Mark Shaw of Then Jerico is a man with many stories and memories for he has lived through some amazing experiences, all of which I believe have made him who he was at the height of Then Jerico and the man he is in 2025. We spoke for a fair time about his early life and how his endeavour to succeed and an endless self belief forged his fame during the late eighties. He still likes to stand in front of his audience whenever possible, which now takes the form of a mix of full band shows and semi-acoustic performances (Upcoming shows are noted below).

I asked Mark how the acoustic shows work?

Mark Shaw: “It’s myself and Ollie Brum, he's a brilliant guitarist, the idea is it's just a vocal, guitar and a little added tambourine occasionally, but there's a lot of musical space so it works really well.. He tends to write a little guitar pattern,  and we'll loop that and sometimes then he brings them in on the choruses so each performance is created as we go, this keeps the crowds coming back, you'll  hear the songs you know as they're very recognisable but sometimes I'll sing different notes and I'll try different lyrics with different guitar voicings so it doesn't sound identical to the record. I'll go off and I'll try and hit notes I've never sung before. For “Sugarbox” I'll even go into a falsetto which isn't something that I've ever been aware I've been able to do but over the last couple of years because of the fact I'm not singing over a battalion of rock musicians I actually do have the vocal space to do that”. 

“We do have moments of hilarity, it's all about our on stage personas even though we don't take ourselves seriously, we take the music and songs seriously, it's very much about entertainment and having fun and a giggle, it's almost taking the piss out of the whole 80s thing. There's a lot of banter, we have fun with the audience, that's the reason that I love playing acoustic shows.” 

LIVE DATES 2025 / 2026:

Then Jerico Full Band: “The Return”

BUTLIN’S ULTIMATE 80’S WEEKENDERS: MINEHEAD - SEPT 13th 2025

MORECAMBE WINTER GARDENS, UK - NOV 15th 2025

VISOR FESTIVAL, VALENCIA, SPAIN, SEPT 26th 2025

OLD WOOLLEN LEEDS, UK, DEC 11th 2025

O2 ACADEMY 2 LEICESTER, UK, DEC 12th 2025

O2 ACADEMY 2 OXFORD, UK, DEC, 19th 2025

O2 ACADEMY 3 BIRMINGHAM, UK, JAN 16th 2026

O2 ACADEMY 2 LIVERPOOL, JAN 17th 2026

Then Jerico Acoustic:

PIZZA EXPRESS LIVE, HOLBORN, LONDON - SEPTEMBER 20th 2025

As mentioned at the start of his piece Mark and I spoke a lot about the beginning  of his life and the moments of importance in the story of Then Jerico, it shows that decisions and turns in your life have such an influence of what happens next, Mark Shaw was a “chancer” I think he won’t mind me saying that and he had the bravery to persist where many would fall. The story did meander but I think and hope you will agree it is all important in its own way, so I have included as much as possible. This is your classic Rock ’n’ Star in the making.

Return To Sound: “Can we start here and talk about the beginnings of Then Jerico, how it came to be? Because, let's be honest, you were a good looking chap at that time and sometimes that can work against you? 

Mark Shaw: “It has, especially at the beginning”

RTS: “I mean, obviously you are going to attract a lot of fans for certain reasons, not necessarily your musical talent but then you want to be taken seriously, you know, “I'm writing great songs here”, and you wrote some great songs, you want to be famous for those songs, not for how you look, did you suffer a little bit from that?”

MS: “I didn't really think, I thought it made no sense because I guess I'm stupid, I never thought of myself as good looking, I didn't have a girlfriend until I was about 17 years old, I was like the lonely kid at school, it was really only when I started a band that I started getting attracted, getting girlfriends. Which I think says a lot about my personality, the fact that I'm okay when I sing, you know, but I never thought of myself in that way”.

“It was only when I started working with photographers, and they liked you a certain way. I think the look, the way that I naturally looked, the way the band naturally looked, being kind of skinny and, you know, high cheekbones and stuff, that became very fashionable in the early 80s. Predominantly driven by Bowie, I think, and the fact that everybody wanted to look like Bowie, or look like Jagger”.

“That became, what rock stars look like. They're sort of skinny and have a certain look about them. But then of course I was a Blitz kid, you see. I was into alternative music before that”.

