Melody Maker Article 18.2.95
Marion have
been called the Manchester Suede. The band themselves want to do
to people's minds what Joy Division did 15 years ago. They are
epic northern rock with stadium tendencies meets epic fey pop.
And with their new single 'Sleep' in the shops and a tour with
Morrissey under their belts, these Young Men With Weights On
their Shoulders are coming to blow you away. Report : Ian Gittins
Barrowland, Glasgow. Outside, it's a dour and pissy Friday night.
Inside the cavernous and intimidatingly bleak venue is a sea of
gold lame shirts, rigid Teddy Boy quiffs and limp bunches of
gladioli brandished in chubby fists. The notoriously
impossible-to-please local indie intelligentsia are eagerly
awaiting a royal visit from Morrissey, his first live show for
two years, and anything which prolongs their wait for their
fanatically worshipped idol is likely to be regarded as an
irritating intrusion. Who the F*** would want to be a support
band TONIGHT?
Five very young lads slope onstage. They pick up their
instruments and without a word fire into a turbulent, fierce,
ferocious rock thunderstorm. They are Marion and they are
wonderful.
There are these two guitarists - Anthony Grantham, moody and
intense behind his pencil-thin oddly (and this is strictly a
one-off) hip-looking beard, and Phil Cunningham, a ginger-nut
howl of fury whirling his arm in a Pete Townshend windmill flail.
There Jaime (pronounced Jamie) Harding, the crafty, agile
frontman with pale and piercing eyes who is obviously meant to do
this, and this alone. He's dancing with his mic stand, he's
posing, he's preening, he's winking. Nobody can tear their eyes
away from him. Nobody wants to blink.
It's immediately evident that something very special is
happening. The Barrowland crowd are transfixed. The terrace
braying of "Morr-i-see? Morr-i-see" is silenced inside
one song. Marion are playing this classic, brooding rock as if
their very lives depend on it. They're potent, powerful,
intriguing, an unholy and wholly thrilling merciful release of
dream and desire. Marion thrash out this huge, looming, beautiful
noise and time suddenly stands very still.
The cheers start early. The screams follow. Soon, whole sections
of Barrowland's audience are SHRIEKING their love for these
angel-faced upstarts, these lairy kids who are cocky enough to
charge out and slam Mozzer's salivating disciples against the
ropes. When Marion leave the stage, Barrowland echoes to the
whoops and howls of Morrissey fans who've been starved of seeing
their hero for two years, and they're screaming as only the newly
converted can: they're DEMANDING that Marion return to play an
encore.
Shortly afterwards, Mozzer himself emerges to pose and flounce
through a short, token set, look profoundly bored and distracted,
and leave his followers deeply and painfully disappointed. But
THAT, thankfully, is another story entirely.
TWO hours after their Barrowland show, Marion are sitting around
a table in their hotel, nursing beers, all talking at once.
They're buzzing, fizzing, kicking off the high of an opening
night which has been successful beyond (i.e., perfectly in line
with) their wildest dreams. "Were we ever big Smiths
fans?" ponders Jaime. "No, not really. We were too
young, man. I mean, Morrissey's done good stuff, but...when did
The Smiths split? 1987? We were 12 years old. We're not into
history. We're into the present and the future."
MARION fell together a long time ago. The band's creative core of
Harding, Grantham and Cunningham were just 10 years old when they
got together at school in their rough and tumble hometown of
Macclesfield, just outside Manchester, and decided that the only
way for them to make any sense of life in that dreary outpost was
to form a band. They rehearsed in the school music room and
played a few halting, nervy lunchtime gigs.
Inevitably, they fell for rock'n'roll. Hard. "We knew we had
to do this at once," recalls Jaime, mulling over the memory.
"There was never anything else. Our first gig was just
like...a revelation. It just felt right. I mean, we weren't any
good, or anything - we made up a few songs and played some punk
covers. But it just felt so right, and after that, nothing else
did."
(Incidentally, please exercise caution vis-à-vis the
apportioning of quotes in this interview. Jaime, Anthony and Phil
sit around me at 2am providing answers to my questions in softly
spoken, chewy Manchester accents. We're in a hotel foyer of
questionable acoustics, surrounded by very loud and braying
Glaswegians. When I play my interview tape back, it sounds like a
handful of people whispering very quietly, without using any
vowels, at the far end of a wind tunnel. Well, whatever. It made
sense at the time.)
Marion set about crafting a series of elegiac, passionate
melodramas which in classic northwest pop style longed for escape
- from small-town claustrophobia, reduced horizons, the sad,
bitterly normal cycle of waste and decay. The three school
friends searched for intensity, for meaning, for purpose. They
didn't even know they were doing this. They just knew they loved
the energy, the passion, the big white noise.
"Me and Phil go wild when we play guitars" says the
thoughtful Anthony. "We always have done. We hit the guitars
the same way now that we did when we were 13. We've always got
more excited when we're more aggressive, more mental. When we
really get into our music, so do other people - so we go
mad." "When we're on stage we can't help sometimes
doing things that other people have done" reflects Phil.
