Escape From EK
I don’t lose sleep thinking about Wham!
Jim Reid, 1985
The band’s star was rising and the time had finally come to move on from East Kilbride, although Bobby Gillespie would stay in Glasgow as he was still developing Primal Scream. There was no pressure on Bobby to choose between bands at this point, but even though Primal Scream was his own group, he still felt more connected to the Mary Chain.
‘I was just happy to be part of it,’ he says. ‘I didn’t really feel part of Primal Scream at that point. The Mary Chain’s thing was more fully formed. And they had better songs.’
Because Jim had lived in London in pre-Mary Chain days, staying in cheap, down-at-heel hotels in Earls Court, in January 1985 Jim, William and Douglas checked in at one of the hotels Jim had stayed at before, a shabby bed and breakfast then known as the Hunters Hotel on Trebovir Road. The hotel boasted such benefits as ‘hot and cold running water’, and it was just a few moments from Earls Court underground station. The Mary Chain crammed themselves into a family room to save money, and paid for it between themselves. It was one of the strangest places they had ever lived, replete with seedy Pinteresque intrigue and assorted maniacs. Memories of living on Trebovir Road are still etched on the Mary Chain’s respective memories.
‘We’d never seen prostitutes or junkies before,’ says Douglas, ‘and suddenly we were in this insane place. We were broke, but it was a real adventure. There was a block of hotels in Earls Court and William Burroughs had lived in one in the 1960s two doors down. It was like something out of a Harold Pinter play, total Birthday Party. People in their pyjamas wandering about, you could hear people fucking, fighting . . .’
‘Weird place,’ says Jim. ‘There was a Polish immigrant that lived in a cupboard under the stairs. He was a wee bit not right upstairs. They let him live there just to do maintenance work. He was nuts. We had these big brothel-creepers and we’d stomp downstairs to go out and he’d jump out and shout at us. He’d be waiting for us.’
Tempting as it must have been to stick around at the Hunters Hotel – which sounds like a real-life version of the dilapidated Happiness Hotel in The Great Muppet Caper, only with a bit less happiness and presumably fewer musical numbers – it wasn’t long until the Reids and Douglas found some cheap bedsits in nearby Fulham. The flats might have been fleapits, but it was an exciting time, filled with possibility, and with no parents or hotel receptionists to slink past. For the first time in their lives William and Jim would be living separately, and Douglas would also be in his own place after years of sharing not just a bedroom but a bed with his older brother back in East Kilbride.
The advance had come through from Blanco Y Negro, which meant that finally they were able to sign off the dole. For William, this was partially a disappointment, as he was a whisker away from his fifth anniversary of signing on. ‘He was going to celebrate it,’ McGee says. ‘He was pissed off that he never got to do that. That’s not even a joke.’ Still, independence was theirs for the first time.
‘We were all living round the corner from each other,’ says Jim. ‘But Douglas’s flat was horribly damp, so he moved in with me for about six weeks. We slept in the same bed like Morecambe and Wise, reading the paper with our pyjamas on. Not very rock’n’roll.’
Despite the Fulham years being a happy time, some of the neighbours were a little offbeat, to say the least. ‘There was this nutter woman,’ Jim says. ‘We used to hear her having arguments with herself at 3 a.m. She’d be screaming, and then there’d be a pause where you knew that she was hearing voices, and then she’d scream, “You fucking . . .” Then there was this toff called Adrian who lived next door to me. He used to have friends over to play charades on a Friday night.
‘To top it off, there was this psychotic Scottish drug dealer called Archie, and he was bad news. I was always terrified he would figure out that we were in a band. He’d have broken into my shabby little room.’
On one occasion, William came over to use the communal bathroom. Just as he was getting out of the bath, the door was unceremoniously kicked in by the drug dealer, his face covered in blood. ‘He needed to wash it off,’ explains Jim. ‘You’d get out of there quick. Having said that, I lived there for years.’
*
All the while, the Reids had been working on new material. They were and always have been prolific songwriters, and the future months were already being mapped – there were more gigs, more sessions for John Peel and, first things first, it was time to record ‘Never Understand’, the band’s first single release on Blanco Y Negro.
‘We’d made “Upside Down” in the studio Alan used to use,’ Douglas says. ‘But obviously Geoff knew everyone, and he suggested we do it with Stephen Street at Island Studios.’
Island was based in Ladbroke Grove, West London, a stone’s throw from Rough Trade. The studio was imposing and sterile, and the Mary Chain were not keen on where Stephen Street was trying to go with their song. Street, who had already worked with Rough Trade signings The Smiths among others, was pretty nonplussed himself. It probably didn’t help matters that the proposed title of the B-side they were recording was ‘Jesus Fuck’.
