After a hiatus of more than sixteen years, Gary Marx, founder member and guitarist of The Sisters of Mercy has returned with Green Ginger Jive, an album of original material heavily inspired by the glam rock he loved as a teenager: Suzi Quatro as much as Bowie, Slade as much as Mott, The Glitter Band as much as Alice Cooper.
“I prefer not to create a hierarchy for something as gloriously inane as pop music,” Marx explains. “Some of the glam figures that populated my teens are lauded fifty years later, some were viewed as figures of fun then and still are now, some have seen their status seesaw with the dictates of passing fashions.
“There’s an unapologetically large shot of T.Rex in Green Ginger Jive,” Marx continues. “It’s Ronson and Bolan boogying on twin guitars, with Johnny Thunders and Zal Cleminson tottering on their platforms and trying to gate-crash the party.”
Indeed, if Green Ginger Jive has a patron saint, it’s Mick Ronson: Hull born and bred. From its title on down (Land of Green Ginger is a street in the old town in Hull), the album is littered with references to Marx’s native East Yorkshire, especially the city – Kingston upon Hull to give its full title – where Marx (or Mark Pearman as he was then) musically came of age.
Much of the album was recorded at Fairview Studios on the edge of the city and it’s released by Wrecking Ball Sounds, a small label in Hull, run by – and this is scarcely believable – a fellow called Gary Marks. Part of the artwork even contains a photo Marx took of what appears to be a large, dilapidated shed, but is in fact the village hall in Rimswell where Ronson once played with The Rats, one of his pre-Bowie bands.
“I was standing in the kitchen of my auntie’s house at a wake,” Marx explains, “when a friend of one of my many cousins beckoned me over to the window in the front room and pointed across the road to what looked like a small farm outbuilding. ‘I saw Ronno play there.’
“The thought that you could take just half a dozen strides from the modest home of my blood relatives, and enter this other realm, that became the starting point for this collection of tunes – my ‘blue-collar rhapsody’.”
Until news of Green Ginger Jive, it had been widely assumed that Marx had completely withdrawn from the commercial music industry and was happily retired, dividing his time between Wakefield and Catalonia. So why make a new record now? “I reconnected with several really old friends when I turned 60 in 2019,” Marx explains. “The results were nearly always fantastic – some knew what I’d done with my life, but lots didn’t, and weren’t remotely interested in any notions of rock stardom.”
Due to Covid, “I felt quite cheated that I couldn’t see a lot of my new/old friends, so I started sending bits of songs to a few of them, just as a way of keeping in touch. Often they’d be covers, but also some jokey glam-flavoured things I wrote specifically for them, because that was the common musical vocabulary of our youth. Quite early on in the process, some songs that worked beyond being jokes emerged, and so I decided to run with it.”
Marx doesn’t describe Green Ginger Jive as “my lockdown project” because he was also focused on another distinct set of songs more in the vein of The Sisters into which he was also incorporating violin, which he had taught himself to play during Covid. The 50th anniversary of the final Ziggy show last year prompted him to jump back to “the glam stuff”.
That 2023 deadline was missed because life got in the way, namely serious illness within his immediate family and because his friend and usual collaborator, Choque Hosein (formerly of Salvation, The Hollow Men and Black Star Liner), effectively shut down his studio in Leeds in which Marx usually recorded. Fairview and Hull beckoned.
In contrast to his other solo records – Nineteen Ninety Five and Nowhere (2008) and Pretty Black Dots (2002) – some of the songs on Green Ginger Jive contain guest vocalists, including John Robb of The Membranes; Daniel Mass of Salvation; Miles Hunt of The Wonder Stuff and Wayne Hussey of The Mission. Marx and Hussey were of course in The Sisters together and made the now-classic First and Last and Always. This is the first time they have worked together since Marx’s swan song in The Sisters playing live on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1985.
