It was a scorching hot summer day in June 1984 when we went to London for that first meeting with McGee. We’d got the overnight bus down from Glasgow and turned up early at the gig at his club the Living Room, which was a little shit-hole of a room upstairs at The Roebuck Arms near Tottenham Court Road. We set up our gear and waited for McGee to show up before attempting our first formal soundcheck. Because we didn’t even know what Alan looked like at that point, we were hanging out of the first-floor window assessing all these interesting characters walking up the street towards the pub and thinking ‘Is that him there?’ ‘Oh yeah, that guy who looks like Jim Morrison. I bet that’s him…’ It wasn’t, though.
This went on for quite a while until finally this frizzy red-headed lunatic character was heading in our direction. Nobody pegged him as McGee until he came up the stairs saying ‘Hi, I’m Alan, how you doing?’ The ‘For fuck’s sakes’ were barely out of our mouths before his enthusiasm began to grow on us.
We made the introductions and started playing our soundcheck. We’d got through about half a not very musical song when William and I had a big blazing row over something that was nothing – which was something we used to do a lot. This screaming match almost came to blows before we started playing the song again, and by that time even the vaguest contact with the intended rhythm and chord structure had probably been lost.
McGee was watching sort of spellbound – I think he just thought we were nuts, but he was going crazy for it. He’d been quite luke-warm when we sent him the demos and he’d only put the gig on as a favour to Bobby, but as soon as he saw us doing that soundcheck, everything changed for the better. Because he used to salivate a lot when he got excited, he was literally frothing at the mouth.
We couldn’t believe it, as we thought we’d ruined our chance – we were standing there ready to headbutt each other, thinking ‘That’s that opportunity lost – they probably won’t even let us play this gig tonight.’ Alan had walked in to find these two guys with big floppy fringes swinging at each other and we couldn’t have blamed him if he’d just walked straight out again. Instead he was rushing over saying ‘Fuck yeah. Let’s make albums!’ Talk about validating destructive behaviour patterns!
It was the first time apart from our initial contact with Bobby Gillespie that anyone had said anything positive about anything we’d done, and here was this guy calling us ‘genius’. Of course it wasn’t long before we realised that everything was ‘genius’ to McGee – he overused the word to an extent that made it utterly meaningless – but his intentions were good, and at that point any positivity was welcome.
It wasn’t that we needed other people’s approval, because we were very sure of ourselves in terms of what we were doing. There’s a ridiculous implication in some accounts of this first gig that our sound was some kind of happy accident arising out of our not knowing how to work the equipment, where in fact it was more like the opposite of that – a carefully planned operation that left space inside itself for the chaos to be real. There were a lot of accidental occurrences that led to the sound of the Mary Chain – things like chancing on that fuzz pedal and the noise it made when we plugged it in. That was an accident that was given to us, but we still had to work with it.
It was a mark of our confidence that after arriving in London early in the morning, we’d gone down to the NME offices in Holborn to hassle them into coming to the gig. This was our first ever live show, remember. McGee laughed at us and said that would never work, but when the guy we spoke to – who turned out to be the music journalist David Quantick – asked why he should come along, we said: ‘Because if you don’t, you’ll be pretending you were there in five years time.’ Those words obviously struck a chord with him, because he did actually turn up to review the gig. We weren’t just a couple of wide-eyed country bumpkins that got lucky. Well, we did get lucky – the dice really landed in the right place for us – but for that to happen we had to have them in our hands to throw. It helped that we really knew our music, and also that we’d already spent a certain amount of time in London – we’d been there when we had a bit of money and when we had absolutely fuck all, so we weren’t going to be overwhelmed by it. It was a place that we understood and kind of knew our way around.
It would be strange to say that being Scottish made us exotic, but it was certainly a point of difference that we could play upon as we started to establish ourselves, and being from out of town and not like everyone else, but also not being tourists, did actually give us a bit of an advantage. David Quantick admitted later that one reason he came along to our show was because he hadn’t been able to understand more than the odd word we were saying, and he wanted to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
I always feel weird talking about myself in a historical context, especially when you’re talking about something you’ve done forty years ago: your whole skin and your body have changed since then. I don’t like discussing the minutiae of what happened in 1984. Because my recollections feel like conjecture instead of fact, all you’re hearing is feelings – how I felt it was.
