Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  ‘It was quite problematic making that record,’ Jim adds. ‘We just couldn’t get it right. We knew what the record should sound like, and there’d be this guy in the middle trying to take it somewhere else. What’s the point in that?’

  Geoff has no memory of recommending Stephen Street at all, however. ‘That wouldn’t make any sense,’ he says. ‘They did try to work with Stephen Hague, and they spent three days trying to get the drum sound, and William just said, “This is a waste of time.” Conventional producers bored them. Later on, Daniel Lanois wanted to produce them. He had a house in New Orleans and all the gear in there. William said, “I’m not leaving Archway.”’

  However, Geoff Travis’s subsequent suggestion of recording at the late John Loder’s Southern Studios in Wood Green, North London, was, as Douglas puts it, ‘genius’. ‘Geoff told us about this guy who had a studio in his garden,’ says Jim. “He said, “I think you’re going to like this guy.” I thought, Here we go again . . .’

  Loder was like no engineer they’d worked with before, and Southern, set up with the anarcho-punk group Crass, reflected his relaxed attitude. It had an atmosphere that was conducive to lateral thinking, freedom and creativity. McGee says: ‘Crass have now become incredibly hip, but in 1985 they were about as hip as the UK Subs. We knew deep down it was cool. It just wasn’t hip. It was smelly. But Loder was a nice guy.’

  Far from trying to impose his ideas or try to patronise the relatively inexperienced group, Loder would set everything up, head back to the main house where he ran Southern Records, light a spliff and simply be on call in case anything got blown up.

  ‘We immediately hit it off with John,’ says Jim. ‘He was exactly what we were looking for. He just set all the faders up and left us to our own devices. Obviously we didn’t know what we were doing and we fucked up a lot, but it was great. We’d sit there and press buttons. “This is pretty good! I think I broke something but it sounded good!”’

  The band were learning as they went, and, as they recorded, certain elements of the song evolved, particularly the lyrics. ‘Never Understand’ would end up featuring an homage to American garage rock band The Seeds, of ‘Stranded’ fame. Bobby explains:

  ‘If you listen to “Never Understand”, on the original, Jim sings “Looking too hard and you just can’t see me . . .”, and I said, “Change it to ‘pushing too hard’ as a tribute to The Seeds.” And he did.’ The song ends with a tangle of noise; the Reids wanted to make it sound as if everything was descending into a violent maelstrom. William provided ‘most of the yelling,’ Jim recalls. ‘He was good at shouting.’

  The pairing of the Mary Chain and Loder evidently worked, and it would be at Southern Studios that the band would record their first album, Psychocandy. ‘Never Understand’, meanwhile, was released in February 1985, the first of their records to chart. The finished product was the ideal next step from ‘Upside Down’, another major-key vocal melody murmuring through a screech of feedback and relentless snare cracks. Lyrically, the song echoes ‘Upside Down’s sense of alienation, but a wasted confidence and carelessness pushes ‘Never Understand’ somewhere else. ‘The sun comes up, another day begins/And I don’t even worry about the state I’m in./Head so heavy and I’m looking thin/but when the sun goes down I wanna start again . . .’

  A video was made to accompany the track by the late Tim Broad, who took the group to a disused warehouse in Wapping to film them playing along with the song. There was no high concept here; the Mary Chain didn’t need one. Watching the video to ‘Never Understand’ is basically as close as you can get to seeing how the group manoeuvred live at that time – hunched over guitars, swearing, physically clashing, knocking over drums – only a little more self-conscious than they would have ordinarily been.

  ‘If you see the videos, you can see the connection between the four boys,’ explains Bobby. ‘It’s emotional. Crashing into each other, it’s quite homoerotic. It’s interesting. We were young, not sexually experienced. It’s just a need for connection, it’s not that you fancy the other guys.’

  ‘Jesus Fuck’ was still the track that the Mary Chain wanted on the B-side, but this was not to be. Geoff Travis insists there was never a problem at Blanco, but ‘they might have been a bit disturbed at the pressing plant’.

  Alan McGee says: ‘The old-age pensioners who put the records in the sleeves at Warners, they were a staff of 67-year-olds and they all went to church. I’m not even taking the piss. Of course somebody took offence. It had to be changed.’ The alternative? The still relatively salacious ‘Suck’.