“I knew Miles had done more than one Slade cover with the Stuffies,” Marx says. “When I found out John Robb was a massive glam fan, and that he’d done an album with an ex-member of The Glitterband, that meant he had to be on it. I wrote a song especially for him called ‘Louder’.”
Marx had initially begun with a very long wish-list of guest vocalists, which “included all kinds of people, including comedians and people not necessarily known for their singing. I also put down several original glam stars – so Steve Harley, Slade’s Jim Lea, Suzi Quatro.”
These were unrealised ambitions, as were Clare Grogan and Paul King, included because the early Sisters supported Altered Images and the pre-King band, Reluctant Stereotypes. By the same token, Clint Mansell was an initial target because his early band, From Eden, (also containing Hunt) had supported The Sisters at a pub gig in Birmingham.
“I also became quite fixated with the idea of getting Bill Nelson of Be-Bop Deluxe to sing on a tune,” Marx continues. “He hails from my adopted hometown of Wakefield, where I’ve lived for almost 40 years. He also has a great affection for my actual hometown of Withernsea, because he used to go there to the seaside on holiday as a kid.”
“I can hear most of those people in my head when I listen to the tunes, so perhaps other listeners should imagine who the hell they like singing them.”
Here Gary Marx chooses the twelve songs that encapsulate his life in music. From The Sisters to Ghost Dance, the band he formed afterwards with Anne Marie Hurst of Skeletal Family, to his solo releases, up to and including Green Ginger Jive.
Adrenochrome – The Sisters of Mercy (1981)
"This song was around from almost the very start of my time working with Andrew Eldritch in The Sisters, and the first one that made me think, 'This guy’s actually got something to back up his attitude.' Conversely, it’s a useful song in terms of pointing ahead to why we drifted apart as musical collaborators as well.
"Adrenochrome had shape, melodic ideas aplenty in the guitar parts and the vocals, and a killer chorus. With a different lyric and vocal on it, I could imagine a band like the Undertones doing that tune. Back then I thought that’s what I was getting with Andrew – someone with all that flair and poise, with layers of meaning and interest in his lyrics, a desire to create music with an edge, but combined with a deep-rooted pop sensibility similar to mine. The chorus of Adrenochrome has that barnstorming Glitter Band thing.
"Increasingly as The Sisters went on, I felt Andrew sacrificed melody in favour of his lyrical preoccupations, which was selling the songs short to my ears, and something we’d go on to clash over. I think that also hampered a lot of his work on Vision Thing and after. But that’s a tough call, because you get great poetry, but not so many great songs.
"The references to the ‘boys of the spires’ were his equivalent to my time at De La Pole Avenue. He had been perfecting his rebel snarl in Oxford against a backdrop straight out of Evelyn Waugh, and I was practising mine just up from the football ground, over a cloudy pint in the Silver Cod in Hull."
Heartland – The Sisters of Mercy (1983)
"This represents the first real fan-favourite that I was directly responsible for writing in The Sisters, so it’s a massively important track to me. From the outset I was blagging it as a guitar player – that’s not modesty, it’s fact. Somehow on this piece of music, I manage to sound almost heroic at times. I could never play rigid, repetitive patterns consistently but, when I was just free to make stuff up and wander, I was a bit like that footballer you have to give a free role to get the best out of.
"I wrote a whole song with finished lyrics for a couple of verses and the chorus. The original working title was Fools And Angels. I showed it to Andrew, and he said he’d play around with the lyric, because there were bits he liked. I can’t remember my chorus – not a good sign – but his decision to just repeat, “My heartland, heartland, heartland…” for the later choruses was a bit of a shock at first. Once I realised it wasn’t because he couldn’t come up with any more words, I saw its strength. It allows the song to build in a hypnotic and powerful way. It’s as if the vocal becomes a mantra allowing the different guitar parts I play high up the neck to sing out.
