… and God Created The Jasmine Minks
We had moved to London and there was me, Tom and Adam and our bass player at the time, Stephen (who left before we started playing many gigs although we did some demos with him playing). We were writing our own stuff and rehearsing them. We auditioned Harry Howard , (brother of Mick Howard of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds) for a bass player. He ended up playing with Crime and The City Solution. He didn’t work out for us. I was more into Postcard Records and he was more into The Stooges. We were too wimpish for him, musically. Martin Keena was playing in a punk band called Premature Ejaculation or Prem Ejac for short. Things picked up quickly when he joined. We did some demos in a studio in a flat in Brixton, the engineer was an ex-member of The Psychedelic Furs, which pleased us. We sent the demo tape to Sounds – they had a page which reviewed new bands’ demos every week. It got a decent review. A day or two later I got a call from a guy called Alan McGee. We had a good chat, he said he got my number from Ian Pye, who had reviewed our songs. Alan said he had started a club called The Living Room in central London. That weekend, Alan came along to see us rehearse at Alaska Studios in Waterloo. He sat and listened to our whole set without saying a word – a good half hour or so. We finished and he said, what was the last song called? I said ‘Think’. He said, that’s your best song. It’s too long though, so trim it and it’ll be a single. Alan phoned me again in a few days and said he liked what he saw and that he had two criteria for being on his new label, Creation records (which had nothing released yet).
1. Being a Scottish band.
2. Liking The Velvet Underground.
We passed both criteria successfully so that was the easiest interview for a job I ever had. We were on our way! But before The Jasmine Minks there was punk and new wave…
… in The Beginning God Created Punk Rock
Me and Tom started playing music in his bedroom in 1977 when we first heard punk rock. I had a cheap electric guitar and no amplifier, Tom used a sun lounger as a drum kit. He did own a set of drum sticks at least! We played with a friend of ours, Stephen. We played songs from The Clash, Sex Pistols, The Ramones and David Bowie. We briefly had a frontman, Dugan, who had to get paralytic drunk with vodka before singing at rehearsals when we finally got some gear and started using Tillydrone Community Centre so we could play loudly. Dugan only played one gig with us and that was the new year of 1978 at my flat with only a few friends and my mum and dad watching, although the whole street could hear us as the flats had virtually no sound insulation. Dugan left soon after and within a few months we had recruited a frontman, Gary Davidson, and were playing gigs in and around our hometown, Aberdeen. We wrote most of our set and played cover versions of The Ramones and Chuck Berry songs too. We even recorded a load of our songs at a school studio, although I’m not sure if there is a copy anywhere. Gary was a great frontman but left the band after we had spent months playing local gigs at youth clubs (including our local primary school which we booked one Friday evening and let in all the local kids – that was our greatest night. We even hired a PA and an engineer – it was very chaotic and we even had another band play before us.) We recruited Adam Sanderson as our new singer. Adam had played with other local bands. He was a dynamic frontman with a great turn in lyric writing. We were mad Joy Division fans by this time and when Tom moved to London to stay with his girlfriend, we decided to follow.
Tom and I knew each other since I moved to Tillydrone, an Aberdeen housing estate, in the late 60’s. We played football a lot and learned about music from our older sisters. Tom’s sister, Anne, was a mad pop charts fan and would record the charts onto her cassette player on a Sunday evening. She was always up to date with the charts and Tom developed that love of pop music. His dad was a great crooner too, so Tom had a great background already when we decided to play music together at the age of 15. My sister took me along to folk clubs from when I was very young and I got to learn about the folk scene. She’s a fantastic singer and this had a big effect on me. She used to sing pop songs (Donovan’s Jennifer Juniper and Groovy Kind of Love by Wayne Fontana come to mind) to me when I was very young – we had a tough time in Jasmine Terrace, moving about the street, eviction after eviction and Sandra, who was eight years older than me, was sometimes my carer. My mum wasn’t around much, always working or drinking, but when she was around she’d sing hymns to me or play the mouth organ, so I had a rich musical upbringing too.
… and The Living Room
The Living Room was Alan McGee’s club. It was a tiny room above a pub called the Adam’s Arms in Conway Street not far from the Post Office Tower in central London. He put on a load of indie bands, usually two or three every Saturday night. There was a steep, narrow staircase which led from the pub up, through a door, into the function room, where small meetings and wedding receptions were held. The room had old-fashioned lights fixed around the walls and a fireplace. There was no stage. It held about 50 people if you really squeezed them in, which did happen. I imagine it was the kind of place where Karl Marx would have had tiny meetings with Engels and other world changers but maybe that’s just my imagination. We had world changers of a sort there too. We played our first gig there with Primal Scream, who changed the world with their mix of rock and dance music a few years later. The Television Personalities (TVPs) became regulars, as we did. The Loft, The June Brides, Biff Bang Pow (McGee’s own band), were among the groups who played but there were many more.
One night we played Morrissey turned up. He’d already been on the Top of the Pops and The Smiths were a beacon of light in the pop scene because they were a real guitar-pop band and had none of the 80’s programmed music (which we mostly hated). They used guitars in a way that highlighted but didn’t dominate (like heavy metal and goth bands did), Morrissey sang in a post-punk way which we did (less raucus and more croony) so bands like The Smiths and bands at The Living Room had lots in common. I saw Alan talking to Morrissey and then he came over and said that he had suggested a combined single between The Jasmine Minks and The Smiths. We offered him one of the songs we sung that night, Ghost of a Young Man. The single never happened but it was really nice of Morrissey to even consider it.