Quite a lot of it, I’ll be honest, I forgot – wine is beautiful but I don’t think it’s good for the memory. I do have some slight remembrance, tiny stems of whatever happened, but the point where looking back at all this stuff really began to depress me was when people started to write books about it. If you ask people what happened on a night when you did something together forty years ago, one of them will say ‘We went and got a Burger King’, but another will counter ‘Oh no, we just went home – we never ate.’ And once those different perspectives start to appear on the page between hard covers, they start to acquire an authority they shouldn’t really have.
Where this realisation really hit home was when David Cavanagh’s Creation book, My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize came out. Until that book was written – I know Dave was a good writer and a lot of people really like that book, but bear with me – I used to love music biographies. I would devour them – three or four a year easily – until I became the subject of one. I was racing through the bits about us, thinking ‘No way, you’re painting this as black and white, but there were so many nuances to this situation!’ It spoilt me, or rather it spoilt them, because after that I just couldn’t read music biographies any more.
You know if somebody punched somebody in the face and five people saw it? Their account will depend not only on their relationship with the puncher or the punchee, but also something as basic as where they were standing. Everyone will have their own different viewpoint, but let’s say two of the five people agree, and they’re the only ones whose version gets quoted, then it will very quickly become the definitive account. And if you’re one of the three people who haven’t been asked, then being faced with the official version given by the other two people can be a very painful experience.
And that’s why I’ll be leaving most of the nuts and bolts of what happened in this first public phase of the band to Jim. Our interests were so closely aligned in the common cause of The Jesus and Mary Chain at that time that – even though we’d still sometimes get on each other’s nerves to the point of physical conflict, like we did at that first soundcheck – you couldn’t really get a piece of tissue paper between our opinions on anything to do with the band.
So when we plugged our guitars in to play the actual gig, it was just screeching feedback that filled the room. Beneath the cacophony it was a massive relief to finally get that creative outlet for all our frustration after all that time of nobody being interested or wanting to give us a gig in Glasgow. Somewhere inside that noise were the skeletons of songs that ended up on Psychocandy – ‘Never Understand’, ‘Inside Me’ and ‘The Living End’ – but if you hadn’t heard the demos, they’d probably just sound like people punching the shit out of their guitars while an actual nutter screamed into a mic.
There were a few covers in there as well – just songs we liked and thought we could play, like Subway Sect’s ‘Ambition’ ,’Love Battery’ by Buzzcocks and Syd Barrett’s ‘Vegetable Man’. A bit of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody To Love’ probably crept in, too, but for people hearing us for the first time that night the covers probably weren’t much more recognisable than the original material. There certainly wasn’t anything particularly musical about what we were doing. David Quantick’s review said we sounded like a bee in a lift shaft, which probably wasn’t a bad shout.
As far as going onstage was concerned, we’d rehearsed many times and we knew what we were fucking doing. The element of chaos – the drinking, arguing and falling over – was something we knew we had to leave space for. By definition we couldn’t control how that chaos was going to turn out, and our failure to control it was part of the excitement. So it was kind of orchestrated, but if it was too orchestrated it wouldn’t be chaos. And the fact that we sort of knew what we were doing, and sort of didn’t, gave us the perfectly unsure foundation on which to construct our rickety edifice.
One reason we only played short gigs in the beginning was because we only had about five songs of our own. The other was that we felt it should be like an explosion, and explosions can’t last too long…
How did two total introverts staging fake live photos of imaginary gigs in their bedroom get up the courage to actually face the London gig-going public (or at least the tiny proportion of it that was in The Roebuck that night)? The mystery ingredient, in my case at least, was alcohol.
The first time I got drunk, it was like somebody had flicked a switch in my soul. Do you know that film Whisky Galore where Gordon Jackson’s overbearing mother won’t let him do anything, but then one day he has a couple of whiskies and goes and tells her a thing or two and the other guys are saying ‘Some fellows are just born two or three drinks below par’ and that explains everything? Well, that’s me, I was born two or three drinks below par… In fact, I think I’m going to have that on my fucking headstone: ‘Jim Reid – he was born two or three drinks below par…’
I’m not saying I’d never drunk a beer before the band, but the process of me taking to drinking like a duck to water, the feeling of ‘Oh my God, where have you been all my life? Now I know why people do this – why did I resist it for so long?’ That was totally bound up with our first live shows and the fact that alcohol was the only thing that gave me the confidence to get up and do them. I realised right from the start that this wasn’t something I was going to be able to do sober – the only way I could manage it was to get wasted, hopefully not so drunk that I’d be falling over and unable to remember the words, but drunk enough to overcome my high level of natural resistance to doing anything in public, never mind singing on a stage.
Even the most experienced drinker will tell you that this dividing line can be a difficult one to get right, and I was not an experienced drinker. I told you before I was a late developer, and those embarrassing memories of the first flush of alcohol consumption that most people tend to gather in their mid to late teens still lay ahead of me in my early twenties. The fact that I would accumulate them as the lead singer of what was about to become the most notorious rock band in Britain was just the icing on the booze-laced cake.
From that first show at The Roebuck to the night The Jesus and Mary Chain imploded onstage in LA fourteen years later, I was off my tits every gig we played. Or if not fully off my tits, certainly very much under the influence of something – whether that something be drink, or drugs, or most usually a combination of the two. Booze and drugs – I couldn’t have done any of it without them. Left to my own devices, I struggled with going outside my own house and walking down the road, but with the help of booze and drugs, all things were possible.
Virtually overnight, with alcohol’s assistance, I’d gone from being the kid who spent his entire adolescence trying not to stand out from the crowd in any way, to the (on the surface at least) reckless and provocative frontman who could be pulled off the stage by the bouncers in the middle of his second-ever gig, then kicked down the stairs, then thrown out of the venue, and somehow not turn a hair. That last scenario is not a theoretical one, it’s exactly what happened when we played at Night Moves in Glasgow, a few days after our London debut. Not everyone hated us that night – Bobby Gillespie, who was there to see us for the first time, thought it was the best thing he’d seen since punk rock. So with him and Alan McGee on board, it felt like we had a gang now.
After that gig we went home and wrote a load of letters to Billy Sloan, a DJ who had a show on Radio Clyde. He was like a ‘Glasgow’s John Peel’ type of character who played the indie music of the time at midnight on a Thursday. Basically these letters divided down the middle – half of them said ‘I’ve just been to Night Moves and seen the best band you could ever imagine,’ and the other half said ‘I’ve just been to Night Moves and seen the vilest creatures that have ever picked up a guitar and called themselves a band. I’ve never been so offended in my life.’ He read a bunch of these letters out, not realising that we had written them. Years later I was interviewed by Billy and he said ‘I knew you guys were gonna be big, because our mailbag was always empty until you came along and then it was full.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him we’d written all those letters, but I think Douglas did a few years later.
You couldn’t just write gushing letters in that situation – it was important to have a range of views. Not just to cover your tracks, but also because you want to divide opinion when you’re starting out. I guess we were Marmite in the beginning, because when we got reviews of the same gig in Sounds and NME, they were at 180 degrees to each other – NME said we were the new Sex Pistols or some bullshit, and Sounds said we were just the worst thing ever. That couldn’t have gone any better.
It felt like nobody was taking any chances any more. William and I watched a Doors documentary around that time, where they were playing the Hollywood Bowl – it was after ‘Light My Fire’ was a massive hit, but Jim Morrison just turned up really late and did a forty-minute version of ‘When The Music’s Over’ and then left the stage. I remember us thinking ‘My God – why don’t people do things like that now?’ It shouldn’t just be about pandering to your audience’s demands. If we felt like doing a song called ‘Jesus Fuck’ for half an hour, we thought that should be up to us: ‘You’ve come to see us and this is what we want to do, we won’t do it like this every night, but tonight we are, so just sit back and enjoy the ride because this is what you’re getting.’
It never seemed to go smoothly, not least because we were absolutely fucking rat-arsed onstage and we’d not been playing together long enough to have any certainty about what was going to happen from one minute to the next anyway. It was always chaotic and there was an incident of some kind at pretty much every show, whether that meant me getting punched in the face by a bouncer or us getting threatened by someone in the crowd. People didn’t sit there and politely clap their hands afterwards, some of them would really want to beat the shit out of us for what we were doing – that was the norm back then – and with the help of my new best friend, alcohol, I wasn’t seeing that as a problem. This devil-may-care spirit wasn’t everything the band was about – we knew we had the actual songs to back up the attitude – but it was an element we really loved. The idea that we could do that and get away with it was really important to us.
Half the people in the room wanted to kill me, but the other half thought it was really cool, and I couldn’t let that go. After a couple of months, when I started to attract an increasing amount of female attention, William was saying ‘I want to be the singer’, but no deal – we’d tossed that coin, I’m afraid.
I was fine with being in the shadows. I did sing once at an early gig in London – when Jim had lost his voice – and I really enjoyed it, but being the frontman wasn’t for me. Jim was born for that role, even though he would never admit it.