‘He was disgusted,’ Douglas recalls. ‘He was quite . . . well, it didn’t go well. He was shocked that I only had two strings on my bass and we couldn’t really tune up by ear; it was a bit of a clash. We stopped after a day. He’s a good producer, but not to do us at that point. No.’
‘It was quite problematic making that record,’ Jim adds. ‘We just couldn’t get it right. We knew what the record should sound like, and there’d be this guy in the middle trying to take it somewhere else. What’s the point in that?’
Geoff has no memory of recommending Stephen Street at all, however. ‘That wouldn’t make any sense,’ he says. ‘They did try to work with Stephen Hague, and they spent three days trying to get the drum sound, and William just said, “This is a waste of time.” Conventional producers bored them. Later on, Daniel Lanois wanted to produce them. He had a house in New Orleans and all the gear in there. William said, “I’m not leaving Archway.”’
However, Geoff Travis’s subsequent suggestion of recording at the late John Loder’s Southern Studios in Wood Green, North London, was, as Douglas puts it, ‘genius’. ‘Geoff told us about this guy who had a studio in his garden,’ says Jim. “He said, “I think you’re going to like this guy.” I thought, Here we go again . . .’
Loder was like no engineer they’d worked with before, and Southern, set up with the anarcho-punk group Crass, reflected his relaxed attitude. It had an atmosphere that was conducive to lateral thinking, freedom and creativity. McGee says: ‘Crass have now become incredibly hip, but in 1985 they were about as hip as the UK Subs. We knew deep down it was cool. It just wasn’t hip. It was smelly. But Loder was a nice guy.’
Far from trying to impose his ideas or try to patronise the relatively inexperienced group, Loder would set everything up, head back to the main house where he ran Southern Records, light a spliff and simply be on call in case anything got blown up.
‘We immediately hit it off with John,’ says Jim. ‘He was exactly what we were looking for. He just set all the faders up and left us to our own devices. Obviously we didn’t know what we were doing and we fucked up a lot, but it was great. We’d sit there and press buttons. “This is pretty good! I think I broke something but it sounded good!”’
The band were learning as they went, and, as they recorded, certain elements of the song evolved, particularly the lyrics. ‘Never Understand’ would end up featuring an homage to American garage rock band The Seeds, of ‘Stranded’ fame. Bobby explains:
‘If you listen to “Never Understand”, on the original, Jim sings “Looking too hard and you just can’t see me . . .”, and I said, “Change it to ‘pushing too hard’ as a tribute to The Seeds.” And he did.’ The song ends with a tangle of noise; the Reids wanted to make it sound as if everything was descending into a violent maelstrom. William provided ‘most of the yelling,’ Jim recalls. ‘He was good at shouting.’
The pairing of the Mary Chain and Loder evidently worked, and it would be at Southern Studios that the band would record their first album, Psychocandy. ‘Never Understand’, meanwhile, was released in February 1985, the first of their records to chart. The finished product was the ideal next step from ‘Upside Down’, another major-key vocal melody murmuring through a screech of feedback and relentless snare cracks. Lyrically, the song echoes ‘Upside Down’s sense of alienation, but a wasted confidence and carelessness pushes ‘Never Understand’ somewhere else. ‘The sun comes up, another day begins/And I don’t even worry about the state I’m in./Head so heavy and I’m looking thin/but when the sun goes down I wanna start again . . .’
A video was made to accompany the track by the late Tim Broad, who took the group to a disused warehouse in Wapping to film them playing along with the song. There was no high concept here; the Mary Chain didn’t need one. Watching the video to ‘Never Understand’ is basically as close as you can get to seeing how the group manoeuvred live at that time – hunched over guitars, swearing, physically clashing, knocking over drums – only a little more self-conscious than they would have ordinarily been.
‘If you see the videos, you can see the connection between the four boys,’ explains Bobby. ‘It’s emotional. Crashing into each other, it’s quite homoerotic. It’s interesting. We were young, not sexually experienced. It’s just a need for connection, it’s not that you fancy the other guys.’
‘Jesus Fuck’ was still the track that the Mary Chain wanted on the B-side, but this was not to be. Geoff Travis insists there was never a problem at Blanco, but ‘they might have been a bit disturbed at the pressing plant’.
Alan McGee says: ‘The old-age pensioners who put the records in the sleeves at Warners, they were a staff of 67-year-olds and they all went to church. I’m not even taking the piss. Of course somebody took offence. It had to be changed.’ The alternative? The still relatively salacious ‘Suck’.
Jim Reid told the NME’s Mat Snow: ‘“Jesus Fuck” was downright repulsion at how sacred the name Jesus was. People seriously think this little group making an obscure little record called “Jesus Fuck” is going to do any harm?’