"The only bit of my lyric to survive was the second verse which Andrew modified slightly. I don’t remember the recording of it, but it would have been during the first of our stints in Strawberry Studios over in Stockport. It's mostly as a live number that I think of the song. That outro section building and building, with Andrew singing in a part of his range he wasn’t entirely comfortable with, and me with my spindly guitar sound going as high up the neck as I could by the end.
"It’s remarkable that something that would look like nothing on paper, if you were to break it down, could deliver such an almighty thump. Andrew had started talking about wanting to own a Pontiac Trans Am, despite not driving, so that renegade, open road, white-line-fever imagery came into play in the lyric. Yet, the song also appealed to me, who had no interest in speed, because it links to the sense of belonging the band and those closest to it felt. That’s why Andrew was very keen to give equal billing to “Pontiac (Detroit) and The Citizens Of Wakefield” – who had become the largest single contingent within the gang that followed us on tour – on the label of the 7” single. He turned a borrowed mythology into his own mythology and yet it still connects to an emotional world I recognise and inhabit.
"I don’t think it’s a better song than some that I went on to write, but for me there is definitely that feeling of 'the first cut is the deepest' about it."
First And Last And Always – The Sisters of Mercy (1985)
"My discussions of First And Last And Always usually centre around what I don’t like about it or how difficult the recording of it was. This time I’m going to focus on what I love about the finished song. I think the verse lyrics are fantastic and have that poet’s disregard for syntax that I so admired in Andrew’s best lyrics. It didn’t seem a construct or forced with him – it brought added depth to a lot of the songs we collaborated on. I fully accept it made them more substantial songs than if I’d completed them myself. I could knock out a good tune every now and then though – and this is a good one.
"The main instrumental overdub was an autoharp played by Wayne [Hussey] in the section after the first chorus and an example of what he had in his bag of tricks. Words like ‘texture’ and ‘timbre’, or the idea of a ‘sonic landscape’ were all a bit alien to me but Wayne had already learned to be more orchestral in his approach to arranging. It’s a song that’s better for being made by the four of us in the band.
"It became the title track of the album of course and that’s what helps to afford it a special status. I’m often asked about the title, and to what extent it was already in Andrew’s head from early on that this would be the one and only album we’d make together. I honestly don’t know, but that title gives the album a sense of importance, while still being a bit teenybop – which I like – Dante meets David Cassidy."
Grip Of Love – Ghost Dance (1986)
"This gives me a chance to publicly acknowledge the enormous musical contribution Etch [Paul Etchells] made to Ghost Dance. Grip is probably the best showcase for his flamboyant approach to the bass. His chorus part is like Jack Bruce or Chris Squire trying to play with Joan Jett, and always makes me smile. The song became a firm favourite live, and proved to be indestructible, as we pulled it this way and that. We would go on to use it as the foundation for a number of different medleys live, throwing in bits from lots of the older tunes like Celebrate, Dr Love and Last Train. We’d chuck in whatever we fancied. Most memorably we went from Grip into Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport when our friend, the mighty Chris Pugh, was emigrating to Australia.
"Before ultimately recording Grip with producer Richard Mazda, we considered working with Nicky Graham, who had produced pop hits for PJ and Duncan and Bros, with a view to him doing a much more mainstream version of it. He lived in a beautiful house in London and invited us over to hear a version of Grip he had been working on. His studio was high up in the attic – you accessed it through a very narrow opening at the top of a an almost vertical step ladder.
"Nicky got his hand-held microphone with one of those enormous pop-shields on it and hit play. He was giving it full stadium rock oomph about a metre from Anne Marie’s face. There was no headroom in the attic for anyone above average height, so when he reached a new section he’d written, he tried to emphasise the phrases with a raised fist, but he didn’t have the space to extend his arm, so he began to crouch. He looked like a bleached-blonde Quasimodo.
"We were trapped in this tiny space listening to something that was a million miles from anything we could contemplate doing, and worse still, the man at the controls had 100% conviction that he’d struck gold.