RTS: “So you went to the Blitz Club? Did you meet all those people, you know, Boy George, etc? ”

MS: “Oh yeah, Rusty Egan, Steve Strange, Chris Sullivan, John Galliano”. 

RTS: “That must have been incredible, you know, incredible”.

MS: “Oh mate, it was phenomenal. First of all, Blitz was just the name of the club as The Blitz was a 1940s wine bar. So it wasn't as if the movement decided, like Steve and Rusty said, “let's call it the Blitz”. Boy George was the hat check guy, for God's sake. So you'd go in and you'd be suddenly be hit with George. If you didn't look a certain way, you wouldn't get in at all, when it first started on a Tuesday night, it only ran for six weeks initially”.

“And it all came from a pub called Billy's, which was in Dean Street, they did Bowie nights. And Steve was involved with that”.

"Jeremy Healy, who was the DJ, became a top DJ. Jeremy ended up in a band called Haysi Fantayzee, now he does some film music and does music for adverts . Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant man and a great DJ. He was 15 years old!. His hair had a blue or purple spike sticking upwards”. 

“The Club came from Billy's. Then it moved to the Blitz. It was simply the fact that Blitz was the host venue. It was almost completely inappropriate as we were so futuristically obsessed, it was Futurism, which is what Electro was called in its early days, of course. But we were all Bowie fans. So it was essentially a Bowie night with Rusty DJing. They were northern soul dancers, Steve and Rusty”.

“Steve and Chris Sullivan, both being Welsh, used to dance at Wigan Casino. Rusty was an amazing northern soul dancer. So these guys would get up and do the splits. This is where the high peg trousers and that whole kind of look that Bowie was wearing. Yeah, the 78 Bowie look”.

“So there was this weird collision. So for instance, Rusty would play and Midge Ure used to DJ as well. Midge at the time had just been in Thin Lizzy. So it was a bizarre thing”.

“You'd go there and it was 8 o'clock at night and it would be just ordinary people. And they'd all look at you with some very strange looks. You'd get beaten up on the train trying to get there anyway. There'd only be about 30, 40 people in the room. And then at 8 or 9 o'clock Steve arrived and it became the Blitz. And it only ran until 11 o'clock. So you're talking about three hours, for maybe six weeks. That was the official run”.

"They could sew,

design and paint

then there were the

likes of me"

“Then it closed because they weren't making any money. And they couldn't afford to rent it. It wasn't as if it took off like. It was the second incarnation of it. This is as far as I remember”.

“People like John Galliano, Christos Tolera, Stephen Linard, Chris Sullivan, they were at St. Martin's fashion college art students. And Christos Tollera was in Blue Rondo aLa Turk. So they understood how to make clothes. I mean Chris designed Spandau's gear for one of their Tours. So you're dealing with people that were great artists in their own right. They could sew, design and paint. And then there were the likes of me”.

RTS: “So how old were you then, Mark?”

MS: “Well I'm 64 now. I believe it would have started about 1980 or so. So I would have been about maybe 19 years old. But there were no other clubs you could go to. I mean you used to get beaten up at most clubs anyway by the bouncers. But no one was quite sure what was going to happen”.

RTS: “ 1979 to 1981 was such a mix of trends, fashions and musical genres?”

MS: “It was phenomenal, wasn't it? An amazing couple of years. I remember being in the street and this guy walked up to me and he said, What are you? Because I had white makeup on and black combed back hair”. 

RTS: “You also had to be part of something. That was sort of the only rule, wasn't it? You had to be a mod. You had to be two-tone. You had to be this or that, you weren't really allowed to cross any barriers. People didn't like that?”

MS: “That's correct. Which is different now”.

“Well, that's it. We weren't any of these people. I think because a lot of them knew each other. Kim Bowen and Judy Blame, who has unfortunately now passed, was a brilliant jewellery designer. They all knew each other. They were all friends. All were remarkably talented in their own way. All coming together, just wanting a club to go to where they could listen to the music they wanted to listen to and wear what they wanted”.