  Jim Reid told the NME’s Mat Snow: ‘“Jesus Fuck” was downright repulsion at how sacred the name Jesus was. People seriously think this little group making an obscure little record called “Jesus Fuck” is going to do any harm?’

  The song ‘Jesus Fuck’ really was just Jim screaming ‘Jesus! Fuck!’, and was born of his usual sound-check routine. McGee recalls: ‘He’d go, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Jesus! Fuck!” It was kind of catchy.’ The rejected B-side would eventually see the light of day (after being forgotten by the Reids themselves for years) when Psychocandy was reissued in 2011.

  In true lo-fi Mary Chain style, the single was promoted with a poster created by Jim Reid and Douglas, scribbled vigorously in crayon. The original is still on the wall of Geoff Travis’s office. Douglas says: ‘I remember Geoff saying, “We need a poster for ‘Never Understand’,” so we were like, “Give us a bit of paper . . .”’

  *

  McGee had organised a UK tour around the release of ‘Never Understand’, but when the group played Brighton Pavilion on 2 February 1985, the sense of turmoil in the audience always simmering at Mary Chain gigs was now manifesting in a more sinister way. ‘The first real signs of trouble coming were in Brighton,’ says Jim. ‘We got bottled off.’

  Up to a point, the Mary Chain would often feel as if they were surrounded by such a strong psychological force-field that they were invincible even as missiles whistled past their heads, but this was the first gig that saw the audience turn. Who knows whether discord was sparked simply because the Mary Chain seemed to have a gift for inadvertently inciting a collective experience of exhilaration, frustration and confusion with their music – emotions that the band themselves often felt? All we do know is that the concert quickly spiralled into a very angry situation, and the Mary Chain were under siege. Bobby tells the story: ‘We were playing, then suddenly we looked up and there was a guy on top of the PA, throwing stuff at us. I stopped playing. Jim was singing, but I was like, “This guy . . .” At this point I got smacked in the face with a plastic glass, then I started throwing stuff back at the audience, then more stuff came.

  ‘My girlfriend Karen was at the side of the stage and she got smacked in the head with a bottle. She had a lump like a tennis ball coming out of her skull. That was four songs in.’

  Jim Reid says: ‘Not taking any of this, I got back on stage with our fee and waved it at the audience, Loadsamoney-style. They were lobbing glasses at us.’

  ‘This was before the internet,’ adds Bobby. ‘If you’d had the internet then it would have been even worse. Everywhere you went would have been riots. It became the norm, see the Mary Chain, start a riot.’

  *

  The day after the Brighton gig, The Jesus and Mary Chain would have to shake off the insanity of the night before and head up to Maida Vale to record their second session for John Peel, to be broadcast ten days later. If they thought their first Peel Session was fraught between themselves and the engineers, this one would be worse. Their name and reputation had grown overnight, literally, and the studio hands were taking no chances.

  Jim Reid: ‘We wanted to break glass. There was an oil drum there so we said, “We’ll stick a bottle in there, put a mic in and record it.” The engineer said, “No way.” “We’ve been asked to do what we do here, and you’re saying we can’t?” And he said, “Not in my studio, sonny boy.”’

  ‘I don’t know
why we didn’t think of using a fucking sound effect,’ adds Douglas.

  The tracks recorded were ‘The Living End’, conjuring visions of the doomed biker in the Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader Of The Pack’, the Stoogesesque ‘In A Hole’ and ‘Just Like Honey’, which featured Bobby’s girlfriend Karen Parker on backing vocals. This was the latter song’s debut: it was so fresh that the Reid brothers were still writing the lyrics during the session.

  John Peel loved the Mary Chain, as did his listeners, and he would be inviting them back again soon. But in the meantime the band had a tour to do, although after the Brighton fiasco, in true Pistols-style repetition of history, some local authorities were quick to cancel gigs. The problem wasn’t so much the band as the fans who were attracted to them, but, as frustrating as this was for the Mary Chain, Alan McGee was rubbing his hands together.

  ‘I understood the media,’ he says. ‘Doing the gig or not doing the gig, it was almost as if it didn’t matter. We had so much publicity from being banned, more than if we actually played a good gig. The Mary Chain would be pissed off to have driven all the way to wherever to find they’d been banned, though. We got banned from half of the gigs we were booked to play, and of course, every time I’d be phoning the newspapers and they’d print it.’

