When Malcolm returned to Essex from university in Sheffield, his ears full of a new band called the Smiths and his head full of Marxist theory, the three of them resumed making music together. This was the point at which the idea of fusing tuneful pop music with political lyrics was forged.
‘It was political almost from the start. “There’s no point writing love songs” became a thing because we couldn’t be as good as the Beatles. We could never hope to write something like “I Saw Her Standing There”. So Malcolm decided what he could do was write political songs because there hadn’t really been any particularly fantastic ones written in the way he was thinking about politics. There obviously had been political songs, but not from a real, properly thought-out Marxist perspective.’
The concept was sound. Pop tunes to get people over the threshold and then encourage them to think about the lyrics. Another iron fist in another velvet glove.
‘It made us stand out from everyone else. We weren’t marching around. We weren’t Stalinists or anything.’ At the time, Billy Bragg was the most conspicuous political songwriter. He was from their home patch, a few years ahead of them at the same comprehensive school. ‘We knew him as one of the big Jam fans in Barking. He was in that band Riff Raff who, for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, played on the back of a lorry in Tim’s street.’
This top-floor office is level with a railway viaduct just outside the window, carrying trains back and forth between Clapham Junction and Richmond. They rumble past every couple of minutes, occasionally emitting a metallic screech. John is clearly used to it. He’s been at Domino now for fifteen years.
‘At the beginning, we always aimed for Top of the Pops,’ he explains. To some, being an anti-capitalist band aiming to work in an industry known for its rapaciousness and greed might seem a little contradictory. ‘My favourite quote about this is from John Cooper Clarke – “There’s no point being an island of Marxism in a sea of capitalism”.
John then cites McCarthy’s ‘Use a Bank I’d Rather Die’, a song written with heavy irony. ‘Just because you think a certain way, you’re not going to stop using the bank. You’re not necessarily going to cut things off.’ (The use of irony and sarcasm – those traits much enjoyed by the Manics – often led to the band being misunderstood. ‘Almost all of the McCarthy songs are sung by a “character”,’ Malcolm explained in a 2007 interview before he fell silent on the subject of the band, ‘like a character in a play. I often don’t agree with the sentiments expressed in the song. Quite the reverse.’)
