The Mac bounce back
MARTIN Metcalfe may be Scotland’s great lost rock star. Blessed with the stature to look lanky Nick Cave straight in the eye, a dark rich baritone and the songs to match, in the 1980s and 1990s it seemed he could only pout it all away.
Fate conspired to take matters out of his and Goodbye Mr Mackenzie’s hands, thanks to eccentric management, and the emergence of Shirley Manson as one of the pop music icons of recent time.
She stepped out of the backing vocal shadows of the Mackenzies to front Angelfish, essentially the same band with Metcalfe reverting to guitar duties with Manson.
The minute he saw Shirley strut her stuff, Butch Vig knew that if this girl joined his band Garbage, he could be famous for something other than producing Nirvana’s breakthrough album, Nevermind. He was right.
It has taken these 10 years for Metcalfeand the rest of the Mackenzie boys – Derek Kelly and Fin Wilson – to completely rethink and regroup, via two male-only line-ups that didn’t quite click.
It started making sense after they met a girl from Portland, Oregon, with a naturally world-weary delivery of a song which suited their new bluesy surf punk feel.
She took the name Isobel Goudie, famous in Scottish folklore as a witch and previously immortalised by Alex Harvey in a song of the same name.
So the Filthy Tongues became Isa & The Filthy Tongues, their new singer as shyly sinister as Manson is direct and in your face.
So why does Metcalfe continue to hide his vocal light under a bushel when he possesses the distinctive and powerful instrument so amply demonstrated on the new double live album featuring previously unheard Goodbye Mr Mackenzie material?
“In the beginning I couldn’t sing at all I didn’t think, so hearing myself getting it together live like that made me feel pretty good,” he admits.
“The only reason I was the singer was that every other one we had proved unreliable. I was the guitar player in the beginning, and just pushed my way to the front, more out of frustration with other people. which made me think I had to get it together where they had not. It took a while, because I was a songwriter and guitarist, but wasn’t a natural frontman. I had the drive and ideas and the crucial thing was that Derek supported me.”
But then Kelly and Metcalfe were the band’s twin pillars from the day Martin chose to follow his mate to Edinburgh rather than move from Bathgate to Glasgow with his girlfriend. He suspects his mate was a drummer by default, in much the same way as became a frontman.
“He used to play with the Torphichen Pipe Band so he could drum a bit, and thought that was his only way of getting into a rock group, but would never claim to be the best drummer in the world.”
He first met Shirley Manson when a friend at college suggested going along to try for one of the musicians roles in the new production by Edinburgh Youth Theatre.
Martin typically aimed higher than that, and wanted to try out for the lead role.
“I auditioned for the part without any acting experience, and not surprisingly, didn’t get it. But then they called me back and said there’s another part you might be interested in, which was the old travelling salesman who sold tonic to regrow your hair and all that sort of stuff.
“He did a monologue straight to the audience and that appealed to me. I stood and blabbed straight at them and there is nowhere to hide. If you got it wrong then you were an idiot, and that’s when I met Shirley. She was just out of school and it was just a bunch of kids having a laugh. We did it for the three weeks of the Edinburgh Festival.”
Metcalfe then asked Shirley and her friend if they wanted to join his group, which required precious little persuasion. Even at 17, Martin recalls, the young Manson made a big impression on people.
“Most people would say Shirley is a strange person, or a strange girl. She kind of fitted in, because her behaviour could be quite extreme. I don’t know if that is a good sense of humour or if it is actually madness, but she fitted our remit.”
Goodbye Mr Mackenzie had started to make waves in the Scottish rock pool, after one of their more tongue-in-cheek songs was picked up on by Elliot Davies, en route to the top of the rock management tree with Wet Wet Wet.
“If it wasn’t for him, we would never have taken The Rattler seriously as a song,” says Martin. “We just thought it was a silly throwaway in the beginning, but he was so enthusiastic about it he persuaded Wilf Smarties, who owned the studio we demo’d in, to work hard on it, and gave us great support. Without him, it wouldn’t really have existed at any great level.”
The song’s eventual success was a mixed blessing, being unrepresentative of the darker side of life savagely excavated in the rest of their material, but raising the band’s profile considerably in the late 1980s to the point where they would comfortably sell out the Glasgow Barrowland.
These days the power behind Isa’s throne with The Filthy Tongues is shaven-headed, in contrast to the blonde mane of the Mackenzie’s purple patch.
“All that rock star stuff is just acting, as Bowie explained with Ziggy Stardust. I used to think people like John Lydon were more real than that, but I remember reading something one of his friends said about him just pursuing the theatre of rage, just basing his character on Richard III and things like that. But I think I did an okay job of playing a rock star.”
