The gospel according to Mark

“What did one female suicide bomber say to the other?
‘Does my bomb look big in this?’.”

Send your letters of outrage to Patrick Kielty c/o BBC Northern Ireland, not me. In fact, don’t bother. The comedian was warming up the studio audience for his Almost Live show and said gag was not intended for broadcast, so bear that in mind Mr Angry of Ballyhack before putting lurid green pen to torn exercise copybook paper.

Standing in the wings, just off-camera, JJ72 are waiting for the floor manager’s signal to take the stage and fulfil lip-sync/backing track duties to the new single ‘Formulae’, the first salvo off their forthcoming I To Sky album.

This being a mime job, the excitement level is obviously nowhere near the raw surge of the band when the red lights are on the amps, but they still manage to generate a healthy dose of magnetism, with Greaney approximating his cathartic live performance mode and bassist Hillary Woods doing the statuesque thang, while Feargal Mathews’ hi-hat and dampened down drums bleed over the PA, in perfect time with the pre-recorded version of himself.

Trust us, their body language seems to say. We’re professionals.

An hour earlier we were a hundred yards up the road in the Crown Bar, pondering that old time religion – not the conflicting articles of faith between Prothelics and Cathestants, but rather the residue of a Jesuit education, and how to make sense of that, without getting mired in the small print of the Pharisees and the scribes.

Right now, I To Sky is about to drop, or rather, ascend, in a blaze of light. It’s probably the most unrepentantly spiritual Irish album since U2’s October, albeit fed through a Smashing Pumpkins shredder, with bits of Joy Division, the Manics, Nirvana, Placebo and others tossed in for good measure. It’s a big, sprawling ambitious record. It’s also very good. Just how good, I’ll tell you in a few weeks.

Meantime, your reporter is pondering on that old Jesuit maxim: give me a boy of seven and I’ll make him mine for life. So it proves – Mark and Feargal are alumni of Belvedere College. The Christian Doctrine dogma may have faded, but the residual magic symbolism remains. Each of the songs on the I To Sky sleeve is marked by an archaic symbol which suggests a rock ‘n’ roll version of Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose: audacious, epic, overblown and utterly unapologetic.

“Most of them are Christian symbols,” Mark explains. “There’s one or two goth ones going on there – you have to have some goth.”

As in old school German architectural goth or rum-and-blackcurrant, big sister’s eyeliner goth?

“Not snakebite goth, no. The album alludes to religious imagery. I know there’s so much you can tear apart about all religions, especially after what’s happened in the past year, but to me religion and music walk hand in hand sometimes. The effect that I want religion to have on me is the same effect I want music to have on me. They cross paths.”

I put it to the band that the title I To Sky suggests the apocryphal-yptic image of some anguished soul standing on a hilltop shouting at a god who may or may not exist, and if it does, may or may not be listening.

“The emotion behind it is idealistic rather than definitely religious,” Mark admits. “I think it’s a great image of the guy standing on the top of the hill shouting at somebody, or some serene place, that should exist, that hopefully does exist. That’s the backbone of the record. Our going to Jesuit school and things – I don’t mean this in any disrespectful way, but some of the grandiosity of religion I adore.”

I mention that Gavin Friday has compared Catholicism to glam rock, all purple robes and smoke bombs and incense. Mark nods his affirmation.

“Belvedere House, because of the décor, is an impressive place to walk through every day, and it’s that aspect of religion which really entices me. It may sound disappointing, but it’s not necessarily the doing good or doing wrong aspect. The record is trying to deal with ideals of heaven and how they change through different ages.

“Like, to the monks who lived in Skelligs where the roses wouldn’t grow because of the conditions, to them heaven is a place full of roses, just the way medieval heaven was a place where there wasn’t shit and mud and piss running along the streets. So the album has a lot to do with what heaven stands for in people’s heads.”

So what does heaven look like inside the collective head of JJ72?

“A loada bitches man!” Mark laughs. “No, I can only relate it to life. All the best, most vivid, beautiful memories I have of everything so far in my life, that feeling all combined together, all the smells and textures, this constant litany of epiphanies if you will.”