"He passed the mic over to Anne Marie for her to have a go and she turned to us with a look of total panic on her face. I think it was me who silently mouthed the word, ‘faint’ to her. Fair play to Anne Marie, she did a good impression of a silent movie heroine and nearly fell headfirst through the loft hatch.
"Such is the circular nature of things that I ended up getting back in touch with Nicky just before his death. It was with a view to him remixing one of the songs on the new album - Stardust #5. I had discovered that before his work as a pop producer, he had been a keyboard player in Bowie’s touring band for a large part of the Ziggy years. He’s there on the fabled performance of Starman on Top Of The Pops. Nicky was an honorary Spider."
Stop The World – Ghost Dance (1989)
"Stop The World was the first song I wrote using the traditional singer-songwriter method – sitting with your acoustic guitar and using chords to accompany yourself and trigger a melody and lyrics, which you then develop. Up till then, I would always layer up a backing track and only then think about the singing.
"The finished version on the album is a nice, polite take of the song – it focuses on it being pretty, rather than especially emotive. We did consider making it the second single for Chrysalis but they wouldn’t approve it. They thought it was too gentle in comparison to the first single Down To The Wire, and would confuse our potential audience. Looking back, I think we would all agree that confusing them would have been preferable to pissing them off completely, as we did with the re-worked version of Celebrate.
"The last days of the band were spent on tour in Europe supporting the Ramones. As support band we were doing a fairly short set each night, and we’d decided to ditch all our slower songs to appeal to their crowd. We came off after a sports arena show and had a large caravan as a dressing room. In there was the acoustic guitar we usually carried around with us. Richard [Steel, Ghost Dance’s other guitarist, later of Spacehog] picked it up and started playing Stop The World. We all just sat in the caravan singing along.
"That ‘campfire’ version of the song is the one that I remember the most clearly and with most affection."
Rock It – Ghost Dance (1989)
"As a band who were always far better live than on record, I think it makes sense to include something Ghost Dance never got round to releasing. As a songwriter you can go through phases when you get stuck working in mid or slow tempo and feel the need to get something faster – it doesn’t necessarily matter what it is, just as long as it motors. I know back with The Sisters that was Andrew’s starting premise with Temple Of Love – he just set the BPM on the drum machine and discounted any ideas that he couldn’t play at that tempo.
"I wrote Rock It as a throwaway track, just to get a new up-tempo song in the set. We all liked Motörhead, and I think Etch had been showing me how to play some of the guitar licks to Ace Of Spades. Rock It became my variant on that basic idea. I think by then our drummer John Grant was pushing what he might do, so the Philthy Animal-style double bass drum came into the equation.
"Once it was an established song in the set, it would usually have to be the last number because we knew John would be burned out after it. It became a real party song for the touring crew and support bands – it was common for the guitar techs to abandon their posts and join us on stage or jump into the crowd. It was equally common for the crowd to spill onto the stage and do their best pseudo-Donnington air-guitar displays. My favourite version was when my good mate Choque Hosein – in an Elvis wig – joined us in Bristol doing his best impression of The King.
"At the end of our time with them we were given a budget by Chrysalis to get some B-sides ready for a potential new release. That meant we went back to a place which features so regularly throughout my musical journey – Fairview in Hull. We raced through Rock It but there was a shake-up at the top of the label’s management team and we were dropped by Chrysalis soon after recording it.
"This unreleased song represents the last time we went into a studio together as a band."
Picasso Says – Gary Marx (2002)
"I started working at a performing arts college in Liverpool around 1997. I don’t quite know how it came about but I started writing songs in front of groups of students. I’d walk in and use any trigger to start the ball rolling.
"This is the first song I wrote in that way. I asked the students to shout out letters from the alphabet. P and S were the first two, so I just wrote any words that came into my head which started with the letter P. Picasso came out. The quote I remembered from him was something to do with painting not being complicated but it taking a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. So my opening line was, ‘Picasso says there’s nothing to it really ...’