During the summer months we would play at The Living Room then drive in my car (I had just passed my test and bought an old Hillman Avenger) up to Hampstead to the Women’s outdoor pool. We’d squeeze in as many as we could (6 or 7 people), girlfriends, wives, all of us and the rest would get the bus. It was very late at night, so the pool was always closed, we’d climb over the wall and strip off and swim about in the pool in the dark. It was a great way to cool down after a sweaty night of fast, loud guitar music.
The Living Room moved after a few months and ended up in a pub in Kings Cross, where we had a grand finale. Dave Musker and Joe Foster recorded some of the bands on a 4 -track recorder for posterity and it came out on Creation as the album Alive In The Living Room. We had started doing a few cover versions to show our influences. We were recorded doing Greenfuz and Seven & Seven Is, both of which appeared on the live album. It was a shame that the club closed but it was time to make a move further afield to play gigs and let other people start their own clubs very similar to The Living Room all around Britain, many of which we would play in the coming years.
Think!
Our first single, which was suggested by Alan, was recorded at our rehearsal studios, Alaska Studios in Waterloo, underneath the railway arches. They had a recording studio and three rehearsal studios. Pat Collier, who was the bass player in the early punk band The Vibrators, owned the place and was a dab hand at building stuff, so he was always changing things around and adding soundproofing and all the things needed to minimise the noise of the trains thundering overhead. He eventually added another recording studio, making it two rehearsal studios and two recording studios. We had rehearsed there for a year or more and loved it and so did many other bands, some well known, some not. Nobody was a snob and nobody looked down on you if you were in a band with no released singles or albums. A lot of the early Creation Records ended up being recorded there and I think it was because it was so easy to fit in with the guys who worked there. I remember when I befriended a guy who was often at the reception, Eamonn. I went round to his house a few times and he told me that he had written a trumpet part for a group called Katrina and the Waves, who had come in to record a demo of some new songs. The trumpet part Eamonn wrote was for Walking On Sunshine and it’s probably one of the most memorable brass parts ever written. Charlie Harper from the UK Subs would be in and out of the rehearsal space as would Glen Matlock of The Pistols. Yet us scruffy minks from Aberdeen were welcome too.
We recorded Think! in a day. We were trying to save money, so Martin bought this cheap 2 inch tape for us to use. Pat Collier and our engineer, Noel, doubted whether it was suitable as a music tape but we used it anyway and the whole day cost us about £50. Joe Foster from the TVPs came along to produce. It was great to have his support as well as Alan popping in later on too. Dave Musker, also from the TVPs, came along with Alan and plugged this cheap-looking red plastic keyboard straight into the mixing desk to overdub some amazing fast organ riffs up and down the keys. Alan said that the same keyboard was used on Orange Juice’s single Blueboy, so we were very pleased with that. Orange Juice were probably my favourite band at that time and you can tell it by looking at the way we dressed then with checked shirts and floppy hair-do’s. The overall sound was a bit like the early Who but a bit more funky, maybe a mix of post-punk and 60’s guitar-pop would be a more academic way of labeling it.
The b-side was written and recorded very quickly after an abortive attempt at a New Order-ish instrumental. Work For Nothing was a wake up call for us. It was a back to basics approach with two chords as the basis of the verses and we followed that simplicity through to our second single Where The Traffic Goes.
Think! was pressed and came out with a very mod-ish cover, reminiscent of the 60’s designs. We wanted to get away from all the depressing gothic colours and dark moods which were prevalent and to present something a bit more positive to say that we could take charge of our own world and not be told how or why we should live our lives (a theme we’d come back to in our first album, 1234567 All Good Preachers Go To Heaven).
Our main listening for alternative music was John Peel’s show on Radio 1. It was on from 10pm til midnight Mondays to Thursdays and it was the place to hear new music and to hear sessions from groups who were invited in to present a more immediate version of their album songs. I phoned up the BBC early in the evening and asked to be put through to John Peel and a minute later I was talking to him. I asked him if he would consider playing our first single on his show. He said that he was aware of it and was already planning to play it that very night. I thanked him and got off the phone dazed to have talked to one of the legends of the 60’s scene, legend of the 70’s rock scene and legend of the punk scene – the DJ who first played punk rock records when no one else did.
Think! made a brief appearance in the Independent charts in the weekly press. We were chuffed, even though deep down we hoped it would take the general public by storm. I try to remind myself that it takes a lot of grease money and arse-licking to get singles onto national daytime radio but, even now to this day, I hope that, through a miracle, our latest single will break through all the walls that stop a natural progression of a popular single gaining a wider audience and getting into the charts.
(note: Think! did eventually become recognised as one of the best Indie records released as seen in the Mojo magazine dedicated to the subject)
1234567 All Good Preachers Go To Heaven
Our first flushes of success (getting a single out and played on the radio) gave us the confidence to write songs with a bit of swagger to them. I was listening a lot to 60’s garage music as well as American rock music like REM and The Rain Parade. We tried things we hadn’t done before, slide guitar, acoustic guitar and we had Dave Musker playing Farfisa organ live and on recordings which gave us a variety of sounds. They were all used on side one of our first album, 1234567 All Good Preachers Go To Heaven (a title particularly attractive to a bunch of young guys living in South Wales). We recorded a trio of songs which suited our moods and sounds at that time. The songs had our Monkees signature group vocals and we had developed our distinctive style of writing, simple but saying everything we thought had to be said. We were still very amateurish and the vocals and instruments sound out of time regularly. I was very proud of that album, although I never did like the artwork, far too gothic for me in its anarcho-punk red and black (although some were printed in black and yellow).
A few years later when The Manic Street Preachers released their first single one of them, Richey, sent me a copy with a letter saying that they played our songs regularly and even rehearsed some and that their name came from our album. It was very flattering and we went along to see them a few times in London and me and Adam even played acoustic sets at one gig of theirs at their request.
The Jesus and Mary Chain Changed Everything
We were still playing our gigs in London when, one night, we had a life-changing support band. Life changing for all on Creation, in fact Creation would never be the same again, it went up a level and this affected some more than others. The Jesus and Mary Chain were a group from East Kilbride. They came down to London after Alan had listened to some demos of theirs. He was raving about them as we watched them soundcheck. I was standing beside Alan in disbelief. They seemed like a bunch of kids (only later did we find out that they were actually older than us). They were like nothing on Creation Records, they had the pop tunes like The Ramones but the guitars were fuzztone all the way through with no subtlety. The drummer, Murray, looked more punk and a bit gothic in his dress style but he was a solid drummer. Not many people turned up to see us that night but JAMC were an instant hit wherever they played with us over the next week and across Europe when we went there with them.
When we played with them at Gossips psychedelic nightclub they were so drunk that Jim Reid, their singer, threw up on stage. It was like going back to punk times when getting really drunk was the norm and extreme behavior followed. JAMC didn’t behave extremely, they just made extreme music, extreme guitar pop music!
When we toured Europe with JAMC and Alan’s own band, Biff Bang Pow, you could see immediately that JAMC were enthusing audiences with their anarchic show, even though they had only just released their first single and it wasn’t even available in Europe by then. By the time we got back from Europe, John Peel was playing their single, Upside Down, nightly. The b-side was a great cover of Pink Floyd’s Vegetable Man, a deeply disturbing song, which lost its darkness with JAMC but what it lost it gained in raw punk pop energy. The whole world changed for us. We ended up playing one final time with JAMC at a very explosive concert…
Riots At The North London Poly
Within months of releasing their first single, JAMC were huge. And deservedly so, the charts were dire with middle of the road pop and what guitars there were had no feeling. Apart from The Smiths, the charts stank. The only saving grace was Creation Records and the Indie Charts. JAMC were on their way to becoming national chart regulars, not just in the UK but in many other countries too.
But with their incendiary sound came a group of trouble-makers to gigs, presumably thinking that it was the place to go for a good fight. This was certainly the case at The North London Poly when we played with them. The venue was packed and there were tv crews with cameras at the side. We hung around at the back of the stage drinking a few beers and wondering what was going to happen. First on in the evening was JAMC copyists (we all did that to a certain extent) Meat Whiplash who somehow managed to attract some yobs onto stage who managed to beat them up. I had never seen anything like it. The innocence of The Living Room was gone – we grew up that night and became a lot tougher as a result. It wasn’t a good experience though and the result was that, for a while everybody got very macho on the label. We became very protective of each other – it seemed like war, them against us! The Jasmine Minks were due to go on next but I was shitting myself – I didn’t want to get punched. Tom was a pretty fierce drummer by that time and we used to hammer a big plank of wood around his bass drum with 6” nails to keep it from moving around the stage. The claw hammer came in handy that night as Adam placed it in his pocket with the handle sticking out for all to see – a clear warning not to fuck with us. I had a crew-cut at the time and wore a long Crombie coat on stage, so between the two of us maybe we looked tougher than we really were. For what reason – I really don’t know – no-one jumped on stage at us and I can tell you I was very relieved!
I said that everyone was copying JAMC but no one could do it like them. That basic thump of the drums by Bobby (who had given up Primal Scream for a bit to drum after Murray had left) and the whine of guitar feedback mixed with those Phil Spector-like tunes were done in a way that inspired a generation of kids. Perhaps we were too long in the tooth by then, we had been inspired by punk and post-punk and then dug the old 60’s records, so we weren’t completely taken by JAMC although we could see their huge influence on the younger kids who listened to John Peel and then Top of the Pops. Everybody got a bit more rocky in their music tastes to suit the prevailing mood on Creation. Alan started dressing up in leather – indie pop it was not! Our response was to go back to our favourite records from the punk era like The Undertones and The Buzzcocks and take our cue from them with a hint of JAMC anarchy thrown in. We started getting very drunk at our gigs and being a bit more arrogant I suppose. We had released our second single Where The Traffic Goes (which owed more to 60’s mod than indie music) and marked it by doing a one day acoustic tour of London, playing a few places on Carnaby street and the surrounding area before heading off to Rough Trade shop and miming to it inside, much to the amusement of Geoff Travis. We nicked the idea off a band that we had supported a few weeks earlier, The Violent Femmes, who had done the exact same thing. Our next set of songs were more like Buzzcock’s Spiral Scratch ep than it was like JAMC. We recorded 4 songs, thinking we were working in a more consistent way. Two of the songs eventually came out as a single, Whats Happening and Black and Blue with an amazing cover artwork of Adam’s hand in glorious simple colour holding down a barre chord.