Everything we were doing just seemed to make more sense in London. People in Glasgow weren’t really entertaining the kind of music that we wanted to make, but as soon as we got out of there, things began to click very quickly. It was almost overnight, or at least within a couple of weeks of us playing down in London – there was a buzz about the band in a way we would never have dreamt of back home. And yet as soon as we started to make it a bit, Glasgow was trying to claim us – ‘Local boys The Jesus and Mary Chain have made good’. We used to think: ‘No fucking thanks to you. When we needed a break, Glasgow wasn’t giving us one.’ We resented that bitterly for years afterwards. Were we going to start flying the St Andrew’s cross? No fucking way.
It wasn’t just Glasgow we were angry with. Sonically, the early to mid 1980s was about the worst period for music that I can think of. We listened to what was coming out of the radio and thought ‘Fuck, the radio’s broke’. Then, when we realised the radio wasn’t broke – it was music that was broke. That was when we decided to fix things.
The fundamental problem was what me and William called ‘the standard non-guitar rock sound’ of the eighties. We used to watch Top of the Pops and there’d be bands going mental – jumping up and down and thrashing their guitars – and you’d think ‘Hold on a minute, I don’t think there’s a guitar on that song…’
Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ would be a good example – I quite like that song, but is there a guitar on it? If there is, I can’t hear it. Remember this is Eddie Van Halen we’re talking about – one of the most famous guitarists in the world. He’s practically doing the Pete Townshend windmills in the video, but if you listen to the record, it’s a synthesiser playing the actual riff.
‘Born In The USA’ is another one. Now I quite like Bruce Springsteen for my sins and I think ‘Born In The USA’ is a great fucking song, but it’s got the soulless ‘p’chow-p’chow’ drum beat and a load of synthesiser and OK, maybe a tiny smattering of guitar. But that was one of those records where you’d think ‘Christ, if this had been recorded in 1975, it would’ve been one of the greats.’ I know a lot of people think it is anyway, but I don’t. It’s a great song, it’s just not a great record.
That chronic mid-eighties guitar deficit was what The Jesus and Mary Chain were born to make good. Whatever else you might think about our first single, ‘Upside Down’, no one can deny there’s a guitar on it.
The vocal as it turned out would be more of a stretch. I already had a throat infection before we got on the overnight Scottish Express bus down to London. That was a hellish ride through the night at the best of times – get on at midnight and arrive at seven in the morning – but you could still smoke on buses back then, and I was sitting next to this fat fucker who chain-smoked all the way down. I begged someone to swap seats with me – ‘I’ve got to fucking sing tomorrow’ – but the rest of the band just said ‘No deal’, as he carried on lighting cigarette after cigarette. By the time I got to London my throat was totally fucked – ‘Oh God, somebody kill me.’
I just about managed the vocal on the single, but McGee had set us up two or three shows on the same trip, so one of those ended up being the gig where William had to step in as reluctant lead vocalist. I still think I would’ve been happier as a musician rather than a singer, but much as even now I still don’t like everyone looking at me, it was clear from my brother’s one-off showing as a stand-in frontman that he was even more uncomfortable with it than I was.
Our first experience in a proper studio was a much more positive learning curve. Because it was the first time we had ever made a record, Murray’s drums didn’t sound very good at first, so we got the guy whose studio it was – Pat Collier – to twiddle a few knobs and put loads of effects on to make it sound weird and a bit interesting. I’m not snobbish about anything when it comes to music – there’s a pair of speakers and if what I’m hearing coming out of them sounds good, then that’s it, it’s job done as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t care what piece of equipment anyone was using or who pressed what button to make it sound that way. Joe Foster was in the studio when we made ‘Upside Down’, but he was there on the invitation of Alan McGee, not The Jesus and Mary Chain, because for some reason McGee had this idea that Joe was going to be Creation’s ‘in-house producer’ – like it was Motown or Blue Note or something, even though that concept didn’t really sit easily with the kind of music we were making. It wasn’t just us who had a problem with McGee’s determination to foreground Joe’s contribution. The Pastels had the same sort of situation where McGee had insisted he produce their single but they felt he did fuck all. So when they did the artwork for it – I think it was ‘A Million Tears’ – they didn’t give him a credit.
