Goodbye Mr Mackenzie

Martin Metcalfe:

I didn’t really look at the other members of the band much on stage; we weren’t into being the palsy-wallsy type band, with arms around each other and all that canoodly stuff. It just wasn’t us.
But playing live I remember Kelly and Rona being very stoic, heads down, totally focused.
Rona used to hammer out the computerised sounding parts on Pleasure Search without missing a note. We never used click tracks, or any of that automated stuff, so she had to really play it. Then there would be Fin inevitably naked torso posing furiously.
John used to get so lost in his guitar playing it was like a drug to him, military ketamine strength. Immediately after a solo he would look up for some kind of bearing, as if to say ‘What song is this? What town is this? What band is this?’.
Occasionally I’d look over at the Shirley side of the stage and she’d be spitting at or giving the finger to people in the audience who’d pissed her off. All good clean fun. There was rarely violence. The audience knew we were there to enjoy ourselves we didn’t have a sick agenda. It was never about audience abuse. Though we never said ‘get up and dance or clap your hands everybody’ the fans didn’t need instructions.
Some people described out show as ‘an explosion in a cake factory’, or ‘The Addams Family in a car crash’.

Fin:

We always seemed to be regarded as a kind of Lynchian (David, cult movie director) car crash gone wrong on stage, but basically I just loved playing live. Looking back I can appreciate we weren't exactly your average looking band.
Metcalfe was half Bowie/half deranged Wurzel Gummidge, unpredictable &
chaotic. And Big John was just a maniac on the guitar, a massive, tattooed behemoth who looked as if he was exorcising another of his many demons with every radge note he hit.
Utterly inspiring to play with, he may have lost the plot sometimes after a show, but
somehow always managed to keep it together on stage.
Shirley would always be cavorting and gyrating  with mike in hand or hitting her keyboard, while Rona, resplendent in a tutu,would  bash out her stuff flawlessly. 
Thumping out the rhythms, driving everyone on relentlessly, was Kelly on the
drums.
I always preferred the smaller, more intimate gigs. You could get off on the
manic intensity of playing live a whole lot more with the crowd up close -
one big seething, sweaty mass. We had a brilliant lighting engineer for a
while and the white light, strobes, exploding violets, it doesn't get much
better than that.
The first time I rehearsed with the band was in a freezing cold, damp
warehouse in Leith - with just Metcalfe and Kelly. I was 18 and had never
played alongside such raw emotion before. We went through Face to Face and
it blew me away; Martin's voice and edgy guitar and Kelly's drumming. That's
what we always tried to evoke live, reaching that point where the hair
stands up on the back of your neck.
We used to play the Mysteries of Love, from the soundtrack of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, before we went on stage, and it set the scene well.
The likes of
Niagara, What's Got Into You, Jezebel and Sick Baby always did it for me. I always preferred the darker stuff – it was probably just a stage I was going through.

I don’t mind talking about these songs. You don’t have to believe what the artist says to enjoy the music. Everyone has their own interpretation of songs anyway. These are just my ides today. I could be changing my mind as we speak.

Goodwill City
Blacker Than Black
Face To Face
Diamonds
Pleasure Search
Sick Baby
Goodbye Mr Mackenzie
Dust
HMV
Tongue Tied
The Rattler
Jezebel
Green Turn Red
Niagara
What’s Got Into You?
Port Of Amsterdam
Now We Are Married
Love Child
Mystery Train
Open Your Arms

Goodwill City

Martin

This is a song about the AIDS situation in the UK at the end of the Eighties. Tory backbenchers were proposing to put AIDS sufferers on oil-rigs as if they were modern day lepers.
Having been proclaimed the AIDS capital of Europe because of high levels of needle sharing among drug users, I remember the director of the city’s celebrated Arts festival saying he wanted Edinburgh to be an ‘International Goodwill City’.
These contradictions make up the body of this song, along with a kind of disappointment that it was the era when everyone had to ‘Take Care’ with sex.

Martin:

Blacker Than Black

It is about the addictive nature of war.
Gambling is seen as a form of addiction right? Therefore if you get that adrenaline kick out of gambling your life, or troops or country, wouldn’t that be equally addictive? The main character in the song is depressed in his addiction, just like any addict is. And there is only one thing that can take away that feeling; another hit. And I don’t mean in the chart….

Face To Face
Metcalfe:
This song was triggered when an old judge said a girl who was raped whilst hitching a lift on the motorway was guilty of ‘contributory negligence’ because she was wearing a mini skirt. Round the same time a perfume commercial main message was; ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it’. Society seemed to be saying ‘be sexy’, then blame you when for following the instructions.