"All that history is there, in the back of your mind. It's
dead weird talking about it like this, but when we go on stage we
do think - no, we ARE the best live band around!".
"We go and watch bands all the time and we're DESPERATE for
them to knock us backwards," says Jaime. "It hardly
ever happens. With Marion we know it happens. There are some
shows where we don't QUITE hit it, but gigs always depend on the
band. It's no good blaming the audience if it doesn't happen.
They've paid their money and want to be excited. It's always down
to the band.
"But I don't want to talk about that too much", he
decides, struck by a sudden fear. "I don't even want to
THINK about it because if you analyse what makes you special too
closely you can lose it. I'm not trying to be pretentious, but I
do know for SURE that right now, anybody who comes to see us can
lose themselves. LEAVE themselves for an hour while we're
on."
MARION first sandblasted our consciousness late last year with a
debut single called "Violent Men", which was a furious
burst of venom against alcohol-fuelled aggression. Now they
return with a compulsive follow-up, a scintillating, heady guitar
explosion named "Sleep". This categorically driven song
hangs around a mesmerising chorus of "In a sense we're
exactly the same/Because we're so different in very way" and
clearly defines an obsessive love affair where two contrary
partners can live neither with nor without each other.
"Well no, it doesn't actually," says Jaime, rudely
killing my flight of fancy. "It's about this friend who was
totally into the kind of music I hate, and we'd argue madly, but
I could recognise he was just as fanatical as me. That's what it
meant when I wrote it. It can mean different things to me".
"Sleep" is backed with a track called "Father's
Day" which sounds as sheer and glacial as the most ominous,
portentous Joy Division. It's about a family ruled by a bullyboy
patriarch with no love. It may - or may not - be about Jaime
Harding's own childhood. Jaime's not saying "There's a line
in that song, 'I hate you so much when I smile'", he says.
"That's how I feel. When people are laughing around me -
that's when I feel the loneliest. Do I feel alienated? Yeah, I
suppose so. I spill my soul out when I write, yeah. Doesn't
everybody?
"It's interesting that you mention Joy Division, because I
go so much from hearing them. I love the feeling of having to
make an effort. We're not like Oasis, where they're about
celebration and that's it. We've go a lot going on. You can't
reduce us to one angle. We pride ourselves on that".
"A new song can scare the crap out of us because it sounds
so good" says Phil. "It happens a lot. We hear
something in out head, play it on guitar and think, 'F***ing
hell!' We play new tunes next to our old ones and think, 'Is it
the same band?'
Marion make some people think of The Smiths. They remind others
of The Buzzcocks, or early James, even of "a Manchester
Suede". Jaime, Anthony and Phil don't care greatly for these
list of names. They care about their embryonic, tumultuous music.
They care about being exciting, spellbinding new Britpop
contenders, and about being heard.
"We just love being onstage," says Jaime. "It's
the only place that feels real. When I'm up there singing, and
everyone's listening to me, it's everything I've ever wanted. I
love it even when my words are so personal that I can hardly bear
the rest of the band to hear them. But when people come up to me
in the street and they want my autograph or start praising me -
well, it's happened a few times in Manchester now, and I just
can't handle it. I have to run away. "
THE fiery, abrasive Marion are learning fast about the
absurdities of the on-the-road lifestyle. the Melody Maker photo
session the morning after their first Morrissey show is not
without incident. For reasons best known to himself, our lensman
Tom Sheehan decides that the boys will look best standing on a
busy railtrack leading out of the main Glasgow British Rail train
station.
Marion happily comply until the session is halted by the sudden
unexpected appearance of two policemen, who we will call PC
McNice and PC McNasty. PC McNice is joviality itself, gently
chiding the lads for high spirits and even being tempted by
Sheehan's kind offer of a walk-on part in the pictures. PC
McNasty, however, has different ideas.
The band, he informs them, are idiots. Tom Sheehan, because of
his directly role and greater years, is a bigger idiot. PC
McNasty needs everybody's name and address, and THEN he will
decide what to do. Marion hang their heads and mumble their
details in contrite shame until bassist Julian Phillips declares
to exercise his (non-existent) right to silence. PC McNasty is
reasonableness itself "You give me your name and address,
sonny, or you're all coming with me, you're all getting locked
up, and you're not supporting Morrissey in Motherwell tonight or
anywhere else!" Julian has a rapid re-think and decides,
after all, to furbish PC McNasty with his name and address.
Marion are let off with a caution.
THREE days later I'm chatting to Jaime Harding on a crackly
mobile phone. Marion are in their van speeding towards Sheffield
City Hall for the next Morrissey date. I idly wonder where Jaime
would like Marion to be in a year's time.
"I'd like to be driving towards Sheffield City Hall, like we
are now, but next year I want to be headlining it".
Obviously.
'Sleep' is out now on London. Marion tour with Morrissey until
February 26 and support Radiohead in March.