“But it wasn't the kind of club where you'd go and you'd make mates. You'd go there and everyone was so busy posing, they were looking at you up and down. And so that was part of the look, was that you didn't talk. You got up and everybody danced. It was extremely loud, Rusty and Midge used to like to crank up the volume. And it was ear-splittingly loud. But everybody would get up and dance. And it was like the Blitz dance that was created, which was if I remember, where two guys could dance together or two girls could dance together. And it's taken until now, where you see Strictly Come Dancing, where, oh, look, there's two men dancing.That was totally normal in the Blitz. You'd go to the toilets and the men went into the women's and vice versa. Because there was this playing with gender roles. So it was perfect. It was normal to turn up with a pair of stiletto shoes on and make-up”.

“I had to make my own clothes because I didn't have the money. None of the clothes we wore could be bought in any shops that existed, apart from possibly PX, which was sold in Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's shop. Unless it was from PX, there was hardly anywhere you could go. Those clothes were acceptable because they were cutting-edge. But pretty much everybody who went to Blitz wore the clothes that they'd made themselves or they were vintage clothes they'd picked up. And the look that became known as New Romanticism or New Romantics only really passed through the Blitz for a couple of weeks”.

“It wasn't like everybody wore ruffles and velvets. That wasn't a fact. One week, everybody would be wearing 1930s clothes, and next week it would be whatever the leading lights at the club were wearing. They'd go out of their way to outdress each other. So one person would be dressed like an 18th-century fop. Somebody else would be dressed in a highland kilt. Someone wore a metal jumpsuit and space helmet on, everybody looked different. You wouldn't ever find two people looking the same. And if they did, they'd nip out and come back dressed differently”. 

“So it was a combination of Bowie and Roxy and then the Germanic Electro of Kraftwerk and Can. Also music such as Nina Hagen or Toyah plus a lot of Siouxsie and the Banshees. There was a lot of female rock music as much as there was male music, which is a great balance. But then suddenly Rusty would play the original version of "Tainted Love" and these people would get up and dance to Northern Soul. I tried but couldn't do the moves (laughs loudly)”.

“There was also this great competition between the Birmingham scene and the London scene because they had their own, with Martin Degville and the Duran boys, they had their own clubs and their own way of dressing. It was very much we had Spandau, they had Duran. And it was very looked down upon to be a Duran fan even though I'd bought the first album like a lot of Blitz kids did. But the weird thing was that it wasn't this conscious thing”. 

“I can remember Jackie Charlton came down to the club”.

RTS: “The Jackie Charlton of Leeds United fame!!?”

MS: “ Yes Jackie Charlton came down. He did a bit of TV presenting and there was a Sunday lunchtime TV show which the name escapes me now, he just wanted to know about this club. He came in and filmed us and they said to us we're going to be having a Sunday afternoon two hour Blitz session, if you could all be up at that time, which most of us weren't”. 

RTS: “The thought of TV must have been, lightbulbs in everyone's minds though?”

MS: “Oh, it was. It was amazing. And he came down with some of the cameras and so a few of us were sitting there and I remember he sat next to me and interviewed me. My piece wasn't shown but he sat around and he said I think you guys look great. You people look fantastic. I love what's going on. Can you explain to me what's going on? So we all sort of said look, we're called “The Cult With No Name”.

“The press started calling it “The Blitz Kids" this was a name that was kind of foisted upon us. I don't know Rusty may say I'm wrong but I don't remember it being a consciously adopted terminology. We were just this group of people who turned up nodded at each other. “How are you doing?” You know, people would talk but most of us would sit around just posing trying to look as androgynous as possible and then you'd get up and you'd dance your ass off to amazing music. Then by 11 o'clock the lights would go up and everybody's make-up was running and we'd try and go to other clubs. Most clubs wouldn't let us in so there were a few places like all night restaurants, bars you could go to if you knew the right people. There was a place called “Up All Night” which was on Regent Street and there's a famous Chinese restaurant in Soho where you'd go and you'd order a pot of tea and of course it would be wine in a teapot. So there'd be great post-mortems over who was wearing what and what was played”.

“Then The Blitz kind of closed down because the club was sold, it was when Mick Jagger turned up and got turned away another night Bowie turned up, pleased to say I was there. Suddenly the paparazzi started turning up because they knew that rock stars were going to be there and it got in the papers. That's when they moved to a Club for Heroes which was actually a restaurant in Baker Street called “Barracudas”, before they actually took it to Camden Palace”.

