THESE DISARMING MEN Melody Maker - 29.4.95

MARION could well be the first cool stadium band on the planet, making panoramic mainstream pop with an edge. Their members are inspired by the dark passions of the most darkly passionate band of all, Joy Division, and their music is fuelled by sinister urges and tumultuous emotions. But Marion aren't just po-faced pompous twats. When they supported Morrissey, they 'ran away' when he tried to talk to them. And they hang around Ian Curtis' grave! CAITLIN MORAN meets 'the Manchester Suede/the Nineties Smiths/the Radiohead with sex appeal/the teenage U2'.

This is the dark art, 1995-style. This is your next big thing. This is the story of three friends from Macclesfield who never fitted in (but do we ever?) and who formed their first band when they were 12 or six or being conceived or something. Two of them are guitarists: Anthony Grantham, whose school nickname was "Beard", which is why he grew one, and Phil Cunningham, who objects to being called "Binkie" by Melody Maker when we decided he too should have a nickname. The third is Jaime, lead singer, lyricist, kill-the-bastard beautiful and haunted by the stuff he never saw. This is the Dark Art, 1995-style. It is called Marion.

"It's not an obsession - it's necessary. I need this stuff. I need this stuff."

Binkie's asleep on the floor, working as a handy draft excluder. Beard is avidly reading the sleevenotes of a bootleg Beatles album. Jaime ("Pronounced Jamie - my father was into all that poncey Spanish stuff") Harding is hunched up on the sofa. His eyes are as wide and bright as the moon that spins behind him. He looks like he thinks too much - rare in this day and age and still as dangerous as ever. We are listening to "Unknown Pleasures" by Joy Division.

"I'm not obsessed by Joy Division," Jaime continues, rubbing his chin to see if he's started growing facial hair yet. "It's just I feel that I know why he did everything - the way he moved, the lyrics, all his interviews. Ian Curtis gave everything - there was nothing fake. I hope that's the one thing we do - we don't fake anything. when I'm onstage, I feel electrified, like sparks are coming out of my fingers, my eyes - the only time I feel fully functional is when I'm in front of an audience. If I ever felt I was pretending, if I was bullshitting to a crowd, I'd despair, give up." "Doesn't that ethos worry you, though? We all know of someone who worried about "faking it".

"Well, yeah - but I haven't anything else to give. Music has been my life since I was 15. I can't do anything else. I'm intrinsically useless unless I'm onstage or writing songs".

"There is a desperation", Beard chips in. "Our music is desperate - we keep reaching for something outside our grasp; we want to pick up enough speed to catch up with it, grab it, make that unreachable stuff our own. Put it on records with 'Marion' written on them".

"I won't rest until I feel I've gone for enough," Jaime says, darkly, "What's "far enough"?

Jaime shrugs, and flips his hands out.
He says nothing. But his eyes darken for a second.

Oh, the next couple of Marion-months are going to be interesting. Marion are five (as in number of personnel, not age - although they are, as we said before, very young). They are Beard, Binkie, Jaime - the old school gang, mates so close they finish each other's sentences and drinks - plus granite-jawed bassist Julian Philips, and drummer Murad Mousa. A freaky thing happened to Mousa: "We were recording in a studio Up North," says Beard, his voice full of awe, "and, through a long and boring sequence of events, we were introduced to Debbie. Debbie Curtis."

Beard pauses, a fanfare of trumpets going off in his head like something off a Boo Radley's record. He blinks, and continues. "We hung around with her, and after a while it became pretty apparent that she really fancied Mousa."

Beard pauses again. Now something loud and Wagnerian is rumbling ominously inside his skull. Big timpani. Huge f***-off cellos.

"I mean," he says finally, "Ian Curtis' widow. Fancied one of us." Beard pauses for the third time, the last minute of "A Day In The Life" playing in his brain.

So what happened?
"Well...well," Beard stutters (the booze brings on his stutter), "whatever I say will sound really bad. So I'll have to say 'No comment'". Binkie rouses himself from his slumber for a second." "You've spent all your life wanting to say that," he chortles, then collapses on the floor again.

"It's not an obsession," Beard continues, and this is beginning to sound like Marion's catchphrase, "but... but sometimes, we go to Ian Curtis' grave, and just spend some time there - and the gigs we play immediately afterwards always seem to be our best. It's like we've returned to our roots. And it's such a small, plain gravestone. So modest. That's what Jaime sings about on (early Marion song), 'Factory Greyness'. That line, '...passing by your modest kerbstone...' So modest."

Modesty had nothing to do with it - Tony Wilson was probably such a tight-arse he wouldn't fork out for a bigger headstone. "Oh, if that's true, we'll buy a big one with our first royalty cheque," Beard says, looking almost tearful. I resolve to stop being so flip.

HERE'S the factual stuff. Marion have released a handful of records: "The Only Way" on tiny indie label Club Spangle; "Violent Men" on rough Trade; and "Sleep" on London. Their manager is Joe Moss, who used to manage The Smiths; they've supported Menswear, Radiohead and Morrissey on tour; met Steve "The Diggle" Diggle from the Buzzcocks, their biggest living hero; and they've done their share of rock 'n' roll smashing-the-place-up-and-drinking-the-beer arsery. This is why snooty producer Stephen Street (Morissey, The Cranberries, loads of other people), now refuses to work with them any more.

"We were bored," Jaime says, dragging himself away from the bootleg Beatles sleevenotes for a second.

"We were in the studio and just bored. And drunk - just a couple of nightcaps, but drunk. It's a fatal combination. We just started chucking stuff around, then we chucked some bigger stuff around, then we broke some stuff...broke a cistern. I think some fire extinguishers went off."

