Here in the second of his monthly memoires of early Haçienda gigs, author, journalist
and broadcaster John Robb remembers taking Alan McGee of Creation Records and a
young Jesus And Mary Chain to The Haçienda on 13 December 1984 to see Lee “Scratch”
Perry & The Upsetters. John recalls the early days and promise of The Mary Chain
as he’d earlier done one of the first interviews with the band prior taking the
group onto FAC51 for a performance by one of reggae’s most legendary figures.
It was a cold night late in 1984. And I was living in the South Manchester bedsit zone in a beat up house on Burton Road, West Didsbury. A week before the bathroom floor
had fallen into the kitchen and the one bar heater barely made a difference in the damp slug infested interior.
In the fierce rush of youth this mattered little. This was a band house which my band the Membranes shared with various members of A Witness. When we were not touring we
would huddle together in one room to keep warm and stash all the gear in the other rooms that were damp and glistened with the slug trails. This was prime time Thatcher era rock
n roll poverty, living on the dole in the days when the state hated rock music. It didn't matter because we would spend most of our time traipsing round the country playing
loud, abrasive music. That suited us we were extreme people living an extreme lifestyle.
On these travels we met lots of like minded people. One of them was a flame haired Scottish firebrand called Alan McGee who was starting his own label off called
Creation. There had been talk of the Membranes signing to Creation earlier that year but there was no money to record with so we had to go to another label. However McGee was
great value and his vision and lust for life matched my own so I would hang out with him in London talking up our high decibel revolution and it was through this connection that
I heard the beat up demo tape of a band he was apocalyptic about called Jesus And Mary Chain.
At the time my fanzine Rox was one of the main best selling fanzines in the UK along with Vague, The Legend and Attack On Bzag and I had started writing for Zigzag which
was a great long lost music magazine that had started in the hippie era then surfed through punk and had recently been revamped in the post punk era- edited by Mick Mercer and
Kris Needs. The first interview I did for Zigzag was with the entertainingly pugnacious Hooky at Suite 16 studios and the second one was with the Jesus And The Mary Chain. The
band were unknowns at the time- just a fierce whisper in the Creation circle.
As previously mentioned me and McGee were buddies, punk rock partners in crime and I closely followed his label whose initial releases, whilst hardly setting the world
on fire sales wise, had some great moments amongst them. Their lo-fi mashing of sixties psychodrama and lo-fi punk setting the staple sound of the early Creation. McGee would
rave about these singles in meetings and phone calls and already his vision of Creation far outstripped the bands.
When he rang up about the Mary Chain though, I knew this was different.There had been this demo knocking around Glasgow shyly handed in to Bobby Gillespie by the band at
the Splash One night he co promoted in the city. The demo was then changing hands quickly, initially more on account of its flip side compilation of tunes which contained the
fab Generation X and the genius Syd Barrett- including Syd's legendary 'Vegetable Man' which was unreleased at the time and which the band was planning to cover.
When the Glasgow heads flipped the tape and finally started listening to the Mary Chain's rough hewn diamonds on the cassette's other side they exploded with excitement.
Bobby contacted his old mucker McGee and McGee signed them to Creation. It was during this period that I too had already heard the demo and managed to persuade Zigzag to let me
interview the band. McGee brought them up on the train to Manchester because he worked for British Rail at the time and had a bunch of free train passes. They caught the bus to
West Didsbury, a ragamuffin blur of leather, frizzed electric shock hair and a flame haired man who talked non-stop. On the way McGee had been to the off licence on Burton Road
and got a plastic bag full of tins to get the quieter and darker band droogs cranked up. He was probably hoping to start his own, mini Sex Pistols moment.
We sat in the freezing cold front room of the house with McGee talking like a hurricane pouring out world beating plans with the bravado of youth whilst the band slumped
sullenly on the beat up furniture oozing a classic rock n roll cool. McGee was a one man revolution who was a combination of Bill Grundy Sex Pistols fired by enthusiasm and not
hate and Loog Oldham's sharp creased sixties cool. He was a dangerous individual.
Every now and then he reached into his bottomless carrier bag and handed out another can to the band. Gradually as he got them tanked up they began to open up and we got
the interview done. They may have been shy individuals skulking behind perfectly apocalyptic hair and a switchblade Glasgow pallor but when they opened up they were driven by a
nihilistic rage, the kind of nihilistic rage that was part of the DNA of my blank generation- which was one part idealistic dreamer and one part Sid Vicious warrior of nihilism.
