Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story

by Zoe Howe

  This discreet attitude also meant that, in a way, a purity was retained, Douglas observes, ‘We kept ourselves to ourselves. Nowadays if you get a band that has the level of publicity that we’ve had, they’d be going out with kiddies’ TV presenters and hanging out at parties, but we were sitting on our own watching the telly.

  ‘Even at the height of the fame we weren’t out every night getting wasted on drugs, no way. That helped us focus on the music, but talk about different times! And I think if one of us came in while we were making Psychocandy and said that he was going out with a kids’ TV presenter, he’d have been thrown out of the band.’

  A lot of time on tour in the US was spent listening to music, exploring junk shops and record stores and reading. Jim was an avid reader of biographies, and no second-hand book store was safe when the Mary Chain were in town. ‘Jim read about people like Lenny Bruce,’ says Laurence, ‘people with talent and who were really representative of Americana, but sick. Every time we came back our suitcase would be full of second-hand records, books and things like that.’

  The members of the touring party were collectively fascinated by almost everything they saw as they travelled across the US, from the landscapes to the truck stops to the evangelical bumper stickers. Particularly in New York and Los Angeles, the Mary Chain made a point of requesting a few extra days to explore before the tour moved off again.

  ‘When we arrived at any new city in the States, any free time would be spent looking for guitar shops,’ adds Laurence. ‘It was a total obsession with Gretsch and Gibson semi-acoustics and Les Pauls . . . and go-karting. Unfortunately you couldn’t bring back many things, but guitars, we did every second-hand guitar shop in every city.’

  Back in the UK, the news had broken that Bobby Gillespie was leaving the band, prompting many a sombre, big-haired youth to wonder what it might be like to take his place. John Moore was one of them; he was just more determined than most. He was a huge fan of the Mary Chain, and when he picked up a copy of the NME from Knight’s, his local newsagents in Reading, and read the story, he knew somehow that this was his chance. It was, as he puts it, his ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory moment’. The fact he couldn’t play the drums was frankly neither here nor there.

  John Moore had already been to East Kilbride to soak up as much in the way of Mary Chain vibes as possible. His father was running a courier firm at the time, and occasionally John would run errands for him. The opportunity to deliver a package to Glasgow arose, and John was all over it. ‘I took the overnight train with the package to deliver to Sauchiehall Street by 9 a.m.,’ he says, ‘and I worked out from the train timetables that I could get a train to East Kilbride and have a look at where my favourite band came from.

  ‘East Kilbride was not what I expected. It was like a new town, it doesn’t really have the romance of granite buildings or fog. It was a bit boring, a bit nondescript, a bit like where I came from.’

  In order to have the full experience, John went to the high street and bought a black shirt from Topman, where he imagined Jim, William and Douglas had bought their own black shirts. He was going all-out. ‘I tell Jim this and he says I sound like a fucking stalker,’ he laughs. ‘More of a charming enthusiast, I think . . .’

  One trip to Topman in East Kilbride does not a future in the Mary Chain guarantee, but fate was on John’s side. A friend of his from Reading had started working at Warners in Broadwick Street, Soho, and was intrigued to see pictures in the office of a group of ‘young men with a really bad reputation’ who looked just like John.

  John came into town to take his friend to lunch, and in the foyer of the office he spotted Alan McGee. The wheels were in motion. They’d already seen each other a week earlier at Tottenham Court Road Tube station, McGee noticing John because he looked distinctly Reid-like, and they shared a nod of semi-recognition. This time John decided to intercept McGee and broach the subject of being Bobby Gillespie’s replacement.

  ‘I said, “I play the drums.” He looked sceptical and he went up for his lunch with Rob Dickins or whoever it was. But then I went to see Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Scala in King’s Cross, the Joe Orton film. There must have been ten people in the cinema, but among them were William, Jim and Douglas. Then a couple of nights later, at a Sonic Youth gig, there was Jim again. We seemed to be at so many similar events that we got talking.’

  Jim says of those early meetings: ‘We’d kind of spotted John around the place; he was almost like a weird stalker. At the Sonic Youth gig John came up and said, “I saw you the other night.” I thought, Oh God, is he coming on to me or what? What’s going on? He was a bit of a hustler, you could see that. He’d spotted the drumming spot was vacant and he was going to go for it. It was McGee as well, he said, “There’s this bloke who looks just like William, and he wears leather trousers. I think you should get him.” We’re like, “Can he drum?” “Er . . . oh, I don’t know about that.”’

