Rants, Reality and Trouble in the Ballroom
An immaculate conception of love songs, and one of the finest debut albums ever . . . The kids from East Kilbride should now split up before they have a chance to ruin the bliss.
Jack Barron reviews Psychocandy for Sounds, 2 November 1985
The period spent making Psychocandy was productive, concentrated and exciting, and there was a genuine sense even as they worked that history was being made. Alan McGee loved the album, as did Geoff Travis, although when it was duly delivered to Warners, Geoff chuckles, ‘dear Rob Dickins, he thought there was something wrong with it.’
The next release would be the dreamily erotic ‘Just Like Honey’ in September, a still of the group huddled on the beach from the ‘You Trip Me Up’ video on the cover. This was a motif the Mary Chain would regularly repeat: the cover of Psychocandy would be an image of Jim and William Reid on the white, box-like set of the ‘Just Like Honey’ video, the word ‘CANDY’ emblazoned twice behind the group in black and red. This was the single that many new fans would really fall in love with, and it would reach number 45 in the UK singles charts. The album itself was due for release in November.
In the meantime, there was still a pervading feeling amid the press and public that the Mary Chain’s time was already over. Jim explains: ‘We had the singles, but I think everybody thought that that was all we had in us.’ The critics would be in for a surprise just a few months down the line.
The Mary Chain were booked to play a handful of live dates over the summer, and this included the group’s first visit to Scandinavia – a memorable if not especially enjoyable stint, largely because William had already started to dislike touring considerably. He was disillusioned with the music business – ‘business’ being the operative word – and, after entering it with hopes of a magical future, the scales were falling from his eyes, revealing to him the grubby reality. It wouldn’t take long before he started to view much of his life as a pop star through a glass darkly.
‘It must have been really hard,’ muses Alan McGee. ‘To suddenly be told, not just by me but by the NME, that “You’re fucking amazing and Warners have given you a publishing deal, and loads of girls now fancy you,” when you might not have had a girlfriend in five years . . . they just rolled up like a hedgehog, they didn’t trust anybody. They were the most unready people for that experience.’
At times much of what was spewing out of William onstage would be simple drunken ire. The crowd in Denmark would be subjected to one of William’s now famous onstage tirades, and this one was culturally customised to the Mary Chain’s Copenhagen fans. Douglas Hart remembers: ‘He went into this mad rant and he was going, “You baconeating bastards!” Where did that come from? Kind of great. Yeah, there’ve been a few of those.’
The band’s visit to Finland also ended in a well-lubricated sulk. Laurence, who was backstage at the gig, relates her memories of Helsinki: ‘William was paralytic even before the gig. He was almost falling off his chair. I could see out of the corner of my eye that William was starting to go. When he actually fell off the chair, everyone was like, “What the hell are we going to do?” At the time they had two guitars on stage, and the sound engineer was given instructions, if William was completely losing the plot on the guitar, to put him down in the mix and the other guy would have to pick up.
‘They managed to salvage the gig. William was all over the place, but we couldn’t hear him too much. At the end, there were these flowerpots on the edge of the stage and William went and kicked them all over into the mosh pit. Bless him!’
‘He’s a complicated guy,’ says Douglas with a shrug. ‘He’s one of the funniest people, but you just have to look at the lyrics, there’s a darkness to him – which we all have to some degree, but maybe he’s just more honest about it. It’s like that with the both of them. Maybe it sometimes comes out the wrong way, but you know what? Fuck it.’
After returning home, a trail of offended Danes and broken flowerpots in their wake, the Mary Chain played Manchester’s now iconic Hacienda club with Meat Whiplash, The Pastels and Primal Scream, taking the stage at around two o’clock in the morning. This, incidentally, was when Karen Parker famously joined the band onstage, not just to sing backing vocals on ‘Just Like Honey’ but to play drums. According to Jim, the story that Bobby had hurt his hand and thus couldn’t play is not true. It was just typically mischievous Mary Chain spontaneity at work.
‘Our attitude was punk in its purest form,’ says Jim. ‘We just said, “Karen, do you want to play drums tonight?” She was like, “I cannae play!” We were like, “Oh, it sounds all right.” She knew all the songs. So she played Bobby’s set, and she was bloody good. And I still got the Bobby grin that I was always looking for. He was standing at the side of the stage going “Yeah!”’