Now that I think of it, that trip down to London to record ‘Upside Down’ was actually the very one where The Pastels met us at Glasgow bus station to hand over this lovely professionally produced artwork before we got on the nicotine express down to London, so we could give it to McGee. When Alan saw it he got a pencil out and scribbled ‘produced by Joe Foster’ all over it. We asked him ‘Should you really be doing that?’ And he said ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, those Pastels are a pain in the arse.’ We should have known from that point how things were going to go, because The Pastels were (and are) not a pain in the arse, they’re a fucking great band. But for some reason – and I have no idea why – McGee would have pet people, and Joe was one of his longest living pets.
We did make one classic beginners’ mistake the first time we went in the studio, which is to listen back to what you’ve done on the giant speakers inside the studio and think it’s really powerful, then get it home and realise your mistake. What we’d done sounded immense on the giant motherfucking tannoys in Pat Collier’s control room. Then when we played the tape back on a normal cassette recorder, it sounded like Dire Straits. We knew we had to remix it, so William put loads of extra layers of feedback on and it sounded much better.
We were determined to be the antidote to the mid eighties, not just in terms of how we sounded, but also in terms of how we looked. It wasn’t like we sat down and thought about it – nobody discussed what was going to be worn onstage – but we were very interested in the look, and it was a look that we already had. We’d read something in NME about The Beatles in Hamburg at some point – when Stuart Sutcliffe was still in the band. They all wore leather and they just looked so fucking cool in the pictures – I wished they’d never worn suits – and there was a definite crossover from there to those photographs of The Velvet Underground in the John Cale period. The 1966 look that launched a million indie bands. Then when punk came in you had the Ramones in their leather jackets and Billy Idol in his leather trousers in Generation X, and Johnny Rotten wearing those pointy brothel creepers, and all of that kind of came together as our look, with a bit of Echo and the Bunnymen long mac fashion in there too.
The missing ingredient – visually and sonically – was Bobby Gillespie. We did already have a drummer, and Murray Dalglish was – and is – a good guy who I still see from time to time, but he wasn’t really a kindred spirit. He was a younger goth kid who was happy to be in a band but would’ve been even happier if we could’ve done a Bauhaus cover every now and then. We couldn’t have got started without him, but it was obvious he didn’t really fit in, and I think he realised we were probably going to get rid of him, so he did all the early shows – and the recording of ‘Upside Down’ – and then jumped before he was pushed. He just told us he didn’t want to do it any more and we agreed quite readily.
I don’t even remember seeing Bobby play drums before we asked him to take Murray’s place. I think we probably asked him if he could do it and when he answered in the affirmative, that was good enough for us. There was a Creation tour of Europe looming – just a bunch of Creation bands including us playing these little dives all across the continent for a couple of weeks – and when we asked Bobby if he fancied doing it with us, he said yes straight away. I don’t remember any rehearsals, never mind an audition. There was a gig at the Three Johns pub in Islington just before we left for the tour. That was Bobby’s chance to show us he had the chops, and he passed the test with flying colours. It could’ve and perhaps should’ve been a disaster, but it just felt like the final piece of the puzzle.
I don’t think Bobby could’ve played a full kit, but we didn’t need him to. Stand-up drums felt natural and that was the way things were with us at the time – if it felt right, we did it. If Bobby hadn’t agreed to help us out we would probably have ended up using a drum machine, because we had no problems with the idea of that and we wanted quite a mechanical sound. Bobby was so fucking tight on those drums that he might as well have been a drum machine, and the minimal element of it was very important to us on our ‘antidote to the mid eighties’ crusade.
You’d go to see most bands at that time and the stage was basically like a musical instrument shop – there’s guitars on one side, a whole fucking gigantic drum kit filling the stage and blah blah blah. When you went to see the Mary Chain, William had one guitar, that was it. He didn’t change it. He still doesn’t, which is why I have to stand there like a fucking idiot telling jokes while he tunes up. But anyway, it was William with his one guitar, Douglas with his two-string bass, and Bobby standing just behind us with two drums, not on a riser or anything. Stripped down to the bone, it looked great and it sounded great. Simple, powerful, (ahem) primal. There was almost a bit of a Suicide vibe to it, which we were happy with – no fat on it, just the bare essentials, but then also sometimes a vocal that was a kind of panic attack over the top, like in ‘Frankie Teardrop’.
The Three Johns gig was packed because ‘Upside Down’ had just come out and there was a buzz about us, so the music papers were there to review it. The reviews – one great, one terrible, as William mentioned – would be waiting for us when we got off the train back from the European tour at Victoria. Bobby picking up NME and Sounds and saying ‘Oh, there’s reviews in here’ – very matter-of-factly like it happened every day – was a big moment in the history of the band, and we pissed ourselves laughing at the conjunction of the terrible review and the great review, because after all those long nights of hatching plans together, we couldn’t have designed it any better. Basically, we were the new Sex Pistols. However ludicrous that felt to us – and in fact was – for the time being it was a done deal.
