Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  ‘Bobby was like the engine back then,’ says Jim. ‘I could be thinking, Well, I don’t know about this, how’s this going? And I’d turn around and look at Bobby and there’d be a big beaming smile on his face, and I’d think, It’s all right.’

  The audience was a mixture of Mary Chain devotees, people curious about the phenomenon and a significant injection of troublemakers. ‘And sure enough,’ says Neil Taylor, ‘what happened was: short set, garrulousness, the usual drunkenness, falling over, off the stage, and people either demanded more or thought, Right, this is the signal for us to have a good old knees-up and a fight.’

  Alan McGee and David Evans insist they genuinely didn’t expect things to kick off to the extent that they did. They certainly didn’t think their safety would be in jeopardy. Equipment was fair game, of course, at a Mary Chain show. Speaker stacks were being kicked over, gear was getting damaged – but the difference was that this time the fans were attacking it, not Jim Reid. This was not part of the show, although for those involved, no doubt it was simply a continuation of the violent energy and noise that had been conjured by the band.

  Bobby Gillespie viewed the escalating turbulence, which started before they had left the stage, with characteristic glee. ‘People were throwing stuff at us, I was the one picking up the drums and throwing them at people. I didn’t have any fear. North London Poly, hey, I was loving it!’

  Joe Foster, who was teaching at the Poly at that time, was horrified at what was unfolding, particularly when one of the burlier students managed to pull Jim off the stage. ‘It was bizarre, chaos, it was dreadful,’ Joe remembers. ‘Being – how can I put it? – an idiot, I dived into the audience and grabbed Jim. We tried to push ourselves back on to the stage, and that was when one of the student bouncers decided that was a good time to stop us. It was like, “Right, you are going to push us back so your rugby-playing buddies can give us a good kicking? That’s not going to happen.”’

  McGee was aghast, and within moments he’d hurled himself into the fray as well. The following day, Joe Foster would be fired from the college due to his involvement with the Mary Chain.

  As more police officers arrived, serving largely to inflame the situation even further, the Mary Chain escaped to the safety of the dressing room, barricading themselves in because, sure enough, a handful of marauding punters had come looking for them. ‘There were people smashing the door with fire extinguishers,’ says Douglas. ‘It was beyond funny, it was brutal.’

  Bobby Gillespie’s memory of it is slightly different; he was thrilled by the danger their presence seemed to have provoked. ‘When McGee came in and said, “They’re trying to get into the dressing room!” I was like, “Amazing!” I just wanted to wind as many people up as possible. I’d been waiting for my whole life to be at the eye of the storm, fucking right.’

  Once the situation calmed down and the hall was cleared, the group eventually emerged for an interview, seeming very much in control. Whether or not they were just masters of disguising their apprehension we can only guess, but their whispery nonchalance is certainly convincing.

  During the interview, Jim spikily defended an accusation that the guitars were out of tune by explaining that William’s was perfectly tuned, but his own was not because ‘mine is for kicking’. Douglas responded to an inevitable query about his two-stringed Gibson bass by telling the interviewer softly, but not without swear words, that they were the only strings he used, so what was the point in buying the other two? Jim followed this by quipping that ‘any more would confuse the guy’. The journalist asked how they felt about being described variously as both the best and worst group in the western hemisphere. William replied, after a contemplative pause, ‘My favourite colour is gold.’ For a supposedly ‘sociopathic’ group of young men, they knew how to give good quote.

  ‘I watched some of that footage recently,’ says Gillespie. ‘We were just trying to look cool. At the end I’m sitting on the stage saying, “I just want people to listen to the music. Listen to yourself! Who do you think you are?” We don’t look too scared in that film, do we? We look quite arrogant.’

  While the interview was underway, Neil Taylor was already on the phone to the NME, and the legend of the North London Poly gig was set in stone. ‘There were probably two days to go for press, and they pulled whatever story they had on page three and ran this. I always get cross about this because the sub-editor put the headline in that said “Jesus And Mary Chain Riot”. I didn’t refer to it as a riot, although it was pretty close; there were violent scenes. Then the band started going around saying, “It wasn’t a riot, it was that guy from the NME” or whatever, which is why I always raise it.’