While for some members of the Mary Chain touring was a necessary evil, Douglas generally loved the experience. ‘It was always a thrill to go somewhere new. Even later on I enjoyed touring,’ he reflects. ‘Some people thrive on every part of touring, staying up all night every night. We, being slightly more sensitive, would get comedowns. But I’m not going to moan, we loved it.
‘McGee would come on a lot of those tours as a tour manager – he wasn’t just our manager. Especially on the early ones he would be with us, so it really was like a gang, in the best way.’
‘There were camps within camps,’ McGee remembers. ‘Obviously there were the Reid brothers, who confided in each other. Bobby and Douglas were close, but then you had other twists in it: Bobby and I were close, we went way back. Jim and I were close, and I got on well with Douglas. William and I never really connected. I thought he was an incredible talent; we just didn’t connect as human beings.’
What would often make the touring experience more enjoyable was travelling with people they liked, such as Felt and of course The Pastels, who would reconvene with the Mary Chain in early September for a gig at Preston’s Clouds venue.
‘We did OK,’ Stephen Pastel recalls. ‘My main memory is that William was quite drunk and he told me he loved our music. He was really unguarded and it was a sweet moment.’
Douglas Hart says: ‘I loved playing places like that because they were a bit like the places we grew up in. I remember in Preston this kid came up to me, really young, strange-looking guy, and he said, “I’d like to start a band.” I was like, “You should, you should!” And he said, “But I’ve got no friends.” God, what a thing to say. Kind of beautiful. It haunted me. I always wondered what happened to him.’ This poignant exchange must have accessed a part of Douglas that would surely have felt similarly isolated – another outsider from an outsider town – had he and the Reids not found each other in East Kilbride when they did.
Violence at Mary Chain gigs was not such a problem in the regions, although if you weren’t keen on spitting, that rarely welcomed hangover from the punk years, a Mary Chain gig was probably not the place for you. ‘Those first few tours we did of Britain, people would spit all the way through,’ Douglas recalls. ‘Someone’s mum came to see us and she said, “What were those bits of paper people were throwing at you?” We were like, “Those were not bits of paper . . .”’
The general feeling was that, even after a hiatus, London was still the main problem in audience terms. It was where the most dangerous scenes had been sparked, and care would be needed when the band played there again. It might have seemed over the top, but Alan McGee was nervous enough to employ two Scottish ex-SAS bodyguards. Even they wouldn’t last the course; the last straw for them was the Mary Chain’s show at Camden’s Electric Ballroom on 9 September 1985.
A good proportion of the crowd that piled into the venue that night was keyed up and ready to fight. They weren’t ‘smashing up pop’, they were kicking the living daylights out of each other. Unlike North London Poly, McGee ‘expected it to be heavy, and it was. Very heavy.’
‘It happened straight away,’ adds Douglas. ‘There were big, thuggish guys there, throwing bottles from the back, like at the football – that used to make me sick – so that people down the front would get hit.’
Jim Reid, who felt largely immune to what was happening thanks to being utterly plastered, admits the Mary Chain didn’t help matters by coming on to play a good 90 minutes later than they were expected. ‘I know why the riots happened at the North London Poly, and I know why it happened at the Electric Ballroom,’ he says. ‘They kept coming into the dressing-room and saying, “It’s time to go on,” and we were going, “No, we’re just chilling out, playing some music, we’ll be on in fifteen minutes.” That went on for about an hour and a half.
‘Looking back on it, it was idiotic, but at the time I thought, We’re the band, we should go on whenever we feel like it. Was that a smart thing to do? Probably not, but there you go.’
They didn’t want to just listen to music and relax, of course – they wanted to knock the edges off their nerves by getting as obliterated as possible while still being able to function. ‘The drinking was always there,’ Jim admits. ‘Me and William, we’re not really at ease socially, to say the very least. It’s a social lubricant. At the beginning we’d go on tour and we’d get shit-faced every night for ten weeks, and then you’d get back home and be kind of glad not to drink any more. I never used to drink at home, though, and couldn’t understand why anybody would. That changed. I can’t remember when or why.’
Laurence Verfaillie was backstage that night and she knew from experience there was no way they’d be going on stage until they had reached a satisfactory level of drunkenness. That, plus adrenaline and the jolt of hearing the menacing shouts of the crowd, would create a combustible chemical reaction in terms of their own stage presence. ‘They had to have a serious amount of alcohol before going on stage. But the gigs would be fabulous. It wasn’t like Amy Winehouse slurring her words, it was getting them into the mood.’