"We kind of melded

the idea of dance

rhythms with rock guitars

and my out

of tune wailing"

“I don't know how many people went on to form a band from those days, it's probably a long list, we reckon as I've spoken to people recently, that a third of the people either died or disappeared into some sort of drug ablution, a third went on to become famous designers, the rest became either DJs or musicians. I used it as a launch pad very much as a lot of bands did and you got a lot of ideas because it was so inspiring but more than anything it allowed you to be yourself, it gave you the confidence to be a front man. So finally getting round to answering the question of “did our looks hold us back ”it helped enormously looking the way we looked”.

“It helped us get record company attention because” oh look these people came from the Blitz” therefore they must be cool. We had this pretty boy image but we could play and we were an alternative rock band really with a bit of a dance sound. We kind of melded the idea of dance rhythms with rock guitars and my out of tune wailing over the top, all that clicked together and became Then Jerico…… sorry that was the longest answer you've ever had”.

RTS: “Mark, no problem it is all part of your story”

“So 1979-1980 were you living in London?”

MS: “I’d say 1980,81 yeah. So the story goes, my dad was a Geordie my mum was Glaswegian and they moved from the North down to the Midlands so I was born in Chesterfield. My dad was forever moving, I think I went to 12 different schools. We lived in Nottingham, we lived back up North in Sunderland, Newcastle various regions, Gosforth, various regions of Northumberland, Whitley Bay for a little bit then when I was about 10 we moved from the North down to Sussex. That was to the most rural town imaginable called Barcombe which literally had one pub and one shop. It was so isolated, suddenly there I am having come from not having seen a blue sky before because of the many slag heaps from the coal mining industry, and we're living behind a farm where I'm looking out at cows, sheep and a stream and I'm like this is unbelievable, there's nothing to do except ride your bike and go and play football so it was idyllic really. It was strange for me to go from what I knew from up north to come down there and be again this new kid in school. I was always the new kid which is where my creativity came from, I didn't have friends, couldn't make friends, most people couldn't understand what I was saying anyway so I learned to amuse myself”.

“Then we moved from Sussex to Croydon when I was about 11 or 12 and I missed the whole first year because I couldn't get into a school in time so by the second year everybody else had their groups, their gangs. I'd found my own route via my brother Richard who was massively influential on me, always has been, he was hugely into Bowie, Roxy, Elton John and Genesis. He had an amazing span of music and played me all this unusual stuff so one minute he'd be playing Hunky Dory the next minute he'd be playing me Syreeta produced by Stevie Wonder. I can’t emphasise how big an influence my big brother Richard was on me when I was younger - not just musically but also in literary, art and stylistic terms. He was never afraid to be himself, he dressed in the latest fashions and was always ahead of the curve and introduced me to everything from Pop Art, Andy Warhol and writers like Isherwood, Solzhenitsyn, Scott Fitzgerald, Hunter S. Thompson, all of whom shaped my own artistic vision for my music and image. I'd just go and raid his record collection but I had my own stuff too. I was into a lot of jazz when I was young, big band jazz and modern jazz because my dad was into that”.

“Because I was on my own I chose to dress like my favourite pop stars so I'd go to school not with the right uniform but a leather jacket, dyed hair, mascara on one eye like Michael McDowell from Clockwork Orange and get my head kicked in every time because I was this officially weird kid”. 

RTS: “It feels like you were a glutton for punishment?”

MS: “Well I didn't know it was odd you see as I saw it on television”.

“I then had an accident on my bike. I wanted to be a stuntman, so I smashed myself up. So I missed most of the second year of school as well. I was hospitalised. This led to me getting kicked out in my fifth year. So I ended up with very little schooling by 16 years old. My parents had been divorced for several years and I was living with my mum in South Croydon when she basically had enough of me and kicked me out. Mostly because of the way I looked and the fact that I couldn't get a job for long”.

“I couldn't begin a work career because I didn't have any qualifications. So she got fed up with it all and I ended up living in a squat. By the time the Blitz had come around, by the time it got to 1980 I had pretty much been fired from every job I ever had. Someone once said to me I had 36 jobs and I couldn't hold one of them down. I did get work in a club called The Daisy, which was in Charlotte Street. It was a lesbian club. And I was cleaning the toilets. But it came with a flat, you see, at the top above the club where there was also an Italian restaurant, all the waiters lived in all the flats as well where we all shared one bathroom. There were seven people sharing one bathroom. It was a horrible fucking place!!”.

