Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  And regarding The Jesus and Mary Chain’s first major record deal? ‘They hadn’t said a word to me,’ says Geoff, ‘but Alan said, “Oh, don’t worry,” and they loved Subway Sect, and I think that was enough. So we negotiated the deal, which was pretty straightforward, and we signed them.

  ‘Our relationship with them was always quite odd, though. They were always distant. They’re very insular, very Scottish, they were fiercely proud of what they were doing. They didn’t want to join in with the outside world that much.’

  Not long after the weirdest meeting in Geoff Travis’s history, The Jesus and Mary Chain had to fly down to the Warners office in London to sign the deal. It was a time of new experiences – apart from anything else, they’d never been on a plane before. Douglas Hart recalls: ‘When we came into land we got that pressure thing in our ears. No one had told us about it and we thought we were going to die.’

  To quell the inevitable nerves, the Reids and Douglas decided to down a few beers before the meeting. By the time they reached Soho they were, as Douglas breezily recalls, ‘pretty drunk.’

  The Mary Chain stumbled into the Warners building and were instantly ‘horrified at all the Dave Lee Travis types,’ says Douglas, with a note of disgust. Rob Dickins, then chairman of Warners, was an exception to the rule. He might not have loved the band in the same way that Travis and McGee did, but he believed in them. The Mary Chain, however, sensed immediately that most people at Warners, including those who would be promoting their records and supposedly fighting their corner, were repelled by the band. It was a culture clash, and the two sides would never have met in the middle without Travis as the bridge between them.

  Jim Reid says: ‘It’s like, if you could go back and do it again, this is something you’d change. The thing was, Warners or Rough Trade. Geoff was obviously trying to get us onto Rough Trade at first, but at the time it was like, you’ve got to be “indie”, and we were thinking, Why? To me at that time, the indie scene represented failure. The Sex Pistols were on Virgin Records, The Doors were on Warners . . . everybody that made me want to make music was on a major label, so I sort of thought, Well, we need a bankroll.

  ‘The joke is that Psychocandy and everything that went around it came to £17,000, and I’m thinking we needed a bankroll! We didn’t. We also hadn’t anticipated that the people at Warners would utterly despise us. The only one that seemed interested was Rob Dickins, but that didn’t filter through to the people doing the plugging. We should have grabbed Rough Trade, but Geoff was going to be involved no matter what, and thank God he was.’ The instant and overwhelming feeling of antipathy was not merely Mary Chain paranoia at work. Soon after their ill-fated visit to the WEA office, one of the Warners marketing executives told journalist Max Bell they were ‘the most revolting and disgusting group ever’. (With PR like this . . .)

  ‘He didn’t mean it as a compliment,’ said Bell at the time. ‘I couldn’t be bothered to point out that he was right, The Jesus And Mary Chain are guilty on all counts. That’s why they’re so welcome.’ Not everywhere, evidently.

  Perhaps it was because they were drunk and awkward; perhaps it was because, when you feel nervous and defensive you do things you normally wouldn’t. But the fact that most of the Warners collective weren’t too keen on the Mary Chain was not helped by a couple of small accidents that occurred during the band’s brief visit and a touch of mischievous graffiti on a poster of Rod Stewart.

  ‘On the stairs there was a poster for his latest record,’ says Douglas. ‘We drew on it. People did go mad, they genuinely were complaining. We were banned from Warners. “Never come here again,” you know. “You can’t do that to Rod Stewart.”’

  ‘It was embarrassingly juvenile,’ Jim cringes. ‘We drew a moustache on him. A bit of graffiti on gold discs. But it caused such a hoo-hah they were never going to let us in the building after that. Christ almighty . . .’

  To conclude this eventful afternoon, there was an incident on the staircase that, thanks to the Mary Chain’s reputation as rock’n’roll’s new bad boys, was seen as a deliberate act of violence. It wasn’t, but, as far as Alan McGee was concerned, the press didn’t need to know that. Cash from chaos.