The song ‘Jesus Fuck’ really was just Jim screaming ‘Jesus! Fuck!’, and was born of his usual sound-check routine. McGee recalls: ‘He’d go, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Jesus! Fuck!” It was kind of catchy.’ The rejected B-side would eventually see the light of day (after being forgotten by the Reids themselves for years) when Psychocandy was reissued in 2011.
In true lo-fi Mary Chain style, the single was promoted with a poster created by Jim Reid and Douglas, scribbled vigorously in crayon. The original is still on the wall of Geoff Travis’s office. Douglas says: ‘I remember Geoff saying, “We need a poster for ‘Never Understand’,” so we were like, “Give us a bit of paper . . .”’
*
McGee had organised a UK tour around the release of ‘Never Understand’, but when the group played Brighton Pavilion on 2 February 1985, the sense of turmoil in the audience always simmering at Mary Chain gigs was now manifesting in a more sinister way. ‘The first real signs of trouble coming were in Brighton,’ says Jim. ‘We got bottled off.’
Up to a point, the Mary Chain would often feel as if they were surrounded by such a strong psychological force-field that they were invincible even as missiles whistled past their heads, but this was the first gig that saw the audience turn. Who knows whether discord was sparked simply because the Mary Chain seemed to have a gift for inadvertently inciting a collective experience of exhilaration, frustration and confusion with their music – emotions that the band themselves often felt? All we do know is that the concert quickly spiralled into a very angry situation, and the Mary Chain were under siege. Bobby tells the story: ‘We were playing, then suddenly we looked up and there was a guy on top of the PA, throwing stuff at us. I stopped playing. Jim was singing, but I was like, “This guy . . .” At this point I got smacked in the face with a plastic glass, then I started throwing stuff back at the audience, then more stuff came.
‘My girlfriend Karen was at the side of the stage and she got smacked in the head with a bottle. She had a lump like a tennis ball coming out of her skull. That was four songs in.’
Jim Reid says: ‘Not taking any of this, I got back on stage with our fee and waved it at the audience, Loadsamoney-style. They were lobbing glasses at us.’
‘This was before the internet,’ adds Bobby. ‘If you’d had the internet then it would have been even worse. Everywhere you went would have been riots. It became the norm, see the Mary Chain, start a riot.’
*
The day after the Brighton gig, The Jesus and Mary Chain would have to shake off the insanity of the night before and head up to Maida Vale to record their second session for John Peel, to be broadcast ten days later. If they thought their first Peel Session was fraught between themselves and the engineers, this one would be worse. Their name and reputation had grown overnight, literally, and the studio hands were taking no chances.
Jim Reid: ‘We wanted to break glass. There was an oil drum there so we said, “We’ll stick a bottle in there, put a mic in and record it.” The engineer said, “No way.” “We’ve been asked to do what we do here, and you’re saying we can’t?” And he said, “Not in my studio, sonny boy.”’
‘I don’t know why we didn’t think of using a fucking sound effect,’ adds Douglas.
The tracks recorded were ‘The Living End’, conjuring visions of the doomed biker in the Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader Of The Pack’, the Stoogesesque ‘In A Hole’ and ‘Just Like Honey’, which featured Bobby’s girlfriend Karen Parker on backing vocals. This was the latter song’s debut: it was so fresh that the Reid brothers were still writing the lyrics during the session.
John Peel loved the Mary Chain, as did his listeners, and he would be inviting them back again soon. But in the meantime the band had a tour to do, although after the Brighton fiasco, in true Pistols-style repetition of history, some local authorities were quick to cancel gigs. The problem wasn’t so much the band as the fans who were attracted to them, but, as frustrating as this was for the Mary Chain, Alan McGee was rubbing his hands together.
‘I understood the media,’ he says. ‘Doing the gig or not doing the gig, it was almost as if it didn’t matter. We had so much publicity from being banned, more than if we actually played a good gig. The Mary Chain would be pissed off to have driven all the way to wherever to find they’d been banned, though. We got banned from half of the gigs we were booked to play, and of course, every time I’d be phoning the newspapers and they’d print it.’
As an electric wind of tension crackled around the Mary Chain, the group must have been glad to cross the Channel for a night or two. A gig was booked at Les Baines Douches, a small but significant club in Paris, for 6 March 1985.
McGee contacted Laurence Verfaillie, the Parisian Mary Chain fan who had made such an impression at the ICA, and she organised an interview with Bobby for her friend’s fanzine before the gig. After the interview was complete and night had fallen, Laurence took her place in Les Baines Douches as the room filled up.
The club was just the size of an average pub back room, which made the energy of the show all the more concentrated. ‘It was as if the place was going to blow up. And it was packed, there were about 60 or 70 people. Of course,’ Laurence adds, ‘three months later about 500 people pretended they were there.’