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.

 

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