  Part of the appeal of hiring John, from McGee’s point of view, was that it would be good for the band to have someone ‘normal’ who could potentially lighten the mood. Alan arranged a meeting in the pub for John and the group, but when they met Jim laconically stated that they were ‘just going to have a friend of theirs from Glasgow, because they weren’t very good at meeting people’, as John recalls. ‘Never a truer word spoken. But they didn’t have any friends in Glasgow, didn’t have any friends anywhere. They were the most anti-social little clique of people you could ever imagine.’

  Jim clearly didn’t want to commit before he was sure, but the next time they bumped into each other, at a Primal Scream concert at the Dome in Tufnell Park, they were getting desperate. They had another American tour coming up, and still no drummer. ‘McGee said, “Listen, this is serious. Jim’s going to be here in a minute, and we really do need a drummer. Can you really play?”’ says John. ‘And I said, “Well, actually, no. I can’t.”’

  Moments after this bombshell, Jim turned up. After a few seconds spent mulling over the dilemma, he looked at John and said, ‘Can you learn?’

  * Extremely exuberant Irish comedian, TV host and much-loved motormouth.

  16

  Besotted Americans and Burst Eardrums

  I expected sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. Pretty much got it. No point in doing it otherwise.

  John Moore

  John Moore was given two weeks to pick up a new instrument from scratch. He was naturally musical, primarily a guitarist, but it took time, sweat and quite a lot of plasters to get himself up to Psychocandy standard on the drums. He took advantage of his father’s office in Reading after closing time and practiced through the night, a ghetto-blaster playing Psychocandy by his side. His hands blistered up to the point that they eventually turned into ‘one solid wound’, as he recalls with a wince. Still, mission Mary Chain was under way. (His father’s business would later come in handy regarding other matters Mary Chain. ‘I helped Jim and William move house later on, because I had a driving licence and my dad’s courier business had vans,’ John explains. ‘Talk about ingratiating yourself . . .’)

  An audition was arranged at Alaska Studios, where ‘Upside Down’ was recorded. Quietly confident in his abilities, John turned up and duly waited three hours for the Mary Chain to appear. They were still drunk from the night before and in no mood to play.

  Jim has no memory of this audition at all, so John tells the story: ‘We played a few songs, and at the end they said, “Don’t know . . . Your drumming wasn’t that good,” and I said, “Well, nor was your guitar playing!” “Aye, fair enough . . .” Always a sense of fair play in the Mary Chain.’

  The Reids eventually agreed to try him out at the end of the UK tour at Nottingham Rock City, a toilet-circuit sweatbox and heavy-metal stronghold known for its Hells Angels bouncers. McGee sent a train ticket to John in readiness for the journey. In the meantime, John practised, attended a couple of Mary Chain rehearsals and had a pre-gig pep-talk from Bobby Gillespie over coffee.
‘Bobby was very nice,’ John remembers. ‘He said, “It’s not really that difficult, the main thing you’ve got to do is duck when the bottles start flying.” He was so right.’

  The big day would soon arrive, and, after a final nervous primp of his thick black hair and no doubt one last panicky listen to Psychocandy, he left his parents’ house in Reading for the first leg of his journey to Nottingham. On the train he obsessed about the task ahead, hoping he’d pass the trial. He’d done everything he could to prepare: he’d watched Bobby’s last gig at the University of East Anglia, practised until his blisters had blisters, and ultimately he felt as ready as he’d ever be. He arrived in Nottingham five hours early.

  Walking up to the backstage entrance of the club, John was met by a pair of enormous hairy men, their arms covered in spider-web tattoos. Fortunately, they greeted him kindly and welcomed him in to wait for the rest of the band. The three Mary Chains finally arrived, like pale, angular apparitions, ambling into the comforting darkness of the club.

  John’s first gig is justifiably etched on his memory, not least because he would be the only one not drinking; he had to be able to trust himself to get the drum parts right. From the lateness onstage to the roar of the crowd to the shower of glasses that rained upon them when they appeared, every moment is still in bold relief.