He's being delightfully vague.
Picture the full extent of the damage for yourselves. "Stephen didn't seem too happy, anyway. Said he'd never work with us again. Ever. He was really angry."

"He should have realised it was our artistic temperaments," says Beard. "I bet Morrissey did that kind of stuff all the time. And Dolores Cranberry. She looks like she could get a bit handy with a fire extinguisher."

'With their tanks/And their bombs/And their guns/And their fire extinguishers', "he starts singing (wailing, actually) one particularly daft line from The Cranberries' particularly daft "Zombie" to emphasise his point.

"Steve Diggle would have been proud of us," Binkie says, waking again for a second, then slumping back on the floor. Don't you find it bizarre/worrying that your two biggest heroes had their heydays about a decade and a half ago - when you were all Chopper riding, snot-faced toddlers? Why are you digging in the past, like so many other bands, when there's a bright and glorious future waiting to be embraced?

"I dunno, I just can't find what I'm looking for in more recent records," Jaime says, looking ever so slightly worried. "It seems watered down, tampered with, diluted rock 'n' roll. I want the essence of rock 'n' roll. The Buzzcocks and Joy Division and The Beatles seem more pure - from the source. I understand why people think bands being interested in the past is just retro and a bad thing - but if I could find what I was looking for in modern bands, I'd love them, just as hard. I just don't get what I need from pumping jungle music."

So are there any modern bands you have become obsessed with?
"Yeah," Jaime says, his eyes lighting up. "The Sultans of Ping FC"

Hello?
"The Sultans. I followed them around on tour"

Erm, I can turn the tape recorder off if you like...
"No, really, they put on a performance; they gave. They didn't slink on stage and look sulky... they spent all their energy on the audience."

Well, that's as maybe. But the fact remains they sounded very much like the last asthmatic wheezes of Cook, the death-knell of Beauty, The constricting hand of Jolly round the slender neck of Hope. Four c***s taking everything we hold dear around the back of the pub and kicking the shit out of it."

Idiot rictus grins on the corpse of Pop. The stinking, fetid smell of sit-com music. I don't think I'm exaggerating here. "Oh, calm down." Jaime looks perturbed. "I love the Sultans. I'm not embarrassed. They're ace."

We leave the conversation there. This has been the moment where Marion's Cool threatens to melt a tad. We forget, but we won't forgive.

AFTER Marion's storming gig in Wolverhampton, supporting Radiohead, Melody Maker collars a few fans. Hey, you! Yes, you! The Kids! What do you reckon to Marion?

Caroline, 17, is snogging her boyfried Andrew. At least, we hope it's her boyfriend, or she'll be in trouble now. They cease tongue contact for three minutes.

"Well," she says, "I'm a sexually liberated kind of girl, so I don't mind admitting they're all gorgeous hunks-of-sex-stuff. There's a bloke for every type of girl - wimpy artistic singer, beardy guitarist, vaguely ugly guitarist. Couldn't see the drummer or the bass player. I nearly got killed in the moshpit - they kicked Radiohead's arse."

Do you think they'll be big?
"Judging from the size of their noses and hands, I should imagine they're very big".

She chokes with laughter for a couple of minutes.
"They make sexy music. Sexy music. It's great that they're all so young - most bands could be your grandads. I mean, a band like Pulp are so old. We need more teenage bands"

What do you like about Marion the most?
"The fact that they have the word 'Toilet" on the cover of their single ("Sleep") twice. That's funny.

Claire is 14, and so is here illegally, one presumes.
"I wrote off for information on the band, and I didn't get any reply."

What did you want to know?
"If they have girlfriends".

Jesus fuck, everyone fancies them, it seems. Claire continues: "They make music for kissing the back of your boyfriend's neck to. They sound different to everyone else - the nearest comparison is Suede, and The Smiths. It's saucy and depressing, and uplifting at the same time. I fancy the beardy one the most."

He's called "Beard".
"Oh, that's imaginative. I think they'll be as big as Suede, at least." Can you relate to the lyrics? - "Someone told me that you really liked me/But I fell asleep almost instantly...I'd go to sleep so you can dream for her."

"Yeah, that's cool - but I relate to Tindersticks more. Or Pavement lyrics. I really relate to them."

You relate to Pavement lyrics more? "Felt-tip cigarette/On a vinyl chicago moose/I twist my hair around your flares/Haberdasher moonlight flasher/Woooo!/Bdu bdu bdu." You relate to that? "You just made that up." Yeah, and Steve Malkmus doesn't, I suppose. "Oh, piss off"

Still only 75p.
Well, for 75p, we'll tell you that Marion plough the same dark furrow as Strangelove and Delicatessen; as Joy Division and Toiling Midgets; an incredibly impotent (yet potent) railing against the edifices of sartorial elegance and etiquette, against the blank-faced, evil, low-pitched hum of 99 per cent of humanity. They kick away the dull grey scum There's more. Marion specialise in the desperate, gasping whines and shudders that are simultaneously the overture and finale to the End Of The Millennium Blues Concert that started that fateful day in May, 1980 when Ian Curtis hanged himself.

These are the dark, scowling children raised on nightmares and bookwords. These are the offspring that stumbled on their own lexicon of loathing and started a backlash against the bright, Day-Glo, 24-hour party people mainstream. These are the gasping young ones, forever on the edge of drowning. "We don't go out much," says Jaime. "We don't see the point of that. Talk to your friends, or don't bother talking at all". As we said before, this is your Dark Art, 1995 style. Well, the new single sounds a bit like Suede with Peter Hook on bass and The Buzzcocks making a brilliant racket in the room next door

It's out next week and it's called "Toys For Boys". See them on "Top Of The Pops" a week later.

Probably.

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