The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy 9781628929508, 9781501305221, 9781628929515

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PSYCHOCANDY

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series: The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly The Modern Lovers by Sean Maloney Colossal Youth by Michael Blair & Joseph Bucciero Twin Peaks Soundtrack by Clare Nina Norelli Bizzare Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker Homogenic by Emily Mackay Uptown Saturday Night by Will Fulton & Patrick Rivers Workbook by Walter Biggins & Daniel Couch Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry Return to the 36 Chambers by Jarett Kobek Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Rubin Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Peepshow by Samantha Bennett In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony Transformer by Ezra Furman Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti and many more…

Psychocandy

Paula Mejia

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway

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www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Paula Mejia, 2016 Paula Mejia has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. “Troubadour, 1971” and “Whisperers” from cooling board: a long-playing poem by Mitchell L. H. Douglas. Copyright 2009 by Mitchell L. H. Douglas. Red Hen Press: Pasadena. Reprinted with permission by Red Hen Press. All Rights Reserved. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-6289-2950-8 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2951-5 ePUB: 978-1-6289-2952-2 Series: 33 13 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

This book is dedicated to all of the chancers, misfits, mad ones, freaks, outsiders, and every other person who has been othered in some way because they are different. You are not alone.

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Contents

Disclaimer viii Acknowledgments ix Track Listing xii The Living End 1 In a Hole 9 My Little Underground 15 Sowing Seeds 27 Upside Down 31 Never Understand 39 Inside Me 49 Something’s Wrong 57 Just Like Honey 71 Some Candy Talking 79 Taste the Floor 87 Taste of Cindy 93 Reverence 99 Epilogue: Cut Dead 107 111 117

Notes References  vii •

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Disclaimer

Although former and current members of The Jesus and Mary Chain agreed to be interviewed for this book, and all the quotes from said interviews contained herein are correct, this is not an official Jesus and Mary Chain book. The views expressed (except in direct quotes) belong to the author, and not the band.

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 viii •

Acknowledgments

Unless noted otherwise, all quotes in this book come from interviews conducted by the author throughout 2014 and early 2015. Trevor Dann, Bobby Gillespie, Douglas Hart, Ian MacKaye, Stephen McRobbie, and Jim Reid were spoken with in person, while interviews with Eugene Kelly, Frances McKee, Karen Parker, and others were conducted via telephone, Skype and email. Alan McGee and William Reid declined to be interviewed for this book. First, an enormous thanks is in order for Bloomsbury Press publisher and editor Ally Jane Grossan for being understanding, gracious, and incisive with her edits. A big thanks goes to Laura Snapes for her guidance in conducting crucial research in the U.K., and a huge shout-out goes out to Trevor Dann, who was instrumental in providing both context and contacts for this book, as well. Thomas Mallon and Gayle Wald provided crucial edits and wisdom for a (very) rough draft of this book I penned as a thesis in graduate school at George Washington University, and I am entirely indebted to them. This book wouldn’t have been possible without  ix •

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Jessica Hopper either, who encouraged me to submit the proposal in the first place. Thank you for that. Many thanks go out to my colleagues and friends for the endless encouragement and enthusiasm: Ryan Bort, Cady Drell, Doug Main, Zoe Schlanger, Zach Schonfeld, Lauren Walker and Lucy Westcott. A huge thank you to the Creation Records clan, especially Simon Fletcher and Keith Murray, for helping arrange crucial transatlantic interviews, and ensuring that I made it to the Psychocandy performances in Glasgow and London. Bobby Gillespie was the glue that held this book together, helped set up key interviews, and was extremely generous with his stories and time. Cheers goes out to Douglas Hart, former bassist of the Mary Chain, for his wonderful stories and candor, and for gifting me his copy of Tom Wolfe’s The Pumphouse Gang, which I now treasure. Millions of thanks go to Jim Reid for meeting with me in Glasgow and telling me about his band’s landmark record openly and honestly. I enjoyed nerding out about The Cramps and Nancy Sinatra with you. Thank you also to the greats who agreed to share their experiences with me: Eric Green, Eugene Kelly, Ian MacKaye, Frances McKee, Stephen McRobbie, Karen Parker, and Simon Reynolds. This book is what it is because of the fantastic Finn Maclean, who graciously took me in for nearly a week in Glasgow during research travels, for showing me what Scotland is really about, and teaching me how to dance at a cèilidh. I have to extend a huge thanks to Hugo Campbell and Digby Scott Vollrath as well, the old pals who took me in without question during two separate research ventures to London. I owe you all one and then  x •

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A cknowledgments

some. Thank you also to my family and friends, specifically Patricia Bacalao, Jack Detsch, Tim DeVita, Eric Thurm, Bailey Pennick, Sandra Johanssdotter, Anne Loos, Max Maclean, Luis Mejia, Alex Noghaven, Jameson Oyer, Jason Speakman, Connor Stevenson, Conor Wilson, and Joey Yang, for the encouragement and support through this journey to the center of psychotic candy-coated noise. This book and this record alike would not have existed without Lou Reed and his Velvets. So this book is dedicated to that salty old Lou and his friend David Bowie, a shining star for weirdoes everywhere. Godspeed, and thank you for the noise.

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Track Listing

1. “Just Like Honey” (3:03) 2. “The Living End” (2:16) 3. “Taste the Floor” (2:56) 4. ‘The Hardest Walk” (2:40) 5. “Cut Dead” (2:47) 6. “In a Hole” (3:02) 7. “Taste of Cindy” (1:42) 8. “Never Understand” (2:57) 9. “Inside Me” (3:09) 10. “Sowing Seeds” (2:50) 11. “My Little Underground” (2:31) 12. “You Trip Me Up” (2:26) 13. “Something’s Wrong” (4:01) 14. “It’s So Hard” (2:37)

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The Living End

Pop music is composed of lightning-speed ascents and crashes. And speed, both the concept and drug, are critical to the Jesus and Mary Chain tale. The band would later on dabble in amphetamines (among other things, which would perhaps inspire titles like “The Sound of Speed”), but their ascent was entirely categorized by momentum. In other words, the idea that you could become the one dictating your mobility and ascent by taking matters into your own hands, and they did when they barged into the NME office and threatened that the hype mounting around their burgeoning band was too great to ignore. The drug speed “promotes sexless concentration, single-minded focus; in overdose, it can cause temporary psychosis,” as Joy Press and Simon Reynolds write in their landmark text The Sex Revolts, a manifesto of sex and rebellion in rock music throughout the twentieth century. This isn’t just a diagnosis, though, but perhaps also a lens through which to think about the dual forces that caused the formation of the band’s first album Psychocandy, like its past psychic twin The Velvet Underground & Nico. It’s the tension between extremities:  1 •

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That of a tunnel vision focus while teetering just close enough to the edge of madness—in all its free-form dissonances and uncertainties—and the exploration of trying to find this middle ground. Certain parties might call this the search for the work–life balance. While recording at Southern Studios with producer John Loder in early 1985, the band hunkered down and created Psychocandy in a “quite civilized” environment, as the band’s vocalist Jim Reid told biographer Zoë Howe in the Jesus and Mary Chain biography Barbed Wire Kisses. Their daily routine went as follows: Get up, put on whatever clothes were lying on the floor, schlep from Fulham to Wood Green (where they were recording in London) around noon to begin working. They would go to the Wimpy Bar for a bite to eat and then they worked all day on the record before having dinner together. The day would end around nine o’clock, they’d go home, then do the same thing over and over again until it was perfect. “They had the image sorted, how they were going to record, even what you should and shouldn’t say in interviews. Very rigorous,” drummer Bobby Gillespie says of the Reid brothers, the masterminds behind the band, while recording their landmark debut. Back then, the brothers William and Jim would be on-and-off again fighting (sharing a bedroom and making music with your sibling naturally leads to tiffs, I would imagine). But it was “about the music then,” says Jim, and their drive was such that the fights between the two would settle pretty quickly.1 The resulting Psychocandy is an unapologetic swooning love letter to pop music. Regardless, the band didn’t care about what others thought of their taste, whether it was off-kilter, unpopular or pandered to past popular  2 •

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artists. Given all of this, the word “speed” may even be an understatement when speaking about the Mary Chain’s rise—it was within a year that Bobby Gillespie had joined the band and the Mary Chain became a worldwide phenomenon in 1985. Pop music’s backbone is speed, embodying how hard and fast one can fall when in love, documenting the steep rise and even more spectacular explosion of musicians, not unlike those supernovas we so admire as they hover in the sky then die before our eyes. The Mary Chain wanted this instantaneous rise, but they wanted longevity too. Endurance was always a part of the Jesus and Mary Chain blueprint. They didn’t want to be one-hit wonders, or fleeting names on a chart that would disappear the next year. And the extreme debut they recorded certainly made an impression. The critical British music magazine Melody Maker would recall Psychocandy a few years later as something that “sounded like the end of history … a merciless furnace to bring it all to a horrible destruction.” In the Outsiders documentary, Sean Dickson, of Scotland’s Soup Dragons, describes how Psychocandy’s release changed everything for young people. “It was a wake-up call—they felt like the Sex Pistols of our generation,” he said. “They made it believable, that someone that great lived up the road.” The Jesus and Mary Chain wanted to be adored, but they likely didn’t know how their music would impact culture for years to come. Sure, Psychocandy never shot to number one on the charts, and sold just over 100,000 copies in the U.K. upon its release. But as a March 1992 issue of Melody Maker notes, the influence of the Mary Chain billows out as close to their contemporaries  3 •

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like My Bloody Valentine, Curve, St. Etienne and Chapterhouse, as far as contemporary eardrum annihilators including Thee Oh Sees and even Nine Inch Nails renegade-turned-prolific film scorer Trent Reznor. Of course, they hoped they would achieve some kind of longevity and had the hard-nosed confidence to prove it. In a Melody Maker interview supporting the release of the studio album Honey’s Dead from that same year, William Reid deadpanned the interviewer: “Psychocandy was one of the greatest albums ever made.” Still, the Jesus and Mary Chain’s continued influence is compelling considering that in 2015, we are seeing a particular trend that’s not necessarily the death of full albums, nor singles, but the increased desire for sound bites. This is a phenomenon that Chromatics’ front man Johnny Jewel once likened to culture being “seduced by the loop,” these bits and pieces that people can splice with other sounds in order to create a conglomeration of sounds. Programs like Ableton make it easier than ever for bedroom musers to create a cohesive set of sounds and distribute it to the world without so much as going outside. But as the spheres have widened, the edge that used to categorize pop has dulled in a way. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s singular use of pop and noise, seemingly opposite themes of sex and death, and combination of honey and vinegar to forge the unholy noise that is Psychocandy has virtually disappeared in today’s pop landscape. “Contrast’s dead,” as Psychocandy bassist Douglas Hart told The Guardian in 2015. “We live in this slightly anodyne world. That contrast [of noise and pop] was important psychologically. If you were pissing people off it made you feel great.”  4 •

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As for today, festival lineups are indicative of the decline of rock music. Scan the lineups of big-name festivals like Lollapalooza and Coachella—at one time in history, the champions of the underdogs, the freaky and the alt-rock—and EDM acts such as Calvin Harris, Steve Aoki, Disclosure, along with big-name hip-hop acts such as Drake, Future and Kanye West, dominate the headlining acts. A trend in recent years has been for a culturally significant rock act, long dormant, to reunite for one-off festivals or tours where they perform, such as Pixies burning through their seminal album Doolittle in 2009 and Pavement doing a handful of career-spanning sets in 2010. The reunion fervor also includes shoegaze legends (and Mary Chain pals) My Bloody Valentine performing cuts from Loveless and their twenty-years-inthe-making follow-up mbv in 2013, Slowdive performing the entirety of their landmark 1994 album Souvlaki in 2014, and Ride getting back together in 2015. Now, the Mary Chain is back on the road to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Psychocandy. After an uncere­ monious 1998 breakup and a brief reunion in 2007, then again in 2012, what led Jim and Reid to lay their arguments to bed and dole out Psychocandy to the world all over again? Are they pandering to the contemporary reunion fervor, taking the money and splitting? Music. It’s about the music, as Jim recently told The Quietus about the new tour: “It’s about taking the album out and, as you say, shining a light on the album and not the madness that went on around it … it’s a celebration of songs that we recorded in 1985.” I’d argue that part of this desire to reunite and tour isn’t a desire for money-grubbing at all, but instead to expose a new  5 •

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generation to songs from classic albums that rocked their past generation. It’s a testament to the longevity of albums like Psychocandy, which have the rare ability to transcend the era in which they were created, and still reach people informed by different experiences and values years later. The tension between the two brothers hasn’t necessarily eased, though. They have years of collaborating, touring, and experience dealing with each other, yet they “still argue,” as Jim told KQED earlier in 2015. “It’s still difficult with us. I guess it always will be.” There’s a new album in the works from the Mary Chain as well, but it likely won’t happen until the brothers come to a consensus on the music. Psychocandy’s power continues to confound me with every listen. It’s an album that I can readily revisit in times of strife and under the spell of love. I can’t say that about many others. The record’s fuzz-spurting feedback is admittedly decadent, an acquired taste, and for some completely unpalatable. “Psycho, my brother made up that name,” Jim Reid remembers. “What it is, it’s a one-word description of what the album contains. Psychocandy, I mean really, but what are you going to get? Psycho wasn’t really referring to unhinged behavior,” he says. Part of it was the madness that people like them, who had been consistently beaten down by their surroundings and had a gallows outlook on life, could actually create something that became overwhelmingly popular. The questions I’ve gathered during the writing process admittedly outnumber the ones I began with. This project began as a simple deconstruction of a record  6 •

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that I found intriguing and that had been important to me. I hold that Psychocandy is a piece of art emblematic of its time, marking the transgressions of a socially and politically fraught period that perhaps doesn’t differ from the state of fear that permeates culture today, particularly among youth unsure of where to turn and what to do. But along the way, this work evolved into something far more complicated, plunging into musings on Scottish culture and the complicated politics of being a misfit. It wandered into explorations of masculinity and the working class, how this album subverted notions while becoming a standard. It became about how we can never separate our art from our lives, art out of apathy, or separate our complicated relationship to music and ourselves. It has been an opportunity to think about how culture, art, and identity merge in the digital era. I’m not sure Psychocandy would have seared through the underground and to the top of the pop charts today, shifting the scope of noise and pop as it did in the ’80s. Yet perhaps the beauty of this lies in that it maybe wasn’t supposed to happen. Post-punk and pro-confusion, Psychocandy became the sound of a confused generation and established Creation Records as a taste-making entity full of misfits in the process. The band’s notorious live performances, punishingly loud and riot spurring, simultaneously became socio-political commentary on tensions emerging in mid-1980s Britain. Through caustic clangs and feedback channeling the rage of the working-class generation who’d had enough, Psychocandy gestures toward the perverse pleasure in having your eardrums exploded and loudness as a politics within itself, not unlike the S&M pleasure of noise core.  7 •

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Yet Psychocandy’s irresistible blackened candy heart center—calling out to phantoms Candy, Cindy, and Honey with an unsettling charm—makes it a pop record to the core, not unlike the Ronettes or the Shangri-Las’ late ’60s croons. Drawing from the sweetness of ’60s girl groups, the Stooges’ masochistic stage antics, and Lou Reed’s feedback-laced guitar swells, the Jesus and Mary Chain expertly carved out a place where depravity and sweetness merged, and emerged from the isolating underground of suburban Scotland with a distinct sound of a generation, apathetic and uncertain. The record’s cult popularity became embedded within the sacred canon of pop music. This masterful pop record causes us to grapple with our relationship to music, society, and ourselves. I’ve long been fascinated with noise as transcending sound itself. This book has been, in a way, an examination of that. The process has caused me to not only ruminate on how I identify with music, but how we ingest culture as consumers and what constitutes pop music in an increasingly complicated realm. So I suppose that means I’ve been eating the psychotic, lovesick, sugared noise candy. But recognizing that is a sweet victory in itself.

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In a Hole

First they had to crawl out of an abyss. Before Scotland’s Jesus and Mary Chain became honeyed, spastichaired superstars, opened for Iggy Pop and rang in the anniversary of their caustic debut Psychocandy with a slew of worldwide reunion shows thirty years later, they were way down in the hole, so to speak. Take the album’s fourth track, “The Hardest Walk.” The song alludes to the arduous climb from humble beginnings to a sugarcoated pedestal of fame, fortune, and stardom. While it describes the vast journey ahead, the song doesn’t discount the unexpected feeling of being numbed by something as singular as a voice, or a touch, that strays you from what thrust you in the driver’s seat in the first place. The loss of something— sensitivity, feeling in your heart or in your toes—is the crux of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s experimentations in pop as thrash, depravity as sweetness, pain as the perverse necessity to eventually reach a sweet release. But perhaps the hardest walk was the one taking them away from their shuttered factory hometown of East Kilbride, one of Scotland’s first suburban post-war “new towns.”  9 •

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Forged by the brothers Jim and William Reid on vocals and guitar, respectively, Douglas Hart on bass and Bobby Gillespie on drums, the Jesus and Mary Chain all grew up in these kinds of suburban towns. The Reids and Douglas Hart called East Kilbride, a town about eight miles outside of Glasgow, home. Bobby Gillespie instead hailed from Mount Florida, another Glasgow suburb roughly twenty minutes from East Kilbride by car. It’s remarkable how similar the towns were, though, given how Jim, Douglas, and Bobby speak about their upbringing. They were destined for a life of high-stakes, paltry blue-collar jobs, and this kind of predestination made them stir-crazy and resentful. Especially Bobby. “The thing about the Mary Chain is, we’re all working class. Jim, William and me grew up in tenements, and they moved from the tenements to East Kilbride, then [my family] moved to a house in Mount Florida,” Gillespie remembers. “I only discovered this a few months ago—because Jim was talking about the first few years of his life when they left, and it was very similar to mine. My experience. It’s quite interesting that we all had this rage, but we never spoke about it.” To give you an idea of what East Kilbride was like, Douglas Hart has described his hometown in the past as “fucking Neolithic,” like “Stonehenge with windows.”1 Right after World War II, the tiny town of East Kilbride—at the time boasting a population of just 2,000 residents—was the first of Scotland’s post-war “new towns.” Poised on the distant promise of rebirth after the war, hundreds of towns across Europe struggled to re-establish their sense of identity after the war’s social and architectural dismantling. East Kilbride was the first •

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of these towns to spring up in Scotland in 1947, and was followed by Glenrothes (1948), Cumbernauld (1955), Livingston (1962), and Irvine (1966).2 The purpose of these new towns was, as the education resource Scotland on Screen put it, “an ambitious solution to build new communities and ease the problems of slum tenements and Scottish cities after World War II,” particularly in Glasgow. In the case of Glenrothes, the new town was established to assuage overcrowding issues in hubs like Edinburgh and Dundee. A revivalist movement gave rise to new measures like the Beveridge Report, which in 1942 had singled out five “Giant Evils” plaguing British society at the time. These included idleness, disease, want, ignorance, and squalor. Embraced by the Labour government elected shortly after the war, the prime minister, Clement Attlee, was determined to wipe these “evils” from society and instituted a welfare plan that had been outlined in the Beveridge Report.3 In the pursuit to trump these evils, Attlee was hinged on bringing up families “from the cradle to the grave”4 with better housing plans. So beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the program sought to relocate residents (back then, totaling about 750,000 people) to these new towns, East Kilbride among them. This move was made by the government primarily to combat Scotland’s dire lack of housing. The promotional film Glasgow Today and Tomorrow details how 1945’s Bruce Report was created in order to drastically restructure both housing and transportation within Glasgow, which had been suffering from extremely narrow roads and tight buildings that had •

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long outgrown its initial Victorian-era infrastructure. City Engineer and Master of Works Robert Bruce was the one behind the radical idea to restructure the city in keeping with the modern times. (Today, the Report is a bit of a sore subject, as Bruce also wanted to eradicate historic areas in Glasgow, such as the City Chambers and its Central Station, as part of the sweep.) But the idea for Scotland’s “new towns” themselves came from the work of Ebenezer Howard, a social reformer who had attempted to solve London’s similar problem of overcrowded city centers in the early twentieth century with two cities, Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City. Howard believed that the infrastructure of these utopian city centers could help humans to coexist better with each other.5 The new towns were thus marketed as an escape from the inner city, and “tended to be based near cities which were being regenerated or next to areas where large industries were based,” according to the BBC. Initial East Kilbride plans outlined just four neighborhoods and had fewer than 10,000 houses intended to enable more “breathing space,” including community areas, modernized factories, houses, and schools. Like the other new towns, the relatively young East Kilbride was modeled as the prototypical space that nurtured family values and the promise of a quaint life away from the tense, overcrowded, crime-ridden city center of Glasgow. The towns boasted even more safety because traffic going into the city was intended to steer clear of both pedestrians and residential areas. “This is East Kilbride—booming new town, real community, and a magnet for high-tech industry!” boasts •

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a jaunty voice in the government-funded promotional video East Kilbride: The Making of a Town. The video (which you can find on YouTube) proudly advert­ises the development corporation that was able to propel the once-village “into the shopping and leisure content that it represents today,” waxing poetic about the planned and integrated mixture of facilities, housing developments, and centers for technological development. Towns like East Kilbride—often referred to as “overspill,” because they drew so many people from the cities—were intended to lure middle-class families from the cities out into the suburbs. The chirpy voiceover announcer in the video goes so far as to announce that, “East Kilbride would be everything the overcrowded city centers were not!” The implication was to maintain a certain kind of person within the city and other people out in the family-centered suburbs. And for a while, it worked. The town quickly evolved from sparsely populated into Scotland’s sixth-largest city, now boasting 70,000 residents.6 It followed a hand-traced blueprint that many other cities in Europe had attempted to follow, in the spirit of reconstruction after the trauma that World War II left upon the continent. Structurally, the town’s economy stemmed from the mall at the center and the factories strategically situated towards the outskirts of the town. East Kilbride’s city plan grouped residential areas and terraced housing developments to be built. The structure of these single-family homes was fashioned specifically to ensure convenience and social interaction with friendly fellow neighbors. The ironic thing is, the sense of community that these new towns set out to establish was lost, as people relocated to •

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these areas in droves but didn’t know (or necessarily care to get to know) their neighbors, according to the BBC. The town’s layout was designed so that each home acted as its own self-contained entity, where everything could be readily available to its citizens. But plans these ambitious are often doomed to fail, especially where the idyllic prospect of a utopia is concerned. For one thing, in the attempt to make inexpensive housing, the places often appeared to be a prison-like gray due to the sheer amount of concrete that had been utilized to build them, and quickly. In fact, East Kilbride was nicknamed “Polo Mint City,” because a new addition to the city, roundabouts, resembled the memorable sweet mint candy. A sort of psycho candy, perhaps?

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My Little Underground

It’s fitting that in their current iteration, the Jesus and Mary Chain spliced part of the aforementioned government-funded East Kilbride video to open the 2014 leg of Psychocandy reunion performances in the U.K. When I saw the same video I had watched so many times during my research whir on before the band went on at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom to perform the album, I was struck by how poignant it felt. Here they were, reuniting to play their iconic debut and coming out to the world, an album they had crafted meticulously as an escape from the town. Thirty years later, it’s the precedent that must be played before they even took the stage. The current lineup has been reshuffled a bit since the band’s humble beginnings: the Mary Chain is now William and Jim Reid, who are taking their brotherly differences one day at a time; Phil King (of the venerable shoegaze legends LUSH) on guitar; Mark Crozer of Mark Crozer and the Rels on bass; and Brian Young of, yes, American power-pop sensations Fountains of Wayne on the drums. And while he’s no longer in the band, former Mary Chain bassist, contemporary pal and East Kilbride dissenter •

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Douglas Hart is the first to admit that, “East Kilbride, as much as it marred us, it made us.”1 I’d think that growing up somewhere like that might cause a bit of madness to begin bubbling within your brain. Name-checking a psychiatric disorder in their debut record’s title—the “psychosis” in Psychocandy— is emblematic of restlessness within their minds, and their desperate desire for an alternative kind of culture. Perhaps it was bred from boredom, extreme exasperation, or the stir-crazy spirit of these specific floor plans and the perfectly proportioned cul-de-sacs, but Psychocandy stands out as not just a venerable noise pop statement, but also the new culture they forged together when nothing was available, or relatable, to them. Mary Chain front man Jim Reid has been rather public about his distaste with his hometown over the years, too. “We couldn’t get out of there fast enough,” he told me, referring to East Kilbride, when we met in Glasgow in November 2014. Judging from how he speaks about his old hometown, the place was—and is—desperately in need of an adrenaline injection. You can see it now, from YouTube videos depicting the town’s landmarks as it stood in 1980s, there is almost no color present in photographs of the town. The architecture of the buildings was unremarkable, in hues of orange, gray, and brown. The colorlessness no doubt contributes to a sense of hopelessness. Virtually no options were available for working-class young people such as the Reids and Hart, who were predestined to follow the working class trail “of under­ achievement from school onwards into employment and adulthood in our post-industrial society.”2 The yearn •

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to escape from this life is perhaps loosely outlined in Psychocandy’s “My Little Underground,” describing the trench mentality they developed together. This song is one of the most poignant tracks on Psychocandy: It viscerally details the pain of feeling completely isolated in that very place you’re supposed to call home and needing to “run and find” a place that one “can’t be found.” But it’s hopeful too, and suggesting that with the right people one can form a sanctuary of sorts, even under the grayest April skies. When they became famous, the Mary Chain would attempt to mask their past with a devil-may-care attitude onstage. But their resentment about growing up working class came out in occasional spurts. One vivid mention of their upbringing emerged in a June 1985 interview with The Face magazine in which William Reid calmly explained to the writer how his past job involved picking roaches out of Parmesan cheese at a cheese factory. Before then, he had worked as a sheet-metal manufact­urer, in which he described how he was worried about losing his fingers (I hear that’s not ideal if you’re hoping to play guitar). Meanwhile, Jim Reid worked briefly at the RollsRoyce Aerospace factory, which made airplane engines for the giant metal birds at Boeing. The Reid brothers quit their jobs in 1980, and scrounged up the several hundred pounds from their dad—who lost his factory job in 1983—from his redundancy pay-off. The brothers wisely used that money on a Portastudio to craft the scrappy demos that would eventually evolve into “Never Understand” and “Upside Down,” the first singles they debuted to the world.3 •

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As Douglas Hart tells Zoë Howe in the Mary Chain biography Barbed Wire Kisses, he and Jim first formed a kinship through a mutual friend, Ivor Wilson. Wilson took karate with Jim Reid, and noticed that he, like Hart, had lovingly scribbled the names of the same bands on their schoolbooks, the Stooges and the Velvet Underground among them. The two met and bonded immediately; an outsider knows when they’ve encountered another one of their kind. In the Creation Records documentary Upside Down, Jim Reid remembers that he and his brother William, with whom he shared a bedroom, “befriended Douglas Hart years early simply because there weren’t that many people in East Kilbride that were into the music or literature or movies that we were,” he explains. “It seemed that everyone was moving in the same direction and the people that moved in the opposite direction were easy to spot. There weren’t many of them.” And in East Kilbride, people who were different were derided: “We were three freaks in a horrible town where people would literally shout at us on the street,” recalls Hart.4 Wilson, Hart, and Jim Reid would go on to play their first show together at a house party, where they played the likes of the Sex Pistols (“Anarchy In the UK,” “Pretty Vacant”) and the Jam (“Art School”). Just six people attended, but it was an audience nonetheless. Later on, Wilson would be critical to the Mary Chain yet again, as he ended up selling the older Reid brother his first guitar. Given how Douglas Hart and Jim Reid talk about it, East Kilbride was completely devoid of alternative culture. To catch a movie or even visit a record store, the Reids would have to commute to and from Glasgow. •

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Records? You had to wait for the traveling record fair to come around town, according to Hart, and hope that the scraps one had saved up would be enough. “It was hard to get that music back then,” Gillespie says of music in the 1980s. “You had to really search for it at record sales or send away for it in America, you know. We didn’t have much in the shops.” It was especially hard since their tastes lingered on things that had been out of print, notably Velvet Underground records. East Kilbride offered little in the vein of venue spaces too, save for bars and the occasional house party. The music scene in East Kilbride itself was nonexistent save for a handful of funk bands kicking around the local pubs, Jim remembers. But they never hung out there. “We hated pubs because we would get our heads kicked in,” says Hart. The only semblance of a “scene” was all “neo white boy funk,” according to Jim, who shook his head as he said this. It wasn’t much better in Glasgow, more culturally rich but far enough removed to be practically a different universe. “Most bands in Glasgow were playing like white funk, and trying to be like David Bowie in Young Americans,” remembers Gillespie. It wasn’t quite the idea of funky town they had. In nearby Mount Florida, future Mary Chain member Bobby Gillespie was similarly scheming and dreaming. As a young man, he was sharing noise tapes and collaborating with fellow “fucking outcast” and “freak,” his neighborhood pal Jim Beattie, in what would be the fledgling incarnation of Primal Scream. Like Gillespie and Beattie, the Reids and Hart formed a literal band of brothers out of necessity and a form of survival against ridicule. “We were just existing in this •

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utter void, it gave us a gang mentality in a weird way you know? Just utterly underground,” Hart recalls. Douglas says that if they ever went out in East Kilbride it was in the dead of night—lest they be targeted by gangs of neds, a Scottish term he says means “non-educated delinquents” (or “unquestioning people,” as Gillespie puts it). Instead, Reid and Hart would stay up all night and stroll about town. Hart says that they took walks to obsess about the punk bands they loved, as well as take muchneeded breaks from their respective brothers (both of whom they shared bedrooms with) and would talk about forming the perfect band. Hart’s description of them existing in an “utter void” and having a kind of trench mentality is resonant with the idea that culture, is sometimes the only choice amongst certain parties, the last resort before a predetermined factory life, or else one is relegated to being on the dole. “It really messes you up,” Jim Reid told the Los Angeles Daily News’s Craig Rosen of his and William’s tense surroundings. “[William and me] used to get in really big fights over the most trivial subjects, like who is going to answer the door or the telephone,” he added. “Five years of unemployment can drive anybody insane.” The idea of forming a clan, and a group militant about being on the frontlines of pure pop music, is the “chance to live like a man rather than a minion” to the status quo.5 The fraught search for a cohesive identity is inherently at the core of Scottish life, as well. One infamous scene in Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting, about heroin addicts in ’90s-era Edinburgh, features Alex Renton (played by a gaunt Ewan McGregor) in tears, describing the fractured identity that many Scots feel in •

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relation to England: “Don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonized by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonized by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat into creation.” Harsh, but Renton’s words are resonant in the struggle to find an identity that has plagued Scotland since the seventeenth century, and feels especially poignant now given the fraught, ongoing conversations around a possible referendum that would mark its independence. In his essay “By the Water of Leith I Sat and Wept: Reflections on Scottish Identity,” contemporary Scottish author Angus Calder expands upon this notion, writing that in Scotland’s post-industrial fade “‘working men’ can hardly find a basis for identity in the prideful skilled work when such work is no longer there for them. Culture has now become the surviving option.” Faced with these kinds of options, what else was the Mary Chain to do? Culture was the only way. While they were in love with culture, the problem remained that the Mary Chain felt ostracized by their community and found little kinship with people in their town. So the Reid brothers instead stayed in their shared room, listening to the likes of the Cramps and the Stooges, two respective tribes of weirdoes. Early Mary Chain lyrics, often penned by William Reid, were done sober, and melodies written drunk and/or stoned, due to his view that both came from “different places” in the subconscious.6 For the Mary Chain, music was self-empowerment, and bred from a shared love of sound. Hart mentions •

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that while the band had just narrowly missed punk, they admired their punk predecessors for the power that came through doing things themselves—whether that’s in the form of creating your own music, punkifying your clothes, booking your own performances, or learning how to take photographs for the sake of creating your own fanzines. When Jim and Douglas walked and talked all night, dreaming up ways to become “the perfect band,” they were drawing from their DIY heroes to craft the Mary Chain image that would later on be notorious. Taking a cue from David Bowie’s persona Ziggy Stardust (who in imagining the experience of becoming a rock star becomes one), they decided to study to become rock stars. In East Kilbride, they would stay up all night getting loaded … on dreams and black tea. Yes, really. The late-night brainstorming sessions Jim and William Reid shared in their bedroom back in East Kilbride were crucial to even beginning the Mary Chain. They did this by mainlining cups of thick Scottish black tea and getting down to work on their image, sound, and the audience’s experience of seeing them perform. They had found their muse in Ronnie Spector of the girl group the Ronettes and later wife of Phil Spector. From a young age she was determined to become a star, once claiming, “I wanted to be the Marilyn Monroe of Spanish Harlem.”7 Similarly, the Mary Chain wanted to be the Beatles of East Kilbride. Hart tells me that in the band’s fledgling stages, they especially drew from the likes of Jürgen Vollmer’s book Rock ‘n’ Roll Times: The Style and Spirit of the Early Beatles and Their First Fans, which outlined the rock and roll aesthetics, and explored the mythology that the Beatles turn into icons once •