“But it gave me a flat, one room in Charlotte Street in the West End in London. Which meant I could walk to most of the places I wanted to get to or get a bus. It was the place to be at that time”.

RTS: “The place to be, like the eye of the storm?”

MS: “Yes indeed, yeah. And it meant it gave me a small income and enough to be able to afford to place an advert in Melody Maker and audition and put a band together".

RTS: “So Then Jerico was something you had in mind from all the influence you were soaking up, you started that by putting an advert in Melody Maker?”

MS: “ Yeah, though first I auditioned for two bands. One called Naked Lunch who were an electro band at the time. They had a couple of singles out. I knew the bass player pretty well and became friends with him. He said, we're looking for a singer. You look great, come along. So I went along. The only problem he said is that you look great but you sing out of tune. So I didn't get that job. And then I heard that Fashion a band from Birmingham were looking for a singer”

“So I went all the way up to Birmingham, wearing an outfit I borrowed from Steve Strange, funnily enough. I went looking the bomb, you know what I mean? a steel grey tunic and a 12 foot long velvet scarf around my head, about three times around. I went there, full makeup, got there and the same situation. Mulligan, who's the keyboard player and sort of the guiding light behind Fashion, you know, what are you singing? They're not our lyrics, are they? I said, no, no, no, I'm making my own words up. And he said, well, that's not the job. You're supposed to sing the words to our songs. I said, well, I think they're crap. I'm sorry. I've got good lyrics.And he said, well, that's great, but you're supposed to be joining our band. We're not joining your band. He said, look, go away. I'll give you an hour then come back, because there were loads of people auditioning for the band”.

RTS: “ Do you think you had a bit of an ego? Because that sort of sounds a bit of an ego, doesn't it?”

MS: “Oh, mate, I had a huge ego. I always have, it's a self-defence mechanism. If you're going to go all the way up to Birmingham, you know, just head to foot in an outfit like that, white makeup, painted nails, lipstick, the lot. I mean, I had more makeup on than anyone I've ever met. I just took all the members of Japan and put them together. That would be me”. 

“He said, look, you're going to go away and learn the songs. I'll give you an hour. I came back. And he said, well, great you are singing the words, but the trouble is, you're in the wrong key. Can you tell me what key you're in? I said, no. So he said, you're not really a singer, are you? And I said, no, I'm not. So he sat me down with the keyboard, and he said, I'm trying to figure out what key you're in, because what you're doing is really unusual”.

“He said, look, you're making up your own words, and you're pretty much singing your own melody. But it's really unusual, because no one's doing that with music. What you're doing doesn't really work, technically. It shouldn't work, but it kind of sounds good. I suggest you go and form your own band. He also said, anytime you want any help, give me a call, blah, blah, blah. So I rang him a few times, he said, the best thing to do is put an advert in Melody Maker, hire a studio, audition your own band”.

“I put  as a title of the advert “A boy with style”, so I got AB, then alphabetically my advert went straight to the top of the listings, it went A boy with style, keyboard player, guitarist, drummer, sax player, blah, blah, blah. And I put record deal, tour, management, everything is in place. Of course, I was inundated”.

“Now the fact that I was in this place, where there was one phone at the bottom of the stairs, and everybody used it. It was bombarded with calls, and the Italian waiters were going, look, we need to call home and you're on the phone all day and night! So I hired a rehearsal room quickly.”

“Now I'd never even sung with a band before. I auditioned all these musicians, and I got them all in the room at the same time, I didn't realise you'd get players in one-by-one, so I had 35 people altogether. They must have all been looking at each other, thinking, what the hell's going on? how big is this band? So I ended up with people walking out, But by the end of it, I whittled it down to the five or six guys that I could hear over the top of everybody else, it meant they were playing loud enough and with the right frequency and they're the ones that I wanted. I formed a band called Terminal Jive to start with”

“Terminal Jive was a Sparks album and I loved Sparks. We started rehearsing once a week and after about six weeks, we had just run through covers. Then I said right, I've got lyrics, let's try some ideas? So they'd play chords and I'd sing over them and after a while, a couple of people left saying, this isn't going anywhere. And the couple of guys left said, look, where is this manager? When's the tour happening and where's the record company? So I had to admit that there was no record company, So the drummer left, so it was me and the guitarist”.

