Gregory Gray

He began his career as a member of Rosetta Stone, a 1970s boy band, and became an influential cult musician who made indie music and videos under the pseudonym Mary Cigarettes.

[3][4] On returning to Portrush, as a 14-year-old he accompanied the "Singing Farmer" John Watt on the guitar in the Northern Star pub in Ballymoney, which Lerwill's father owned.

[2] Lerwill started his recording career as a guitarist with the boy band Rosetta Stone, originally called the Young City Stars, in 1979.

[1] In 1981, he left Rosetta Stone, returned to Northern Ireland, and changed his name to Gregory Gray to disassociate himself from his pop boy-band past.

The other original members of the group were Donal Boyle (guitar), George Nelson (bass), and Pete Kerr (drums).

[3] The group was a support act for U2, Eurythmics, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), Talking Heads, and Paul Young.

[3] On their own, they toured the UK, often performing in university towns and small venues in rural Northern Ireland.

[7] Along with Steel Pulse, Big Country, Eurythmics, and Simple Minds, Perfect Crime performed before a crowd of 15,000 on 14 August 1983, at a nine-hour concert at Phoenix Park Racecourse, Dublin, when they were supporting U2 on a later leg of the War Tour.

[11][12] His second solo album, Strong at Broken Places, was produced by Davitt Sigerson and released by Atco Records, a subsidiary of PolyGram, in 1990.

He began to make his work available for free on platforms such as SoundCloud and YouTube, under the deliberately ambiguous nom de plume Mary Cigarettes; he continued to use the name Gregory Gray in his personal life.

[5][11] As Mary Cigarettes he became more adventurous and experimental, embracing a diverse range of styles, including indie pop and rock, techno, jazz, and folk.

[14] While Gray (then Lerwill) was in Rosetta Stone he had a romantic relationship with Tam Paton, the band's manager, and became involved with a hedonistic social circle that included Freddie Mercury.

[5][11] In the mid-1980s he bought a small, isolated farm and cottage on the North Antrim coast, which he used a base for writing and recording.