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onstage. The Jesus and Mary Chain were incredibly selfaware and intelligently crafted their image to be part girl group probing noise-laden pop, while looking like the Beatles in their Hamburg era. The Reids and Douglas Hart came across a photo of the Fab Four clad in leathers and pointed boots in that book, and suddenly a vision began to converge for what would soon be the Jesus and Mary Chain. “That, we thought, is an amazing look! It’s us,” remembers Hart. Clad in leather jackets, sunglasses, and frizzled hair, they embodied the disaffected rebel look that both looked slick and would confuse people enough to keep coming back. Punk poetess Patti Smith once infamously said that the formula for rock and roll is art + electricity. They had the electric, suburban desire of rebellion, and were studying the art. So they weren’t out getting sloshed, but instead were fastidiously studying the craft, and finding out a new way to carve it into something entirely their own. That’s decidedly a rock and roll ethos. This band wasn’t so much bred out of want, but a need. The Mary Chain’s early process is reminiscent, too, of how art was created in an era that heavily influenced their sound: 1970s New York, which had bred punk in the slums of the Bowery and the East Village. The impoverished area was rich with creativity, and people with a desire to make something with their own hands. “Is there a relationship between the squalor and the fertility?” wrote Richard Hell, formerly of Neon Boys, the Voidoids and Television, of the 1970s. “Yes, for the obvious reason that we had nothing to lose.” In the same way, the Mary Chain, with few options, were free to forge something positive from their own squalor. •

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Psychocandy is an album that viscerally clangs with the sound of struggle and outcasts making sense of their bitterness, using music as survival and, ultimately, a form of escape. From the pummeling chords of “Taste The Floor” to the thuds electrifying songs like “It’s So Hard” these sonic selections perhaps even mimicked the factory environments they had spent their lives working in, and was perhaps a way to contextualize those experiences. Politically and culturally, Britain was also experiencing a dangerous time, when tensions between the unpopular prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the restless public in the mid-1980s, when the Reids were dreaming and scheming of becoming stars, were coming to a head. The vast increase in interest rates—enacted in order to ease Britain’s then-high inflation—resulted in soaring unemployment and tax jumps during a deepseated national recession emerging in the early 1980s. Unrest began to unfold. Rioting hit a number of Britain’s major cities, London, Leeds, and Liverpool among them, in 1985. London’s rough Brixton and Tottenham neighborhoods, in addition to Liverpool’s Toxteth district, were plagued with robberies in addition to riots, which happened the same week during the fall of 1985. Gillespie says he felt deeply angry as a young person in Mount Florida. Not just because of what was happening politically, but to assuage from that sense of outsider­ness. “We had this real fucking rage and an urge to create,” he says of himself and his “one other friend” in town, Beattie. The pair started a racket—literally—in a primitive noise band, where Gillespie played two dustbin lids as drums and screamed while Beattie also screamed. •

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“My Mary Chain drums were the same except these were trash cans,” he remembers, smiling. For Douglas, it was more about finding a tribe. “We all thought there was no one like us … and then you discover there are other people like that. So it was really important psychologically to me. Cause we might have went insane [if not],” he recalls. Given the urgency of the music and their fierce determination to become pop stars, the Jesus and Mary Chain had more of the straight-laced discipline that would be emphasized by industrious groups like Washington, D.C.’s Fugazi. In America, these collectives directly advocated for political justice through songwriting, demanded all-ages performances that would create accessible safe spaces for all, and rejected traditional music industry practices that might overshadow the music speaking for itself. Ian MacKaye, front man and principal lyricist for Fugazi and Minor Threat, tells me that he crossed paths with the Jesus and Mary Chain in the studio several times. Much like Fugazi, the industrious Jesus and Mary Chain’s catalyst for becoming a band itself was simply because they didn’t identify with anything around them. “Fuck it, there’s no one making the kind of music that I wanna buy,” Jim Reid told The Quietus in 2011. “So let’s go out and do it and make a band.” In light of the struggle comes beauty, though. The band managed to unearth mature and salient songs that rang with clarity and vision, forging classics like “In a Hole” and “My Little Underground” that were directly reminiscent of their fraught upbringings. Our culture both triumphs artistic reinvention (Prince) and •

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demonizes it (Lana Del Rey), yet no amount of costume changes, producers, or lifestyle shifts can change the fact that you are always, in some way, chained to where you come from. The Mary Chain would not be who they are, nor would they have written Psychocandy, had they grown up somewhere besides East Kilbride. At the very least, it gives you adequate time to plot your escape. “What it did is that it [gave us] a lot of time to just sit down and a blueprint for what [we were] going to offer the world,” Reid tells me of his hometown, thirty years later. “And that’s what we did.”

•

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Sowing Seeds

Before they’d even dubbed themselves the Mary Chain or the Daisy Chain, the band’s first iteration was the Poppy Seeds. It’s an homage to their love of music’s poppy seedlings, a dedication to Nuggets-era psychedelic garage numbers. Or, it’s a nod to their shared penchant of mind-altering psychedelics. A lesser-known fact of East Kilbride was that back in the ’70s and early ’80s, mind-altering mushrooms, or psilocybin, grew wild in the fields of their suburban hometown and even in their neighbors’ front yards.1 Douglas Hart remembers that he found out about the psychedelic fungi one day at school. “Literally the headmaster came in one day and he had a photograph of them and says, ‘You shouldn’t pick these!’” he remembers, laughing. Naturally, he went after them. “He didn’t quite say what they were but we went straight down to the library going ‘what the fuck are these things?’” According to the BBC, the two types of mushrooms in the U.K. bearing lysergic properties are psilocybe cubensis and psilocybe semilanceata. The latter, dubbed “liberty cups,” are the most common and frequently crop up on grassy grazing lands.2 •

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Since both Douglas and Jim shared bedrooms with their respective brothers, these long jaunts and traipses into fields were a way to get out of that claustrophobic space, he says. The out-of-body tripping experience, which lasted several hours, undoubtedly trickled into the eventual psychedelic overtones of Psychocandy: Hart remembers in the Mary Chain biography that it helped them to get outside of their heads and experiment musically. This is perhaps most explicitly addressed in the warbling song “Inside Me,” on side two of Psychocandy. Under Bobby Gillespie’s banshee drum beat, Jim Reid— as though in a trance—sings about watching his head expand, the elusive notion of time itself floating far away. The image of the growing head is as much a tradition set forth in rock—with a pill making one larger, or smaller, as per Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” or their hero Damo Suzuki singing of mushroom heads in red skies in Can’s “Mushroom,” the latter of which they covered on 1988’s Barbed Wire Kisses. They were perhaps also drawing from the “mushroom heads” they foraged in their hometown. The notion of seeing something beyond reality becomes explicit in the Psychocandy cut “Sowing Seeds” as well, when Jim croons behind Bobby’s gentle thumps and William’s guitar that he sees “candy people.” This could mean anything from sweet people or the nightmarish Candy Man, who lures in children with saccharine promises before devouring them. Perhaps the Reids were attempting to replicate the feeling of listening to the album’s spiritual guide, The Velvet Underground & Nico, which they’d once said felt psychedelic. “If I could buy that feeling, I’d pay a fortune for it,” Jim has said. •

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S owing S eeds

Timothy Leary disciples and psychedelic enthusiasts hold that lysergic drugs help to expand the mind, loosen inhibitions, and, for a time, make even the murkiest thing seem clear. It’s the drug of choice for the wanderers, the rebels who yearn for connectedness amidst escape. Hallucinogens cast one free of all things standing in the way of a singular “life-force,” that fluid thing that flows through all of us. Of course, this notion has bred its generous share of bad-to-terrible eggs, most infamously Charles Manson. In the late 1960s, Manson amassed a “family” of wanderers, urging them to take LSD as a form through which they could be truly freed of all inhibitions, while in reality he would take less than them, and would use it as a tool for manipulation that ultimately led to a string of grisly murders and other atrocities. Yet this sensibility of “psychedelia as an answer” has Psychocandy written all over it. In the truest sense the album was a trip, bodily and mental, for the guys to transcend their immediate, grim realities. It’s a fitting image, because mushrooms growing wild in the town’s fields may have been the only semblance of pastoralism in the factory-driven East Kilbride. The parallels to Eden here are palpable: It’s music as a refuge. But Psychocandy also functioned as a plea for their peers. With its droning white noise and the repetition of feedback sputtering into a mantra of sorts, the album implored listeners to be more open-minded with their musical selections. It was a statement against what was popular at the time. The irony, of course, is that Psychocandy became that popular upon its release, practically overnight. Either way, the Jesus and Mary Chain were fixated with bringing people back to the garden. •

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•

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Upside Down

The Reids and Douglas Hart kept to themselves in East Kilbride, but they were missing one key component to make their dream band a reality: A good drummer. “We had Murray Dalglish [who drummed for the Mary Chain before Bobby Gillespie] and he was OK, but he was just a kid and he wasn’t really like us and it was never going to work,” Jim recalls in the Creation Records documentary. They were hitting a wall, and rehearsals weren’t going so great. They would attempt to rehearse, “get there, argue for half an hour and go home.”1 Not too far away, in Mount Florida, an equally frustrated young musician was trying to make noise. Bobby Gillespie was the missing link the Mary Chain didn’t know they had needed. And when they found him, he was immediately ushered into the Mary Chain. Why was Bobby the perfect fit for this clan of loners? For one thing, he was a fellow outsider, too. But he also shared the same cultural sensibilities as the Reids and Douglas Hart: The rupture and renaissance bred from the culture of the 1960s, punctuated by the freewheeling libertines of Woodstock and truncated by the fears perpetuated by Charles Manson, Altamont, and the •

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Vietnam War was compelling to a young Gillespie. The individual circumstances at the time were different, but the unsettlement—which Joan Didion aptly described in her book The White Album as a time in which “a demented and seductive vertical tension was building”— is something they saw playing out in their own lives twenty years later. And, they loved the same music. This infatuation spanned from the magnificence of crucial albums from Velvets, to Nick Cave and the Cramps, to the singles of Nancy Sinatra and girl groups like the Ronettes. It was the same thing that had brought Douglas Hart and the Reids together: Not a lot of other kids in Mount Florida or East Kilbride were into this freaky, terrific stuff. At the time, Bobby says that Primal Scream was kicking around, trying to find an artistic identity, to varying degrees of success. One fateful day in 1984, a frustrated Gillespie was gifted a tape by Nick Lowe, who owned a hip alternative venue in Glasgow called the Candy Club. From how Gillespie describes it, the Candy Club was one of the few venues at the time to champion the counterculture in music. The band on the tape was one he hadn’t heard of before, called the Daisy Chain. Fed up with trying to make things work in nonexistent East Kilbride, the band had dropped by Lowe’s club, hoping it would help them snag a gig there. They left Lowe a tape, including two of their two most fleshed-out songs at the time, “Upside Down” and “Never Understand,” and a Syd Barrett compilation. Lowe wasn’t into it and he didn’t end up booking them at the Candy Club. (I can’t help but notice that their album •

