake, you don’t know the half of it.’

  Come the witching hour, some rather conspicuous characters with guitars could be seen loping into Alaska Studios, once again with minim
al gear. Studio manager Pat Collier was already semi-prepared for this. ‘I’m going, “OK, what are we going to use for amps and drums?” And they said, “We’re going to use the Pastels’ gear.” This was par for the course. All the Creation bands would turn up and say, “We’re using the Pastels’ gear.”’

  It hadn’t occurred to anyone, however, to contact The Pastels in advance to make sure they could get into their equipment cage in order to actually use it. It was now past midnight and no one was picking up the phone. The solution? Good old brute force.

  Joe Foster says: ‘We just had to break into their cage and borrow their gear, which they were quite baffled by when they found out. They were like, “If you’re going to break into someone’s equipment cage and steal something, aren’t you supposed to, like, keep it and not give it back?” And we were like, “Yeah, but we were only borrowing it.” We just had to buy them a new padlock.’

  Pat Collier hauled the gear out of the cage only to find that the bass drum skin was, as he remembers it, ‘pretty much ripped in half. At midnight there’s not much you can do, but we got around it. I gaffer-taped a bit of plywood to the skin, so there was no drum sound but it went “click”, and I used that to trigger a Linn drum, which would just give you a sampled bass-drum sound.’