Then Jerico

An advertising desk at ZigZag

Then Jerico was put together in London in 1983 by a singer with no band and no obvious route to one. Mark Shaw had grown up in Chesterfield, Nottingham, Newcastle, Sussex and Croydon after his parents divorced, attending ten schools along the way, and had wanted to be a stuntman before he wanted to be in a group. The job that got him close to music was in the advertising department of the magazine ZigZag, and the band was assembled from there.

Shaw's listening at the time ran to Bauhaus, Gang of Four and The Stooges, which is audible in the early material more than in the singles that later carried the band. He auditioned his way through a run of players — the liner notes to the 2024 box set document that search in some detail — before settling on Jasper Stainthorpe on bass, Steve Wren on drums and Scott Taylor on guitar. London Records signed them in 1984.

Two albums, one of them everywhere

The debut, First (The Sound of Music), arrived in 1987, co-produced by Owen Davies and Shaw, and reached number 35 in the UK albums chart. Its singles were more visible than its chart position suggests. 'Muscle Deep' was an anti-apartheid song; 'The Motive' became the most-played single on BBC Radio 1 across 1987 and sat in the top 40 for three months. The contemporary weeklies — NME, Sounds, Melody Maker, Kerrang! — were broadly behind a band writing melodic, socially pointed rock built for large rooms.

The follow-up did the commercial work. 'Big Area' was released in 1988 and peaked at number 13, the band's biggest single, and the album The Big Area followed in 1989, reaching number 4 and going gold. Rhett Davies, whose credits include Roxy Music and Brian Eno, worked on the record, and Rick Nowels produced several tracks; Belinda Carlisle sang backing vocals on 'What Does It Take', issued as the second single. Across the two albums the band took five hits into the UK top 50.

The split, and the fifteen years after it

What followed the gold album was a label dispute rather than a creative collapse. London Records pushed the members towards solo projects, and Shaw later learned the company intended to replace his bandmates with session players. He refused — 'I couldn't do Then Jerico without them, they were my friends' — and negotiated a deal with EMI instead, at which point the other three declined to come with him. The original line-up broke up in early 1990.

Shaw's solo album Almost appeared in 1991, produced by Andy Taylor of Duran Duran, a band Shaw had mocked in print years earlier. It sold badly. Occasional reunions ran under the name Then Jerico 2 in 1993, and the self-financed Orgasmaphobia, also produced by Taylor, came out in 1998.

The long interruption was physical. In 2004, at Café de Paris in London, Shaw climbed a speaker stack to intervene when a drunk customer began throwing champagne bottles; the stack collapsed and he landed feet-first on the steel ring of the sprung dancefloor, shattering both heels. He was registered disabled for fifteen years and dependent on painkillers. In February 2019 he put down the walking stick and came off the medication, having already given up alcohol after rehab. He has said he will walk with a limp for the rest of his life. The original four played together again in 2012. Scott Taylor died of a brain tumour in April 2020, aged 58.

Four discs of evidence

The case for the band as more than a two-single proposition was made properly on 23 August 2024, when Cherry Red released Before The Future: 1984-1989, a four-CD set assembled with Shaw's involvement. It is the fullest account of the London Records years: disc one is First (The Sound of Music), disc two collects edits, B-sides and twelve-inch mixes, disc three is The Big Area, and disc four gathers demos, remixes and previously unreleased recordings. 'The Motive' appears in three separate mixes; 'Sugar Box' gets a run of remix variants.

It sold better than an eighties reissue usually does. The set entered the Official UK Independent Album Chart at number 20 and the main Official UK Albums Chart at number 50 — the band's first chart placing in thirty-five years. Reviews treated it as a serious archival job rather than a cash-in; Get Ready to ROCK! gave it three and a half stars and singled out the liner notes and the demo material.

Where the band stands in 2026

Then Jerico now means Shaw plus Ryan Williams on guitar, Magnus Box on bass and Paul Davis on drums. The touring has been steady rather than occasional: an acoustic show at Pizza Express Live in Holborn on 10 May 2025, thirty-minute hits sets across three Butlin's Ultimate 80s weekenders through 2025, and a full-band London headline show at 229 on 5 July 2025. A short academy run followed — O2 Academy2 Leicester on 12 December 2025, O2 Academy Oxford on 19 December, then O2 Academy Birmingham on 16 January 2026 and O2 Academy2 Liverpool on 17 January.

February 2026 brought the band's first full-band headline shows in Ireland: Limelight 2 in Belfast on 19 February and the main room at Whelan's in Dublin on 20 February, tickets at €30 and over-18s only. Shaw framed the trip as overdue rather than nostalgic, and talked about reassessing the early recordings and B-sides while compiling the box set.

The next move is the largest commitment since the reunion. Then Jerico have announced a 40th anniversary tour built around playing First (The Sound of Music) in full. It opens at the Craufurd Arms in Milton Keynes on 12 November 2026, takes in Shiiine On Weekender at Butlin's Minehead, Room 2 in Glasgow on 20 November, Parish in Huddersfield, the Old Fire Station in Carlisle and the Booking Hall in Dover, then returns in January 2027 for Birmingham, Liverpool and Bush Hall in London.