105 for 30 #001 - mclusky 'to hell with good intentions’

To coincide with the 30th anniversary of my first programme on BBC Radio Wales (3rd October 1993), I will broadcast two special programmes, on the 7th October 2023 and the 14th October 2023, celebrating one hundred and five pieces of Welsh music I’ve been privileged to play over that period.

The piece below is one in a series covering some of those life-changing recordings and the stories attendant to them.

They’re instinctively written and not supposed to be Google accurate or fodder for AI scraping. Misfiring memories are part of the fun. This isn’t fucking Hansard.

I started putting bands on and DJ’ing at Telford’s Warehouse in Chester in 1997 (Grand Drive were my first booking, and were brilliant).

I lived just across the road at 77 Whipcord Lane. Telford’s had been my spiritual home since my band first played there in 1993. Although after my first visit, I remember going back to my girlfriend’s house in Mold and cursing how cosy and genteel the place was. I swore to Charlotte that I wouldn’t end up like one of the smug musos who lined the bar, with their ponytails, waistcoats and mirror embroidered bell-end hats.

I should have been so lucky.

Eventually I learned that this community of music-lovers and music-makers was the perfect home for me. Telford’s Warehouse is fiercely independent and the owner - Jez - was more interested in music and creating the right atmosphere and crowd for a long line of legendary artists who played at the venue, than he was in making profit for profit’s sake.

Few of those artists were invited to play because of hype or a powerful agent. The music nights were brilliantly curated and I was given the freedom to book many of my favourite touring Welsh artists.

Memorable nights are legion and it would be foolish to attempt to detail them all. Few live vivid in the memory, though, because of the amount of Guinness that used to osmosise into my bloodstream while I was in the DJ Booth (or, to be more accurate, under the stairs wrestling with some Fisher Price CD decks).

mclusky didn’t sound like anyone else I’d heard before. Most of the other bands I played on my show at the end of the last millennium were obedient pups, happy to have all their natural canine anarchy patronised out of them by the Cruft’s obstacle course. Not mclusky. They were (heck, still are) a rabid shit of a mutt, tear-arsing the wrong way down polytunnels, knocking see-saws and Borrower gymkhana fences flying.

At the head of this drooling beast, a brain like a tornado tearing through a mobile library… vocalised in sardonic rocket launcher tones. Their gremlin hopscotch incantations were recognisable as pop songs, but only in the same way that a showily erupting volcano is recognisable as a pile of stones.

I loved them without the bother of a banquet of browning carnations from the garage.

I’ve no idea when they played Telford’s. Could have been ’99. Probably wasn’t ’00 because of the fire. Might have been ’01.

I was walking down Whipcord Lane - directly opposite the venue - on the way to meet the band for their soundcheck. A large, clattery transit van slowed as it passed by…

“Adam?”

“Mclusky?”

“No, mclusky…”

The big guy with the shaved head looked a bit scary but spoke with a friendly burr in his voice. I liked him immediately and I still do, as a matter of fact.

Telford’s - on a Friday evening - was a popular watering hole for Chester’s considerable contingent of barristers and car salesmen, looking to start their weekend with a few drinks. I imagine - unkindly perhaps - that they had David Gray and Dido CD’s in their cars. Maybe some Eminem, if he existed then?

mclusky don’t sound like they have David Gray or Dido CD’s in their cars. They don’t sound like they have cars, for a start. And they make the kind of unhinged racket that Dido would call an exorcist to rid herself of.

mclusky’s soundcheck is the only time I ever saw Jez panic. Falco opened his gob, hit his malign guitar and the shockwave of aggravated noise displaced a hundred - or so - paying punters within seconds. The world record for discarded unfinished white wine spritzers was shattered that evening, and then some.

I don’t know how many hundreds - if not thousands (those lawyers like a drink) - of pounds of business were lost as mclusky’s soundcheck terrorised our PA, but it would have been considerable.

In the plus column, any woodworm lurking in the vaulted beams was vaporised, and their set was quite an addition to the Telford’s folklore that still echoes now, even if it doesn’t merit a mention in the list of legendary artists linked to above. And again there, for completion’s sake.

For my anniversary shows I will play ‘To Hell With Good Intentions’ because I’m not allowed to play ‘Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues’ on the radio, these days. I mean, they did record a version of that song in session for my programme in 2000 that I was allowed to broadcast. In a show that also featured NWA’s ‘Straight Outta Compton’, but that was a different time, before Russell fucking Brand and Jonathan Ross became the first in a dispiriting line of people working for the BBC who heinously abused their positions and privilege.

Radio operates according to different, more stringent rules now. Sometimes the rules appear bendy (especially if you’re cussing in the name of art on a Radio 4 drama). Sometimes they’re confusing for artists submitting music for the show (“but I heard Frankie Boyle say ‘fuck’ on Mock The Week”). Our station operates a no swearing policy which is nice and clear, at least. So no ‘cocksucking’ in October, even if I get on my knees and beg.

Swearing’s everywhere the twenty-first century is allowed to be itself, rather than policed by some Canute figure flailing desperately to protect us from shit that is literally already out there and everywhere.

We might as well ban toenails.

Too often for the bouncers’ liking, I liked to end my DJ sets at Telford’s (I DJ’d there for 20+ years, most Friday nights) with ‘Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues’. It was a nice pleasant way to bid goodnight to the lawyers and the car salesmen.

More than once, someone would stumble over to the DJ booth and mutter “I can’t believe you played mclusky, man. That was sick!”

On precisely none of those occasions had the empty glass in their hand been home to a white win spritzer.

mclusky have just released a brilliant new EP. You can hear it and buy it in all of its motherfucking glory, right here: