The Reverend is back on the make

If the titular Reverend of Reverend and the Makers — or, to use his government name, 44-year-old Jon McClure — was to pinpoint the nadir of his long musical career, it would probably be when the band played Cleethorpes Rocks festival in 2016 and the stage blew away. “It was a bad festival that we shouldn’t have been doing,” he admits, during a lengthy chat at his house in Sharrow. “But we had slid so far.”

Despite Reverend and the Makers being picked to support Oasis in 2009, which significantly raised their profile, things were already starting to sour by then. “Oasis sort of resurrected us because we would have probably gone out by that point,” Jon says. (Indeed, in 2008, he told the BBC he was leaving the music industry because “it absolutely stinks”, only to publicly U-turn a month later.) “But it weren't enough to address the decline in the band's fortunes.” For the next three years, though they didn’t release any music, Jon still kept seven bandmates on permanent retainer, meaning he “ended up with no brass” and no idea what to do next. “I had no record deal, half the band left and I was all over the shop, taking loads of drugs, in a mess.” 

This troubled period also marks a low point in Jon’s relationship with Sheffield, the city where he was born and has lived for almost his entire life (minus a year or two in London). During the decade between 2010 and 2020, he confesses he spent far too much time smoking weed, reluctant to show his face in town. “I was involved in launching Tramlines and that didn't transpire in the way that I would have liked it to,” he says. “I found that to be a bruising experience.” (Albeit not so bruising that the band wasn’t prepared to play the festival’s main stage later this year.) As a result, he turned his attention to national causes, such as his well-known support for Jeremy Corbyn, and “never really tried to contribute to the city”.

But, more recently, things have changed. “I would say I've had a U-shaped career,” Jon says. “It’s probably been my best period during the last couple of years.” The band’s seventh album — Heatwave in the Cold North, released in 2023 — was their first to break into the Top 10 charts since the 2007 debut that launched them to fame. Their most recent release, this year’s Is This How Happiness Feels?, has been hailed by some as their best work since those early days. And, outside of music, Jon finally felt ready to rejoin civic life. In March, he was named chairman of Sheffield FC, after his company IAV Holdings Limited bought a large stake in the club, and announced his ambition to turn its struggling fortunes around.

For those not familiar with the world of noughties indie rock, Reverend and the Makers is something like the Salieri to the Arctic Monkeys’ Mozart. (Or, to use a more local example, the two are a 00s version of Richard Hawley and Jarvis Cocker’s Pulp — acts that arrived on the scene together and both succeeded, though one became vastly more famous.) Jon only started calling himself the Reverend, or the Rev, after the nickname was coined for him by the Monkeys’ bass player. “He said to me ‘you’re always banging on about things, you like preaching to folk, you’re like a reverend’.” 

Jon and Monkeys’ frontman Alex Turner became friends after meeting on a bus in the summer of 2003 and, for a fleeting few months, performed together in a ten-person band called Judan Suki. (“We were absolutely dog shit,” Jon recalls, “like bad, really bad.”) When Jon got a bar job at the nightclub Boardwalk, on Snig Hill, he sorted one out for his new mate too. “We saw a lot of music there we wouldn't have seen otherwise,” he recalls. “Things like the Fall and like John Cooper Clarke.”

Though the Reverend and the Makers debut The State of Things reached number 5 on the UK Album charts, he admits it wasn’t easy existing in the Monkeys’ shadow in those early years — especially given he and Alex Turner at one point shared a manager, a producer, a recording studio and a house. “You don't expect your mate to become the biggest rock star in the world, right?” he says. “It's like being on a football team with Lionel Messi. You could be a reyt player yourself, but they're always going to talk to you about Messi.” Then again, he adds, “when you look back at that scene from that time, there's only me and them still really making music”.