"I started singing that line until I found a melody I liked and then rushed to find some piano chords to support it, to give the students an idea of how quickly you could have these building blocks in place. It wasn’t to claim I was some kind of songwriting genius, just that the more open and flexible you were, the less likely you were to get bogged down. I finished my song and played it for the students in another workshop session the next day.
"When I came to record it with Choque for the solo album Pretty Black Dots, I decided to take it away from a built-up arrangement to just a John Shuttleworth-style keyboard vamp. The whole of that album captures me at my most playful and childlike."
Black Eyed Faith – Gary Marx (2008)
"The songs on Nineteen Ninety Five And Nowhere had originally been a collection of instrumental demos I’d written for Andrew Eldritch in 1995 after we had discussed working together again, after a period of close to ten years of not speaking. This album – with lyrics and vocals added by me – was simply giving a rough idea of what might have been. For certain fans, who had been starved of new recorded material from Andrew for a while by then, it seemed enough. I can easily hear how great it could have been with Andrew onboard.
"Although part of me was annoyed that I hadn’t found a new audience with Pretty Black Dots, which I saw as being closer to the likes of Badly Drawn Boy and The Magnetic Fields, I learned to relax and enjoy where I was. It’s no bad thing to be mostly known as the co-founder of The Sisters of Mercy. I mean, Skippy The Bush Kangaroo might have secretly longed to play Hamlet.
"The formula first established recording my vocals on Black Eyed Faith has been the one I’ve stuck to ever since really. Choque and I quickly settled on a way of adding a touch of my higher vocals here and there to punch out key lines, and stop it just being me singing way down in my boots.
"The song’s other key role was that it reminded me how much I liked playing electric guitar. I’ve played standard guitar solos in the past, but it can feel like a lazy option sometimes. I much prefer the sound of two or three of my guitar lines interweaving as they do on the outro here."
Blood Moon – Gary Marx (2008)
"If you asked my wife which is her favourite song of mine, she’d probably say this one. It’s not because it’s written for her or that it’s obviously romantic. It’s a sonic thing – it’s a song that pushes the bass guitar to centre stage and she loves to feel that undertow.
"Blood Moon was the last of all the tunes I recorded for what became the Nineteen Ninety Five album. It’s one of those cases where a song benefits from being left to ferment for a while. I went back to the original rough demo I’d done for Andrew and thought the overall feel, and main guitar pattern were in danger of just being ‘more of the same’ when placed alongside the songs I’d already completed. I opted to try the main guitar melody figure on bass instead. That pushed it into the territory Joy Division might have occupied around the time of their second album. Rather than fight that, I just went along with it and indulged my love of that sound world.
"It means there’s a lot of space on the track and that allows my voice to sound richer and fuller. Although there are bits where my pitching wanders it’s one of my favourite vocal performances. It’s me crooning in that grand tradition of Scott Walker and co, and just enjoying the sound of the words in my mouth. That is most true of the second verse, which I love: ‘The patterns thrown all red and gold, all red and gold cross the sea/And Saturn drools like a lovesick fool showers jewels at your feet/I feel the pull, I feel the pull, something beyond my control/And I feel powerless beneath you, more or less alone…’"
De La Pole Avenue – Gary Marx (2024)
"There would never have been a musical career for yours truly if I hadn’t met one special person when I did. And it’s not Andrew Eldritch. My best friend from the age of fourteen was called Graeme Haddlesey. He’s the reason I ever thought of trying to sing or pick up a guitar. This is one of a couple of songs on Green Ginger Jive I wrote especially for Graeme.
"We lived in a bedsit just off De La Pole Ave in Hull. That’s where we dreamed and schemed – and got steaming drunk a lot of the time. We moved there in 1977 and were fully caught up in the punk explosion – it was a glorious time. We were snotty, self-righteous, penniless, with next to no talent, but convinced we were destined for greatness.