Diamonds
Metcalfe
I once started watching a movie, aWestern, halfway through. American indians hold up a stagecoach, killing and robbing everyone.
In desperation a pretty young girl offers her diamonds to one of the attackers in exchange for her life. He stuffs the diamonds in her mouth and choking her to death. It’s a song about offering too little too late.
Does anybody know what the film is called? It’s not a quiz, I would just like to know….

Pleasure Search
Metcalfe
This song was inspired by a documentary on the Japanese novelist/S&M military freak Yukio Mishima; I’d do anything to avoid writing about love & relationships.
Mishima wrote some very beautiful descriptive stuff about the natural world, but was a big tangled ball of contradictions.

Sick Baby
Metcalfe
The record company hated this one and we liked it, which was nothing unusual for us.
We still recorded it though - a Happy Mondays loop and a Gloomy Sunday troupe.

Goodbye Mr Mackenzie
Metcalfe
This was mainly written by Ewan Drysdale, who was in an early line up of the band.
We chose to use the name of the song as the band’s name when we were drunk one night. I don’t think any of us had the courage to admit it was a bad idea the next day, so it stuck. Oh well. I think the song a science fiction idea about a super race of bankers, then God brings his terrible wrath down upon this greedy race, and the last member standing is Mr Mackenzie.
It’s a judgement day song, and powerfully anti-materialism, which I liked.
It’s the oldest song we recorded, and I remember it being much better before we made it all tuneful and complicated.

Dust
Metcalfe
Kelly’s initial lyrical Idea I guess it’s about some Australian gold miners or something???
My take on this was really about people in the music business. They gave us Dust.
Many of them were just office workers; who didn’t really have any passion or belief in music. They’re not all bad though.

HMV
Metcalfe
HMV used to be a record label.
If you remember the original Image on His Masters Voice recordings it was the same as the music store - a little dog listening to an old 78 disc player through a big horn on it, presumably playing a recording of his master’s voice. It reminded me of Pavlov’s dog experiments. I imagined the recording was issuing orders.
I just imagined me being the dog, and alcohol and the force of nature being the recording. And the voice said ‘shag, puke and piss in a wardrobe’.

Tongue Tied
Metcalfe
Love and relationships – I am afraid it could not be avoided.

The Rattler
Kelly
We got bored with the way it was on record, so we started playing
around with the arrangement to amuse ourselves..
Our early management was a Glasgow based company run by a guy called Eliot Davis who looked after Wet Wet Wet.
We sent this song through to him on a demo cassette, and about 2 hours later he
was on the phone playing it back to us shouting about how fantastic it
was.
Everybody had it down as Springsteenesque when it had
really started off with a kind of Cocteau Twins vibe...before suddenly taking
off in a totally different direction. For some reason it always
went down a storm in Glasgow, which was the place where the band first
really took off, and the fans there were always the best.
Metcalfe
The title really comes from the Glaswegian expression ‘ah’d rattle the arse oafy that’
and ‘The Rattling boy Of Dublin O’, by poet William McGonagall. The music is a rip off of ‘The Road To Nowhere ‘ by the Talking Heads. I don’t know why people thought it was like Bruce Springsteen. The chunky voice was an impersonation of the Skids’ Richard Jobson. They had a great song called ‘Hurry on Boys’ with a similar kind of backing vocal refrain.
The Rattler was just a bit of silly fun but it did have that forlorn section; ‘I’m going to a better place, I don’t like people to know my face’. That part of it seemed to resonate with people.

Jezebel
Kelly
We'd been listening to a lot of Roy Orbison stuff at that time, playing around with the tragic epic style of song that he in particular did so well. Some times when we were playing this and Martin was really letting rip with the vocals you could feel the whole audience mesmerised. It was one of those songs that made you feel in your bones how good a band this really was.
Metcalfe
Yes, a Roy Orbison song performed by Ian Curtis and the London Philharmonic.

Green Turn Red
Metcalfe
I saw Gene Pitney perform I’m Gonna Be Strong on the re runs of Ready Steady Go, and he looked so like Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho., I always wanted to marry Sixties’ dramatic sounds to a modern monsters thoughts and actions.
I was obsessed with the military. With other kids it was football, with me it was the guns and uniforms. I was also something of a social reject, so I identified with those guys that dress up in army gear and then kill everyone. For the record though; I don’t approve of that behaviour in the slightest, I just find it fascinating. You know ‘what are you doing today my khaki clad friend?’ ‘Oh I’m going to wander downtown kill everyone around me and then blow my head off!!’ One of our most cinematic songs, and I always thought of all of them as movies.
Kelly
The original demo title for this was called Cowcatcher.
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Niagara
Metcalfe
Niagara was about my obsession with the movie. I loved Joseph Cotton’s handsome, neurotic personality, and his high forehead.
I thought he would make a great rock star - enter The Associates!
He was a Korean War veteran and very disturbed by his experiences. His wife was a dark character, which attracted me, enhanced by Marylyn’s Monroe’s sexual allure and the power of her selfish animal instincts.
I’ve always liked the Cruella Deville’s of the movie world, and I also like the relentless way Kelly pounds his toms on this song.
Kelly
We had this song hanging around for ages before we recorded it.
It was in Berlin 1990 which was around the time that I felt our song writing started to become a bit careless.
We had a right good time in Berlin though. It was our kind of place; awkward,
dirty, a bit gallus, contradictory, truculent, seedy and a bit of a
bad attitude. Perfect.

