I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO CRY Melody Maker - 7.10.95
Culture
Of Despair alert! Since their rise to prominence, MARION have
lost their friends and gained loads of ghoulish groupies. IAN
WATSON tries to cheer up a depressed JAIME HARDING. Shadowplay:
PAT POPE.
Jaime Harding would make an awful card shark. He may be blessed
with the kind of chiselled features perfect for a poker face, but
the singer has the worst gambling habit imaginable. He's got a
"tell", a subconscious mannerism that shows when he's
feeling nervous or under pressure. Worse still, his tell isn't a
minor idiosyncrasy like tugging an earlobe, it's the rather more
noticeable habit of flicking his lighter on and off. As soon as
he starts up you know you're on to something.
To Jaime's credit it's a good 15 minutes before this quirk
becomes apparent. We've talked about Marion's brilliant year,
which has seen the Mancunian fivesome go from supporting their
all-time hero, Morrissey, to wowing their own adoring fans at
'95's major festivals. And Jaime has even voiced his hatred for
the "Dark Art" tag which he feels purposefully ignores
Marion's rock 'n' roll leanings. But when I ask the singer how
he's coped with all of the sudden attention, he quickly reached
for his lighter.
"Not well," he admits. "Doing gigs and everything
that comes with being in a band really ripped me apart. I hated
it. I'm just getting to like it a bit more now, because I've
started to broaden my horizons and sing about things other then
feeling frustrated and being trapped. But at the start I felt
awful, especially when I was onstage and everyone was looking at
me. I didn't think I was anything special, but I was supposed to
look cocky and arrogant. And doing that is crippling to be
honest."
Anyone who went to the early Marion gigs will confirm that
Jaime's performances were a mixture of fear and determination, a
knife-edge encapsulation of what makes the bands music so
compelling. Jaime shudders at the memory.
"I just felt this overriding feeling of, 'Fucking hell, I
don't like this', but I want to do it, I really want to be the
centre of attention. Singers always say they can fake it, but I
really can't go on and pretend to be confident when I'm not. I've
spent a lot of time on my own and I come from a broken home which
I suppose added to it. But that's starting to change now and I'm
getting used to being in the public eye."
Jaime says he managed to overcome his initial difficulties by
concentrating entirely on the band and channelling any
frustration into his songs. This cleared up his insecurity about
being about being a rock 'n' roll performer, but still left him
feeling slightly at odds with the world.
"I'm confident about Marion now, but nothing else" as
he flicks a flame from his lighter for the millionth time.
"And the other thing is that I have absolutely no friends at
all now. Before I had people I could ring up, but nowadays it's
just the band all the time and the only people I meet are people
who've listened to the songs and they expect you to be outgoing.
They've seen you onstage giving it some, and it confuses them why
you're quiet. It's a very unusual situation."
Do your fans expect to have an instant rapport with you?
"Some do. There's all types at the minute. There's the girls
who just want to have sex with you and there's the lads that just
want to have sex with you and then there's the people who expect
you to be a soulmate. The odd thing is I've been getting into a
few brawls as well. A lot of people go, 'We've heard about you,
you want to get away from the violence of Manchester. Well you're
not going anywhere.' And they come round and start pushing you
about and you have to push back and hope for the best."
Of course, one of Jaime's main reasons for starting a band was to
get away from the moronic beer boy element that made his youth
such a living hell. Even now he talks of hid childhood peers as
"working at Kwiksave and going to the pub to have a
fight." So the discovery that Marion was going to bring him
into contact with more thugs was obviously a tramautic moment.
"That happened when we played the Fiele festival in
Ireland,"Jaime frowns. "It was the booze talking I
suppose. I'm a young lad in an up-and-coming band with a girl's
name, so I guess I'm bound to get hassle. A lot of people think
we're going to be a bunch of wimps, but we're neither a bunch of
wimps nor a bunch of hard lads. The reason I don't like violence
is that if you've seen a lot of it, you don't want it.
"We had bottles chucked at us just after that," he
adds. "We were on a ferry coming back from Ireland and a
load of beer boys were singing 'Sleep' [early single] and one of
them threw a wine bottle across the bar and it hit [guitarist]
Phil's arm. They came over and apologised, but it was still
weird, very weird."
If you've been paying attention, then you'll be familiar with the
figure responsible for Marion's emotional skeleton, a friendless
and painfully insecure singer whose unhappy childhood was
dominated by a violent hometown and "bastard father".
But what you won't know about is the tenderness that gives the
emotional skeleton some much-needed flesh and blood and brings it
joyfully to life. That's because you've yet to be introduced to
the most important person in the Marion ecosystem - Jaime's
grandmother.
"I only met my grandmother once or twice years ago and I
can't really remember her, but she was called Marion," Jaime
explains. "I don't want to talk about this but she was a
really tender woman and I can't get over how nice she was
considering she was surrounded by so many arseholes. I have a lot
of found memories of her and those memories really helped me
through loads of bad times. She made a big impression on me. I'd
have either named the band Marion, or a little girl Marion."
This thread of warmth and understanding has threaded through all
three Marion singles, from the bravely autobiographical
"Violent Men" onwards, but it's only with the band's
new release, "Let's All go Together", that it really
comes to the fore. To a melody that fuses the romance of
Radiohead with Marion's own distinct style, Jaime appears to
offer comfort to an unloved soul with the words, "It's hard
for you / They don't understand / That life's an exam / And you
need something".
All is not what it seems, however.
"I wrote it because I was feeling angry and frustrated and I
felt, 'Let's all go together'," says Jaime. "I don't
want to sound pessimistic but, at the time, I was looking for a
way out. You know what I'm talking about."
It sounds like Jaime is referring to suicide, but he won't be
drawn on the subject. Hmmmm. Was there a specific incident behind
these feelings?
"Yeah, there was," he nods, fingers busy with his
lighter. "It was the death of someone I knew. They died in
an awful way and just because they had been on their own for so
long."
Did them kill themselves?
"Yeah," Jaime sighs. "It made me feel sick. But
the good thing about 'Let's All Go Together' is that it's a
positive song, I'm pleased that something so good has come out of
something so bad."
And so he should be. Even with the knowledge that it was inspired
by suicidal feelings, "Let's All Go Together" is still
an amazingly uplifting song and one that effortlessly embodies
Marion's overall desire to provide a lifeline for those with a
genuine need
Does that sound like a fair assessment of what you're trying to
achieve, Jaime?
"Yeah, totally," the singer nods. "That's exactly
what we're about."
And with those final words he slips the lighter back into his
pocket.