“Rock ‘n’ Roll is a real life soap opera,” Mark Shaw, the lead singer from Then Jerico, once remarks in Smash Hits. He was probably referring to an incident where he felt a bit embarrassed because he’d done a radio interview and made an obtuse comment about someone he then bumped into, literally, a week later. That person was Jason Donovan who was on his way out when Mark was on his way in. Mark had commented to Jason that he liked his jacket and asked where he’d bought it, Jason obliged by telling him it was a shop in Covent Garden and that was that. Jason left and Mark turned round to Then Jerico’s bass player, the unlikely named Jasper Stainthorpe, and said “God, how embarrassing, I was so rude about him on the radio last week and he’s so nice!”
Back in November last year, I went to see Then Jerico in London and got to chat with Mark at the end of a great and energetic show. I told him I’d written a piece about Big Area for my website and asked him if he would like to read it prior to publication and add or amend anything as necessary. I gave him the draft and he was very keen to do this and said he would be in touch. He also added if I hadn’t heard by mid-December to give him a nudge. This I did, but sadly, he’s never come back to me. I live in hope.
Anyway, back to the beginning, prior to their first success, albeit minor, in 1987 when Let Her Fall stalled at number 65 in the UK chart, the band had formed four years earlier and Mark Shaw explained how it all started, “I actually put an advert in Melody Maker, I’d never been in a band but always wanted to be and didn’t really know to go about forming a band but I used to read Melody Maker avidly and used to regularly read about people auditioning for other bands. Now because I used to work in advertising, I knew that if you started with the letter A, you’d go straight to the head of the advert column, so I put, ‘A boy with style seeks drums, bass and guitarist and added that we have a record deal, a management deal, a publisher deal and an imminent tour’ none of which, we, of course, had but had 37 guys in one room because nobody told me you’re supposed to have them in one at a time. So, I ended up picking the one who I thought looked the best and who played the loudest and that’s, kind of, how it happened. I also knew that with the right people we could make it because being a lyricist and a melodist, but not an instrumentalist, so it was important to have the right people who had a grasp of the kind of music I wanted to make which was in the David Bowie and Roxy Music tradition.”
In July 1987, The Motive became their first big hit reaching number 18 but then Muscle Deep missed the top 40 altogether. They spent 1988 writing and recording new songs for their next album The Big Area of which the title track and the song that opens the album was chosen at the lead single. Now treating themselves as a serious rock band and claimed they had nothing in common with most of the people in the charts at the time.
Then Jerico were formed in 1983 by Chesterfield-born Shaw, his father had various jobs which involved the family moving to various locations until his parents divorced and Shaw and his mum settled in Croydon. Reflecting, Shaw said, “I consider myself a Geordie and because I went to 10 different schools, I didn’t make many friends. I’ve always been a bit of a loner. My anger has always been in me, mainly being bitter that I didn’t get a better education.” He had ambitions to be stuntman but, “I missed two years of school after twice getting smashed up on my bike, I was always breaking my arms.” He had been working in the advertising department of ZigZig magazine and admired bands like Bauhaus and Iggy & the Stooges, but said of the band he had just formed, “Then Jerico weren’t that kind of band. When I was a kid, I thought that if you were successful, everybody would like you and it’d mean you’d proved something. The reality is, success exposed my shortcomings, because you always have more to prove.”
Their first single, The Big Sweep, was released on the Then Songs record label, but failed to get radio play and missed the chart, it turned up again on the B-side of Big Area. They signed a deal with London records and the first single, Fault also failed to attract the public’s attention. The next single, Muscle Deep was championed by John Peel and David Jensen but still went fairly unnoticed. It was early in 1987 that Let Her Fall became a minor hit and got them noticed and The Motive put them in the top 20 in the summer of 1987.
Shaw was never impressed with his own song writing; “Let’s be clear, I liked me! But we were a naïve band,” he explained to John Earls in Classicpopmag. “The song writing was naïve. I never had any vocal lessons, or song writing lessons, no music lessons of any kind. And that’s how a band should be. But Then Jerico’s songs are not what I wanted them to be. They’re not ground-breaking, dangerous or cutting-edge. I accept that, really, we were quite a safe band, at least leftfield from the rest of the game at the time, but we were still effectively mainstream.”
If you’ve ever seen Mark live, you’ll notice he walks a little gingerly, this was caused by an incident in London’s Cafe De Paris. Mark was lucky to be alive; in the VIP area, a demented punter climbed up a speaker stack and began hurling champagne bottles around, so Mark went up to deal with him and as he did, the stack began to collapse and, as Mark explained the situation in Classicpopmag, “I landed with my feet impaled on the steel ring of the sprung dancefloor. I was drunk that night and it was typical of my stupid anger that I wanted to sort things out. I hated the idea of being disabled, it made me really bitter. But it’s done me a lot of good, it made me give up drinking, and now I channel my anger. I’m a more positive person. ” He became very addicted to painkillers and, in more recently admitted, “I was off my face on those painkillers, it was very dangerous. I’ll walk with a limp for the rest of my life, and if you’re as vain as I am that’s hard! But I know now I’m very lucky to be a functioning human being. It also made me realise what disabled people go through and it did me the world of good really. It taught me a lesson.”
Mark Shaw has always been the ultimate showman, the good looks, the right moves, the distinctive voice and a tight band to back him. In recent times he worked alongside Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley and the pair regularly perform at Pizza Express in Soho.
At the time of his accident and to show his caring side, Mark still managed to fulfil his obligations, “When they took me to the hospital they cut off my beloved Chelsea boots and told me I’d never walk again as my feet had shattered into a thousand pieces,” he told Ian Woolley. “I had several gigs coming up oversees for our armed forces which get no recognition for what they do and so I went over in my wheelchair to perform for them. Music can bring people together no matter what is going on in their lives. You can make them forget in a few minutes where they are and what they are doing” he said. “It took two years of hard work and physio despite being told I’d never walk again. Even though I still walk with a limp and constantly in pain but at least I can walk.” he added.