HAVING quit Buzzcocks after their 1977 “Spiral Scratch” EP, singer Howard Devoto was seeking a new collaborator when sleeve designer Malcolm Garrett told him: “The guy I share a house with can play all the parts to Marquee Moon on guitar.” As it happened, John McGeoch could do more than ape Television. His work with Devoto’s new band Magazine and later Siouxsie And The Banshees established a spiky tonal palette that would be endlessly imitated in the 1980s. “He played like no-one else,” says Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite in Rory Sullivan-Burke’s The Light Pours Out Of Me: The Authorised Biography Of John McGeoch. “I hear his influence everywhere.”
Born in Greenock, McGeoch moved to Essex as a teenager – taking guitar lessons from Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler at Loughton Tech – before he headed for Manchester to study fine art and find his musical calling. His signature sound impressed the cognoscenti on Magazine’s first three albums, but McGeoch yearned for more tangible success; a spell moonlighting with Visage proved lucrative before he became a Banshee for goth-pop touchstones Kaleidoscope, Juju and A Kiss In The Dreamhouse.