That was when the men in Armani suits came looking for us. It turned out those two weeks in Europe had been the beginning and the end of our rock ’n’ roll dues-paying experience. Other bands have to slog around doing that for ages, but we only roughed it for a fortnight. After all those years of not much going on, everything suddenly seemed to be happening at the double for the Mary Chain.
We figured that all this was as new to Bobby as it was to us. He’d vaguely mentioned something about the Factory band he’d been in called The Wake, but he didn’t go on about it much. It was only when we read his book years later that we found out that compared to us he had actually already been around the block a few times in terms of live music. But he was so wide eyed and fresh faced about it all on that first European tour that it seemed like it must be his first time driving hundreds of miles in a draughty old Transit to play a gig with only eight people watching, too.
The thing with Bobby was that at heart he’s not a drummer, he’s a singer, and we always knew Primal Scream were going to be his priority in the long run. But somehow knowing that he was going to have to go back – feeling like we were borrowing him – made the whole thing brilliant. The ad hoc feel of it totally fitted with the way we wanted things to be, so it was almost like a dream.
Me and Bobby had a pretty intense relationship onstage. I think you’d have to be a musician to know what I was talking about but it’s a thing called being ‘simpatico’. We would just look at each other while we were playing and burst out laughing. He was the same with Jim as well. People thought of the Mary Chain as a bunch of miserable bastards, but there was a lot of joy in what we were doing – there were so many moments when I’d be playing, out of my mind with the intensity of it, then I’d see Bobby hammering away at his two drums and it was just an incredible amount of fun.
Bobby was like the engine in the back. I’m not talking about his drumming because I honestly think anyone could have done that, but it was his energy and the way he looked the part. We’d be doing some gig in the wilds of Germany where no one had ever heard of us and there’d be a bunch of lukewarm people dressed in black giving out that ‘Come on, show us what you’ve got, impress us’, vibe. I’d be feeling momentarily crushed until I turned around and saw Bobby with that manic mental smile on his face, then I’d just think ‘Fuck it, here goes.’ And the gig would kick off from there. He was kind of our onstage barometer of ‘How’s this going?’ Sometimes in the more free-form improv sections he’d just flick his hair across his face and go ‘whew’ and then you’d know it was going well – the electricity of the show seemed to course through him, and I could always turn to Bobby if I needed a pick-me-up. Then I’d look at William with his head stuck in the speaker and his arse up in in the air like a monkey as he bent down to get the feedback out of the amp and that would give me the energy to do what I needed. Well, that and the alcohol and the drugs – I would just start rolling around on the floor screaming blue bloody murder and that would be it.
I was basically drunk for the entire two weeks of that European tour so my memories of it are a little foggy, but there were were definitely a bunch of us – Biff Bang Pow, The Jasmine Minks and the Mary Chain – crammed together in two small vans. It wasn’t like we enjoyed experiencing the local culture, it was egg and chips and lager all the way as we breezed across Europe in our little British bubble. The broadening of our horizons would come later but it didn’t happen on that tour. We had more of a Pulp Fiction vibe going on – fucking hell, the Europeans are putting mayo on chips! Our minds were blown.
I guess these were the kinds of experiences that middle-class kids would’ve had on French exchanges, but even though William and I had both gone abroad on school trips as kids, I’d not been drinking for very long. Mind you, I took to it like a duck to water. In retrospect, that tour was probably the beginning of my wrestling with alcohol for the next forty fucking years, but it was also very enjoyable. Not glamorous, but exciting – disorganised, utterly chaotic and strangely fun.
One of the reasons the drinking had to be so relentless was because of the kind of places McGee made us stay in. He’d give the big build-up to the hotel we were heading for in Düsseldorf, then when you’d get there the place would literally be a doss house. ‘McGee, this isn’t a hotel – there’s an old man over there in a bunk bed drinking methylated spirits, for fuck’s sake.’ The next night we’d be staying with someone McGee had met five years before who had misguidedly said ‘If you’re ever near Frankfurt, drop in’, only for Alan to call by with twenty people in tow. It was like the Monty Python sketch – ‘You said drop in any time and here we are… now you’ve got three bands sleeping on your floor.’