We played quite a lot of gigs with these songs and a load of other new ones, dropping much of our old set, much to the chagrin of some of our fans. We didn’t realise then that people really wanted to hear the songs they already knew, songs from our singles and album. We were so much into our art that we didn’t take that into account. We would write new songs and perform them immediately. Some of them made it onto future albums but some never made it past the live gig situation. It all depended what we wanted when we had a vision of a new album and if the songs didn’t fit with our current mood then we wouldn’t consider them.
The Blue Album
After we had gone through our ‘Buzzcocks – Times Up’ phase we went back to a more song-based structure. We had been a bit more punky and a bit more edgy but we wanted to move on to sound more like what we were listening to: bands like The Pale Fountains, The Go-Betweens and classic bands like Love – all with a bit of Soul stirred in for good luck. I was listening a lot to Northern Soul and Motown/Stax records so they were all bound to have an impact.
One morning when I was living in Elmers End Road, near Beckenham, Kent I was woken up by a knock on the door. I opened it to see my old school pal, Derek Christie. Derek and I had always kept in touch – we were punks at school and would bring records along to the school disco like The Buzzcocks and Sham 69 because the DJ didn’t have any of the music that we liked. After I moved to London we would write regularly and meet up now and then. He would send me cassettes: I remember one with VU’s third album and another with Cabaret Voltaire’s The Voice Of America. When we were at high school I would walk to Derek’s house and call for him on the way to school. His family were always very welcoming – they were mad fans of a radio show called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. I only knew Radio 1 so Radio 4 was a new thing for me. Derek would carry his cornet to school for his music lessons. I was impressed that he stuck it out and learned a musical instrument. I was teaching myself how to play rock guitar but there were no teachers who would do that then and no YouTube videos to learn from. So Derek turns up at my house in a car coat, travel bag and a trumpet in a wee box. He’d hitch-hiked all the way from Aberdeen, 600 miles or so. Within a few hours, after breakfast and coffee, we started playing together, me on acoustic guitar and Derek on trumpet. He was coming up with some amazing lines for songs which would eventually end up on the Blue album. He joined The Jasmine Minks and stayed for a couple of years, playing on a John Peel session, a Janice Long session, a Radio France live session as well as all the recordings we did at that time. He really did add a different angle to our sound and we got closer to that mix of sounds I mentioned earlier: Pale Fountains, Love, Motown/Stax. Derek played lots of gigs with us and brought a genuine uplifting quality both to our sound, but also to our whole demeanour. We were growing up a bit.
The Blue album was recorded in Ellon, Aberdeenshire in a friend of our’s, Ian Slater, house. Iain is a fantastic bass player, singer, songwriter and general musical genius when it comes to recording and live mixing. He was in a legendary Aberdeen band called APB. He did the sound for us at a gig in Aberdeen and invited us to his house to do some demo’s. We loved the clarity of the sound, so we arranged for a two week visit to do an album. It was miles away from the garage sound we got at Alaska Studios in London but we felt it was time to move on (we’d be back there in a year or two). We wanted to emphasise the guitar-pop sound we were going for without using the retro sound we had in previous recordings. It was still a million miles away from the electropop sounds that were in the charts but it sounded modern nevertheless. Iain was straight down the line and wanted to record us as we were. At the time we were using our guitars a lot more lightly and the trumpet added a very special, plaintive sound to the album. We had more than enough for an album and sent the results to Alan McGee, including a song, Everybody Has Got To Grow Up Sometime which Alan quickly told me was his favourite and announced that this would be the name of the album – there was even a poster made with upcoming Creation Records which had this as the title.
It would have been a more consistent album had he gone with all the songs we recorded at Iain’s house. I think Alan was both mystified and impressed that we had recorded the album at a friend’s house. He decided to use an older recording of a song, Forces Network, with that scratchy Buzzcocks sound (even though we had recorded a new version of it at Iain’s) and added a song he had rejected for our Preachers album, Cold Heart, and also released it as a single. It was our best song lyrically for sure and almost fitted in with the new sound. Somehow between the recording and the mastering of the album, the title track was dumped. In the end Alan said he thought it was too soulful for the record label. The album came out with a cover I didn’t like but then again I didn’t like the Preachers album cover either. It was the beginning of the end of the original line-up.
Adam Leaves
Adam was there from the beginning of the band, being the main songwriter with me and the mouthpiece for us. He was often unhappy about being in a band and made it clear he wanted to leave a few times, most memorably when we were in the middle of a tour in Germany. He did eventually leave after we had recorded our second album, the eponymously titled, Jasmine Minks (although we always refer to it as the ‘Blue’ album.) Adam was obviously unhappy about being in a band and I think he felt better moving on to other things. He had an abrasive persona on stage (as I did at times – once threatening a member of the audience and even punching someone who kept calling me ‘plastic’ like my guitar – referring to my plexi-glass Dan Armstrong guitar I used to play). But he was a good frontman and the best lyricist Creation Records had in its history. One only has to read the lyrics to Cold Heart and see there is no better lyric on a Creation recording.