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would eventually include “candy” in the title—a sort of jab to the rejection, perhaps?) But Lowe thought Gillespie might be into them, due to the inclusion of the Syd Barrett song. He sent it in the post. A couple of days later, Bobby Gillespie received the tape. “I had a little red cassette recorder, and I played it on that really loud. I was blown away. I thought, man, these guys were incredible,” he says, smiling. “There was a drum machine but it sounded to me like a white noise synth. Instead it was two guys, like Soft Cell or Suicide.” The story goes that Bobby found Douglas’s number on the tape, and he called him up. Douglas’s mom picked up, and said he wasn’t home. “Are you famous?” she asked Gillespie. “Not yet, but I will be,” he remarked, with a characteristic Scottish pride. To wit: William Reid would say years later that, “After us, the perfect record is ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ by the Stooges.”2 When Douglas got home, he heard the message and immediately called Bobby back. The two were on the phone for hours, riffing about the bands they adored, like the Seeds and the 13th Floor Elevators, as well as films that moved them, among them If… and A Clockwork Orange. Gillespie would soon discover that Douglas and his bandmates Jim and William were the kindred spirits, freaky and preoccupied with making music. They gushed over the same punk bands that he did, but Gillespie notes that they were also completely obsessed with the harmonies, aesthetic, and production styling of girl groups, notably the Ronettes (the Jesus and Mary Chain, with that name and songs entitled the likes of “Just Like Honey,” they could fool any of us into thinking they’re a girl group). •

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But the band needed some extra momentum, perhaps from a Shadow Morton or Phil Spector figure, in order to become the larger-than-life group they wanted to be. Bobby initially thought that the Daisy Chain could join forces with his and Jim Beattie’s ongoing project. But the band was already full, with Hart, both the Reids and Murray Dalglish helming the Daisy Chain. But Gillespie was so floored by this band, that he did two things: He set out to get them a real gig, in London, and he called Alan McGee. The myth of Alan McGee and the label he founded with Dick Green and Joe Foster, Creation Records, already comprise several books (and a film, to boot). Erratic, defiant, unapologetic, and savvy, the Scottish-born Alan McGee, a teenage friend of Bobby Gillespie’s, helped to make deities of the Jesus and Mary Chain. He released their first record, eventually managed them, departed, and then remanaged them later on. The story goes that Gillespie pleaded with McGee to give the Mary Chain a chance after he’d been won over by their brilliant tape. Now with the chance to prove their chops, the Mary Chain hastily put together a demo tape with the single “Upside Down” on it and sent it over. It piqued McGee’s interest, but he wasn’t yet convinced. At Gillespie’s insistence, though, McGee had the Mary Chain perform at his Living Room club in London, their very first show in the city. Back then Mary Chain performances were divisive, to say the least. Half the audience would think it was brilliant, and the other half would either be disgusted, or not stick around long enough to find out. Everyone agreed that this performance was particularly drunk and disorderly, though. William Reid •

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thought it was a disaster. Bobby wasn’t there, but he remembers Alan McGee calling him right after: “He was raging, saying the two brothers were fighting each other and screaming at each other at the sound check, and by the time they went on they were so smashed they couldn’t play,” he says. “They were just screaming and making a noise. And then he goes, ‘It was genius.’” Jim remembers that Alan McGee was “literally frothing at the mouth” after the show. “He was saying things like, ‘Five albums! Ten albums! We’re going to make millions!’” according to Reid. Surprised that someone was loony enough to want to put out one of their records, let alone five, the band shrugged and signed with Creation that very night. Founded in 1983 by Alan McGee and Joe Foster, Creation Records was flypaper for talented misfits wielding guitars. It was less a business venture and more a front for riotous music, alternative political beliefs and divergent lifestyles. The London office was housed in a “nondescript, disused shop with a green door,” as fellow Creation Records labelmate Noel Gallagher remembers it. The offices were housed upstairs, whereas the basement was reserved for woozy Dionysian dance parties that brought friends and contemporaries, including My Bloody Valentine, together. Creation Records decided to release “Upside Down” as the band’s first single on November 9, 1984. The very first of taste of the Jesus and Mary Chain pre-­Psychocandy begins with screeching decibels of feedback and a whirring bass line in the distance. They continued the momentum in their second single, “Never Understand,” which clinks, clangs, and sizzles in the ear. The end •

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features a voice screaming in pain, as though he or she is receiving third degree burns. The singles both intrigued and confused new listeners and Melody Maker writers alike. But it wasn’t a gimmick. The Jesus and Mary Chain were laying themselves bare, even if the deluge of feedback over the songs suggested otherwise. Mere weeks after the Mary Chain met Alan McGee, the single soared to the top of the U.K. pop charts. “‘Upside Down’ is a great noisy thing,” wrote ZigZag magazine’s John Robb. “The guitar making a noise like a needle being scratched backwards and forwards over your favourite record; the bass plays the tune and sounds like a twanged out guitar; the drums crash and smash their way through and the most surprising factor is the almost laid back vocal style.”3 Alan McGee himself called the single he’d released a “racket,” but the brilliance lay in its distinction from typical pop hits of the time. Even now “Upside Down” is an unusual pop song, challenging the listener to peel back layers of pummeling feedback to reach a sugary centered and catchy chorus. With “Upside Down” the band presented something to the world that’s a bit tough to chew, something requiring molars and canines. The Jesus and Mary Chain weren’t giving the hits to people easily—you had to work to extract the sweetness underneath the folds of the caustic instrumentals. It’s a delicious reward in itself. Creation would later become enormously successful with other bands they’d eventually sign, including Ride and another pair of dueling brothers, Noel and Liam Gallagher, of Oasis. But releasing the Mary Chain’s “Upside Down”/“Vegetable Man” single was the •

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first successful release for the then-burgeoning label. Following the record’s success, Foster recalls in Upside Down that the Mary Chain unexpectedly kicked off a movement that “started from our delusion and eventually became the mainstream sound of a generation.” Who knew it would take the outsiders of the pop world to make that happen? While Creation Records didn’t foster a sort of concrete “scene,” it certainly catalyzed compelling musical movements being made in Glasgow, London, and surrounding environs. But its championing of shows at small DIY venues were the true mark of counterculture surging through various parts of the U.K.

•

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•

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Never Understand

The mainstream and underground media immediately took notice. Who were these oddballs who came out of nowhere and put the British music world into a tizzy with “Upside Down?” The Mary Chain’s refusal to pander to the typical charismatic behavior of a band, in videos and interviews alike, soon earned them the labels “slackers” and “lazy.” They looked the part of being too cool for school and the streets, cross-armed, shrugging and stumbling about in leathers. But the so-called “enfants terribles of the British rock scene” (a label meant to be derogatory that evolved into something complimentary) were much savvier than the media made them out to be. The so-called shoegazing bands that were beginning to crop up in the late 1980s and early 1990s United Kingdom are often described in similarly condescending ways. Many of them would end up on Creation Records at some point, a fact that Alan McGee simply chalks up to him being the only person in the world who wanted to take in these bands at all.1 Early purveyors of the genre included Reading, England’s Chapterhouse and Slowdive; the brilliant London collective LUSH; Glasgow’s ethereal Cocteau Twins; and later fellow •

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Creation Records bands Ride and Dublin’s My Bloody Valentine. “Shoegaze” was coined by the British press to describe the rise in throttling rock bands emerging onto the scene that merged pummeling “walls of sound” with a punk ethos and pop rhythms. But an underlying tension was that a number of journalists who propelled this label had fallen out of love with bands like Chapterhouse and Swervedriver. They critiqued the bands for not being expressive, and for not bringing a charismatic performance to the stage. Instead, these guitarists and bass players often stared at their feet (in their defense, looking at their elaborate guitar pedal boards), and often had their backs turned to the audience, adrift in this noise. One journalist, Melody Maker’s Steve Sutherland, dubbed it “the scene that celebrates itself” in 1990 after harboring the belief that these bands were all co-conspirators who hung out together and went to shows to support one another. The name, once used to describe a collective, innovative sound by a wide array of musicians, had taken an entirely derogatory meaning that scoffed at the musicians as “insular, self indulgent, middle class dilettantes.”2 The Jesus and Mary Chain are often conflated with being a part of a nascent “shoegazing” scene, yet their associations with the genre are loose at best. Before their performance at New York City’s Terminal 5 in fall 2014, I interviewed Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead and asked them about the impending Jesus and Mary Chain reunion. Rachel surprised me by saying that she didn’t know the band all that well, mentioning that while she and Jim didn’t live too far away from one •

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another, they had yet to share a stage or be a part of the same social circles. Slowdive was much tighter with Ride, and Chapterhouse, who had also grown up in their native Reading, as Goswell told me. Another band touted as the crown jewel of shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine, would later record on Alan McGee’s Creation Records several years after the release of Psychocandy. And while the Valentines shared a similar sensibility for the same kinds of sounds, and would go on to make videos with budding filmmaker Douglas Hart, they, like the Mary Chain, weren’t necessarily forging forward with others to create a kind of a movement together. They kept to themselves, intending to become musical forces on their own terms. The excellent Channel 4 Documentary The Outsiders illustrates how a short-lived yet prolific parallel scene was emerging in Glasgow around the time of Psychocandy’s creation, when a group of like-minded miscreants were ostracized from everywhere else. This community had coalesced around tape trading and at self-booked perform­ ances in the city’s George Square. The central Glasgow hub was home to several dance clubs where psychedelic pop, androgyny, and dancing converged. Around that time, a group of industrious music lovers decided to put on what would become an influential dance partyturned-salon entitled A Splash One Happening. The parties, which ran from June 1985 to June 1986, were held every two weeks and quickly achieved cult status through word of mouth. Named after a song on the 13th Floor Elevators’ album The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, the happening existed within its own bubble outside of the gossip-hungry media columns, and championed the vanguards of underground revolutions. •