  William often insisted there were never really any real ‘riots’ at all, just ‘the odd clown who thinks he’s Rambo, tap-dancing on the mixing desk’. Still, no amount of playing it down could change the fact that the increasing number of disturbances at their shows were becoming a concern, not just from the point of view of personal safety, but because violence was totally at odds with who the Mary Chain really were. ‘I hate it,’ said William at the time. ‘We’re trying to present ourselves as serious, not a Cockney Rejects, Oi! type of group.’

  The day after the North London Poly fiasco, the Mary Chain and McGee were on their way to Germany for a TV appearance. ‘It was fine, bit of sanity,’ says McGee. Naturally the press had already been in touch about the previous night’s madness, but McGee had put his real feelings on ice in a bid to release a dispassionate, Malcolm McLaren-esque statement: ‘The audience were not smashing up the hall, they were smashing up pop music . . . this is truly art as terrorism.’ The Situationists would have loved it.

  ‘It wasn’t cool though,’ he says now. ‘It went a bit weird, and after that point it was a little bit Cinderella going to the ball. I thought everybody knew we were taking the piss, and suddenly people were actually smashing things up and it wasn’t that funny. Even though we made the most of it, “art as terrorism” and all that, the truth of the matter was that we were going, “What the fuck happened there?”’

  13

  New York, Innocence Lost, Psychocandy

  It was happening really fast: from the time we got rejected from that Candy Club to making Psychocandy, it was one year.

  Douglas Hart

  When the Mary Chain played gigs outside of London, the response from the audience was never quite as physical. It was mainly in the capital that opportunists would appear just for the chance for a fight. The band might have sneered that they didn’t care, that the idiots fighting, and in many cases causing the gig to be curtailed, were just ruining it for themselves, but the violence was odious and, at times, frightening. Occasionally the promoter would have to pull the power in a desperate bid to pour cold water on a brewing skirmish. Meanwhile, the Reids just wanted people to pay attention to the songs they were trying to perform. Something had to change.

  *

  ‘People would be throwing bottles at us and just missing us,’ says Douglas. ‘That’s not what we were about. We hated and avoided violence: we’re not neds, we didn’t get off on fights. We were the kind of guys who’d be chased around town by people like that, we didn’t want them coming to our gigs. I’m sure Alan saw that, but I think he got caught up in it.’

  It was agreed that the Mary Chain would have a break from playing shows in London to allow things to cool off, and this would give them the perfect opportunity to work on their debut album at John Loder’s studio. But first they had a trip to New York to look forward to, organised by the late US promoter Ruth Polsky.

  Polsky was well known; she had brought The Smiths to the US and was the promoter who had organised the US Joy Division tour that never happened, due to the tragic suicide of singer Ian Curtis on the eve of the trip. This would be the first time the Mary Chain had ever been to the US, and though they were playing just two shows they were booked to stay in New York for a week.

  ‘Ruth Polsky was a wonderful lad
y, and that trip was magical to me,’ says Jim. ‘I mean, the idea of going to New York is pretty cool anyway, but we had only signed off the dole in January. By April 1985 we’re playing in front of an audience in New York City.’

  They had to get there first, though, and McGee admits this was the first time he’d ever had to think about getting a band over to the US. He was a one-man operation with ambition, a telephone and a lot to learn. ‘I was just 23 when I found them, and 24 when they started getting big,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know about getting visas, because I’d never had a band that anybody in America had wanted to put on. We didn’t even know anybody who had done it. I basically had to find out – I know it sounds mental – how to do the forms and send the equipment over, get the visas. Now you’d just hire a tour manager, but we were so young and naïve.’

  Thankfully, Alan managed to organise everything in time, and soon they were wandering Times Square, sightseeing and enjoying springtime in New York (which was, as Douglas remembers, ‘just like an episode of Kojak’). It was quite a contrast to the gloom of London and the wide-eyed Mary Chain were dazzled by the experience of simply being there.

  The general innocence in the Mary Chain camp would inevitably be eroded but during this first trip to New York it was still relatively intact. However, the Warners executive sent to meet them didn’t know that. Assuming this rock’n’roll band would be requiring some entertainment, he turned up with a pair of prostitutes.

  ‘He was a real old-school music guy,’ Douglas remembers. ‘I think he was thinking back to the 1970s. We were just like: “Hi! Do you come from round here then? What school did you go to? Do you like Subway Sect?” I was going, “Do you like If . . .?”, and they were like, “F?” “No, the film If . . .” They eventually just said, “Don’t you wanna fuck us?” We were innocents abroad. We were corrupted over the next few years, though.’

  For many young men, the whole point of being in a rock band is the ego trip: the praise, the parties, the legitimate wearing of leather trousers and, most importantly, the guaranteed no-strings sex with nubile women. However, groupies were, comparatively speaking, not the Mary Chain’s scene by all accounts. This attitude was quite punk – many UK punk and post-punk groups proclaimed groupies to be just another sleazy element of the priapic excess associated with faintly embarrassing rock dinosaurs.

  ‘I think some of the American promoters assumed they were gay,’ says Laurence Verfaillie, by now Jim’s girlfriend. Apart from anything else, as William himself put it – albeit evidently speaking from some experience – ‘there’s nothing worse than waking up next to someone you don’t even know or like’. Some of the reluctance to indulge at the time might also have been down to sheer familial awkwardness. ‘Imagine trying to pick up girls in front of your little brother,’ William cringed in an interview with sometime bandmate John Moore.

  This isn’t to say the Mary Chain were unaware of the effect they had on their audiences. They knew sex was an intrinsic part of rock’n’roll. As soon as you put anyone on a stage, they are instantly more desirable. Give them a guitar, sexier still. The Mary Chain had the advantage of being cool, stylish and toothsome in the first place. There were no illusions as to why there were a large number of girls at their gigs.

  ‘On stage we’re one of the sexiest groups you can imagine,’ Jim dead-panned at the time. ‘Three or four guys in leather, rolling around showing their backsides to the audience. All I know is that we get tons of screaming young girls. If a gig doesn’t have sex, there’s something wrong.’

  The trip to New York would be a baptism of fire as far as drugs were concerned. The Mary Chain were no strangers to mind-altering substances but they were now being inducted into a new league of showbiz drug-taking. Alan McGee says he’d ‘never seen so much cocaine in my life. Ruth Polsky fancied Douglas, and Lord knows what went on in that room but he was in there for a long time. There was a mountain of cocaine on the table. I don’t even know if I took any, but I do know I started wearing shades around that time. I’ve stopped now. It was one of my phases. Now I’m trying to look like a Welsh farmer.’

  The Mary Chain were booked to play two nights at the Danceteria, a hip four-floor nightclub frequented by the likes of Madonna. There they would play to their biggest crowds yet, though the audiences were largely made up of curious punters and regulars – no-one knew who they were, with the exception of the handful of people from the record company.

  The first night had an alternative, indie feel, and inevitably drew in people who ‘looked a bit like us,’ according to Jim. However, the second night was not aimed at the usual Mary Chain crowd. ‘There were people break-dancing,’ Jim recalls with amusement. ‘We were playing away there, doing what we do, and there were these guys who seemed to be digging it but it was all baseball caps on backwards and spinning about on the floor. It was surreal!’

  ‘There were 200 Anglophiles and then about 1,000 people who were just roller-skating,’ adds McGee. ‘Quite a bit of roller-skating going on there.’ Roller-skating to the sound of the Mary Chain: there’s an image. This certainly made a change from being attacked by morons who weren’t even listening.

  Stimulated by the welcome culture shock, after the gig McGee and Jim headed out into the New York night to another club, eventually returning to their hotel via Times Square. They were on a high, undoubtedly in more ways than one, and as they walked, Jim and Alan found themselves surrounded by such glorious, almost clichéd sleaze that it was hard not to feel as though they were on a movie set. Their education continued.

