Tea and Cakes with Travis
I want them to be everywhere, to be like Coronation Street.
Alan McGee in The Face, June 1985
The Ambulance Station gig in November 1984 was the latest milestone in the Mary Chain’s trajectory, yet again polarising the audience and, crucially, attracting the attention of Geoff Travis. The Jesus and Mary Chain were already Creation’s biggest-selling artists at this point, but now they had an opportunity to move to a bigger label and fulfil further ambitions beyond the so-called indie scene. As Jim Reid admits, ‘I wanted to be Marc Bolan. I wanted to be Johnny Rotten. I didn’t want to be this little oik in a Fair Isle jumper playing in some indie club with just my friends in the audience.
‘We all wanted to shake things up quite a bit. The worst thing I can imagine is just being another band that gets ignored. We were into the whole rock star thing, Bowie, T. Rex. That was nowhere in the picture at that time, and that’s what we wanted to bring back to the table.’
McGee, who would continue to be the group’s manager, was philosophical about the next necessary step. ‘We couldn’t really carry on,’ he admits. ‘We had no money with Creation, it was such a little label. We were used to doing 7,000 copies and suddenly we’re doing 45,000 copies, and Geoff . . . you know, it looked like the best deal. We’d done well to press up 40,000 records, never mind pay everybody, so to think we were going to hang on to The Jesus and Mary Chain against the weight of Warner Bros, that was never going to happen.’
The chance to go with a major label, but with Geoff Travis at the helm, seemed ideal at the time. The Mary Chain knew Travis was serious about his music. He also had indie integrity, but they would be getting major-label support. Blanco Y Negro had already released records by the Monochrome Set, Marine Girls, Everything But The Girl and Subway Sect’s Vic Godard, and had worked with Lawrence from Felt. It seemed like a good home for the Mary Chain.
‘The Mary Chain knew they were good,’ says Travis. ‘They didn’t know how they would fare in the commercial world, but they definitely knew they were good. So they probably thought, Indie, schmindie, what’s that got to do with us? Fair enough. Jim and William had bigger ambitions. If we didn’t have that hybrid with the major label, maybe they would have signed to someone else.’
Jim Reid says: ‘Had Creation Records been what it later became, there would have been nothing to think about, but you have to remember that at that time Alan was still working for British Rail. We got “Upside Down” out, we physically bagged all of those records. That’s what it was; you were never going to get on Top of the Pops, or if you were, it was going to take some time.
‘We were like, “Just show us the fucking money!”’ adds Alan McGee. ‘Everybody else was being really indie; we couldn’t give a fuck about indie. We were influenced by punk.’
‘Our big thing was that Geoff had released a couple of Subway Sect singles,’ says Bobby Gillespie, ‘and we thought, He works with Vic Godard, that’s cool. That’s as far as our business acumen went. Rough Trade was like a Marxist, right-on record label, but really Geoff was signing us on behalf of Rob Dickins at Warner.
‘I love Rob Dickins, he’s great, but he was a bit more flash. His wife was Cherry Gillespie from Pan’s People, so that was pretty glam, right? We were four not-very-well-educated – not stupid – working-class kids from Glasgow and Glasgow suburbs. So it was a classic music-business thing, Oxbridge-educated record company guy . . .’
A meeting was arranged between Travis and the Mary Chain at Alan McGee’s parents’ house in the Glasgow suburb of Mount Florida (‘Something of a misnomer,’ observes Douglas Hart), complete with cups of tea and French Fancies. The path to rock’n’roll stardom is lined with cake. And coke, of course, but mainly, at this stage, cake. Despite the chintzy surroundings, for Travis this was ‘the most difficult meeting with a group I’ve ever had in my life.
‘They were all sitting on the sofa, all in a line. They sat staring at the floor for about an hour and a half. Didn’t say a word. It was really insane.’ (Alan McGee remembers it well, although he ‘thought it was just normal Mary Chain madness, to be honest.’)