Feargal: “I think it’s more like, you’re not actually there, it’s like your soul is more calmed and in its place. I do see it as a kind of a graveyard in a way, just kind of calming. No visuals about it, none at all, just a hugely calming, soulful thing happening.”

Hillary: “Ehhm, somewhere where everyone is at one with themselves.”

Mark: “…Ohmmm…”

Funny how a concept like heaven can get perverted. Maybe Kielty’s joke is hanging in the ether, but post- 9/11 this writer can’t help but think of terrorists rationalising murder as a means of getting a backstage pass to Paradise. One song on the new album, ‘Serpent Sky’, was conceived while JJ72 were on tour in the US.

“I actually stole that from Walt Whitman writing about when Abraham Lincoln was shot,” Mark recalls. “He was writing about his emotions, America in shock. We were on tour after September 11, we were in a Holiday Inn in New Jersey somewhere, and they ran this thing about Walt Whitman and he was describing the clouds as being like serpents in the sky and how people felt at that time, it was like an exorcising of evil spirits.”

In the lost Gnostic gospels of Saint Thomas, discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945 and dismissed as heresy by the Catholic orthodoxy, there’s a version of the Garden of Eden parable as told from the point of view of the serpent, which was often viewed as a symbol of wisdom in pre-Christian times. Similarly, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene suggests that she may have had a carnal relationship with Christ, and that He might have even favoured her over the apostles.

JJ72 bassist Hillary professes herself “pretty horrified” at the idea that the Church patriarchy may have written its first lady out of history, but there are even wider implications. For instance, the Gnostics’ belief that these artefacts contain the unadulterated words of Jesus, which can be interpreted as stating that the holy spirit is within everyone, effectively rendering the Church’s middle-men impotent. I run the following, remarkably Zen-like quotation past Mark Greaney:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

“I believe in that totally,” the singer says, “I believe that that little abstract piece of you that wells up inside you and makes you want to scream your head off into a microphone, unless you give that (free rein), then you’re bottling up something that is a gift. I’ll never apologise for writing our first record or a record like this. There’ll be plenty of detractors of course, but no apologies whatsoever, it’s part of what I am and it’s that simple.”

This is of course heavy talk for four o’clock of an afternoon in The Crown, but I To Sky is not casual listening, no more than John’s Revelations make for light airport reading.

“A lot about this album is that we wouldn’t be sitting here listening to it on the speakers in a pub,” Feargal points out. “A lot of the songs are not public place-songs. I’d say over time, if it does what I want it to do, a song like ‘I Saw A Prayer’ is a mixture of the darkest and the poppiest things.”

Indeed, there are times when the record harks back to the era of The Big Music, the head-bursting romanticism of records like The Unforgettable Fire or This Is the Sea or Ocean Rain.

“When I listen to the record I just think it’s really romantic,” Hillary says. “It represents so many ideals that I think so many bands are afraid to even address. I think we’ve so much faith in the songs because it was very instinctive compared to the first album. With that album, we knew what songs we were gonna record and it came out the way we imagined – whereas this album we went in and it was three of us playing live in a room, capturing something really special. And it worked on us, so I’d be extremely confused if it didn’t work on others.”

“Music should be about the soul,” Mark adds. “The grandiose part of religion is magnificent because it’s the whole thing of the soul being too big for your body, physically you can’t contain the power of it and that’s why you pop your clogs eventually. That’s what I’d like to believe anyway: that yearning thing, the question that’s never answered. I’m not saying this album is, ‘Yes, Mark Greaney’s thought of something groundbreaking’ – not at all, and that’s why the ancient symbols are there to go with each song.

“But just because it’s all been said before, it doesn’t mean that it’s not important, because it is. You put someone in front of me who can honestly say they haven’t thought about where they’re going when they die, they’re lying. Hopefully for these 12 songs, the listener goes to their respective heaven, whatever it may be. That’s the ideal. Jesus, if it doesn’t work there’s probably going to be a lot of people thinking it’s I To Hell!”

Maybe that’s another album, the one that comes after two years on the road trying to break the US. For now though, the band are attempting to channel the Latin mass through secular Marshall amps, nowhere more so than on ‘Always And Forever’ (“Halfway to heaven I saw light was on/The deep blue of emptiness my refuge so strong”), a song that evokes the phrase Mark and Feargal were required to write at the top of their copybooks in their Belvedere days: Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam.

“It means everything you do is for the greater glory of God,” Feargal says.
I venture that this suggests a humility not often associated with JJ72. Mark responds.

“The attitude, this thing like, ‘Is it worth putting out there into the market?’ I can’t relate to that,” he maintains. “And that’s something maybe that’s gone against us on the first album, it’s come across as arrogance, the fact that I only want to really release things that are worthwhile and valuable. And I really believe that this record will be valuable to people. I wrote the lyrics to this record because it was a necessity.”

Fair enough. The forelock-tugging I’m-just-a-humble-craftsman-routine gets extremely irritating when you’re in need of an Iggy or a Ziggy.

“I think people who are interviewed and apologise for what they do, it’s almost like a lack of self respect with them,” Hillary reckons. “I don’t know how people can honestly aspire to be like those people. It doesn’t mean that they’re not good people personally but…”

But they’re boring as all hell. One thinks of Hendrix or Marley or Coltrane, artists so self-aware that they neither had to play the braggart nor false modesty cards.

“I think any maturing that has happened over the last couple of years is the realisation that you must leave something behind for other people,” Mark says. “It’s important that real people connect with something you do. I see the band as one person, the band as part of that one person’s speech.”

And all bands worth the term eventually seem to morph into each other, finishing each other’s sentences, wearing each other’s faces. Watching JJ72 in the BBC Green room, one sometimes gets a glimpse of this polymorphous process at work. Sometimes the trio start to resemble weird siblings out of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles or Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden. Or maybe the trio of telepathic precognitives – two brothers and a sister – from Phillip K. Dick’s Minority Report. At one point, while Feargal looks on, Hillary asks Mark to buy her a dress out of his E200 gift token.

“What kind of dress?” Mark asks her.

“Black. Backless.”

“To show off the acne,” quips Feargal, miming someone sticking to the back of their chair.

The room groans. The point is, I’m mildly astonished the bassist would trust her bandmate’s taste in dresses.

I t remains to be seen how I To Sky will play live, long term. Previously the things I liked most about JJ72’s records and interviews – their head-high insistence on being who they are and damn the detractors – have stymied the stage show. Live, Greaney can come across like a little Lord Baudelaire; rendering the gigs an exclusive rather than inclusive experience.

“I think on the first album it was down to a lot of nervousness, an automatic kind of defence mechanism,” reasons Mark. “I don’t see it as a problem but I think other people have and will. I’ve nothing to say to an audience between songs, just the way when you’re in an airplane going somewhere far away you can’t shout out the airplane windows to people back home. I think music says things that I can never put into normal spoken words, and I’d hope that when we play these songs live people don’t need me to give them a lecture on fireworks going off in the sky and all that shit.”

Hillary: “I find that quite irritating, I think it’s underestimating people’s imagination or the audience’s intelligence.”

“I think when we take this out live we’ll be a different band,” Mark continues, “because the joy I felt doing two gigs with this material was tenfold compared to the first stuff. When we play songs like ‘Sinking’ live I wanna cry, seriously, and hopefully it affects people like that. Maybe I’m giving too much leeway to the audience to expect them to feel the same, maybe that’s the flaw sometimes. There are a lot of salesmen out there in bands, good at doing the Alan Parsons talk.

“It’s like, ‘What do they want, do they want me to get a flow chart out on stage? – ‘For this section this song should make you feel like this…’ It’s not like that and it shouldn’t be like that. You think about some of the most important things in your life – including traumatic things – non stop for 50 minutes or an hour, that’s what it’s like for me (on stage), and that’s also the reason why after a song I can’t go, ‘Did ya like that one folks?!’ I can talk and talk and talk about the record now but when I play it it’s completely different.”

We’ll see what happens. If there can be detected one significant shift in the thrust of JJ72’s noise it is that the stress has shifted from passion – in the Yeatsian sense of the word – to compassion. For example, there’s ‘Brother Sleep’, with its refrain of “I’m going to see you through this my love.”