But what to do now that Adam had left? It had been on the cards for about a year, so for it to be finalised was a relief, although we did feel a huge gap had been left, both in the quality of his lyrics and in the way he spoke his mind to an audience. I learned a huge amount from Adam – not just in music but in literature too as he as an avid reader and a great character to be around. This quickly led to me writing a song which contained some of these sentiments…
Cut Me Deep
Me, Tom and Martin rehearsed as a three-piece for a while. Derek would be there and come up with some funky brass lines. In general, the new songs were much funkier and less melodic. It was good for a while but all that changed when I had another visitor. This time it was someone who used to live on the same street as me in Aberdeen. We weren’t friends then as he was much younger than me and Tom (who lived in the next street along to us). But we would be from then on until this day and probably until the day one of us dies. Wattie arrived in a less conspicuous way than Derek did but with the intention of joining the band and revitalizing us. And that he did. Wattie had been playing blues and country covers in pubs in Aberdeen. When he came along to rehearse we went back-to-basics as The Jasmine Minks with 12-string electric guitar and the power pop style of Big Star ringing in our ears. It was wondrous finding ourselves again. We had just recruited a local organ player, Paul Cooper, who had answered our ad in a local music shop, Rock Bottom, in Croydon. Paul brought a great deal of style to The Jasmine Minks. An excellent organist and pianist (he could even play the saxophone), Paul had a love of 60’s organ and ska music. He was a jolly fella who fitted right into the band as soon as everyone had met him. Over the years he developed an organ sound, especially live, which was the envy of any bands we played with. For an encore we would often quieten the guitars and leave Paul do some Booker T-ish jams for as long as the audience would let us!
Around this time I started writing a new song. Cut Me Deep was written as a tribute to Adam, our frontman, who had just left the group – I never dreamed the song would have a long life after that. In fact I wasn’t even sure we could carry on as a group without his charisma. But Wattie came along from nowhere with a load of enthusiasm and got us back on track. Cut Me deep’s introductory octave notes, played on Wattie’s Rickenbacker 12-string (yeah we were mad Byrds fans) gave the song a simplicity which never leaves the song throughout (it had taken me years to work out that simple is best and I still feel that). It has a trippy-hippy feel to it and the original chorus even had a ‘red, green and purple and all the colours’ lyric in the chorus. I brought the song to the group rehearsals (at the time a mouldy basement in Penge, where it’s said Rolf Harris did his first British recordings). The song was an immediate hit with Wattie, Tom, Martin and Paul, so we introduced it to our live set straight away.
The first time we played it was at Adam’s club (after leaving the Minks Adam run a few clubs putting on live bands) in Kings Cross. I will never forget the reaction. I started singing the intro lines and I could see Alan McGee leaning against the bar at the back of the dance floor in the venue. He stood straight up suddenly and wandered to the crowd where I could see him with that concentrated look on his face he sometimes has. Something was definitely up! The reaction from the beginning was good and Alan asked me about the song afterwards. He could see its potential immediately.
Soon after that we recorded it at the BBC Maida Vale studios where we were booked in for a Janice Long Radio 1 session. Wattie got this session for us by bringing along some cassette demos to Broadcasting House and asking to meet Janice and her producer, John Walters (he also got to meet John Peel that day as he was in preparing his show). Janice listened to the cassette of two songs, Follow Me Away (there’s a story about that song too but you may have to wait until my demise before it is told!) and Ballad. Janice loved Ballad (later to be called Soul Station) and booked us on the strength of that song. A week later we spent a day in Maida Vale studios recording 4 songs, including the songs she first heard on cassette, plus our live finisher, Where The Traffic Goes, and Cut Me Deep. When the show was aired she said Cut Me Deep was her favourite song of the session. In fact, when she introduced us on stage at Dingwalls in Camden Town a couple of years later, she said that she had the song recorded on her ‘birthing cassette’, used to make her feel good as she went into labour with her first child. High praise indeed.
It was obviously going to be a single, so we decided to book a studio in Edinburgh, Planet Studios on Broughton Street and use the engineer, Wilf Smarties, as producer. We all went up for a weekend and got started. Wilf was totally enamoured by the song and set about re-arranging it and actually played Wattie’s 12-string Rickenbacker guitar on some of it too. We slowly worked up a stronger arrangement, including a key change to boost the last verse. It was sounding great. We headed back down to London and knew we had something special. Me, Tom and Wattie headed up the following weekend to add some final touches, we thought! In the meantime, Wilf had gone into mad, Phil Spector mode and was frantically working out new string parts, marimbas and stripping out drums and guitars for new programmed drums. The technology was basic then for electronic music, so it was time-consuming and we worked through the night as there were other artists in recording during the day (Wilf recorded APB and Wet Wet Wet among others). We had an exhausting weekend, watching Wilf rip the song apart and put it back together. We finished about 6am on Monday morning. No doubt, it was sounding great. We had no money and Wattie sold his beloved Rickenbacker so we could eat and have petrol etc. Tom, Wattie and me headed up to Aberdeen for a break, me driving the van, while Tom and Wattie (who were meant to be keeping me awake) slept!