The idea was that Geoff would sign The Jesus and Mary Chain on behalf of Blanco Y Negro on a one-single deal for the song ‘Never Understand’. The Mary Chain might not have piped up much, or indeed at all, but their minds were whirring with the possibilities. ‘He said he was going to sign us and gave us £1,000 each,’ says Douglas Hart. ‘We were like, Wow! Just for one record. It just seemed surreal, like a film. And we were all in Alan’s very prim and proper mum’s house, dressed like beatniks, all sitting there on our best behaviour with our little china cups and French Fancies.’
Geoff Travis left the McGee residence in a state of vague confusion. He had no idea what the band members were feeling and no clue as to how they thought it went. He wasn’t even sure how he thought it went. To add to the slight surrealism of the day, Alan McGee then took him for a walk to the run-down Hampden Park football stadium, close to his family home. They had to climb in through a hole in the fence. ‘It was really shocking because it was all overgrown with weeds and shrubs,’ Geoff remembers. ‘It just seemed like this archaic place which had gone to seed.’
And regarding The Jesus and Mary Chain’s first major record deal? ‘They hadn’t said a word to me,’ says Geoff, ‘but Alan said, “Oh, don’t worry,” and they loved Subway Sect, and I think that was enough. So we negotiated the deal, which was pretty straightforward, and we signed them.
‘Our relationship with them was always quite odd, though. They were always distant. They’re very insular, very Scottish, they were fiercely proud of what they were doing. They didn’t want to join in with the outside world that much.’
Not long after the weirdest meeting in Geoff Travis’s history, The Jesus and Mary Chain had to fly down to the Warners office in London to sign the deal. It was a time of new experiences – apart from anything else, they’d never been on a plane before. Douglas Hart recalls: ‘When we came into land we got that pressure thing in our ears. No one had told us about it and we thought we were going to die.’
To quell the inevitable nerves, the Reids and Douglas decided to down a few beers before the meeting. By the time they reached Soho they were, as Douglas breezily recalls, ‘pretty drunk.’
The Mary Chain stumbled into the Warners building and were instantly ‘horrified at all the Dave Lee Travis types,’ says Douglas, with a note of disgust. Rob Dickins, then chairman of Warners, was an exception to the rule. He might not have loved the band in the same way that Travis and McGee did, but he believed in them. The Mary Chain, however, sensed immediately that most people at Warners, including those who would be promoting their records and supposedly fighting their corner, were repelled by the band. It was a culture clash, and the two sides would never have met in the middle without Travis as the bridge between them.
Jim Reid says: ‘It’s like, if you could go back and do it again, this is something you’d change. The thing was, Warners or Rough Trade. Geoff was obviously trying to get us onto Rough Trade at first, but at the time it was like, you’ve got to be “indie”, and we were thinking, Why? To me at that time, the indie scene represented failure. The Sex Pistols were on Virgin Records, The Doors were on Warners . . . everybody that made me want to make music was on a major label, so I sort of thought, Well, we need a bankroll.
‘The joke is that Psychocandy and everything that went around it came to £17,000, and I’m thinking we needed a bankroll! We didn’t. We also hadn’t anticipated that the people at Warners would utterly despise us. The only one that seemed interested was Rob Dickins, but that didn’t filter through to the people doing the plugging. We should have grabbed Rough Trade, but Geoff was going to be involved no matter what, and thank God he was.’ The instant and overwhelming feeling of antipathy was not merely Mary Chain paranoia at work. Soon after their ill-fated visit to the WEA office, one of the Warners marketing executives told journalist Max Bell they were ‘the most revolting and disgusting group ever’. (With PR like this . . .)
‘He didn’t mean it as a compliment,’ said Bell at the time. ‘I couldn’t be bothered to point out that he was right, The Jesus And Mary Chain are guilty on all counts. That’s why they’re so welcome.’ Not everywhere, evidently.
