From Banshees to Bunnymen, Death Cult to U2, these days all God's chillun want transcendence - music rouses, takes flight in a soaring arc of fantastic uplift and primal magicke. 

Rhythms tap a deeply atavistic pulse. Otherworldly, apocalyptic voices ring out like the sonorous cries of priests, prophets and shamans. Guitars flicker fiery orange against the night's deep velvet black. 

From Albert Hall to Hammersmith Clarendon, Hacienda to Hellfire Club, the old-time religion grips worshippers anew… 

And from the land of our fathers, Celtic fringe outpost of mountain and valley, song and chapel, poetry and post-industrial slagheap and steelmill, have risen Gene Loves Jezebel, a band shrouded in not a little Welsh mystery and imagination. 

For a year I've watched this shy but genial quintet perform rock rituals not so much Gothic as Druid - a theatrically flamboyant evocation of sorrow and frustration, like the mournful lays of a proud but captive tribe. 

Gene Loves Jezebel's song-and-dance does not wholly entrance me, though many youthniks can and do surrender to the spell. But I find them intriguing - flawed and unfulfilled for now, but suggesting depths as yet unexplored. 

And so Gene Loves Jezebel (who I suspect to be mercurial mystics in touch with ancient forces I don't believe even exist), and myself (Anglo-Saxon product of the Age of Reason) sat in a Leeds hotel lounge all by ourselves in the middle of the night, trying to get our thoughts into synch whilst all around freezing mist rolled in from the Moors to besiege us. 

Very Welsh, I thought. Very Gene Loves Jezebel. 

Mike and Jay Aston are identical twins, who appear not only inseparable but virtually indistinguishable. Photographer Jeremy Bannister once snapped them both full-faced, divided each shot along the middle, and matched one brother's left to the other's right. You can hardly see the seam - almost a mirror-image. It's rather spooky. 

"A lot of people don't understand Mike and I's relationship," Jay lilts in a mild sing-song. "They thought we were screwing each other's egos 'cos we stuck together a lot." 

"The fact we're twins - they do tend to bound together," continues Mike, smoothly taking over his brother's baton of explanation. "When you work in a group, people aren't used to that, they see you as ganging up on them or something. But in truth we've never known any different. So it's Gene Loves Jezebel, you'd better remember that, ha ha! 

"Jay is Jezebel, Gene doesn't really exist…it's just a silly alter-ego." 

The twins (Jay on guitar sharing vocals with Mike) and their mate Ian Hudson, also from Porthcawl, started playing locally and even some dates in Swansea and Cardiff, calling themselves Slav-Aryan. PiL's 'Metal Box' might have been an influence, but GLJ are very coy about their musical roots. 

"We always had that naïve attitude that we didn't want to sound like anybody else, and the moment we did sound like somebody else, we wouldn't do it. The whole thing was a total reaction against everything," murmurs Jay. "What actually transpired was that Ian was a natural musician, picked it up just like that, which contradicted the whole philosophy really." 

"People tend to cover other people's songs," picks up Mike. "We'd spend hours and days, months in bedrooms, just banging away. Much more exciting. But we did find we began to structuralise… It wasn't like a theory, we weren't approaching it in an intellectual way. The fact is we'd never ever written a song, so all we had was those rhythms - a free-for-all." 

Their live set and recorded output from the debut 45 'Shaving My Neck' through 'Screaming For Emmalene' and 'Bruises' to the LP 'Promises', would seem to bear out this creative process. A GLJ song doesn't sound like it was conceived as a single, integral entity, but rather as a variation or vein of a much larger, more diffuse theme. 

Gene Loves Jezebel have arrived at a transcendent sound but, unlike, say, the Bunnymen, have so far not succeeded in recasting it in endlessly new and distinct permutations. Cumulatively, GLJ's songs rise to quite a peak of intensity, but individually they lack definition. 

And sometimes I hear others' echoes in a certain chord pattern, the keening interplay of stratospheric guitar and choral flight, a histrionic vocal flourish…Gene Loves Jezebel are taken aback by the comparison of their song 'Upstairs' with Echo And The Bunnymen, and positively insulted when I liken 'Bruises' to U2. 

"But we can't stand U2!" 

And when I suggest that Mike and Jay's stage moves - highly melodramatic, flouncing in sinister widows' weeds surmounted by fried bladderwrack hairdoes, throwing the weirdest witchdoctor/Kung Fu shapes - might appear somewhat similar to the Virgin Prunes' act… 

"I think that's a really horrible and unfair comparison!" fulminates Mike. "The fact that they have two front-people is the only comparison. Musically and visually they're so different. I really believe that." 

After making little headway locally - "They're not very hospitable people, the Welsh," sighs Mike, "they got a lot of yobs into Heavy Metal" - yet committed to their music and without job-ties, Gene Loves Jezebel moved in 1982 to London. Jay's bar job at the ICA led them on a chain of luck starting with an ICA Rock Week booking, there being spotted by and duly signing to Beggars Banquet subsidiary Situation 2. 

The great John Murphy (once with Australian legends Whirlyworld, also ex-Associates, now with SPK) had a brief stint behind the traps, but now the line-up is completed by the amiable duo Steve Marshall (bass) and Dick Hawkins (drums). Elfin wailer Kim occasionally guests live to shriek on 'Screaming For Emmalene'. 

But right now the Welshest wizard of all, John Cale, is poised to produce them in New York. The genius of Crynant sees huge possibilities, both commercial and artistic, once Gene Loves Jezebel condense and structure their free-flowing angst-rock into dramatically focussed songs. His vision is of Pink Floyd crossed with Culture Club. I kid you not. 

So what is it that Cale sees? What do Gene Loves Jezebel themselves think they're about? "Frustration…I think," ventures Jay. 

Typically, Mike promptly steams in to complete the sentence… 

"And the will to overcome." 

Perhaps that's what transcendence is all about. 
 
 
 

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