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The nameless organizers of Splash One, selfproclaimed “guardians of psychedelic punk realism,” penned a manifesto promising to expose themselves and each other to “near-fatal doses of obscurism and selfindulgence,” stating that Splash One would go on “until we lose interest” on the grounds that “we are not polite, but honest.” Music geeks and musicians would converge there, striped shirts and anoraks in tow, and would trade tapes, dance together, and gush about pop music. “We would go to a disco named Daddy Warbucks just off George Square, put on a band every Sunday night and make compilation tapes together,” recalls Bobby Gillespie. “A Clockwork Orange would be in the background as everyone would be dancing to like, the 13th Floor Elevators,” reminisces BMX Bandit’s Duglas T. Stewart, of the Splash One parties.3 This bizarre scene of the strange and the tongue-in-cheek is perhaps immortalized in the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “In a Hole,” in which Jim Reid sings about seeing himself on a dancing screen, his limbs flailing about to the sound of a scream. These were people who loved Television and Nancy Sinatra equally. Like the Mary Chain, they thought that the breathy sweetness of, say, French New Wave films could coexist with the hard-edged “Heroin” of the Velvet Underground. Frequent Splash One-ers included Bobby Gillespie, Rose McDowell of Strawberry Switchblade, Frances McKee and Eugene Kelly of the Pastels, BMX Bandits, Soup Dragons, and others. “It was definitely of the time and catering to the tastes of the people who ran it,” remembers Frances McKee. “But it was re-influencing the people who were key to it who were also influencing what the people were creating.” •

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This scene also opened up the space for women to play as equals alongside men in bands such as the Vaselines and Strawberry Switchblade. McKee tells me that the interest in creating music and art was genuine amongst Splash One’s attendees and the peripheral scenes emerged as a consequence. It was a place where “people were vibrating to their own creativity, using the scraps of what they came into contact with to come up with something of their own,” she says. Back then no one made specific plans, but would probably end up at a pub called the Griffin on Friday nights, after which they would try and go catch a show or, as McKee puts it, would just get “absolutely steaming drunk.” The Splash One parties were crucial for punk-surged pop groups to find a foothold within Scottish culture. The scenes were territorial, as Rose McDowell of the noise pop band Strawberry Switchblade remembers: “The neds hated the punks, and everybody hated the punks—maybe because we were a threat to manliness,” she said. At Splash One, boys danced with boys and girls danced with girls—something unheard of at the time. BMX Bandits’ Duglas T. Stewart, for instance, said that it was a space in which he could put on nail polish and call himself Nancy, and it was accepted without question. “Boys became girls, girls became boys, and it was kind of beautiful,” he remembers.4 The Mary Chain were crashing into this too, albeit unconsciously. It’s especially true of them filming the video for “Never Understand,” which was done in a dilapidated warehouse in Wapping in east London in early 1985. It featured an unprecedented sense of intimacy that was uncommon amongst men at the time, •

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as Gillespie recalls in Barbed Wire Kisses. There was no underlying narrative or plot in this video. It was just the four guys crashing into each other, seeing how their individual bodies ricocheted off each other. Bobby Gillespie recounted that the videos were indeed emotional and homoerotic: “It’s interesting. We were young, not sexually experienced. It’s just a need for connection, it’s not that you fancy the other guys.”5 The aggressive movements in mosh pits—usually in the form of mosh pits and slam dancing—have been coded as aggro modes of expression, a masculine mating dance exclusionary to women. The kind of feverish dancing and expressive response that audiences had to Mary Chain shows in their early performances gestured towards something else, though: A form of togetherness with homoerotic undertones, in a way that’s typically demonized in any other capacity. While mosh pits seem like uncontained chaos, they exist as an algorithm of ultimate sonic expression. It champions the body as an uninhibited and fluid form, at once alone and creating something when converging with others. “Slam-dancing and stage-diving offer contact between male bodies that is normally illegitimate,” wrote Simon Reynolds and Joy Press of the phenomenon.6 “The masochistic pleasure of immersing yourself in the sweat-and-bloodbath of the mosh pit is a kind of macho (per)version of oceanic feelings.” And who hasn’t gone to a concert in search of catharsis, clarity, or something to do, and is in turn rendered alive by this singular call-and-response dance that exists between the audience and performer? This loss of inhibition, as well as the crashing, is what won Bobby Gillespie over after he saw the Mary Chain •

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live for the first time at Glasgow’s Night Moves. The show was on June 10, 1984, two days after they rocked Alan McGee at London’s Living Room. It maybe lasted ten minutes, but Gillespie was in love. “I remember it being quite sexy. I know now they were scared but they didn’t look scared, they just looked insane. Just gone. Just … in another world,” he says. “They got thrown off after three songs, if you can call them songs. But it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen, and I was just like … you know, I thought was incredible.” It’s what drew him to them without even knowing them. “It’s hard to explain this feeling, but that was a very transformative experience, that night for me. There was some kind of bond made. It was pretty fucking cosmic,” he remembers. “I had real love for these guys. I didn’t really know them, but I had love for them for this performance and these songs. The songs are one thing, but performance is another. To me, it was just … that’s the thing that blew my mind, it was this energy, this dark, violent, sexual energy.” The only other time he felt this way, he tells me, was seeing the Clash back in the late ’70s. Frances McKee and her Vaselines bandmate Eugene Kelly say that the Mary Chain were the ones who helped carve a creative path that led others to follow their own freaky flags and start their own musical movements, from East Kilbride to Glasgow and beyond. The irony of it all is that while the Mary Chain orbited these countercultural movements in Glasgow, the Mary Chain—who never lived in Glasgow, and moved to London as quickly as they could, in January 1985—were outsiders to this, as well. Part of this is because they were so hyper-focused in developing their own individual project. •

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The Mary Chain’s measure of individual success subverted traditional masculine roles that typically exist within working-class upbringings, illustrated in a 2006 paper published in the British Educational Research Journal. The far-reaching study observed young men “living [in] disadvantaged provincial areas, which had experienced the decline of traditional industries such as mining, pottery and steelworks and which lacked large ethnic minority communities.” The study discusses how for many working-class young white men, masculinity is performative, a device they use “positively as an explanation for their behavior,” but is consequently “consumed negatively by others, with concrete effects on their learning opportunities.” A sense of concrete masculinity is often conflated with slacking off, while it’s considered more stereotypically feminine to seek out success within the working class. The study notes how this notion is evidenced by university entrance rates, as women were 18 percent more likely to seek out higher education than their male counterparts. Additionally, 17 percent of working-class males in the United Kingdom weren’t actively employed or seeking out higher education.7 It’s a bit of a paradox: “Young, white working-class men in disadvantaged areas are the ultimate ‘losers’ in university participation and completion. They are positioned as victims of gender ‘inequality’ but also as bringing it on themselves by their hopeless behavior,” the study’s authors write.8 Whereas many of their working-class counterparts were dropping out, the Mary Chain and their Splash One conspirators were instead taking the other part of the infamous Timothy Leary phrase: turning on and tuning in to the •

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culture around them. Not only did establishing a tribe for themselves mean success, but it also meant survival. As young men they had a very clear idea of where they wanted to ascend—straight to the heavens, neon lights flashing, Top of the Pops stardom. Not everyone has that kind of ambition. Their upbringing had not made them lazy but instead industrious: They preferred to hinge their future on the tenuousness of a creative field rather than willingly fade away in factory life.

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Inside Me

The Mary Chain was young, hungry, and itching to create a racket within music. They were rebels in the truest sense, bold movers verging on the psychopathic as described by Robert Lindner in his famous examinations of psychopaths, Rebel Without a Cause. In it, he writes, “The psychopathic way of life is characterized by aggressive behavior, the expression and actional counterpart of a belligerent social attitude, the forceful surmounting of frustration-provoking barriers by acts of voluntary willfulness, as well as by techniques of escape and avoidance from the frustrating situation. He becomes, then, a wanderer and a nomad, always frantically searching out an avenue of escape.”1 This particular escape is personified in “The Living End,” in which Jim takes on the role of a leather-clad biker whirring ahead onto a dark road. He’s unsure of where it leads, but secure enough to reach wherever that destination might be. To barrel down that path, the band had to take extreme chances that more conservative folks (or sane people) might advise against. The Mary Chain wanted to crack the Top 40 charts, they wanted to play Japan. It was the Mary Chain against the world, but they wanted •

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to grab it whole. How else to do it than to take control of how the game is played? At least at the beginning, there was no middleman: starting from the ground up, the band did everything themselves. The Mary Chain was an autodidactic bunch, gathering materials on their own that would help them craft their image, aesthetic approach, and performance style. The band created the interiors of their record sleeves, rounded up their friends for help, and took the photographs that would grace Psychocandy’s front cover in Jim and William’s shared bedroom in East Kilbride. (“Marc Bolan didn’t have to stuff the sleeves of his own records,” Jim remembers grumbling at one point.) They spent many late nights at Alan McGee’s flat in Tottenham wrapping up records in plastic bags, remembers Karen Parker, Bobby’s then-girlfriend and soon-to-be-unforgettable vocalist on “Just Like Honey.” By June 1984, the young band had already signed to Creation. But at the time “musicians” was a loose term to describe them, at best. Bassist Douglas Hart notoriously thumped his bass with two strings, one of which actually worked. “Two is enough, it’s adequate,” he would say to interviewers years later. “Anybody can play this bass.” William Reid played guitar because he could do it only slightly better than his brother Jim, which meant he could hardly play at all. “He could barely hold down a bar chord,” remembers Jim of William’s guitar playing at the beginning. As for William’s guitar? “It’s totally out of tune, because my guitar’s for kicking,” he told video interviewers in 1985. Bobby Gillespie had been screaming in his first industrial noise band before

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joining as the Mary Chain’s drummer (his “drum kit” was comprised of two trash can lids). The younger, painfully shy Jim Reid had been relegated to the role of the band’s vocalist out of necessity because no one else would do it (he and William flipped a coin, and he “lost”). Originally, Jim tried to get Douglas—then the youngest member of the band, just a teenager—to sing. “I was like fuck, what? I couldn’t believe it,” Hart recalls. “It was total shyness on his part. I was like, ‘your voice is fucking amazing’, and he’s a good looking bastard!” Their attempts at performing live had been minimally successful thus far, and their audience typically comprised their friend/superfan Bobby Gillespie, Alan McGee, and a few confused onlookers, most of whom left after several minutes. Though they were booted off the stage at a psychedelic club night at Alice in Wonderland (in London’s Soho) in September 1984, they decided that the next show (at another venue, of course) would be different. Perhaps it helps that before their first show at the Living Room, they marched into the New Musical Express offices in London, and announced to the tastemaking writers and editors that they, the Mary Chain, had arrived. “We went down and said, ‘We’re the Jesus and Mary Chain, we’re playing tonight [at The Living Room] and if you don’t come, you’re going to be pretending that you did in five years,’” Reid says. At first, McGee wasn’t too keen. “We explained to Alan that we were going down to the NME offices to invite them to the show. He was laughing and saying, ‘Fuck, that’s not how it works.’ But why isn’t it how it works?” says Jim Reid. “He was like, •