Perhaps it was because they were drunk and awkward; perhaps it was because, when you feel nervous and defensive you do things you normally wouldn’t. But the fact that most of the Warners collective weren’t too keen on the Mary Chain was not helped by a couple of small accidents that occurred during the band’s brief visit and a touch of mischievous graffiti on a poster of Rod Stewart.
‘On the stairs there was a poster for his latest record,’ says Douglas. ‘We drew on it. People did go mad, they genuinely were complaining. We were banned from Warners. “Never come here again,” you know. “You can’t do that to Rod Stewart.”’
‘It was embarrassingly juvenile,’ Jim cringes. ‘We drew a moustache on him. A bit of graffiti on gold discs. But it caused such a hoo-hah they were never going to let us in the building after that. Christ almighty . . .’
To conclude this eventful afternoon, there was an incident on the staircase that, thanks to the Mary Chain’s reputation as rock’n’roll’s new bad boys, was seen as a deliberate act of violence. It wasn’t, but, as far as Alan McGee was concerned, the press didn’t need to know that. Cash from chaos.
‘Only the Mary Chain, specifically Douglas Hart, could do this,’ Alan says. ‘They had all the gold records on the wall, and on the first floor, Douglas, because he’s basically nuts, was . . . well, he was walking down the side of the wall. He managed to take down about three or four gold, silver and platinum discs. And because he was just a clumsy guy, he also managed to kind of smash the wall up.
‘It looked to the world as if we’d smashed the place up. The truth was that Douglas Hart didn’t know how to walk down a flight of stairs. Of course we went and said, “Yeah, not only did we smash the place up, we stole Rob Dickins’ wallet.” That made the national newspapers. I thought, We’re going to get hung anyway. Everyone played along and The Sun printed it.’
‘We were drunk,’ says Douglas with a shrug. ‘There was a bit of elaboration, but that’s the way of the world. Up in East Kilbride we’d read NME and the gossip columns and we thought it was all gospel, but then you realise it’s not quite . . .’
Alan McGee was living the dream, teasing the music papers with stories about the Mary Chain being arrested for possession of speed, ‘destroying a radio station’ (William and Jim were having a spat in the foyer of Capital Radio in Leicester Square) and building on their troublesome aura. It worked from the point of view of attracting attention and remaining in the press – even the tabloid press, where bands at the time, especially alternative ones, rarely featured. On the other hand, it was also magnetising the kind of trouble the Mary Chain themselves never wanted to be involved with. Still, McGee was in his element, and he freely admits that part of the thrill of what was unfolding was that he was closer than ever to emulating his idol, Malcolm McLaren. ‘All I wanted to be was Malcolm,’ he admits. ‘I’m not in denial of that. If you’re going to have a hero, you might as well have the best one.’
McGee had to take some stick for his obsession with his fellow flame-haired Svengali, particularly because he had seemingly assimilated the entire script of Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, regurgitating lines from it as if they were his own words. Jim Reid says: ‘We used to take the piss out of him mercilessly. He would say things and we would say, “Alan, that is actually in The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.” I remember him saying, “Jim, we’re not going to play any of those rock’n’roll houses . . .”, and I thought, I’ve heard that before.’
After a quiet Christmas in Scotland, The Jesus and Mary Chain would have to return to London again before the old year was through, and it was clear that, fairly soon, it would make more sense to leave East Kilbride and move down to London for the foreseeable future. They emerged from the post-Christmas ennui to play ICA Rock Week on the Mall, near Buckingham Palace, on 29 December 1984.
It was also Jim’s twenty-third birthday, and it was on this afternoon that he bought his prized (but later pinched) Vox Phantom guitar from Alan McGee for £150. ‘It was,’ Jim recalls, ‘quite an eventful day.’ And that’s not even including the gig. The Jesus and Mary Chain might have played it down but they were the band to see, and their show at the ICA, supported by These Tender Virtues and Shelleyan Orphan, had been fully booked for months.
Meanwhile, a young French music fanatic called Laurence Verfaillie was making her way over to England on the ferry to see this very gig. Laurence had made the crossing the previous month to see the Mary Chain at the Ambulance Station, but, due to stormy weather, her ferry was kept just outside Dover for hours while the Mary Chain took to the makeshift stage some 75 miles away. She was not going to miss them this time.