  ‘Only the Mary Chain, specifically Douglas Hart, could do this,’ Alan says. ‘They had all the gold records on the wall, and on the first floor, Douglas, because he’s basically nuts, was . . . well, he was walking down the side of the wall. He managed to take down about three or four gold, silver and platinum discs. And because he was just a clumsy guy, he also managed to kind of smash the wall up.

  ‘It looked to the world as if we’d smashed the place up. The truth was that Douglas Hart didn’t know how to walk down a flight of stairs. Of course we went and said, “Yeah, not only did we smash the place up, we stole Rob Dickins’ wallet.” That made the national newspapers. I thought, We’re going to get hung anyway. Everyone played along and The Sun printed it.’

  ‘We were drunk,’ says Douglas with a shrug. ‘There was a bit of elaboration, but that’s the way of the world. Up in East Kilbride we’d read NME and the gossip columns and we thought it was all gospel, but then you realise it’s not quite . . .’

  Alan McGee was living the dream, teasing the music papers with stories about the Mary Chain being arrested for possession of speed, ‘destroying a radio station’ (William and Jim were having a spat in the foyer of Capital Radio in Leicester Square) and building on their troublesome aura. It worked from the point of view of attracting attention and remaining in the press – even the tabloid press, where bands at the time, especially alternative ones, rarely featured. On the other hand, it was also magnetising the kind of trouble the Mary Chain themselves never wanted to be involved with. Still, McGee was in his element, and he freely admits that part of the thrill of what was unfolding was that he was closer than ever to emulating his idol, Malcolm McLaren. ‘All I wanted to be was Malcolm,’ he admits. ‘I’m not in denial of that. If you’re going to have a hero, you might as well have the best one.’

  McGee had to take some stick for his obsession with his fellow flame-haired Svengali, particularly because he had seemingly assimilated the entire script of Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, regurgitating lines from it as if they were his own words. Jim Reid says: ‘We used to take the piss out of him mercilessly. He would say things and we would say, “Alan, that is actually in The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.” I remember him saying, “Jim, we’re not going to play any of those rock’n’roll houses . . .”, and I thought, I’ve heard that before.’

  After a quiet Christmas in Scotland, The Jesus and Mary Chain would have to return to London again before the old year was through, and it was clear that, fairly soon, it would make more sense to leave East Kilbride and move down to London for the foreseeable future. They emerged from the post-Christmas ennui to play ICA Rock Week on the Mall, near Buckingham Palace, on 29 December 1984.

  It was also Jim’s twenty-third birthday, and it was on this afternoon that he bought his prized (but later pinched) Vox Phantom guitar from Alan McGee for £150. ‘It was,’ Jim recalls, ‘quite an eventful day.’ And that’s not even including the gig. The Jesus and Mary Chain might have played it down but they were the band to see, and their show at the ICA, supported by These Tender Virtues and Shelleyan Orphan, had been fully booked for months.

  Meanwhile, a young French music fanatic called Laurence Verfaillie was making her way over to England on the ferry to see this very gig. Laurence had made the crossing the previous month to see the Mary Chain at the Ambulance Station, but, due to stormy weather, her ferry was kept just outside Dover for hours while the Mary Chain took to the makeshift stage some 75 miles away. She was not going to miss them this time.

  Laurence Verfaillie was first captivated by The Jesus and Mary Chain’s music after hearing their first Peel session with her friend Aline, who ran a fanzine called Agent Orange. Both friends were serious about their music, and when they fir
st heard the Mary Chain it was like an epiphany. The fact that there wasn’t as much deliberate distortion or feedback on the Radio 1 session wasn’t a problem for those tuning in from abroad, who were listening on crackly medium-wave. Laurence says: ‘The reception was so bad we didn’t know what was actually part of the sound or not. But we really thought there was something interesting there, we were hearing the song as opposed to the production.’

  After her previous experience of missing the band, Laurence made sure she reached the ICA, in cold, grey central London, in plenty of time. There was just one problem: oblivious to the group’s surging popularity, Laurence Verfaillie hadn’t booked a ticket in advance.