  McGee says: ‘We walked past all the prostitutes, and – this was not one of my better moments – I was shouting out, “Hey darlin’!” They threatened to stab us! They knew we were out of our depth. I think they were probably men.’

  The Mary Chain spent the week in an overstimulated daze. They’d grown up with American culture and were obsessed with American film and style. Douglas remembers that New York stint with the band as ‘the best week of my life’ (even if he often had to be left behind when the others headed into nightclubs – unlike the others, he really was still a teenager and the bouncers were strict). Returning to England, having survived, thrived indeed, in New York City, the Mary Chain and Alan McGee would view their situation with a fresh perspective.

  The thrill of New York and first-time transatlantic travel had barely worn off, and suitcases were still half-unpacked on the floors of the Mary Chain’s bedsits, but they had to get back into studio mode to work on their album, Psychocandy. They were welcomed back to Southern by John Loder, who was as generous as always – and being trusted by someone like John meant they rose to the occasion even more. That’s not to say they were ever going to slack off; this was their first album, after all, and they took the whole process very seriously. There would be no alcohol in the studio. ‘Occasionally we’d take a line of speed,’ says Jim, ‘but we wouldn’t get out of it.’ Speed was useful, enabling more to be done in a shorter space of time, but William ‘hated it. I just couldn’t stand it,’ he recalled. ‘Then I met a girl who turned me on to marijuana, and that was that.’ Still, it would be some time before the Mary Chain allowed themselves to get stoned in the studio.

  An average day was, as Jim recalls, ‘quite civilised’. They would get up, sling on some clothes and catch a cab from Fulham, arriving at Wood Green for midday. After a fry-up at the local Wimpy Bar, they were ready to work. ‘Later, we’d have dinner, stop at about 9 p.m. and then go home,’ says Jim.

  ‘We made the album during the day, totally straight,’ Douglas adds. ‘Go to the Wimpy for tea . . . it was a really happy time because we knew we were making something that would stand the test of time. It’s not like we discussed it, but we knew. There was a quiet confidence.’

  Before they’d even entered the studio, William in particular had a clear idea of how he wanted the album to sound. As with every other element of the Mary Chain, what would often look effortless or accidental was considered and decided upon
. ‘William had thought about how they were going to mix the record,’ says Bobby. “They had the image sorted, how they were going to record, even what you should and shouldn’t say in interviews. Very rigorous.’

  A song that was recorded relatively early on at Southern was ‘You Trip Me Up’, a melodic paean to troubled love and abused feelings, turning from melancholy (I walk sideways to avoid you, when I’ve annoyed you) to the sly, teasing: I’d like to trip you up. The lyrical contrasts were echoed by musical contrasts, sweet simplicity crashing into distorted dissonance. Geoff invited Pat Collier, who had engineered the first single ‘Upside Down’, to mix the track.

  By this time, the Reids had, as Alan McGee observes, ‘started to gain control of making the album. They didn’t need babysitting. I would just go up once a week, they’d play me something, and then I’d go home.’

  Tim Broad was commissioned to make the video for ‘You Trip Me Up’, but while the mood and setting would be quite different from the promo for ‘Never Understand’, the glum wariness of the Reids and the slightly cockier attitudes of Bobby and Douglas were still present and correct on the finished result. Location-wise, they were a long way from an abandoned warehouse in Wapping; this time Tim wanted guaranteed sunshine. It was decided that the Algarve would be ideal; Tim had checked the weather reports and was satisfied that the conditions would be typically sunny and bright. When the Mary Chain arrived it rained non-stop for four days. There was a heatwave in London, naturally.

  Jim and William were keen to emulate the kind of music videos The Monkees used to make, ‘where it’s not necessarily about the playback of a song and a band performing,’ Jim explains. ‘It was more the band walking along a beach in a sunny location.’ Or that was the idea. Fortunately there was half a day of good weather, and the group rushed to the beach and shot the video as quickly as they could. The sight of such (temporarily) beautiful weather and the black-clad, squinting Mary Chain provided just the juxtaposition that Tim wanted.