RTS: “It took them that long to realise, did it?”

MS: “Well, yeah, because I've always been a great bullshitter". 

“While working as a salesman I quickly learnt that the art of great selling is to lie to the customer as much as you can. I worked in a shop in the West End called Browns where they were selling designer label clothes and it was like 35 quid for a T-shirt. In 1980, the only people that could afford this sort of T-shirt were rock stars and multi-millionaires. I served Pete Townshend, Ray Davies and Billy Curry from Oxford Rocks and I served the Moody Blues. I had my own customers and I used to ask them for advice”.

 “I finally had this one guitarist and we got together and we wrote a couple of songs. He ended up leaving for a proper band because I just didn't have any gigs. I kept auditioning people, I hadn’t done any gigs as Terminal Jive. I then changed the name to The Anniversary, went to a club called Monkberry's, a Private Members club as they had bands on. I saw Belouis Some there and I realised that they had showcases. So I convinced the owner to give me a gig without a demo tape, we're amazing, just trust me!”

"So I convinced them though I only had three songs that I managed to write with my little band. I had a keyboard player and a bass player. We did this little gig there in front of the assembled glitterati of London. Maybe 100 people, but it was all the right people. It was designers, and fashionistas, and by chance... Phil Collen, the guitarist from Def Leppard, who happened to be there just before he joined Def Leppard.

“Anyway, I had a chat with him, and he asked me a question. He said, I'm in a band at the moment, but I've been asked to join this other band, Def Leppard. I'm not sure if I should join Tigers of Pantang. They both want me. I advised it's got to be Def Leppard. He then mentioned our gig asking how long have you been singing? I said, well, I've never sung before. This is my first gig. He said, with this band? I said, no, it's my first ever gig! He looked at me, and he said, if that's your first ever gig, then you're a rock star, because of your confidence and your ability to perform. He said, "but you need to get some singing lessons”.

“From that point, I got enough confidence and interest to go out, rehearse the band for a year, while the lineup changed. The guitarist that I wrote my first couple of songs with, one of which was “Let Her Fall” had to go back to Northern Ireland, so I just auditioned people again, until I came up with another lineup”.

“I did one gig in 1983 at the Half Moon in Herne Hill, which was of course a pub, but it had a back room. I had this ethos that I was never going to play in pubs. I knew that all the A&R men used to go to the Half Moon, and it had this back room with a separate entrance, so you didn't go through the pub. You went through the back door, and it held 150 people”.

“I convinced them to give me a gig, and they said, if you can sell 150 tickets, we'll pay. I went out and I sold 150 tickets. We rehearsed for about a year up to this gig. From that one show, I was approached by London Records, and I forget the other label now, I then went off the back of that and blagged four or five other gigs, just from connections I knew in Clubland. Gary Crowley, bless him, gave us a live session, and then we went to New York”.

"In New York I managed to blag the New Music Seminar. It's a whole other story, but basically, I learned the New Music Seminar was happening, the first ever music conference of its kind, and I knew everybody was going to be there, all the English record labels were going to showcase their bands to the American labels, and all the American labels were going to showcase their bands to the English and European labels so they could get transatlantic deals”.

“So there's bands like the Chilli Peppers, it was quite amazing. My brother flew me over there and booked me into a great hotel because I hadn't seen him in, like, ten years, and he said, for your birthday, either 20th or 21st I'm going to book you into the Waldorf! So as I was in the Waldorf Hotel, I thought, great, I'm using this. So I rang up every record company in America and went to see every record company and manager and agent in New York and just pounded the streets for two days, which is all I had there. I span this line, I'm at the Waldorf, best band in England, best band you've never heard of, come and see us”.