But it wasn’t finished yet. The following week I went back to Edinburgh and spent a week with Wilf re-recording and rearranging the song. I stayed at Wilf’s house. We slept during the day and worked through the night, stopping only to get food from the chip shop and take them into the, very obliging, pub to get a pint to wash them down with. He did a mix and I did a mix, his was brave and proud, mine’s was orchestrated and more like the chill-out music of the 90’s listening to it now. But it just wasn’t The Jasmine Minks. Alan phoned me up and was very apologetic but said after a few listens that what we ended up with didn’t fit in with Creation Records. I kind of agreed and was left with a decision about whether to leave the label or not. Initially I decided that I would shop around with the recording and find a willing label. But we had gigs and other commitments, so the old Minks slipped back into our tried and trusted style and Cut Me Deep slipped into the background and was never released as a single.
We did eventually rescue the first weekend recording of it and built a good old-fashioned guitar and singing album around it which went on to be our best selling album, Another Age, released in 1987. Cut Me Deep appeared on a few compilations, including the huge selling Doing It For The Kids. Since then it has appeared on dozens of compilations and would bring us a gold disc I’m sure if we could add all the sales up.
The Last Gang In Town
We carried on playing gigs with Wattie, Derek and Paul on guitar, trumpet (and tambourine) and organ respectively. There were some great gigs: our first visit to Greenock was one of the best reactions we ever got, trips to south west England and to France. But we had no recent records out. McGee was too busy to promote us so we had to promote ourselves. We did had a manager briefly, Linda, and even had a meeting with Jerry Dammers’ management company, as they were interested. But, mostly, we booked our own gigs and subsisted for a while as we built a new following.
We felt like a gang now – we had good people around us helping us with moving the gear around and driving us here, there and everywhere: Chris Narayan, Nick Jones, “Big” Mick Simpson and Mark Allan were fantastic, giving up their time to help us with only the promise of some beer and food and some good craic as the offerings of temptation from us. Without them we would have really struggled. We never had our own sound guy and relied on house engineers every night – although Iain Slater would help out with our sound whenever he could. We were getting really tight as a unit. We did do some of the older numbers, Traffic Goes, You Take My Freedom, Like You and Think. But mostly it was new songs – we were building up enough to consider doing a new album.
Wattie and Derek left to go back to Aberdeen in quick succession. But it wasn’t such a wrench as you’d imagine. I got the feeling that they were happy to leave knowing they had done their jobs – they had come along, added some great sounds and, more importantly, a huge amount of inspiration and positivity to The Jasmine Minks. In some ways, the edginess had gone when Adam left and in other ways we grew into our own, new but more consistent, sound. We had come home in the last few months. We had come a long way from the bedroom-practicing band to a fully-fledged, tight power-pop band. We had toured, we had recorded, we had played on the radio, we had even done a photo session with a Vogue photographer (his pic was used as our Creation Records promo pic in 1986).
Another Age
That’s when the biggest sound we ever got came along. Dave Arnold was the guitarist in The Claim, a great folk-mod band from the Medway towns. They had released a cool album and were playing the same venues we were that were popping up all over the country, indie fans putting on small gigs above pubs and with regular audiences. These were the venues that gave us the opportunity to start anew after the end of the first incarnation of the band with Adam leading.
Dave was a revelation, a mix of confidence and dynamism that never failed to inspire. He played for us and The Claim and tried to make a success of The Claim’s records while giving 100% to The Jasmine Minks. His sound was as meticulous as his dress sense. He had this enormous sound which he used with economy. He’d get his sound then turn DOWN so that he could bring the sound to its full when he felt it was needed. He was a modern guy with an amazing loyalty and honesty. The 80s were saved from banality by guys like Dave and we were all the better for it. The bland conforming to Thatcher values or to an alternative society view were extremes which didn’t fit with Dave. He gave us an intelligence and energy that we were humbled by. He played with us for some tasty gigs. My best memory was a two night Creation showcase at the Hammersmith Clarendon Hotel. We were on just before Primal Scream and we played a stormer of a set which was set on fire by Dave’s playing. Bobby and Andrew from Primal Scream said they didn’t know how they could follow us which was high praise indeed. The set was reviewed in the weekly music mag Sounds with hyperbole by The Legend and it felt good.
It was time to put all our energy into documenting this sound. I planned a new set and we rehearsed at Alaska Studios where we were also going to record the songs. I brought some songs complete and some only with a few verses and choruses but the songs came together really well mostly. For once we worked on melodies and in arranging songs to make them simple but with killer hooks. The recording went easy and there was a real professionalism in the songs. Alan McGee popped in a few times and was amazed by how good we sounded and how efficiently we worked. He came straight from Primal Scream recording sessions for their debut album which was taking a lot of time and stress. Alan looked very tired but he seemed re-invigorated to see us getting our sound with precision and a lack of fuss.
