Murray Leaves, Bobby Joins, Germany Beckons
They were real outsider, loner guys. Weirdos. Like I’m a weirdo. Rock’n’roll kids, basically.
Bobby Gillespie on The Jesus and Mary Chain
Just weeks after the recording of ‘Upside Down’, McGee had an announcement to make: Creation Records would be going on a tour of Germany, and The Jesus and Mary Chain were on the bill, alongside Alan’s own band Biff Bang Pow! and the Jasmine Minks. For the Mary Chain, it would be the first time they’d ever left Britain. Home was still East Kilbride for the band, but life was accelerating and the Mary Chain’s confidence and power were increasing by the day. However, a temporary disaster was about to strike.
Murray Dalglish was uncertain of what the future held with The Jesus and Mary Chain, and when he was offered an apprenticeship in East Kilbride he decided to take it. It was 1984, unemployment was high, and there were no guarantees in the music business. Murray, encouraged by his family, wanted to earn a living.
Murray says: ‘It was decision time for me. I’d been offered a job to build buses. Getting offered an apprenticeship was a massive thing, you couldn’t get them for love nor money. We were on the Tube going somewhere and I just came out with it. I don’t think there was any trying to change my mind.’
Certainly Murray didn’t think there was any danger of ‘Upside Down’ doing particularly well. ‘I wouldn’t have been thinking it would have done anything near what it did do,’ he says. ‘Even when it did go to number 1, number 2 in the indie charts, by that time I was out of the band. But even that, it wasn’t like that’s a massive thing to have done. If you weren’t on Top of the Pops then you were nobody. A few years later they were on Top of the Pops, of course.’
While the news sent Alan McGee temporarily into a tailspin, the rest of the band were philosophical. They liked Murray, but for a while they hadn’t been sure whether he fitted in – which, admittedly, would have been a tall order for most people. He was also just sixteen years old, and the rest of the group, despite what they might have told John Robb, were not seventeen.
‘We – Jim, William and I – had been around together for ages, so it must have been difficult for Murray,’ says Douglas. ‘But he’s a well-adjusted guy, I don’t think it fucked him up to any degree. When there were arguments about style, musically, then that was upsetting for him. “Other drummers are laughing at me . . .” For us it was like, Uh-uh. I guess when it came to it, the most important thing was the music.’
Jim Reid’s stand-out memory is that Murray was also concerned about the money – or lack of it – that they were making as a band. ‘We just wanted to make a hell of a racket and grab people by the throat,’ says Jim. ‘But Murray would be saying, “My dad said we should be making more money.” – “Well, Murray, we will, but we have to go through this.” He would say things like, “If I joined a country and western band and toured Canada, I’d make £500 a week.” There’s nothing you can say to that, really. He was just a kid. You kind of knew it wasn’t going to work. He left before he was pushed, if you know what I mean.’
After returning to East Kilbride, the Reids and Douglas bade Murray farewell and left the teenage drummer to venture forth in his new life. He would still play drums, but the difference was that he would soon join a band with people he knew and fitted in with. Murray explains: ‘I went on to play in a band called Baby’s Got A Gun, named after the Only Ones song. I’d gone to school with some of these guys. I probably had more enjoyment with what I was doing then. I would have still been an outsider even if I’d been in the Mary Chain today, I think.’
Once again, the Mary Chain needed to find a drummer quickly, and the solution was already under their noses. Alan McGee knew Bobby Gillespie had been drafted in the past to drum for Altered Images, the Scottish pop act of ‘Happy Birthday’ fame, fronted by the elfin Gregory’s Girl starlet Clare Grogan. Gillespie would be the ideal replacement: he was already part of the Mary Chain family anyway.
Bobby recalls: ‘I used to roadie for Altered Images because we were friends. I was eighteen and they were fifteen, they were at school, they were punks in Glasgow. I used to go up to town on a Saturday and buy records, and these kids were always in the same record stores. Eventually I’m checking them, they’re checking me, I could see they were buying cool records, and they could see I was buying cool records. So it was like, “Are you going to see Siouxsie and the Banshees this week?’ – “Yeah.” Turns out they’ve got a band, and that band became Altered Images.
‘One time they were supporting Spizz Energi at the Rock Garden and the drummer, I don’t know what happened, he just disappeared. So I played drums in front of all these crazy skinheads. I mean, it was just filling in. Pretty primitive drumming.’
‘I don’t even think we auditioned Bobby,’ Jim Reid admits. ‘We just said, “Can you drum?” “Yeah, a wee bit.” “Right, OK.”’
The Creation package tour of Germany was just weeks away, but The Jesus and Mary Chain had some pre-tour gigs in the book that could act as a warm up for their new drummer. This called for something that marked a break in Mary Chain tradition: a rehearsal.
The Mary Chain booked some time in the crypt of a church off Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, where Fire Engines guitarist Davy Henderson had a studio. It was a hub for bands such as Orange Juice and Strawberry Switchblade, ‘and we all kind of fancied Strawberry Switchblade,’ Bobby admits. Once the band had set up, Bobby walked over to the drums, ignored the drum stool and started to play standing up, simply but powerfully, Moe Tucker-style. Floor tom and snare. No danger of any unnecessary fills here. He’d stripped the drum sound back, perhaps because he wasn’t really a drummer and couldn’t throw in an extravagant drum-fill even if he wanted to, but for the Mary Chain he was ideal.
Douglas Hart says: ‘I remember when we rehearsed in Glasgow with him. The energy . . . it had been good before, but it was just, “This is it”. The difference was quite marked. Not just in the simplification of the drums, but his personality, the energy that he brought just completed it. We got the bus back to East Kilbride, and we were all thinking, Well, this is going to be great. It had always been great; it wasn’t like Murray was letting it down, but when Bobby joined it was a band.’
‘I thought about this a few years later,’ Bobby muses. ‘They had the image sorted out, and when I joined it made it better. Everything about me joining was better for them musically, psychically, image-wise. I can say that without sounding big-headed. It just felt like a unit.’
This was a thrilling watershed for the Mary Chain – they didn’t just have a new drummer, they had a close friend in the line-up, infusing their live show with an electrifying new vitality, confidence and visual impact. Bobby was on his feet, dressed in black, often wearing dark glasses like his new bandmates, playing with furious energy on just two drums, a look and sound that would be emulated by later groups such as fellow Scots Glasvegas. The Jesus and Mary Chain would also be going abroad for the first time in their lives in just a few weeks’ time.
Bobby Gillespie says: ‘Me and Douglas went to get our passports on the same day. We went for a coffee or an ice-cream afterwards and Douglas said, “We’re all going to get leather trousers in Germany, it’s going to be like The Beatles in Hamburg. We’re going to be rock’n’roll stars.” I was like, “I’m not getting leather trousers!” And he went, “You are. We’ll be like Generation X!”’