“So of course, people would ring me back because this kid's staying at the Waldorf. It's the same principle I've always used, as Eddie Murphy once said, “bullshit, attitude and experience will get you far” and that was it. So a combination of image, my ability to talk, and the place I was staying, got meetings with top record labels and a lot of top managers. I managed to convince Danceteria and the Pyramid Club, which was like a gay club to have us on and then the Limelight, which was a church, and they'd never had live bands on there, but I found out that The Jacksons were going to be doing a showcase for the Victory album as part of the new music seminar”.

“So I went and convinced the Limelight to give us a gig, and they said, well okay, we'll book you, but you're not playing anywhere else. And I said, no, we're playing Danceteria, we're playing Pyramid, and they said, no, we'll pay you not to play those gigs”.

“So I thought, this is great, we're getting paid not to play. It's all working, isn't it? It's going brilliantly, yeah. So I got paid enough money to fly the band back over, and then we printed about 2,000 flyers and handed them out around New York telling people that we were playing as a new music seminar official band, which we weren't, but I knew that everybody wanted to go to the Limelight because it was a converted church and it was the hottest club in town. The Jacksons were going to be playing there, I knew that it was the place to go. I didn't realise that the Jacksons were miming. So the Jacksons played the night before us as the first live act they'd ever had, but they were miming. So we were then the next night the first live band to ever play at the Limelight and as a result we had about 1,000 people turn up because everybody wanted to get into the Limelight”.

“We played four songs and then the DJ put a record on. Because we were very good and I think I was throwing a mic stand at the DJ booth, the owner of the club came running and said that's it, you can't just play four songs! Then we went back on and played the same four songs but had such an impact that we then got offered record deals”.

“We came back to England and played another four shows so we played seven shows by which point we had seven record companies after us and of those we chose London”

RTS: “If you weren't in the band I can see you as a Malcolm McLaren character. Making things happen, simple as that”.

MS: “That's it, well McLaren was already a hero of mine and I got to meet him once and he was fascinating and that's exactly what it was. I learned about the music industry and I knew you had to learn to court the music press as well. I'd learnt all the things I needed to to be able to put a band together. I understood advertising, I understood showmanship to some degree from having clubs. I'd even been a window dresser for a while so I'd learnt how to  put clothes into a dummy and I knew a lot of it was about the impact of what people saw in a window. I'd worked in a record shop and I'd learnt little bits about everything and I just used all those elements together to create "Then Jerico”.

"There were

two books, one was

a porno and the

other just half

of a bible"

“We signed with London Records and they said well we need you to make an album now. They found out we only had four songs we had to get writing. I was lucky because the rhythm section Steve and Jasper were in a band already called Red lipstick I knew they could play dance rhythms so that was the way to go".

"The name came from the squat where there were two books, one was a porno and the other just half of a bible. Yeah, I'd read about Jericho but what I didn't realize was it was probably the greatest example of ethnic cleansing in the history of the world, because half the pages were missing. So all I read was the bit about how the walls came down and changed the world. So I thought that's a good metaphor. Yeah, and the “then” part came because there was a band called It's immaterial from Liverpool. Mm-hmm. I love the idea that you could have a title as everybody was called “The” something”.

“When Scott Taylor eventually became the guitarist we needed time to get the band right. Scott came along to an audition, he had been in Belouis Some when I'd gone to Monkberry's to see them play. Bizarrely Neville (keighley) ended up as a mate of mine, he got signed as a solo artist but Scott didn't get signed up with him. So I remember seeing Scott and thinking, I need that guy's he's quite amazing. Probably one of the greatest guitarists I've ever heard in my life. He could play anything Scott. He was phenomenal and he was massively into funk. So he could play like Nile Rodgers and that's an element I wanted, I said right I want him in the band. We wanted to sound a cross between Gang Of Four and Shrieback. He said well, yeah, I come with Ben. He's the keyboard player and we're a team. So if you want me then it’s Ben Angwin as well”.

RTS: “That sounds like Buckingham and Nicks all over again, doesn't it?”

MS: “It's exactly what it was, we did sign up with Ben, but after about a year of being signed it became obvious he wasn't gifted enough to be fair, we unfortunately had to ask him to leave. After that we never had a permanent keyboard player. We carried on without. So then Jericho started out as a four-piece Bass, guitar and Vocals and then I added a second guitarist Rob Downes in 1988".

Interview by Dan Reddick

photos provided by Mark Shaw