What’s Got Into You?
Metcalfe
The Banshees with Kraftwerkish synth sounds. Kelly’s looping drumming was hypnotic.
Terry Adams our producer liked this song and he plays on this version, as Rona had left the band by this time. I like John’s mad prog rock wah-wah guitar work at the end.
My friend Jamie inspired this - he was very into dissecting the bible at the time, looking at Satan’s insidious invasion of the soul. He asked me once ‘if I’d ever really thought about what the expression, ‘What’s got into you?’ means. It got me thinking about what had got into me.
Kelly
Me martin and Shirley absolutely loved the Banshees and this has got
that kind of vibe going. It's possibly a bit tight arsed but so what – we liked it!!!
Be My Slave
Metcalfe
‘The man takes a drink; the drink takes a drink; the drink takes the man’
This is about addiction becoming an increasingly up hill struggle. The hangover cures stop working, in this case, Mexican food, which was one of mine. You can take as many painkillers you want, and drink as much water, but eventually there’s only one thing that’s going to fix it. Then it’s downhill all the way.
It’s also about how addiction takes your soul; - ‘No compassion for anyone, not sick relatives or anyone, never mind unfortunates in bin bags’.
Desperate stuff, but I still held onto some futile hope that I would be the master again.

Port Of Amsterdam
Kelly
We used to do this as a set starter with the band for ages, because
we couldn't fit it anywhere else in the set. Martin used to play the song with
a little acoustic band he was in called Stella's Baby. They recorded it
as a single and got me in to play drums on it.
Metcalfe
I loved this song the minute I heard David Bowie sing this one. I only found out later that many people have covered it, but Jacques Brel’s live version is the best, the one with the piano arpeggio at the end (which Shirley handles very nicely on our version).

Now We Are Married
Metcalfe
I hated the institution of marriage. I used to believe all politicians should be gay. That way they could avoid making prejudiced decisions through fear of poverty, due largely to the fact they had families to support. I thought marriage was such a destructive force in society. Because money becomes so much more important if you’re looking after kids and the fear of losing your job and so on becomes that much greater. I felt this was really making you a cash slave. So in effect you were marrying the devil. I blamed it for causing greed and then war. I’ve softened on these ideas a bit, but I’m still unmarried. Not out of desperation, I might add.

Love Child
Kelly
Personally, I always felt that this song was a bit of a missed opportunity.
The original idea was to have a two and a half minute wall of sound, Undertones,
Jesus & the Mary Chain type song but it just never turned out like that.

Metcalfe
I wrote the lyrics to this about some of my flatmates. They were 60’s kids with irresponsible parents who did drugs and were never there for there children; old hippies. I became that sort of parent for a while. I was a hypocrite. Then I quit.

Mystery Train
Metcalfe
Every one played guitar on this one live Rona even played slide guitar. This is a variation on the Elvis Presley version. I imagined the main character in the song being so obsessed with his baby that when the train takes her away from him, he personifies the train like it’s a bad person and decides to kill it with dynamite. He has a psychopathic denial. The passengers don’t exist for him. This song is from the best Elvis material ‘The Sun Sessions’.
Kelly
Being the drummer, I was always at the back of the stage so could see
everything in from of me.
Sometimes it was very hard to keep playing as watching Big John and Martin totally lose it when they decided to freak was hilarious. Actually trying to work out what John was going to do next was impossible......and every night was different. A true star.

Open Your Arms
Metcalfe
John’s guitar sounds like its firing missiles. He was brilliant with noise. I take responsibility for the dodgy falsetto.
This is about a Paegan ritual killing, originally titled ‘The Death of Alean Oban’, the village scapegoat scenario. It is largely Kelly’s song and I liked the lyrical ideas a lot. I saw parallel behaviour in the Pro Life/ Pro Death penalty lobby in the United States. They seemed to always be Christian fundamentalists who wanted revenge on screwed up human beings, and to make poor people suffer unwanted pregnancies. It doesn’t seem very Christian to me to force 15 year olds to have babies.

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