I’d written a set of varying, themed songs. Everything from positive feelings magnified on Nothing Can Stop Me to Dylan-like anger on Still Waiting. I got Tom to sing Time For You and that could have been a single without a doubt, but we’d burned our bridges with the Cut Me Deep saga. The album included love songs like Follow Me Away about a love affair I had with a woman whose cousin, Foosky, joined The Jasmine Minks a few years later. I even wrote a song ridiculing the indie obsession with songs about the weather, Summer? Where!, and managed to get a line in about sailing through the mist in June to get to the Post Office to cash my Giro. It ended with a spiritual high, Sad, where I recounted the story of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. We re-hashed an older song Don’t Wait Too Long and made it sound huge and included Cut Me Deep using Wilf Smarties’ first day recording in all its genuine Minks glory. The mixing went well, although it had Alaska’s trademark murkiness which seemed to obliterate a lot of Dave Arnold’s power. Or maybe we just weren’t up to competing with that raw power and it got lost in our jangliness. I had hired a 12-string Rickenbacker in deference to Wattie’s great sound and that shone through in places too.
We carried on playing gigs to promote our new songs. The album came out and did better than any previous releases we had, even getting plays on college radio stations in the USA which was a first for us. Cut Me Deep was released on a few compilations including the big selling Doing It For The Kids (which Alan had promised would earn us a silver disc). But the writing was on the wall for us. Dave went back to his childhood mates, The Claim, to help them in their plans. We went back to our basic sound for a while and, somehow, carried on….
The Flying Dutchman
Ed de Vlam was born to a Dutch father and English mother. He grew up in Rye on the south coast of England, near Hastings. He first came to our attention when a friend of ours, Michael, who had put us on at his Indie club in Bristol, brought him along to a gig we played in Islington, London. We were a pretty tight foursome at that time with drums, bass, organ and guitar. But it was quite an empty sound when I took a solo. Michael introduced us to Ed and the next day I went over to his house in Leyton in the East End of London and we clicked straight away. Ed was, by far, the best musician we had come across. He played along to a few, new songs that I had and he played a bit like Tom Verlaine. He joined the band and very quickly became a strong fixture at gigs with his flowing locks, his good looks but most of all his great guitar work and powerful vocals. Around this time we would play football on tour with other bands, Primal Scream, APB and even challenged Jock MacDonald’s Bollock Brothers to a game. Most of the Minks started playing football for our good friend Pat’s team, Syon Wanderers. It was a Sunday morning pub team (as we used to call it) and our home ground was Clapham Common. We travelled around south London to play other teams and even, in a knockout cup, to Hackney Downs. We were normally hungover but we loved it and Ed joined that too and could run like the wind if he got a bit of space. The perfect Jasmine Mink!
We had been going for 4 or 5 years now and rarely got above the support act for some Creation’s bigger bands like Primal Scream and The Jazz Butcher. We had some great gigs around the country with both of those absolutely brilliant bands. We had previously played with The House of Love and, even at one point, supported The Violent Femmes and James. We played some small-time headline gigs, including one over in Belgium. There were a few memorable one-off gigs too, including one with Velvet Underground legend Mo Tucker in Leeds (one of our favourite towns). The Mo Tucker gig came about in a strange way. I’d spoken to a promoter in Leeds who booked us for his venue, The Duke of York, a small venue with a decent stage and PA set-up. The promoter phoned me back a few days later explaining that he’d just spoken to Mo Tucker and that she was over in mainland Europe doing a few concerts and had time for one in England on the same date we were booked into the Duke of York. The promoter could just have cancelled our gig and gone with Mo Tucker. We did have some other gigs to coincide in Manchester and Preston but we would quite happily have bowed out. But the promoter insisted that it was our gig and if we didn’t mind, we could support Mo. Now you don’t meet promoters with that kind of integrity very often. I only wish I could remember his name.
Determination/ Extermination
But one gig was particularly poignant. I knew things were up for us when The Happy Mondays supported us. They had this magical mix of attitude and funky-pop which seemed like another year zero was about to happen just like punk had a decade before. All of a sudden I felt we were redundant, or at least, would be very soon. It was a small venue in London in Camden Town above a pub called The Black Horse. We loved playing there, even though it was an effort getting Paul Cooper’s huge Leslie cabinet for his organ up the steep stairs. The second support group turned up and seemed very different from your average Indie band. They were a strange mix of determination and extermination – determined to play to the best of their ability and to get out of their heads as much as is humanly possible. I remember being transfixed by Bez and his repetitive maracas playing and swaying back and fore like one of the Hare Krishna dancers that snaked through the centre of London.
Scratch The Surface
My intuition must have been right because the gigs got fewer and it did seem like there was a new feel coming into the Indie scene – a scene which we had been in from the start of but had not managed to find a niche that would sustain us, as much as I wanted to continue with writing, recording and performing music live. We did manage to record another album, Scratch The Surface, for Creation Records in late 1988. It contains what I consider to be the best group of songs I’d written. I was listening to Big Star non-stop and that comes across in the sound, Beatles-ish powerpop. It didn’t go down well.