  ‘You go from the corridor where there’s nothing happening to the stage, people’s faces pressed right up. Feedback. It was a really good gig. I might have been musically inept, but it sort of fitted. I’d been playing for about three weeks at that stage. Went on with the Moe Tucker set-up.’

  While it was, as Jim puts it, ‘a bit like having a fan in the band’, having John on board worked well. His cheerful nature quickly made him an asset, just as Alan McGee had predicted. ‘John fitted in straight away,’ says Laurence Verfaillie, ‘I think he had to handle more than he showed but he always came across as a joker, trying to kill a nasty situation with a joke. I liked him a lot.’

  ‘With Jim especially, I became very close,’ adds John. ‘I didn’t hang around with William, he was older and settled down with his girlfriend, and he’d become quite shy. Maybe having all that success had turned him slightly, just shocked him. He kept himself to himself. Jim was more into having a good time, as was Douglas.’

  There was something of a cultural difference between Jim, William and Douglas and their new member, but this only served to break the ice – particularly because there had been a recent news story stating that East Kilbride had the lowest life expectancy in the UK, while Wokingham, where John hailed from, had the highest. ‘I think they called me a Southern ponce about twenty-five times a day,’ says John. ‘He was like us though, more or less,’ adds Jim. ‘He just sounded like a bit of a fop.’

  *

  The band had entered their next phase when John joined the group, and not just in terms of having a new drummer. The Mary Chain were becoming more ‘business-oriented’, as Jim puts it. The sets became longer, up to an hour, and the band also decided to commit wholeheartedly to the mission of cracking America.

  ‘It sounds absurd,’ Jim admits, ‘because we’ve never been businesslike, but we were trying to be. We knew that if we fucked up and fell all over the place, we’d just be a mild curiosity and that would be it. We had no idea what to do, but had decided that a serious approach might be helpful.’

  John, meanwhile, had been hoping Rock City wasn’t a one-off – no doubt the Mary Chain were as poker-faced as usual after the gig – but any anxiety was allayed when McGee next contacted him. ‘He said, “Have you got a passport? We’re going to America for a month.”’

  One of John’s useful functions therefore was, he remembers, ‘working as a translator. At the time those accents were pretty indecipherable. Once you got past Hadrian’s Wall those guys could starve. You know, trying to order something in a café: “What? What’s he saying?” “I think the boys are saying: two plates of egg and bacon, one cup of tea and a side of fried bread please.” “Oh thank you! We haven’t eaten for days . . .”’

  One thing that surprised John was the fact that the Mary Chain rarely behaved in the way pop stars should, in his opinion. There was little in the way of glamour; the Mary Chain were not, as Douglas said earlier, into attending parties with models on their arms (or, God forbid, children’s-TV presenters), and there was a considerable lack of pools, jewels, Mars bars, ‘beautiful, doomed people. . . I thought it would be like The Rolling Stones, basically, a rock’n’roll-carnage lifestyle,’ says John. ‘There were bits that were like that, but it was a bit more prosaic and down to earth. To know that they ate beans on toast, or they had no food in their fridge, or they might have a Pot Noodle . . . pop stars don’t do that! You click your fingers and you have filet mignon brought in.’

  John’s first tour of America with the Mary Chain was memorable, even if it wasn’t going to rival the Stones’ travelling circus in terms of the antics, or indeed the menu. He’d been to the US before, but not in this context. Jim remembers with amusement watching MTV in the hotel with the rest of the band when the video of ‘Just Like Honey’ appeared on the screen. ‘John took a photo of the TV,’ Jim recalls. ‘“Ooh! Ooh!” Mind you, I was impressed myself. Fucking hell, we’re on MTV! I probably took a photo as well.’

  ‘The tour was really good,’ says John. ‘It was like going from nothing to headlining at the Ritz in New York. This was when we experienced elderly groupies hanging on to the side of the bus, going “We fucked Led Zeppelin, you chickens! Why can’t we come with you?” We were terrified. “Get them away! We’re innocent! No!”’

  The Mary Chain were idolised in the US – they mingled fearsome energy with troubled love songs, sex appeal and a doleful remoteness, and this recipe was proving irresistible. Their popularity soared. But still, if anyone tried to barrel their way backstage after a gig, they would be given short shrift. Or no shrift. Silence.