  As an electric wind of tension crackled around the Mary Chain, the group must have been glad to cross the Channel for a night or two. A gig was booked at Les Baines Douches, a small but significant club in Paris, for 6 March 1985.

  McGee contacted Laurence Verfaillie, the Parisian Mary Chain fan who had made such an impression at the ICA, and she organised an interview with Bobby for her friend’s fanzine before the gig. After the interview was complete and night had fallen, Laurence took her place in Les Baines Douches as the room filled up.

  The club was just the size of an average pub back room, which made the energy of the show all the more concentrated. ‘It was as if the place was going to blow up. And it was packed, there were about 60 or 70 people. Of course,’ Laurence adds, ‘three months later about 500 people pretended they were there.’

  12

  Smashing up Pop

  For Alan McGee, the Mary Chain was a way that he could say ‘Fuck you’ to the world.

  Bobby Gillespie

  The twelfth of March 1985 was the date of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s appearance on the BBC’s legendary The Old Grey Whistle Test. It was their television debut, and although it wasn’t live, the producers were anxious about what might happen with The Jesus and Mary Chain on set. The main concern, perhaps unsurprisingly, was that they would turn up drunk and unruly, so it was arranged that they would be at the studio by 6 a.m. By their own admission it was rare for them to get up before 11 a.m. They got themselves through the ordeal in the most sensible way possible: not going to bed at all.

  ‘We thought, Six in the morning? Fuck that.’ Jim says. ‘We got wasted, then turned up with a big crate of booze.’

  Bobby Gillespie was panicking. Visions of a successful appearance on the Whistle Test were dissolving rapidly. ‘They were just knocking it back,’ he remembers. ‘I’m going, “What are you doing? We’re going to be on fucking TV!” and they’re going, “We’re shitting it, we’re totally nervous!”, I was thinking, You’re going to be too wasted to play! You can’t blow this.’

  ‘All of us would get nervous,’ Douglas says. ‘Bobby not so much, but Jim particularly, being the frontman. We’d have to drink, we needed it.’

  At least their inebriated thrash through ‘In A Hole’ would bring stunned TV audiences a taste of the live Mary Chain experience. The sound was fierce and atmospheric, by TV standards at least, and they looked impressive: Bobby in a checked shirt, mallets bouncing off the drums, the beat thudding rapidly like a heart about to burst, the Reids and Douglas stalking the stage in black leather and Ray-Bans. The song eventually seemed to wilfully dismantle itself, and by the end Jim sat down next to a half-collapsed Bobby, whacking the floor tom petulantly as William, on his knees, provided a constant scream of free, distortion-drenched guitar. Jim describes their appearance with his usual sang-froid: ‘It was all right. Nothing bad happened.’ But when the show was broadcast and the Mary Chain themselves watched it, huddled around the electric fire, within a moment a great swathe of the country was hooked.

  Future Mary Chain drummer and guitarist John Moore remembers seeing them on TV for the first time and realising that ‘it was “game over”. No point in starting a band. That’s the band . . . fuck, how could they? They’re doing what you should be doing! ‘I thought Douglas looked marvellous, Douglas Hart . . . my mother fancied him. God, she really did. Dirty old goat! “Ooh, that Douglas Hart, he looks like an Adonis!” With his hair and his big semi-acoustic bass and cheekbones. Yeah, iconic.’

  Jim’s main memory was not of how especially splendid Douglas’s bone structure looked under the lights, but rather a needless fracas between himself and the show’s producers. Just before going on set, Jim had spotted the Whistle Test mannequin on the studio floor, whipped off the dummy’s sunglasses and wore them for ‘In A Hole’. Then he broke them. Accidentally, of course, but ‘there was just such a big hoohah about it,’ he sighs. ‘For fuck’s sake, they cost a fiver, I’ll buy you a new pair. Do we need to have this big drama?’

  *

  From this point forth, opportunities for further TV exposure came thick and fast. As well as the live appearances, the video for ‘Never Understand’ was everywhere, and the music papers they had been so obsessed with as teenagers were now, in turn, obsessed with them. Bobby says: ‘It was so fast. Bang! But we definitely felt entitled to it. We felt, Yeah, we are the best band going. There’s nothing happening. We’ve got the spirit of punk and we’re going to rip a hole in the fabric of reality. It definitely felt like we were righteous. Whether we were, I don’t know.’