But for that studied sneer there was a deep love of music, a fascination for the dark stuff. As they talked their love of the desperate combination of noise and classic pop was
apparent. They talked of Einsterzende Neubaten and the Ronettes, of the Velvets and three chord rock n roll, someone mentioned Joy Division and the dark side and it kept coming
back to the feedback. The dissonant feedback that was part and parcel of their sound. The strangely meditative screech that was part of all the best bands make up at the time,
created by a fascination with the electricity that crackled through all great rock n roll and had been amplified in the desperate mid Eighties into a filthy fuck you screech.
They were also entranced by the Phil Spector wall of sound and the girl groups whose sassy, sexy, gum chewing rock n roll cool and grand symphonies were so much part of
the canyon for any hipster at the time. Add to this was the fact that they were fired by punk rock and full of anger and pure art and you has the right band at the right time.
No wonder McGee was quite literally frothing at the mouth. He had seen something in them instantly and it had fired him back to his punk rock roots. His vision of a label that
was one part punk rock and one part psychedelia was flamed by that demo. This was the band he had been searching for, his very own sexy, young assassins that would match his
vision and turn everything, well, upside down.
We hung out round my house a couple of hours as I phoned The Haçienda and blagged us all in for the gig that night which was the genius Lee Scratch Perry. A perfect
moment, the hottest young band in the country and the Jamaican dub legend whose soundscapes were so much entwined with punk and post punk noiseniks. Perry was playing a show for
the wonderful Blackburn radio DJ Steve Barker whose On The Wire show on Radio Lancs was light years ahead of nearly everything on the radio, even matching John Peel. Steve
would play cutting edge indie and underground but mash it up with best of black music from dub to hip hop and, of course, Lee Scratch Perry, who was a personal friend of his.
There is a great story of Perry on tour staying at Steve's house in Blackburn and the DJ's kids asking Uncle Scratch to do another handstand for them in the front room and he
would abide laughing like a madcap rascal.
We arrived at The Haçienda with the sound booming round the room and the odd puddles on the floor from the rain dripping from the roof. Lee Scratch Perry was, of course,
amazing. Here was the man who had virtually invented reggae tying up the loose ends of mento and other Jamaican music with American R n B and had pioneered the off kilter chug
taking it into outrageous new places that no one else had the imagination to go to. He was also one of the pioneers of dub when his feverish mind had gone into hyperdrive,
taking the music into new shapes and forms in what is arguably one of the great works of the seventies. In his black Ark studio in Jamaica a whole new style of music was made by
stripping it down and turning it inside out. The daring sense of space he pioneered had been everywhere in punk and was part of the palate of Martin Hannett whose revolutionary
production for Joy Division was already legendary for its sense of space, freeing up their inner demon, a production that had helped pave the way and pay for the Hacienda
itself.
That night the big booming ambience of The Haçienda was perfect the big booming soundscape of dub and the bass that was ideal for the room. The Haçienda was already
famous for its 'interesting' acoustics'. For guitar bands it could be difficult with their tinny, shrill, clatter dwarfed by the what seemed, at the time, a huge club with its
muffling concrete walls but for dub and later for acid house the building was perfect. There can have been few places so perfectly matched for the boom of the sound system than
The Haçienda.
Perry was a charismatic stage presence, the talisman, the dub pioneer, the outlaw with his truly original sound bouncing off the walls. His crackling voice, with the
tough gnarled lived in sound of old leather and a smokey wisdom, was intoning over the outer space sounds of dub- the eternal music. Perhaps the Mary Chain had already soaked
some of this in. When their debut single 'upside down' came out Douglas Hart's bass was imbibed with the spirit of the bottom end just like Jah wobbles had been in Public Image-
a perfect fat mattress for the wall of sound avalanche of guitar. Meanwhile Jim Reid's sexy, whispered vocal was a dark sneer holding the cool melting melodies at the same time-
a perfect cacophony.
The smattering of the audience huddled together on the dance floor of the revolutionary new club, a club that was thrilling in its ambition and it's daring otherness. A
club that was one part white elephant and one part gift to the city. Every night there would be some sort of artful madness going on there, a playpen for the arty and weird
subsidised by New Order! Getting to see Lee Scratch Perry in a space as grand as this was mind blowing in the mid Eighties, a perfect frame and backdrop to an innovator.
We returned from The Haçienda that night on the night bus, too skint for taxis but rich in ideas. McGee was still talking as we were sat there thrilling to the
excitement of youth and believing that somehow the world was ours and we would change it and change it with the white noise pop of the Jesus And Mary Chain and the eternal dub
of Lee Scratch Perry that stretched back through time and into the future. It was a fast forward to the future and yet again The Haçienda was involved.
