The Living Room
Britain in 1984 was fucking boring. I like ABC, but that was as exciting as it got: Martin Fry and his gold lamé suit. Then we found the Mary Chain.
Alan McGee
The Jesus and Mary Chain were booked to play Alan McGee’s Living Room on 8 June 1984, supporting Microdisney in the upstairs room of the Roebuck pub on Tottenham Court Road. The Roebuck already had some significant musical history: it was the site of David Bowie’s audition for manager Ralph Horton in the summer of 1965. He was still Davey Jones at that point, but not for much longer.
There was little danger of the Mary Chain over-rehearsing their set, which was at this point mainly covers, including Syd Barrett’s ‘Vegetable Man’ and Subway Sect’s ‘Ambition’, but their overall image and concept was becoming more honed by the day. However, they were still in need of a permanent drummer; Norman Wilson might have helped out on the demo of ‘Upside Down’, but he wasn’t right for the group and, to be fair, he didn’t seem particularly bothered himself.
To say they were cutting it fine would be an understatement, but during the early summer months of 1984, the Reids scribbled a homemade advertisement for a drummer on a scrap of paper, slunk into town and pinned it on the notice-board at Impulse, the record shop in East Kilbride. Like many record stores, it was something of a hub for young music fans, but no one ever saw this enigmatic trio in town, or at least a local goth called Murray Dalglish certainly hadn’t – although, as he observed, they must have gone in at least once to put the notice up.
‘They were quite insular,’ Murray remembers. ‘I would walk about in town for two or three hours at a time, go into Impulse, never saw them. And you definitely would have noticed them.’
Dalglish, a raven-haired sixteen-year-old fresh out of school, was a dedicated drummer who had picked up his skills in the Boys’ Brigade. He revered the impressive chops of Rush’s Neil Peart over the simple playing of The Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker. However, he also loved The Stooges and the Sex Pistols, and that was enough to make him answer the ad, which was just as well, because no one else did.
A date was set for a try-out at the local scout hut where the Mary Chain occasionally rehearsed, but when the time to audition arrived and William wandered in, he couldn’t hide his displeasure at the sight of Murray’s kit. It was hardly a 22-piece Neil Peart number, but equally, a minimal Moe Tucker set-up it was not.
Murray recalls: ‘I could see William’s face kind of . . . you know . . . There’s too many drums there! I had the full kit. They just plugged in, played a couple of songs, I just bashed at the kit and that was it.’
It was a big ask for anyone to fit in with The Jesus and Mary Chain. They existed in their own hermetically sealed bubble that rarely allowed anyone else in. But while the age gap was significant and their tastes differed, Murray did his best and he got the job. If the Reids had their reservations about Murray, it wasn’t because they found him lacking in competence; if anything, he tended to add nifty little rolls and flourishes where, in the Mary Chain’s collective opinion, there should have been none. For them it was more important to have attitude and a direct, no-frills style, and Murray would occasionally get a dirty look (or even a kick to the kit) if he threw in a fill where there shouldn’t be one.
On the night of 7 June, the first complete line-up of The Jesus and Mary Chain made their way to the bus station on Churchill Avenue, East Kilbride. So began a sweltering, cramped, ten-hour overnight bus journey to London. ‘This bus would show up and everyone piled on it,’ remembers Murray. ‘Those were the days when people would pile on to go down to their squats, claim a Giro [benefit cheque] down there and then come back and claim a Giro up here.’
The bus finally reached London at around 9 a.m., so the Mary Chain had an entire day during which the increasingly irascible and drunken Reid brothers had to try not to kill each other. It quickly became an unbearably sultry summer’s day, and the combination of heat, nerves and Dutch courage* meant the feeling in the Mary Chain camp was far from relaxed. At least they were able to travel relatively light – Micro-disney were allowing them to use their equipment, which may or may not have been wise.
The Reids did use some of their time to venture into the NME offices, then in Soho’s Carnaby Street, to drum up some music-press support. For any group, let alone one this shy, this was a brave and important move. But they’d loved and read the NME for years, and the opportunity to at least try to attract their attention was too good to miss.
Jim Reid remembers: ‘We’d said to McGee that we were going to the NME to give them a tape and invite them to the show, and he was laughing at us, saying, “For Christ’s sake, they’ll never come.” But we went down and said, “Anybody’s welcome.”’
As it turned out, their leap of faith paid off – David Quantick attended the gig after work, giving the Mary Chain their first few lines in the NME, hailing their sound as reminiscent of a swarm of bees in an elevator shaft. Not bad for their first gig. Quantick remembers: ‘They were very tinny, hence the “bee” line, but very intense. I’m still quite proud I was at their first gig, because they turned out to be a great band.’
When the time came to set up at the Roebuck for a sound-check, the Mary Chain’s tension – and inebriation – had reached new heights. They were not drinkers in the sense that they would regularly sit in the pub boozing, nor did they drink at home at that point. The alcohol was simply a necessary emboldening elixir, not to mention a vital social lubricant – they were about to meet a whole raft of new people, after all. The only person who steered clear of alcohol that day was Murray. He had to hold it together on the drums. An intoxicated drummer is not generally a recipe for success.