Laurence Verfaillie was first captivated by The Jesus and Mary Chain’s music after hearing their first Peel session with her friend Aline, who ran a fanzine called Agent Orange. Both friends were serious about their music, and when they first heard the Mary Chain it was like an epiphany. The fact that there wasn’t as much deliberate distortion or feedback on the Radio 1 session wasn’t a problem for those tuning in from abroad, who were listening on crackly medium-wave. Laurence says: ‘The reception was so bad we didn’t know what was actually part of the sound or not. But we really thought there was something interesting there, we were hearing the song as opposed to the production.’
After her previous experience of missing the band, Laurence made sure she reached the ICA, in cold, grey central London, in plenty of time. There was just one problem: oblivious to the group’s surging popularity, Laurence Verfaillie hadn’t booked a ticket in advance.
‘I turned up innocently and the guy looked at me and laughed and said, “Darling, it’s been sold out for God knows how long.” I started causing an absolute commotion, saying: “I came all the way from France to see them! Let me in!”’
Laurence would not be placated, and out of desperation a member of the ICA’s front-of-house staff rushed inside the venue to find Alan McGee. ‘Never to be forgotten,’ says McGee. ‘Someone demanded that I come to the front desk because some French woman who I’d never met in my life was kicking off that she wanted to get in.’ Little did he realise that the woman causing a righteous scene at the entrance of the ICA would, in years to come, work closely with him at Creation Records, and be a lifelong friend. She certainly made an impression, however. ‘I was pretty feisty back then, but she just shouted at me until I let her in,’ he says, still incredulous.
*
Laurence went up to the bar, squeezing through hordes of people, all of whom were talking feverishly about The Jesus and Mary Chain. What amused Laurence was that at least three members of the band were lurking in the bar themselves but either no one had spotted them or no one had the confidence to approach them. As Laurence puts it, the likelihood was that it was still so early in their legend that not many people really knew what they looked like.
The Jesus and Mary Chain’s appearance at the ICA was a landmark, and it pointed the way forward for the band. But as always, it elicited mixed feelings. ‘It was short and pretty non-musical, as I recall,’ says Jim. ‘We’d do too much drugs or drink too much and just get into the noise aspect of it. It was good.’
Bobby Gillespie says: ‘It felt like we were the Pistols, there was a feeling that everybody wanted to see this band. It was a really exciting thing to be part of. I knew we were great and there was no compromise. And you never knew what was going to happen.’
Geoff Travis was in the audience, accompanied by Rob Dickins. Dickins might not have entirely got the group, but ‘he was nodding away,’ Geoff remembers. ‘He realised something was happening. They were brilliant in those days, like molten lead pouring off the stage.’
Alan McGee is less romantic in his memory of that night. ‘They went on for fifteen minutes, made a noise, I don’t know if they even completed a song. Jim called the entire audience cunts. They all got upset. People were shouting abuse at me, going, “You’re a rip-off bastard.” I just went, “Go fuck yourself.”’ William Reid’s take on the band’s early exodus from the stage was that, quite simply, ‘We just got bored. I think it’s fairly honest.’
The feedback howled as the group left the stage, leaving a lot of people ‘extremely puzzled,’ as Laurence puts it. Within a noisy, anarchic quarter of an hour, they left a divided audience – some in raptures, some outraged, most wondering whether they’d ever hear again. ‘It went into chaos, but there was so much energy,’ Laurence says. ‘You know when you hear live recordings, everyone goes mad at the end, and there’s all the feedback in the encore – but this gig was that, the gig was the encore. They completely let go from the first moment. It was mind-blowing.’
At the volume Jesus and sons play at, anything is enervating and psychologically disorienting; I felt quite violent and didn’t like it at all.
Ralph Traitor’s review of The Jesus and Mary Chain at ICA Rock Week, Sounds