  If you were to ask Mick Houghton, press officer for Warners and Blanco Y Negro, he would assure you that they certainly were. Part of what enhanced their appeal was that magical James Dean blend of trouble, angst and, most importantly, unattainability – a quality that was becoming rarer by the day in the chirpy pop world of the mid-1980s.

  ‘Journalists were always apprehensive about meeting them,’ remembers Mick Houghton. ‘Interviews always took a while to get going. Neither side felt comfortable. We did interviews in a pub on Old Compton Street, the one that got blown up by a nail-bomb in 1999 [the Admiral Duncan].’ Alternatively, interviews would be conducted in a greasy spoon over cod and chips, a welcome change from that other culinary staple of the Mary Chain’s diet: the Pot Noodle.

  Beers, however, were always necessary for both Mary Chain and journalist. The band found it hard to relax in company at the best of times, and this, often interpreted as chilly indifference, meant it would take time for any kind of fruitful exchange to develop. But still, this helped to stoke their reputation for being enigmatic. Paradoxically, they seemed more in control as a result, no matter how nervous they actually were.

  ‘What they had,’ says former NME writer Neil Taylor, ‘and what all great groups tend to have, was a distinct air of being a sealed unit against the world, and you’re not always allowed into the inner sanctum. It was a similar thing with Morrissey and Marr from the Smiths.’

  *

  Tickets for their next gig, at the North London Polytechnic, sold quickly. The show was to take place on 15 March, the famous ‘ides of March’ of which the soothsayer in Julius Caesar bade the doomed emperor beware. It wouldn’t be quite as dramatic a situation for the Mary Chain, but there was quite a night in store. The band’s fan base had been growing daily, and by the time Neil Taylor walked through the doors at the North London Polytechnic on Holloway Road, the overriding feeling was that, in his words, ‘the beast is getting too big’.

  That night the Mary Chain would be supported by fellow Creation artists the Jasmine Minks and Meat Whiplash. Jasmines’ frontman Adam Sanderson was evidently anticipating trouble, much to the bemusement of th
e headline act. Bobby Gillespie says: ‘At the soundcheck Adam was saying, “Look at that.” He opens his Crombie and he’s got a hammer. I said, “Why have you got that?” And he said, “It’s gonna kick off tonight . . .”

  ‘He lived in a squat in King’s Cross, he must have heard people talking. He was going, “Aye, I’m ready for it. Any cunt comes near me, I’m gonna fucking brain them!” I was just like, That’s a bit much. Bit presumptuous.’

  The venue was already at capacity, but as the Mary Chain languished in the dressing room drinking determinedly, the door burst open. ‘Someone said, “There’s hundreds of people in the street who can’t get in,”’ says Gillespie. ‘Me and Douglas opened the fire doors. It was a punk gesture. Get everybody in!’

  Meat Whiplash, young lads from East Kilbride playing their first London gig, went on stage and were promptly hit by a missile. When the Jasmine Minks came on, the lead singer hurled a wine bottle into the audience. ‘Probably not a good way of starting,’ Neil Taylor observes.

  By the time the Mary Chain made their way onstage the atmosphere was seriously charged. For a while the anarchic rumble in the crowd was drowned out by sheer noise, as the Mary Chain’s live sound engineer David Evans, a former member of Biff Bang Pow!, remembers. ‘They never addressed the audience, but created this loud ad hoc feedback that stoked you into a state of excitement but also left you frustrated, hanging, waiting for the next song as false starts and messing around delayed it yet again. It really was something special, though.’ Fans were electrified by the North London Poly performance. One punter, asked by a TV journalist why he liked the Mary Chain, simply bellowed: ‘They’re noisy.’

  Bobby Gillespie says: ‘Every night would be different, free-form. William is a virtuoso guitar player. I always just had his guitar in my monitor. He’d start with these riffs and then he would go somewhere else, and that would inspire me to play harder. I’d take my cues from him and be sensitive to what he was playing. Then Jim told me that when he saw me go mad, then he would go mad as well.’