Some bands would start off on that circuit and stay there for forty years, but even my very brief experience of that lifestyle cured me of any inclination to romanticise it. I have to admit to quite enjoying the fact that we progressed to a more comfortable touring set-up almost straight away. And if you are sensing the beginnings of a divide between the Mary Chain and the ideological construct that no one really ever calls ‘indie orthodoxy’ – even though they probably could if they wanted – then you are right on the money.
Creation at the point where we came into contact with it was more of a hobby than a proper record label. Alan McGee still worked for British Rail and the records were stacked up in the spare room of his flat in Tottenham. It was one of those two-bedroom conversions on the ground floor of a house that’s been divided into two so someone else can live above. We stayed over there sometimes, like when we played two nights at Alan’s club, The Living Room, but his wife at the time was (understandably) not all that keen on having weird guys in bands cluttering up her spare room and eating her out of house and home, so we weren’t always that welcome. Primal Scream had an unflattering nickname for her, but I could see her point and the constant requirement to play host to hard-living rock ’n’ rollers like us might’ve been one reason that marriage didn’t last.
Either way, it wasn’t that luxurious from our point of view, and Alan’s Creation right-hand man Dick Green lived just round the corner on Seven Sisters Road, so we would usually angle to relocate in his direction, as that was a slightly more relaxed environment. In terms of the records Alan and Dick had released before we came along, you’d have to say the talent pool wasn’t that deep. No one they’d worked with was ever going to be on Top of the Pops, especially not The Legend! A fanzine writer and indie scenester who was in the process of becoming a music journalist, The Legend! (his exclamation mark) was also the man responsible for the first single ever released on Creation – a record so bad it can only be safely transported in a lead-lined casket. He really liked The Jesus and Mary Chain initially but then turned very much against us for reasons I never quite understood – possibly connected to us buying a pair of leather trousers.
This was one of the earliest examples of a response which would affect us throughout our career – where dyed-in-the-wool indie guys (and it is always guys) thought we’d sold out because we had a bit of get up and go about us. The irony of it was that it was our first single which turned Creation from a cottage industry into something almost like a record company. ‘Upside Down’ came out just before we went off to Europe and by the time we came back it was selling in quantities Alan and Dick hadn’t had to deal with before. That’s how we found ourselves in McGee’s flat, folding up the paper sleeves with the Jackson Pollock paint spatters that would make such a big impression on The Stone Roses and putting them in the seven-inch plastic bags. Me, William, Douglas, Bobby and McGee as well were sat in that back room of his flat doing that for hours. When we got bored we started writing abusive messages on them for fun so if you’ve got one of those arcane scribblings you know you’ve got a reasonably early pressing.
By the time we were making our first record, there was this ethos among the kind of indie bands the NME liked of failure being a badge of honour – when people made a record they were proud if it sold 200 copies while anything that looked like success would be considered an embarrassing lapse in taste. Whereas how we were thinking was ‘If we make a record it’s going to be fucking great and why the fuck can’t we be on Top of the Pops like the bands we loved when we were growing up?’ We still considered what we were doing to be pop music, even if our version of that was laced with poisonous feedback. It had strychnine in it as well as a cocktail umbrella, it was a nun in a mini-skirt – that’s why it affronted the hierarchy.
We were very anti-indie at the time, because the indie crowd seemed to be underachievers who aimed low. It’s hard to say this without sounding Thatcherite, but the problem with indie music in 1984 was it had no ambition. As this musical realm was experienced at McGee’s Living Room and many other similar clubs around the country, what it meant was a bunch of people in Oxfam clothes playing to eighteen of their friends in a room above a pub and thinking that was good enough. I love lo-fi music but I don’t like music that doesn’t seem to have any self-belief, and a lot of that eighties indie stuff that was getting played on John Peel at the time seemed to be almost an exercise in futility – it didn’t seem to have any end destination.
Me and William knew what a pop star looked like and it wasn’t some indie kid in Oxfam clothes – any more than it was Simon Le Bon or one of the clowns out of Spandau Ballet like everyone else in the mid-eighties seemed to have decided. We wanted to bring cool-looking people and aggressive-sounding music back to the forefront, because the whole scene seemed to have been hijacked by all these fucking twats in two thousand pound suits, and that wasn’t what we’d signed up for when we’d watched Marc Bolan or Generation X on Top of the Pops.
There was a strand of indie thinking which almost didn’t want success because somehow that was considered too ostentatious or embarrassing. I think that was a very middle-class attitude perpetrated by kids who thought it was cool to wear charity shop clothes with holes in them when in fact they could have afforded brand-new Benetton. I realise this is probably sounding like a rant now but I actually think it’s quite a fundamental divide.