No matter how fabulous they were, this crowd, despite having paid to get in, was in no mood to listen to them. The Jesus and Mary Chain walked on stage ‘expecting to be worshipped,’ Jim chuckles. What greeted them was an angry mob.
The band warily regarded the broiling darkness in front of them for a few silent moments. Then Jim pushed the neck of Douglas’s bass out of his way, Douglas and William turned their backs, and they started to play, lit by three pale spotlights beaming over them and on to the crowd like ghostly searchlights. Jim, leaning forward malevolently, thrashed the floor with his mic stand, William struck his guitar like an anvil, notes ringing and sputtering out like sparks – it was as much a show of strength, a roar of defiance to shout down the crowd, as a gig. There was something of a rumble about it, band versus audience.
This would be one of the first times the Mary Chain played ‘Just Like Honey’ live, and it was utterly lost on the majority of the audience. ‘I was thinking, You fucking idiots, just shut up and listen to this song,’ says Jim.
Alan McGee was standing at the side of the stage with Laurence, who was hit on the back of the head by a flying bottle. Before eventually giving in and rushing backstage for safety, they watched their friends trying to play under increasingly hostile conditions. ‘Football hoolies had suddenly got involved with it,’ McGee says. ‘One of the bouncers got his head cut open. I remember a quarter-bottle of whisky going flying between Jim’s head and Bobby’s. I just thought, If that had hit either of them, they could have lost an eye. That’s when you realise it’s starting to get out of hand.’
Bobby Gillespie remembers that very whisky bottle – it’s not the kind of thing you forget – although the person who forcibly delivered it, he insists, was a friend of his from Glasgow, who had travelled down on the Stagecoach and was now showing the advanced effects of a day’s worth of dedicated boozing. ‘He shouted, “Gillespie!” and threw a bottle at me . . . but, you know, as an act of love.’ Heart-warming indeed.
‘The security did face off the crowd,’ McGee continues. ‘But it was pretty unpleasant. And we were just kids. That’s the thing that people don’t talk about enough with the Mary Chain. With Oasis, they had a manager who’d managed Johnny Marr, Noel was 27, I was 33, 34. If we needed security it was a phone call away. The Mary Chain thing was ten years before. Yes, maybe I was out of my depth, but I’d got them to that point as well, so there was some degree of talent. But there was also a degree of complete inexperience.’
Jim Reid says: ‘We just played fifteen minutes and left; you know, if you don’t want to hear it then we won’t play it. On a normal night we would just be locked into each other, it was almost as if the audience didn’t matter.’ The crowd became enraged when the band decided to leave the stage, but the way William saw it was that they were simply sticking to his quite sensible ethos: play until you get jeered by the crowd, that’s your cue to leave.
Meanwhile, David Evans, the Mary Chain’s live sound technician, was desperately trying to protect the mixing and lighting desks from being destroyed but in doing so he could only watch as, post-gig, the ‘fans’ started to help themselves to equipment from the stage.
By the end of the night the ex-SAS man-mountains hired by McGee had had enough, both of the violence (one bodyguard was knocked out with a scaffolding pole) and of the people they were meant to be looking after. Jim Reid says: ‘At first they were like, “Wait! I’ll check this door,” but by the end of it they were saying, “If I ever see you little fuckers again I’m going to rip your heads off. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t beat the shit out of you?” “Er . . . because it would hurt?” We were probably winding them up.’
When the coast was clear, team Mary Chain decamped to recover at McGee’s flat in Tottenham. They’d managed to escape unscathed, but feeling grateful that they were still in one piece was not how they wanted to end every London show. It had become, as Alan McGee admits, ‘a circus’. The group’s surly attitude and explosive music was part theatre, part expression, part defence mechanism, but it was being taken too seriously by too many.
‘There was a lot of talk about this,’ says Douglas. ‘We were like, “Alan, we want to go down and play, we don’t want to witness fights, we don’t want people to get their heads smashed in.” I think he saw that, but it was out of control. Alan was a young guy as well.’
Events like this, as Mary Chain press officer Mick Houghton observes, would ironically launch the Mary Chain into the public consciousness, but the fact people associated the band with riots would be a millstone for the band for years to come. ‘It overshadowed their career throughout,’ Mick admits. ‘It was very hard for them to escape that initial impression that people have of the Mary Chain.
‘I always felt that a lot of their attitude, which the press loved, was more born out of a lack of confidence. I never thought they had this intent to cause trouble – it was more like trouble followed them.’