  ‘People were frightened,’ John explains. ‘The reputation was more severe than most people’s, still is. People would have to be quite brave to approach, so there weren’t that many people making arseholes of themselves, coming in and trying to take over, “Let’s all have a party!” Actually, you wouldn’t want to go to a party that The Jesus and Mary Chain were at. That wouldn’t be a party.’

  However, this glacial force-field wouldn’t always protect the Mary Chain from the lunatics, ranging from boring to terrifying, who trail bands and try to pierce the membrane that separates fans from stars however they can. Jim, being the front-man, was normally the one who had to ward them off.

  ‘Oh, we got the nutters,’ Jim confirms, heaving a sigh as the memories flood back. ‘More than our fair share. You’d get guys in the front row, so they must have queued up for hours to get that spot, and they’d spend the whole gig going, “You fucking arsehole!” I’d be thinking, Why did you come?’

  ‘There was one guy in New York, I swear to God, it was like Travis Bickle [Robert de Niro’s psychotic character in Taxi Driver]. He was just staring at me. He looked evil. I thought, Well, what can happen? I just laughed at him. But then, oh God, this guy’s climbing on stage. One bouncer comes along and Bickle’s kicking the shit out of him, then two, three. I thought, I’m going to get my arse kicked, or worse, in front of a live audience. Thankfully, three or four bouncers managed to hold him down. But we were like a magnet for that kind of weirdo.’

  One highlight of this tour, apart from surviving the determined attentions of Travis Bickle, was a gig at the Santa Monica Civic Center, ‘where Bo Diddley played on his TV special in 1961’, John says proudly, a large picture of himself and Bo just feet away from us on his wall as we speak. ‘You know, The Doors played here, everyone’s played here and now we’re doing it! And we only played for 25 minutes.

  ‘There were people who’d felt robbed, but other people thought that, you know, if we’d tried to do a full set they’d have felt cheated. But 25 minutes was like a lifetime . . . and Bruce Springsteen or The Jesu
s and Mary Chain? I know who I’d rather see. Bruce Springsteen.’

  The Mary Chain’s sheer Scottishness, as John observed earlier, was a recurring challenge when it came to making themselves understood, especially in America, where ironically it was more important than anywhere to ‘meet and greet’ the record label and the press. Jim and William had to show up for daily interviews with magazines or radio stations, and practically every night there would be dinners with Warners representatives that the band could not wriggle out of if they wanted to build on their appeal in the US. This was not the sort of thing that came naturally to the Reids, but they took their responsibilities seriously and duly made themselves available. However, thanks to their Scottish brogue, it was all too easy for them to be misquoted by American journalists. This certainly resulted in some interesting misinformation appearing in the press.

  ‘Once a journalist asked Jim, “Which bands are you into?”’ says Laurence Verfaillie. ‘Jim of course mentioned The Stooges. They printed “the Bee Gees”. Jim was mortified.’

  The Mary Chain returned to the UK and, barely catching their breath, prepared to go straight into another tour, this time taking in mostly the northern cities: Sheffield, Liverpool, Coventry, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Blackburn and, once again, Manchester’s Hacienda, the penultimate stop before the tour concluded at London’s Hammersmith Palais on 8 May. At the Hacienda and the Hammersmith Palais the group were joined by Alan Moulder, who attempted to handle the Mary Chain’s sound. The Reids had surmised that, working in a respected London studio as Alan did, it would be a cinch for him to be their live soundman. It was not. ‘I had never done live sound,’ Moulder confesses. ‘I hadn’t a clue.’

  Despite this, the Hacienda show went well, and the following night at the Hammersmith Palais was truly great. The venue was packed and the atmosphere electrifying. The Mary Chain’s silhouettes loomed out of the flickering darkness, dry ice billowed around them like an eerie, illuminated mist from a horror movie, and the sound of William’s guitar feedback was huge. So huge, in fact, that during the Mary Chain’s final number, ‘Never Understand’, all the mid-range speakers blew, largely due to Moulder getting ‘a bit carried away’ on the desk and turning William up as high as possible, with literally explosive results.