John McKay: the unsung architect of shoegaze
People often counter Jimi Hendrix’s case as the apical string-king, arguing that some nameless jazz savant or session wizard can play with greater speed and composure. Such positions could well be based on fact, but being a great guitar player also encompasses creativity, presence and distinctive tone. During the punk era, Sex Pistols were a prime example of how popularity does not necessarily correlate with technical ability. The correct external environment and internal thirst for artistic innovation are paramount, as John McKay discovered in the late 1970s.
The first stable guitarist of Siouxsie and the Banshees, McKay, played a pivotal role in shaping the band’s distinctive early sound and murky, gothic aesthetic. Joining the group in July 1977, McKay’s unique playing style bestowed depth and texture upon Siouxsie Sioux’s shrill, haunting vocals and Steve Severin’s driving basslines.
McKay’s innovative approach to the guitar was characterised by his use of atmospheric distortion effects and dissonant chords. This jagged and unsettled approach made way for darkness and tension, presaging the emergence of gothic post-punk stalwarts such as The Cure and Bauhaus.
‘Overground’, from the Banshees’ 1978 debut album, The Scream, bears an unmistakable kinship with the sound Robert Smith developed throughout The Cure’s ‘Dark Trilogy’ of albums between 1980 and 1982. Indeed, Smith had been a keen admirer of McKay’s work and proved the perfect temporary replacement on the Banshees’ Join Hands tour in 1979 following the guitarist’s acrimonious departure.
Speaking to Uncut, Smith once explained how he sought to combine McKay’s frayed textures with Pete Shelley’s more melodic approach. “The two groups that I aspired to be like were the Banshees and the Buzzcocks,” Smith said. “I really liked the Buzzcocks’ melodies, while the great thing about the Banshees was that they had this great wall of noise, which I’d never heard before. My ambition was to marry the two.”
Following his departure and eventual replacement by the equally innovative and influential guitarist John McGeoch, McKay’s “wall of noise” prevailed in a vibrant evolutionary trail. The Cure’s 1982 album Pornography, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1985 debut Psychocandy and the highly influential US noise rock of Sonic Youth are broadly accepted as critical sources of the 1990s shoegaze stream, and McKay influenced them all.
Although McKay played on the first three Siouxsie and the Banshees albums, The Scream often crops up in retrospective discourse. The album’s raw, abrasive sound struck a particularly resonant chord with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. “Did Siouxsie And The Banshees release a better record than The Scream?” he asked rhetorically during a 2020 conversation with Exit Musik. The guitarist also listed the early Banshees single ‘Hong Kong Garden’ in a list of his favourite songs for Consequence.
Likewise, The Jesus and Mary Chain launched their extraordinary vendetta against saccharine synth-pop in the mid-1980s with The Scream in mind. “‘Jigsaw Feeling’ from The Scream album … it was brilliant, amazing,” frontman Jim Reid said while playing some of his favourite records on BBC Radio 6 in 2012. “That’s a reason why I made music.”
It’s impossible to quantify the influence of Siouxsie and the Banshees, but with the likes of Cocteau Twins, Steve Albini and Johnny Marr among its admirers, it’s conceivable to posit McKay and McGeoch as immovable pillars of alt-rock genesis. From these gothic pastures grew a tree of many branches: McKay’s genes resided mainly in drone, grunge, and shoegaze territories, and McGeoch’s in those of jangle pop and indie.
As I seek to crown McKay, once and for all, as the architect of shoegaze, nobody would seem more appropriate to officiate than the archbishop of shoegaze himself, Kevin Shields. The Irish musician pioneered the pedal-happy genre in the late 1980s as the frontman of My Bloody Valentine, releasing the genre’s most quintessential product, Loveless, in 1991.
A zealous advocate of McKay’s, Shields found himself bound to the Siouxsie spell in 1979 when he saw the band perform live in Ireland. On Christmas Day that year, he received his first guitar, a Hondo SG, as a gift from his parents. Soon thereafter, Shields joined his first band, The Complex, which started off with a “Gang Of Four type” sound under the guidance of bassist Liam Ó Maonlaí. However, upon Ó Maonlaí’s departure, Shields led the offspring band, A Life in the Day, to more macabre scapes.
“We moved from being a typical punk band to being much more like Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees,” Shields recalled in a past interview with Aaron North. By 1983, Shields had joined My Bloody Valentine, with whom he developed his ethereal, hazy “wall of noise” guitar sound.
So, there you have it; John McKay is crowned the architect of shoegaze. Of course, if we were to dig further back in the genre’s convoluted evolutionary trail, we would wind up in Andy Warhol’s Factory absorbing the droning vibrations of Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed. All the same, McKay deserves more recognition as a true pioneer of his day. As Geordie Walker, the late guitarist of Killing Joke, said of McKay in a 1984 interview with Music UK, “The guy’s been ripped off so much, he started that flanged chord thing. He came out with these chord structures that I found very refreshing.”
Watch John McKay perform The Scream songs’ Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)’ and ‘Jigsaw Feeling’ on the BBC’s ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ in a recording from November 1978 below.