Musicians from working-class backgrounds who knew what it was to have nothing – like me and William and Douglas and Bobby – weren’t signing up for any of that nonsense. We wanted to be big stars and we didn’t care who knew it, and the hostility this brought down on our heads was very real. You can see this enduring even now in some of the treatment Bobby gets.
I understand there was an ideological undercurrent to it in the eighties. Because of the state of Western politics in the era of Thatcher and Reagan, where everything seemed to be about greed and pushing people out of the way to succeed, there was value in showing things didn’t have to be that way. But that didn’t mean anyone with an ounce of drive or ambition should be lumped in with Gordon Gekko from Wall Street. ‘Greed is good’ certainly wasn’t what The Jesus and Mary Chain were about. Collective self-improvement was our watchword, and it was following that particular yellow brick road which led us to make the biggest fuck-up of our career.
The first time Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis came to see us was a gig at the squatted ambulance station on Old Kent Road. It was quite an edgy night – the element of aggression in audience responses to what we were doing was starting to come to the fore by then – but Geoff didn’t seem to mind.
We were totally aware of all the things he had done at Rough Trade – he was kind of the king of post-punk, in so far as the patriarchal concept of kingship could be incorporated into Rough Trade’s Notting Hill brown-rice feminist world view – and I liked him as a person, but he was always kind of aloof. You were never going to be mates with Geoff. There was no nattering away telling each other your backstory while you went for a pint the way we did with McGee, it was always going to be business. And we were fine with that, because contrary to what you might have read in Alan McGee’s autobiography, William and I were (and are) actually very business-like people.
Yes, we were very, very shy back then, yet there was one thing that was guaranteed to bring us out of our shells (apart from drugs and drink, but I’m talking about when we were sober) and that was discussing our band and its future. The Jesus and Mary Chain was a matter of life and death to us. Without making us sound too desperate, ‘If this doesn’t work we’ll just have to kill ourselves’ was a thought process to which we were not strangers, so we certainly weren’t going to be letting anybody else make key career decisions for us.
On the fateful day when Geoff was flown up to McGee’s mum’s house in Glasgow to offer us whatever he was going to offer us – Alan’s mum may well have made us a cream tea – William and I did not just sit there in silence, looking down at her carpet like a couple of sulky teenagers while the adults took care of business. There’s been some bullshit to this effect from McGee but there usually is – bullshit is his currency, for Christ’s sake. (For the sake of full disclosure, I’ve never read Alan’s book or seen the film of it, but this is one of several warped notions that have drifted through to me at second hand that I’d really like to set straight.)
That meeting at Alan’s mum’s house was me, William and Geoff Travis, with McGee sat in the corner while the three of us had a discussion about what we wanted for the Mary Chain. We told Geoff that we wanted to be rock stars and as far as we were concerned that meant having a major label and a bankroll behind us. He kept telling us ‘You can do that on Rough Trade’, but we weren’t really believing him, and there was a tempting option B, because Geoff was pitching us two alternative deals. Rough Trade, which was the one he was heavily leaning towards, or a bigger money situation with Blanco y Negro, a new faux-indie subsidiary of the international corporate conglomerate Warner/Reprise, which Geoff had helped set up.
This would give us all the clout of a major label deal, but with Geoff – a guy we had quickly come to feel that we knew and trusted – as the translator and middleman. It seemed like a no-brainer, and we duly left that room with a deal for a one-off second single on Warners (via Blanco y Negro) – basically a ‘Dip your toe in the water to see how this is going to go down’ major label situation – for which The Jesus and Mary Chain would be paid a thousand pounds each. The big time was calling and it was very exciting.
It was also a colossal mistake. Elektra was part of Warner Brothers, and The Doors and Love were on Elektra, so we thought that was the kind of label we needed to be on, but of course the major record labels of the mid eighties were very different places to the ones that had signed the bands we loved twenty years before. The world had changed and now (with the power of some exceptionally painful hindsight) I can see that this should have been obvious to us, but at that time, because we were naive idealists with no experience of the music industry, it wasn’t.
Much as I’d like to be able to blame Alan McGee for this defining wrong turn in the life of the band, unfortunately it was all our own doing. Events would ultimately prove that Geoff Travis had been right all along – Rough Trade would’ve been a much better home than Warners for The Jesus and Mary Chain in the Eighties, just as it was for The Smiths, but there’s no going back, so fuck it.