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‘You just can’t do that. They don’t know who you are.’ But we did it anyway.” Their boldness then caught the attention of an NME critic named David Quantick. This time, NME’s own Neil Taylor ended up going to their gig at the Three Johns on October 24, 1984. In his review he touted the Mary Chain as “the best thing since the Sex Pistols.” This bit of press would prove critical to the band moving forward, even if the show itself was admittedly a mess. McGee remembers that particular show dissolving into spectacular chaos. “I don’t even know how to describe it. Every single one of them bar Gillespie was sort of having a nervous breakdown as they played,” he told Barbed Wire Kisses’ author Zoë Howe. “Douglas Hart was … well, I don’t know what drug he was on, but he was, like, pinned to the wall. Jim was having an epileptic fit, William was on his knees, and then they proceeded to smash their instruments up. Gillespie—the guy barely drank, but he was drunk, manically drumming away.”2 It was utterly punk to make something from nothing, and these chances are what made the Mary Chain. Even tensions bubbling up between the dueling brothers took a backseat to the Mary Chain mission. “We just had such a clear idea of, at the end of it, the words the Jesus and Mary Chain are going to be written on something,” Jim remembers. “We want to have control over that. It doesn’t have your name on the final product. It’s got our name. So, you know, we just want to make sure it’s done right.” Part of what set the Mary Chain was their early understanding that maintaining creative control over their product, even when making the move to major •

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labels later on, was crucial to maintain a sense of stability and purity. Speaking to this, Jim recalls a later story about going to film the video for “You Trip Me Up” in Portugal, which they planned so that it would be sunny (naturally, it rained virtually the entire time the Scotsmen were there). What they could control of their music and its marketing, they did—and sometimes, it wasn’t received all that well by others. “It used to really annoy people how we were so hands-on. We edited the ‘You Trip Me Up’ video and they were just so fucking annoyed with us,” remembers Jim. “We would just be randomly cutting up films and splicing them together, and they were so angry! And they would say, ‘Why don’t you go to the pub, and when you get back we’ll have edited your video?’ We would say, ‘No, you got it wrong. You go to the pub, we’ll have edited the video.’ That was our attitude you know? We did everything ourselves.” Regardless, the Mary Chain would be consistently painted in the press as a group of self-indulgent, lazy retromaniacs. Due to their seemingly uncaring attitude and onstage antics, the Jesus and Mary Chain were almost immediately dubbed “Sex Pistols 2.0” by the British press upon the release of their first single in November 1984. The nickname was damning, and nods to the fellows’ polarizing performances, the band’s monosyllabic radio and television interviews, and, of course, their ungodly name. They hadn’t even released a full album, and they were already pissing people off. In a 1986 Rolling Stone profile, Jim Reid grumbled, “We’ve been taken hold of by the media as if we were some kind of plaything. To a certain extent we played up •

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to that in the beginning. But it got to the point where we were being portrayed as drunken idiots. It’s completely untrue,” he says. “Just because the music is loaded doesn’t mean we’re loaded.”3 Instead of being strung out and loaded on heroin, the Mary Chain’s idea of “loaded” was more along the lines of the eponymous myth that wrought the Velvet Underground’s final record, Loaded, a tongue-in-cheek decision made by Lou Reed at the insistence of a producer who urged the then-Velvets to make a record that was “loaded” with hits. Loaded, of course, can also refer to a gun with a trigger ready to be pulled. The band sagely used newfound media attention to their advantage, and toyed with the press right back. One of the first interviews the Mary Chain ever did on television followed their infamous 1985 North London Polytechnic show, where riots broke out. In it, the interviewer asks, “Why are people so excited about you?” presumably anticipating a kind of measured, PR-friendly response. Instead, Jim Reid deadpans, “Because we’re so good. Because we’re so much better than everybody else. Too many other people are complete rubbish, they’ve got to pay attention to us.” When pointedly asked about being simultaneously labeled by the press as the best and worst new band, William Reid says the only possible answer evocative of his pop inclinations: “My favorite color is gold.” They refuse to look at the camera the whole time and chug beers instead. In a Belgian television interview recorded around that time, Jim goads the interviewer when they suggest that the band’s ethos and sound is reminiscent of Joy Division. While Jim is an unabashed Joy Division fan, •

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he tells the interviewer that the late Ian Curtis’s band is “shite,” which causes them to audibly gasp. In the background, the camera shows Bobby making out with his girlfriend on the couch. While now Jim laughs when asked about these instances, the Mary Chain’s guerrilla-style interviewing approach absolutely helped to establish them as a band that didn’t seem to take themselves too seriously, while simultaneously remaining conscious about wanting to be successful. Today, Jim is the one who frequently agrees to be interviewed, especially during the Psychocandy reunion circuit. William rarely acquiesces.

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Something’s Wrong

I traveled to Scotland for the first time in November 2014 for the purposes of this book. It’s a stunning nation brimming with arched highlands, narrow cobblestone streets, and steeples. But there’s an unshakeable darkness lingering through Scotland’s blackened street corners and doom-and-gloom skies. The poverty rate is significant: In 2014, national statistics reported that roughly 16 percent of Scotland’s citizens were living under the poverty line, compared to the 14.5 percent in the United States that year.1 Thousands suffer from dependency issues, particularly with heroin and alcohol. The crime rate flirts with dangerous to lethal. That’s today. While Psychocandy’s influence reverberates from Nirvana to Puerto Rico’s Fantasmes, it’s impossible to separate the album from the simultaneous beauty and destruction of where it was borne. And despite the members’ self-proclaimed rage and sense of outsiderness that went into creating this record—as well as the feverish, near-cataclysmic response it produced from both the press and audiences—Psychocandy isn’t an explicitly political record. It’s inevitably one. And that’s because of Maggie Thatcher. •

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Mere mention of Thatcher’s name in some towns, especially in Yorkshire, still inevitably leads to talk of the miners’ strike from 1984 to 1985. The strike lasted from March 1984 to March 1985 and became one of the era’s pivotal events, given that over 190,000 jobs were at stake when Thatcher’s government planned to close a huge subsection of mines. The strike resulted in about 10,000 striking miners battling roughly 5,000 police officers. One such standoff at the Orgreave plant on June 18, 1984 led to ninety-three arrests and seventy-two injured police officers. Protesting their possible job losses, miners pitted themselves against the police, the government, and Thatcher, a conflict that’s still tense with families in rural England and Scotland even today. Some were all for the strike (“Know your rights,” as the Clash famously squealed), and others saw no choice but to go back into the mines in order to provide for their families. A ubiquitous pop culture example of how workingclass notions of masculinity are subverted in relation to the strike is Stephen Daltry’s 2000 film Billy Eliot, which functions as a sort of period piece illustrating the Psychocandy era, too. Starring a wee Jamie Bell, the film traces the story of the eleven-year-old Billy Eliot, the youngest in a working-class family in County Durham, in northern England (near the Scottish border). In his coal-mining driven town, Billy’s just trying to find his footing and not get beaten up to varying degrees of success. He boxes at the urging of his father, but he’s not particularly good at it. Instead, he’s always dancing in the streets. One day, a ballet class that’s sharing the space with the boxing club piques his interest. He joins in, and discovers •

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a joy in ballet that he’d never experienced with boxing. His father eventually finds out, and is enraged: “Lads do football or boxing or wrestling, not friggin’ ballet!” Jackie Eliot scolds his son, his face growing scarlet. He tries to prevent Billy from going to ballet, but still he finds a way to move his feet. While Billy is waging his own war on masculinity, the film’s strong undercurrent is one of political tension that directly relates to the Mary Chain: the miners’ strike of 1984. Throughout the film, Billy’s dad and brother are on strike, throwing rocks at the strike breakers and whatever else to protest the strike provoked by Thatcher. “She used miners as a political springboard,” said Darren Vaines, a former miner in West Yorkshire who was on strike for a full year, to the BBC. “She knew what she was doing and it was a horrible way to go about it.”2 In the end, the miners eventually were defeated and had to return to work on March 3, 1985. Gillespie and Hart, among others, name-check this event as one of the most resonant clashes in history independently of one another. “There was a lot of discontent in the country, a lot of anger, with Thatcherism and her neo-liberal experiment,” Gillespie recalls. “When you went to gigs, there was a lot of violence. Cause you know, it trickles its way down. Basically everybody is affected by the situation, even if they don’t know it. There was high unemployment and society was changing, and when things change so drastically people get hurt.” The Jesus and Mary Chain’s catalyst for becoming a band wasn’t a direct response to government brutality and sociocultural volatility. Instead, they erupted from pores in the underground and emerged onto a •

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complicated landscape marked by diverging coping mechanisms—denial and acceptance—to Britain’s sociocultural problems, much like the Sex Pistols had several years before them. Six years earlier, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock had snarled onto the pop charts, enraged with increasing violence, and plead for anarchy in the U.K. But 1984 was certainly a time of fizzles and fractures. It’s as though George Orwell had willed the misery of his novel into this very year. The mood was now one of defeat. “Everything is dead, punk is dead everyone’s waiting for something,” wrote ZigZag’s John Robb of the time, in the introduction to his feature on the Jesus and Mary Chain.3 “Too many false starts have made people cynical, though beacons remain,” he continued. He had a point. Gone was the boundary-shattering rock and roll of the 1960s, the swinging sexuality oozing from ’70s-bred anthems. It was the 1980s, an era that oscillated between decadent and overwhelmingly normative. For a time, the Sex Pistols had done what everyone at the time was afraid to do: demand change, for the public to be shaken awake, and for the rights of the largely working-class Britain to be taken more seriously. Someone had yet to pick up the thread, since Sid Vicious’s death had broken up the Pistols. “In 1982, Jim and I would walk around the streets, talking about how we couldn’t believe that no one else was making really heavy, loud angry music,” Douglas tells me. “Like we had to do it, and no one else would. We were driven to it.” Douglas Hart and Bobby Gillespie came from political backgrounds, too, and Gillespie’s father was a trade union leader and a Marxist. But the politics •

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threaded into Psychocandy evolved organically, stemming purely from the desire to create something. It was a desire that had been planted from the seeds of their first love: punk, its own thud in the capitalist void. “We were kind of politicized,” remembers Bobby Gillespie during our conversation. “Punk was music that was a political critique, and especially post-punk. A lot of post-punk guys had been at uni[versity] and probably taught by Marxists. And that stuff was filtered to underground music. So, punk and post-punk had contained a strong critique of capitalist society, and that really chimed with me. I was angry.” “Music at that time needed that injection of ‘fuck you.’ I think also, as much as people talk about the riots that went on, the chaos that went on … people were desperate for that! It was a such a shadowed time,” remembers Karen Parker, of the time when she lent her vocals and toured with the Mary Chain, briefly, for “Just Like Honey.” Though it never directly addresses said conflict, the band couldn’t help acknowledging that “Something’s Wrong.” Psychocandy’s release curiously intersects directly with this tumultuous time in Britain, when everything was in a literal and figurative hole. “We detested that decade. Hated everything about it, especially politics like Thatcherism and all that shit, hated everything. Based on greed and me me me,” Jim tells me, recalling the 1980s. I barely missed the 1980s, but I find that any mention of this decade is either revered or derided (kind of like the Mary Chain). On the one hand, it was a decade that championed decadence— large hair, larger-than-life hair metal concerts, the self-absorbed “me” generation. The year 1985 in Britain •