Mark: “Writing lyrics like that, I wanted them to work for me, in order to comfort myself first. ‘Brother Sleep’ was one of the songs where there’s three different meanings. One of them was being curious about what it must be like going from death to somewhere else – the old Greek thing, death as the brother of sleep – and the best analogy I could come up with is that half-asleep/half-woken state. And another part of it was very much based on a boy-girl relationship, almost a kind of Romeo And Juliet thing of, ‘Life’s not worth living without you’, (although) I’m not saying it’s a song about a suicide pact.”

It's been said thta the devil cannot create, only iitate. The Prince of Darkness is a shit songwriter, but he can do a decent line in pastiches. Hence the devil’s music having nothing to do with Robert Johnson or Marilyn Manson so much as the current batch of scrap metal bozos clogging up the Kerrang! channel. A couple of years ago Mark Greaney told me he was wary of using producers like Steve Albini or Butch Vig, architects of the kind of records that are the sacred texts in JJ72’s sonic temple, for fear of merely carbon-copying Nirvana or the Smashing Pumpkins. Consequently, I was surprised to learn that I To Sky was produced by the Flood/Alan Moulder team that oversaw the gestation and delivery of the Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness.

“The Flood/Alan Moulder thing was mainly that the scope of Mellon Collie was very inspirational for me,” Mark says. “I don’t have heroes but somebody like Billy Corgan to me is the closest thing to a hero I have. There’s something about that record; he went out on a limb on a lot of it and he was given the angst crown for a long time.”

Did you ever meet him?

“I had a conversation with him through someone else on the phone. He rang up Flood one day and we were in the studio. He offered to twang some guitar strings for us in the studio anytime we wanted ’cos he’d seen us play in Chicago and he liked the way we wore our influences on our sleeve.”

Whatever about the music, JJ72 can learn a lot from the Pumpkins’ dysfunctional hothouse in terms of how not to conduct inter-band relationships.

“We were extremely happy in the studio,” Hillary says, “and we came out a happier band, happier people I think. Well, I was. We discovered new dimensions to the three of us working together, and the great thing about Flood was that he listened to us and really brought out the best. He didn’t get into the niggly things. It was all based on faith in the songs.”

And you gotta have faith when it’s such a strange and strained time to be making rock ‘n’ roll records that don’t conform to radio and (M)TV demographics. So what is JJ72’s biggest fear of the fates that may befall I To Sky over the coming months?

“Nothing really,” Mark declares. “No fear on this record. The first one, the fear was, ‘Shit, we made the record when we were scared of the size of the PA in the studio we went into’. And also we were playing catch-up on glowing reports in the press from our first single and first tiny gigs and we were like, ‘Oh, are we good? Great!’ But I can honestly say, hand on heart, right now, this record is a success, that’s it.”

You don’t feel like you’re sending this little baby out to make its way in a cruel world?

“I think this little baby is well able to speak for itself. Just with its eyes it can convince people that it needs to be hugged. I think this record will work on people who actually give it time. And the reason there’s no doubts about the record is there’s not one note on it I played and sang that I didn’t mean, and that’s the truth from start to finish. I think really very few songwriters would say that. On the first record there’s a few songs I would throw away now without a second thought, but this record I think I’ll have a place in my heart for it for a long time.”

In God we trust

- five God-bothering records that won’t make you ill

October
– U2
Not their most focused manifesto, but one that captures the band at their most vulnerable, searching and troubled. Look no further than the keening ‘Tomorrow’ or the headlong four-horse crusade of ‘Gloria’.

‘Mutiny In Heaven’
– The Birthday Party
“If this is Heaven ah’m bailin’ out,” ol’ Nick (Cave, that is) spits: “Ah tied off! Fucken wings burst out mah back/Like ah was cuttin’ teeth!” Perhaps the ultimate recorded gospel of a fallen angel.

Slow Train Coming
– Bob Dylan
Bob’s born-again phase got some woeful bad press but rarely has Christianity been rendered so vindictive, so ornery, so squinty-eyed mean and nasty. Read ‘You Gotta Serve Somebody’ and weep.

Satan Is Real
– The Louvin Brothers
The original hardcore troubadours, the Louvins’ close harmonies might’ve sounded as honeyed as any Everly Brothers’ tune, but the lyrical content revealed an unforgiving wrath straight out of Leviticus.

To Hell With The Devil – Stryper
Just kidding.