  ‘I turned up innocently and the guy looked at me and laughed and said, “Darling, it’s been sold out for God knows how long.” I started causing an absolute commotion, saying: “I came all the way from France to see them! Let me in!”’

  Laurence would not be placated, and out of desperation a member of the ICA’s front-of-house staff rushed inside the venue to find Alan McGee. ‘Never to be forgotten,’ says McGee. ‘Someone demanded that I come to the front desk because some French woman who I’d never met in my life was kicking off that she wanted to get in.’ Little did he realise that the woman causing a righteous scene at the entrance of the ICA would, in years to come, work closely with him at Creation Records, and be a lifelong friend. She certainly made an impression, however. ‘I was pretty feisty back then, but she just shouted at me until I let her in,’ he says, still incredulous.

  *

  Laurence went up to the bar, squeezing through hordes of people, all of whom were talking feverishly about The Jesus and Mary Chain. What amused Laurence was that at least three members of the band were lurking in the bar themselves but either no one had spotted them or no one had the confidence to approach them. As Laurence puts it, the likelihood was that it was still so early in their legend that not many people really knew what they looked like.

  The Jesus and Mary Chain’s appearance at the ICA was a landmark, and it pointed the way forward for the band. But as always, it elicited mixed feelings. ‘It was short and pretty non-musical, as I recall,’ says Jim. ‘We’d do too much drugs or drink too much and just get into the noise aspect of it. It was good.’

  Bobby Gillespie says: ‘It felt like we were the Pistols, there was a feeling that everybody wanted to see this band. It was a really exciting thing to be part of. I knew we were great and there was no compromise. And you never knew what was going to happen.’

  Geoff Travis was in the audience, accompanied by Rob Dickins. Dickins might not have entirely got the group, but ‘he was nodding away,’ Geoff remembers. ‘He realised something was happening. They were brilliant in those days, like molten lead pouring off the stage.’

  Alan McGee is less romantic in his memory of that night. ‘They went on for fifteen minutes, made a noise, I don’t know if they even completed a song. Jim called the entire audience cunts. They all got upset. People were shouting abuse at me, going, “You’re a rip-off bastard.” I just went, “Go fuck yourself.”’ William Reid’s take on the band’s early exodus from the stage was that, quite simply, ‘We just got bored. I think it’s fairly honest.’

  The feedback howled as the group left the stage, leaving a lot of people ‘extremely puzzled,’ as Laurence puts it. Within a noisy, anarchic quarter of an hour, they left a divided audience – some in raptures, some outraged, most wondering whether they’d ever hear again. ‘It went into chaos, but there was so much energy,’ Laurence says. ‘You know when you hear live recordings, everyone goes mad at the end, and there’s all the feedback in the encore – but this gig was that, the gig was the encore. They completely let go from the first moment. It was mind-blowing.’

  At the volume Jesus and sons play at, anything is enervating and psychologically disorienting; I felt quite violent and didn’t like it at all.

  Ralph Traitor’s review of The Jesus and Mary Chain at ICA Rock Week, Sounds

  11

  Escape From EK

  I don’t lose sleep thinking about Wham!

  Jim Reid, 1985

  The band’s star was rising and the time had finally come to move on from East Kilbride, although Bobby Gillespie would stay in Glasgow as he was still developing Primal Scream. There was no pressure on Bobby to choose between bands at this point, but even though Primal Scream was his own group, he still felt more connected to the Mary Chain.

  ‘I was just happy to be part of it,’ he says. ‘I didn’t really feel part of Primal Scream at that point. The Mary Chain’s thing was more fully formed. And they had better songs.’

  Because Jim had lived in London in pre-Mary Chain days, staying in cheap, down-at-heel hotels in Earls Court, in January 1985 Jim, William and Douglas checked in at one of the hotels Jim had stayed at before, a shabby bed and breakfast then known as the Hunters Hotel on Trebovir Road. The hotel boasted such benefits as ‘hot and cold running water’, and it was just a few moments from Earls Court underground station. The Mary Chain crammed themselves into a family room to save money, and paid for it between themselves. It was one of the strangest places they had ever lived, replete with seedy Pinteresque intrigue and assorted maniacs. Memories of living on Trebovir Road are still etched on the Mary Chain’s respective memories.