In retrospect, the sound was never going to go down well with the British audiences. I think we could have done well with that album worldwide (especially in the USA) if we had the opportunity to get over there and promote it. But we were a small band with no real backing and it seemed like an impossible task. Ed left not long after to go and live in Spain and we took on our old pal, Foosky, who had stood in for Tom on drums when he broke his leg playing football. Foosky was a pal who we had met through an Aberdeen pal, Tich. We’d see them whenever we went up to Aberdeen for a holiday or a gig. Foosky and Tich were the best of mates and we’d often end up round at their parents’ houses boozing. Foosky was a multi-instrumentalist. He could play drums, clarinet, guitar and sing. He brought some great songs to The Jasmine Minks. It’s just a pity that, although we had a few gigs with that line-up, we drifted away from live gigs as the scene changed and we were no longer in demand. But we did record with that line-up in 1992. The songs were never heard publicly until we released them a few years back as a tribute to Foosky – a nice reminder of four songs – Poppy White ep.
Popartglory
The 90’s pretty much flew by without us doing much except playing acoustically at people’s houses. By the late 90’s me and Tom had recorded a load of acoustic songs onto my 4-track cassette, some of which are being used for our latest album we are recording. I was also getting pretty good with Cubase and enjoying creating electronic tunes. Eventually the two would meet as me and Wattie (we’d been in touch a lot in the 90’s) would gather a group of disparate songs together with a few full band songs, including the single, I Heard I Wish It Would Rain, with a guest vocal by The Black Tambourines’ Pam Berry. This mixed approach led to me and Wattie collaborating and writing a full album, Popartglory, for Alan McGee’s new record label Poptones. The album was a nightmare to sequence, being as it was, a mix of electronic and live sounds, some recorded on PC, some on a digital 8-track and completed at a studio in Glasgow. It is loud and powerful in places and has some of the most beautiful sounds we have ever recorded. We recruited an amazing keyboard player, Kenny Hossick, for the album and he was probably the most imaginative musician we ever had in the band.
The single from the album, Daddy Dog, included a guest vocal by one of Scotland’s most memorable socialist politicians, Tommy Sheridan. The inclusion of Tommy, and his generosity and willingness to get involved, helped get the song some notoriety and it was front page of the tabloids for a few days back in the early 2000’s. We played a few gigs around then but the logistics of using floppy disks and programming made the soundchecks interminable so we quickly went back to basics, using guitars and live instruments son after. I still stand by that album though.
The Last Decade
We drifted away from things as a band after popartglory. I did a lot of collaborations with a wide range of musicians around the world. But The Jasmine Minks were always ready to play if the demand was there. The comeback started in 2012. We played a gig organised by Sandy Fyfe at The Borderline in London. Adam joined us onstage and played a few times with us after that, including a festival, Indietracks the year after. We recorded one of Adam’s songs, Christine, to bookend a comprehensive Jasmine Minks’ Creation era CD on Cherry Red Records. Wattie and Dave Musker (and Dave Arnold briefly) rejoined the band after that and we have played live intermittently and released two vinyl singles, Ten Thousand Tears and Step By Step/Gravity.
Ten Thousand Tears
Ten Thousand Tears was released on my own home-label Oatcake Records. It is the most meaningful record we have ever recorded and one of our best songs too. Records mean more when they resonate on an emotional level and they don’t get more emotional than this. The Poppy White ep (which had come out a few years before) was lovely to release as it was a tribute to our road-manager and childhood friend Mark and Foosky, our multi-instrumentalist in the early 90’s. But this had even more poignancy in that it was to raise awareness of Motor Neurone Disease which Wattie’s brother, Phil, had been diagnosed with. The single gained lots of airplay in Scotland (and much further afield). But the support we received was amazing, raising awareness of MND and thousands of pounds. The highlight for me was playing in Aberdeen and Phil and lots of family and friends coming along. That was a special night.
Now
After releasing a brilliant vinyl single, Step By Step/Gravity, on A Turntable Friend Records we are about to release a new album for Last Night From Glasgow & Spinout Nuggets. It’s quite exciting to be releasing an album again. It’s our first album since 2001 and our long time roadie, Chris Narayan, who has been playing tambourine at our gigs for a while is now adding to our sound with extra guitar duties. I hope the album brings us good gigs and keeps our interest in continuing to play and record music.
Jim Shepherd
Discography
Singles
- “Think!” (1984), Creation
- “Where The Traffic Goes” (1984), Creation
- “What’s Happening” (1985), Creation – UK Indie #27[4]
- “Cold Heart” (1986), Creation – UK Indie #17[4]
- Pure EP (1987), Esurient Communications
- “Daddy Dog” (2001), Poptones – Jasmine Minks featuring Tommy Sheridan
- “I Heard ‘I Wish It Would Rain'” (2003), Bus Stop Records
- “Poppy White” EP (2010) Oatcake
- Ten Thousand Tears (2017), Oatcake
- Step By Step/ Gravity (2019), A Turntable Friend Records
Albums
- One Two Three Four Five Six Seven, All Good Preachers Go To Heaven (1984), Creation
- The Jasmine Minks (aka the “blue” album) (1986), Creation
- Another Age (1988), Creation
- Scratch the Surface (1989), Creation
- Veritas (2000), Genius Move
- Popartglory (2001), Poptones
- We Make Our Own History (2023), Last Night From Glasgow & Spinout Nuggets
Compilations
- Sunset (1986), Creation
- Soul Station (1991), Creation
- The Revenge of Jasmine Minks: Best of the Creation Years (2004), Rev-Ola
- Cut Me Deep – The Anthology 1984 – 2014 (2014), Cherry Red
The 30-Second Set-Up 