"Graeme died aged 42 but he features on the finished version of this song that’s on the CD version of Green Ginger Jive. We used to set up a cassette recorder of a night, Derek and Clive-style. We’d make up songs and make each other corpse. I used a clip from one of those cassettes on De La Pole Avenue. It has Graeme singing, ‘Oh Lordy what a load of cock, what a load of cock’ after I made a mess of my vocal part on a new tune.
"I got an old friend from Hull called Norm Kirby to sing De La Pole Avenue. It had to be someone who had known Graeme, who still lived in Hull, and was as close to me in age as possible. As soon as I heard Norm start the song, I knew he was the right choice. He has a youthfulness to his voice that has long since gone from mine. This song is an extra special document of a time and a place."
Dressed Up Messed Up Kid – Gary Marx (2024)
"Once I completed the lyric to DUMUK, as it became known, I realised it would work as a duet with me and my great friend Jane Murphy, even though she wasn’t actively making music at the time.
"Jane grew up in North Ferriby, not far from Fairview Studios, although I met her in Wakefield when she was about 17 or 18. We’ve been close friends ever since. She sang with a Leeds band called MK13 who were brilliant, before relocating to Manchester. She got tantalisingly close to a major breakthrough with Snowblind.
"To try and give her a flavour of what I imagined, I cited two duets I especially liked: The White Stripes' It’s True That We Love One Another and Cilla Black guesting with Marc Bolan on Life’s A Gas were the touchstones for the mood. I wanted that same kind of warmth and innocence to be audible. It meant that when Jane came to add her vocal to the track it probably strayed a little outside of the glam world. As far as I was concerned the result was great and I know that Mott, Slade and the rest all wandered off the main road if the fancy took them.
"I also felt certain Miles Hunt would like DUMUK with its slight punk-country leanings. It was one of two songs he finished by the time of the mastering of Green Ginger Jive. I tried various mixes of DUMUK with his different approaches to the lead vocal, but he favoured the performance that stuck closest to how I’d first done it, which was a great compliment.
"The song is much improved for Miles getting involved, and also for the notable instrumental touches my friend Barry Snaith suggested. The whistle in the last verse and outro is all his idea, and so hooky and cute. It’s a hit record to my ears! I loved Jane’s vocals on it so much that I wrote another song for her called Sugarcane, which forced its way straight onto the album."
Teenage Prayer – Gary Marx (2024)
"This was the first song I recorded vocals for when I went back to Fairview, after a break of over thirty years. I originally saw it as the opening track on Green Ginger Jive but it’s actually ended up being one of two songs on a separate 7” single.
"I haven’t completed the more obviously Sisters-slanted set of tunes I’ve been working on, but I thought that the riff which forms the basis of Teenage Prayer had at least one foot in the Sisters camp when I first came up with it. Once the chorus sections came into being I saw it as closer to the glam stuff and wrote a lyric to consolidate that.
"It still sits apart in my mind to some extent. I can hear Eldritch singing it; I can hear Phil Oakey on it. It even brings to mind Muse at their most direct and poppy. The lyric is a crazy overlapping triptych, blurring moments from my early childhood, teenage years and the present.
"As a youngster I lived in Burton Pidsea, a small backwater in East Yorkshire, but somehow managed to meet the great Hollywood star Veronica Lake there. It sounds completely improbable; I almost have to question myself that it actually happened. My dad ran a small farm for a wealthy businessman, who had befriended the actress during her time in a theatre production in Hull and invited her to stay. My mum was a massive movie fan, so we went to be introduced to Veronica. It seems she has stuck in my imagination as some kind of fairy godmother-type figure. In the song, she magically allows the sixty-something version of me to talk to the sixteen-year-old me: 'Celluloid queen, let the boy dream / Tell him from me, this is our song.'”
Green Ginger Jive is released on 5 October as a 12-song vinyl LP with a limited edition 7” single free with the first 250 copies. It will also be available as an extended CD with bonus tracks. It can be ordered here.