Lower of profile he may be, but Metcalfe still does. Isa & The Filthy Tongues are slowly becoming a more powerful blip on the rock radar, winning demo competitions on Radio 1’s Session In Scotland and appearing at the traditional end of year show staged by Edinburgh’s Liquid Rooms, sharing a bill with up-and-comers Aberfeldy.
For now Metcalfe plans to leave the limelight to Isa, insisting he was never happier than when he took a step back prior to Manson’s departure for Garbage.
“When I toured with Angelfish and was just playing guitar I thought: ‘I f*****g love this’.
“I could get pished, go on stage a bit out of my face, play the guitar, make a lot of racket which I thoroughly enjoyed. In the beginning my idol was Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols, then it became John McGeogh of the Banshees and people like that.
“It was only then I realised what a tough job being the singer was, being at the front and having to communicate with all those people is not all it is cracked up to be. It’s difficult work, and I just really loved playing guitar and being free of all that. I was a guitarist at the start and it was only because nobody else was up to the job that I became the singer. If Shirley had been at the stage she was then at the beginning, I would have stayed just being a guitarist in the first place.” There’s an honesty and candour in his statement, as there is in a confession that his drinking became problematic on that same tour. Everybody had their fill of a Martin Metcalfe who was always either “hungover or mad drunk”, he admits. He drinks nothing stronger than ginger beer now, forsaking alcohol nine years ago.
One of the stand-out tunes on Isa & The Filthy Tongues’s forthcoming debut album is called I’ll Do What I Want. It is a statement of intent as Metcalfe picks out guitar lines that Television’s Tom Verlaine would consider the ultimate in cool compliments to Isa’s detached vocal. The album’s instrumental gem Nae Tongues would not fool anyone into thinking the band are beyond having another crack at French kissing fate into giving them a deserved lucky break.
And a final word on The Mackenzies?
“We were like a family because there were girls and boys in the band, it wasn’t your average lads’ band, going off and getting trashed and hanging out with women. On tour we were our own unit, we didn’t need anybody else, but included our crew in that because we had a special relationship with them as well. Even though we were all quite dysfunctional people, as a band we were quite a functional unit.”
A retrospective of live recordings by Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, The River Sessions/Day Of Storms, is out now on River Records.
Isa & The Filthy Tongues play Edinburgh’s Liquid Room tomorrow with Aberfeldy.
Addiction, the debut album, is slated for release in March 2006.
The story so far . . .
In 1981 it was Bathgate no more for Martin Metcalfe and Derek Kelly, leaving behind an old air raid shelter and two bands called Lipstick and Irrelevant. They move to Edinburgh and form a group called The Clan.
They meet local producer/engineer Wilf Smarties, and start recording demos at his basement studio in Broughton Street, Wilf’s Planet.
Metcalfe meets Shirley Manson while auditioning for Edinburgh Youth Theatre. She and Rona Scobie join the band as backing vocalists and it is renamed Goodbye Mr Mackenzie.
West Lothian College label Scruples Records chooses them for its prestigious first single release in 1984. The song is Death Of A Salesman.
Metcalfe continues performing with his side project, Stella’s Baby, which puts out a cover of Brel’s Port Of Amsterdam on another indie label.
In 1986, Elliot Davies, then Wet Wet Wet manager and head of The Precious Organisation, hears the demo recording of the Mackenzie’s song, The Rattler, and raves about it. The band are bemused but gratefully accept the patronage and release it as a single.
The teenage Fin Wilson joins on bass and the band become serial signers of major record deals between 1988 and 1991, managing 11 Top 100 records in the process, including their one Top 40 result with the re-release of The Rattler.
Rona Scobie leaves, then the band split with their manager Deke Primo and latest record label in 1992, forming a second group called Angelfish, with Shirley Manson taking on lead vocals.
With “Big” John Duncan now touring with Nirvana, Metcalfe reverts to lead guitar.
Angelfish release an album in the US on Gary Kurfurst’s Radio Active label, and tour America extensively.
Nirvana producer Butch Vig spots Manson and asks her to guest with his new project, in 1994, while the Mackenzies release a mini LP and perform a final show at Christmas the following year.
Manson then decides to join Garbage full time.
Kelly, Metcalfe and Wilson recruit a new guitarist and tour new material under the name of Angelica, but in 1998 then pour their energies into the creation of the multi-media Blokshock website, while still writing new songs.
This new material is then recorded as The Filthy Tongues, who play their first show at a friend’s birthday party in London in 2003.
The following year they meet an American girl calling herself Isobel Goudie, whose face and voice fits, and the band go back in the studio as Isa & The Filthy Tongues.
The resulting demos are played to acclaim on Radio 1 and Scottish radio stations.
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