By 6 p.m., Jim and William were in an extreme state of anxiety, and Douglas was feeling pretty blue himself; apart from anything else, he had a vision of what a cool London club was supposed to be like, and this wasn’t it.
‘I was imagining something out of The Avengers,’ admits Douglas. ‘Patterned wallpaper, little tables with red lamps on them . . . When we turned up at this pub, I was a bit, “Oh!” Slightly deflated.’
Instead there were two shabby striped beige curtains behind the stage and a bare green light bulb dangling disconsolately above it.
The band waited, bickering all the while, but there was no sign of McGee, whom, up to this point, Jim had only spoken to over the telephone. Finally he arrived, a symphony in paisley. But again, they had visualised a certain type of person at the helm of the Living Room/Creation operation. And again, this wasn’t it, although arguably this was better. Jim says: ‘We were all looking out of the window wondering who this Alan McGee was. We saw a smart kind of Andrew Loog Oldham type and thought, That’s probably him there. Then this maniac with big red hair and a patterned shirt came in. “Jim! Is that you, Jim?”’
To be fair, Alan didn’t exactly think the next big thing had just rolled into town. In time, McGee would describe the three key Mary Chain members severally as ‘charismatic, a natural rock star’ (Jim), ‘a genius guitar-player, the original talent’ (William) and ‘the most striking, like a film star’ (Douglas), but his first impressions that day were that, while ‘they looked cool’, he insisted in his autobiography Creation Stories, ‘there was something wrong about it, a small-town version of a movement that was dead’. He recalled in an interview for this book that ‘Douglas looked about twelve, and Jim and William were screaming abuse . . . I thought they were going to be shit, to be honest. Because I’m Scottish I could pick up what they were saying, basically calling each other a bunch of cunts. They were just swearing away there.’
Jim recalls: ‘We were supposed to be doing a sound-check, but in the end we started swinging at each other. McGee’s standing there thinking, These guys are fucking mad.’
Actually McGee thought it was ‘fucking great’, and it was only going to get better. ‘We did the sound-check,’ Jim continues, ‘and I don’t think we played any musical notes, but Alan was going, “Genius! We’ll do five albums!” We were like, What’s going on here?’
There were, by Jim’s admission, about six people in the audience by the time they had to play, and William stood resolutely with his back to them while the Mary Chain sound unfurled into a devilish spiral of chaos. Alan McGee remembers: ‘They played three cover versions. The first song was “Vegetable Man”, the second was Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody To Love”. They never recorded it, but what a version.’ The third, of course, was Subways Sect’s ‘Ambition’.
The fact that the band only just avoided outnumbering the audience didn’t matter to McGee, who was, in Jim’s words, ‘frothing at the mouth. Literally, I think.’ It was the legendary night that The Jesus and Mary Chain were signed, and the course was set. They would walk away with a one-off deal with Creation Records and a passionate, maverick manager. And tinnitus.
‘We had a vocal PA system that Joe Foster was on the controls of,’ McGee remembers. ‘Now the Joe Foster of today has produced lots of records, but the Joe Foster of 1984 didn’t know the backside of a mixing desk, so he just turned everything up to ten, which is logical when you’re 22, but basically everything fed back. Most other bands would stop and turn down. Not the Mary Chain. Being insane, they just played on.’
‘It was completely chaotic and a total hail of noise,’ adds Joe Foster. ‘The people immediately around us, our friends, they’d have been amazingly enthusiastic about the Mary Chain sounding like utter chaos. They were loving it. The Mary Chain must have thought, We’ve obviously come to the right place.’
Douglas’s memory, admittedly, is a little different. ‘Half the people at the gig hated us. Actually, I’d say less than half liked us.’ Which, going by Jim Reid’s maths, would leave about two people: Alan McGee and Joe Foster, no doubt.
Douglas continues: ‘People were saying, “Alan, you’re mad. You’re mad for wanting to put a record out with them.” It was coming out of that twee era. We thought, or certainly I did, that punk changed the world and all the bores and jobsworths had been wiped off the face of the earth, but everywhere you went it was: You can’t do that . . .’
On that hot London night, however, McGee felt that the Mary Chain could, and should, continue exactly as they were. The whirlwind of sound that they’d managed to manifest was, by accident or design, startling, scary and magnificent, and it didn’t matter that hardly anyone else could see what he saw in them. McGee wanted to be Malcolm McLaren, and in his eyes he’d just found his very own Sex Pistols. The Mary Chain might not have expressed it particularly ebulliently, but they were just as thrilled, relieved even, to find McGee.
‘It was straight after that first very short, very extreme thing,’ Douglas remembers, ‘that he came up to us with a huge smile on his face and said, “Let’s make an album.” We were like, Fucking hell! Great! We loved McGee’s energy, and we loved his love for us. We liked his oddness and, compared to us, he was experienced. To us he was like a saviour.’
McGee says: ‘I just went, me being me, “I can sell 20,000 of this.” I didn’t think, This is a band that will last thirty years. When I went, “Can I sign you?” they looked at me as if I was bonkers. But that was the beginning.’
*Murray recalls that Douglas, who was working at a bar at the time, had managed to snaffle away ‘four beers’ for the journey, a rather modest amount of alcohol considering the band’s reputation but, as Murray puts it, ‘they just couldn’t take their drink. They were falling all over the place.’