  ‘We’d never seen prostitutes or junkies before,’ says Douglas, ‘and suddenly we were in this insane place. We were broke, but it was a real adventure. There was a block of hotels in Earls Court and William Burroughs had lived in one in the 1960s two doors down. It was like something out of a Harold Pinter play, total Birthday Party. People in their pyjamas wandering about, you could hear people fucking, fighting . . .’

  ‘Weird place,’ says Jim. ‘There was a Polish immigrant that lived in a cupboard under the stairs. He was a wee bit not right upstairs. They let him live there just to do maintenance work. He was nuts. We had these big brothel-creepers and we’d stomp downstairs to go out and he’d jump out and shout at us. He’d be waiting for us.’

  Tempting as it must have been to stick around at the Hunters Hotel – which sounds like a real-life version of the dilapidated Happiness Hotel in The Great Muppet Caper, only with a bit less happiness and presumably fewer musical numbers – it wasn’t long until the Reids and Douglas found some cheap bedsits in nearby Fulham. The flats might have been fleapits, but it was an exciting time, filled with possibility, and with no parents or hotel receptionists to slink past. For the first time in their lives William and Jim would be living separately, and Douglas would also be in his own place after years of sharing not just a bedroom but a bed with his older brother back in East Kilbride.

  The advance had come through from Blanco Y Negro, which meant that finally they were able to sign off the dole. For William, this was partially a disappointment, as he was a whisker away from his fifth anniversary of signing on. ‘He was going to celebrate it,’ McGee says. ‘He was pissed off that he never got to do that. That’s not even a joke.’ Still, independence was theirs for the first time.

  ‘We were all living round the corner from each other,’ says Jim. ‘But Douglas’s flat was horribly damp, so he moved in with me for about six weeks. We slept in the same bed like Morecambe and Wise, reading the paper with our pyjamas on. Not very rock’n’roll.’

  Despite the Fulham years being a happy time, some of the neighbours were a little offbeat, to say the least. ‘There was this nutter woman,’ Jim says. ‘We used to hear her having arguments with herself at 3 a.m. She’d be screaming, and then there’d be a pause where you knew that she was hearing voices, and then she’d scream, “You fucking . . .” Then there was this toff called Adrian who lived next door to me. He used to have friends over to play charades on a Friday night.

  ‘To top it off, there was this psychotic Scottish drug dealer called Archie, and he was bad news. I was always terrified he would figure out that we were in a band. He’d have broken into my shabby little room.’

  On one
occasion, William came over to use the communal bathroom. Just as he was getting out of the bath, the door was unceremoniously kicked in by the drug dealer, his face covered in blood. ‘He needed to wash it off,’ explains Jim. ‘You’d get out of there quick. Having said that, I lived there for years.’

  *

  All the while, the Reids had been working on new material. They were and always have been prolific songwriters, and the future months were already being mapped – there were more gigs, more sessions for John Peel and, first things first, it was time to record ‘Never Understand’, the band’s first single release on Blanco Y Negro.

  ‘We’d made “Upside Down” in the studio Alan used to use,’ Douglas says. ‘But obviously Geoff knew everyone, and he suggested we do it with Stephen Street at Island Studios.’

  Island was based in Ladbroke Grove, West London, a stone’s throw from Rough Trade. The studio was imposing and sterile, and the Mary Chain were not keen on where Stephen Street was trying to go with their song. Street, who had already worked with Rough Trade signings The Smiths among others, was pretty nonplussed himself. It probably didn’t help matters that the proposed title of the B-side they were recording was ‘Jesus Fuck’.

  ‘He was disgusted,’ Douglas recalls. ‘He was quite . . . well, it didn’t go well. He was shocked that I only had two strings on my bass and we couldn’t really tune up by ear; it was a bit of a clash. We stopped after a day. He’s a good producer, but not to do us at that point. No.’