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was one marked by political frustrations and tragic instances of violence on the national and domestic level. Besides the miners’ strike, a riot broke out in May 1984 before a pivotal football match between Liverpool and Juventus fans, resulting in thirty-nine Italian football fans’ untimely deaths in what has since been dubbed the Heysel Stadium disaster. The fans were literally crushed to death at Brussels’s Heysel Stadium, and 600 people were injured, which was broadcast for the world, to their horror, to mourn. These tensions were reverberating everywhere in the U.K., from London to Glasgow. Then the riots began. It’s unclear how they started exactly. Until that point, a typical Mary Chain performance lasted roughly about ten minutes before they were ushered off the stage, or “until we got booed,” in William Reid’s words. In videos of their early performances, the Mary Chain performed with their backs turned to audiences, arms crossed, muttering into microphones as guitars squealed behind them. People weren’t used to bands that behaved this way onstage, and naturally, the response was different. Barbed Wire Kisses notes that things took a turn downward in early 1985, at the Brighton Pavilion. Jim remembers that the band was “bottled off” the stage, and foreshadowed the trouble that would follow. Karen Parker left the show with a bottle-sized lump on her head. In a Hit profile from 1986, writer Richard Lowe described the curious duality of a Jesus and Mary Chain performance: “Live they’re a manic mess. Spitting contempt for their audience, they rampage drunkenly through ten or fifteen minutes of furious trash and howling feedback—it’s impossible to tell when one song •

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finishes and another starts. They’re awful and amateurish, but at the same time they’re enigmatic, charismatic and one of the most exciting groups around—a rare flash of brilliance in a dull pop landscape.” Just by making a racket, the Jesus and Mary Chain responded to both the dull pop landscape and the unsettling political climate of mid-1980s Britain, the latter of which had spurred its own kinds of terrifying demonstrations and struck directly at the working class—their class. After a certain point, though, the hype surrounding their mercurial performances grew beyond their control, and the Mary Chain were unable to perform their songs without a riot (“occurrences,” as Douglas Hart corrects me) breaking out. “It became the norm: see the Mary Chain, start a riot,” remembers Gillespie.4 It got to the point where the mob would pound on their dressing room door after the show with actual hammers and threatened to kill them, as was the case in their fateful North London Polytechnic show about a month after Brighton, on March 15, 1985. By this point, the hype surrounding the Mary Chain had blown up. They had made a television appearance on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test, too. Tickets for this show sold out fast, and people were anxious. It likely didn’t help that the band was in no hurry, going on an hour and a half late, as though they were already huge stars like Prince or Madonna. They didn’t do this because they were divas or because they were trying to annoy people by having them wait. Turns out they were just backstage drinking copiously (to get rid of nerves, of course) and listening to their favorite records, as Jim Reid tells me. Seeing that hundreds of people had lined up on the •

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street but couldn’t get into the packed North Poly show, Douglas and Bobby opened the fire doors and let hordes of them in. “It was a punk gesture,” Gillespie says.5 The two openers, Meat Whiplash (from East Kilbride) and Jasmine Minks, were hit by bottles from the impatient crowd, which comprised “Mary Chain devotees, people curious about the phenomenon and a significant injection of troublemakers,” according to Barbed Wire Kisses. The Jasmine Minks threw a wine bottle back into the crowd in retaliation, which likely didn’t help matters. When the Mary Chain finally went on, they were properly liquored up enough to perform. But the audience didn’t see their drunken stumblings so much as a rock and roll move as much as they did an invitation to get up and fight the entertainers themselves. Equipment and bottles started flying, and people started crashing into each other and moshing. The band fled the stage, but the audience wasn’t done with them yet. They had to form a barracks, as the angry crowd was hammering at the band’s dressing room door. Chaos ensued. Hart remembers the audience tearing down the velvet curtains adorning the stage. People crept behind the stage after the performance, beating on the band’s dressing room door with hammers. “What a way to spend a Friday night,” remembers Hart, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “Like, let’s go see a band and kill them after the show.” After the performance, New Music Express rhetorically asked their readers about the North Poly show, “Art as terrorism or bullshit as publicity?”6 Karen Parker says she was unfazed by the bottle throwing; the rioting was not only a sign of the times, but also a sign of affection. •

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“If you talk to anyone who went to a Jesus and Mary Chain concert and that it was a bad concert, they’re such liars,” she remembers. “Even if [people] threw bottles, it was about the music, totally about the music. Everybody was like … come on, let’s have it!” The North Poly show was an incredible perform­ance, in that it evolved into a forum for the very public expression of frustration Parker says was so potent. During the Mary Chain ten-minute performance, the audience destroyed the place, toppling amplifiers, dismantled the PA system, and ripping velvet curtains adorning the stage from their very seams. This response likely stemmed from several things: The stale political climate, buffeted by wideswept social frustration, catharsis, and impatience. “I think the Mary Chain’s music … it wasn’t a political critique but it was a rage and an anger that possibly came from our backgrounds. It was being expressed in music, probably unconsciously. People were attracted to that, the wildness,” Gillespie says. That wildness manifested itself in a mania exuding from Psychocandy. While they had yet to release the album (not until late 1985), audiences were already picking up on the extremities that made it so special and simultaneously intense. Hearing Psychocandy’s early demos was a kind of exorcism, an expunging of demons both personal and political. As Zoë Howe posits, “Who knows whether discord was sparked simply because the Mary Chain seemed to have a gift for inadvertently inciting a collective experience of exhilaration, frustration and often confusion with their music—emotions the band themselves often felt?” •

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In that sense, these performances could be seen as the cathartic cry of youth not yet in revolt, but who wanted to move in any way they could. Young people were free to use the already raucous Mary Chain shows as an outlet to expunge their frustration, in an environment that was certainly safer than outside. Or maybe they were trying to emulate the band before them, especially in the context of North Poly. But unbeknownst to the young people gazing up at them, the gods onstage were just as insecure as they were. To some, the band’s volatile performances appeared like calculated efforts to stir up trouble and expand their profile of notoriety as a consequence. The band wasn’t trying to be aloof and start fights (or at least, they weren’t—though their manager Alan McGee is said to have been influenced by the lore of rock and roll myths and Malcolm McLaren-esque tactics to grab people’s attention). At the beginning, the band took on an apathetic-seeming attitude as a mechanism to contend with their individual insecurities. Gillespie recalls that upon watching live footage of their shows years later, they were terrified onstage, and were responding to their fear by “just trying to look cool.” Jim Reid, who was supposed to be the leader of this band, admittedly had debilitating stage fright, and his brother was just as shy. Douglas, then the youngest member of the band, wasn’t much of a natural performer either (only Bobby was, as he would later prove as the charismatic frontman of Primal Scream). They were young men, some of them teenagers, suddenly having to grapple with that strange beast: fame. The band embraced the feverish response to their •

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shows at first. “The first few times [those occurrences] happened it was that, you know, a kind of beautiful … outletting of frustration, unleashed by the music,” remembers Douglas Hart. “It was terrible … that period in the early ’80s. It was a heavy atmosphere around, and for us to come out of that doesn’t surprise me.” Later on though, he says it would prove frustrating when people would go to Mary Chain shows to pick fights and not to listen to the music itself. Gillespie remembers that the impassioned response helped to expand the young band’s profile, but quickly turned sour when people would come to fight and not to feel something from the music they’d so carefully put together. “Each gig got progressively more violent. But I must admit, I enjoyed it. I thought it was, for a while, was really good,” he says. “But after a while, it became bad because we were a really good band. When Psychocandy came out, we couldn’t get through the gigs because we were just being bottled and people climbed up on the PA, throwing bottles. And in Britain people used to just go fucking crazy, because the music just … detonated people’s minds. It wasn’t Live Aid.” In The Quietus, Julian Marszalek writes about the disastrous Live Aid concert that brought with it a wealth of problems amidst the opportunity for renewal and revitalization of how audiences consumed music in the emerging music video age. “The event had unbelievable ratings—1.5 billion people watched—and raised around £40 million for the famine in Ethiopia.” At the center of it all was Bob Geldof. Though his own pop career with the Boomtown Rats had long since come to an end, Geldof attempted to do what •

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governments had failed to do, in alleviating the suffering of millions.7 Trevor Dann, who worked on this very Live Aid performance, remembers it was the “last hurrah” of the optimistic ’60s Woodstock generation. “Oddly enough, in 1985, when that generation was in a position to do stuff, we thought we were changing the world. We thought, this is fantastic! You can raise a gazillion pounds just by picking up an electric guitar, we got politicians of our kind of age getting into power. What’s ironic was that it was already long gone because by the 1980s, and you can see this from the music that’s on Live Aid, pretty well all the current bands are terrible,” Dann remembers, citing Spandau Ballet and Adam Ant as the last croak of a dying, corporate musical monster. Geldof’s entrepreneurial efforts to make Live Aid a successful cultural event failed miserably. Suddenly bands that had retired or had pursued other projects were now embraced by people who weren’t even fans, revered for their ability to generate revenue in spite of the altruism intended for this kind of event. Once-starving artists, now well-to-do businesspeople, were welcomed back into the fold as though no time had passed. Emerging artists, notably Status Quo and mega glam-rockers Queen, made tons of cash from the event intended to aid suffering Africa. Both groups found their record sales boosted enormously by the event, too.8 Marszalek reports that none of the proceeds, tragically, reached the starving millions for whom they were originally intended. It was a disaster. “I remember the Live Aid thing,” Hart told Marszalek. “We thought that punk had shaken things up; we really believed in that and we couldn’t believe it when we met •

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people who said they were going to go to Live Aid and we’d be thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ I suppose we then tried to compete on their terms and it made us work harder. We figured that if you’d get kids listening to that kind of shit then you’d get kids hearing us. It made us more determined to be bigger.” The Jesus and Mary Chain certainly weren’t the first to translate social commentary into punkified pop perfection. But they took the Clash and the Pistols’ frustration one step further. A generation’s sound of confusion desperate for a voice wiggled itself through Jim Reid’s yearning cries and the band’s instrumental clangs, particularly through the Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut single “Never Understand.” The crackles of insecurity sear through the eardrum-ravaging feedback of “In a Hole,” with Jim Reid saying he wants God to spit on his soul. So what else to do but take a knife to the iron-clad chains of oppression and try to bring them down? The riots largely happened around the Psychocandy era, and were borne of frustration and morbid curiosity alike. But they also demonstrated that daring, provocative pop music can be a medium capable of disarming the power dynamics present everywhere in our world— in the political sphere, certainly, but also in our romantic relationships and friendships, sexual and gender identity, with the ability to transcend staunch distinctions of class. Historically, popular music has functioned both as a form for uplifting people and also as a cleverly disguised critique of social issues, providing snarky commentary on the sociopolitical as well as the hierarchy of the rapacious, capitalism-driven music industry (see Bruce Springsteen’s •

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“Born in the U.S.A.,” a critique of Reaganism; as well as GZA’s “Labels” and the Sex Pistols’ “EMI,” which lash out at major labels). But as Steve Sutherland wrote in his Melody Maker series “The State of Pop,” pop music is never separate from the factions it’s so critical of: “Like the capitalist system of which it’s most enthusiastically part, the music industry has grown very adept at diverting revolt into style, at soaking up novelty like a giant sponge and squeezing it out through the traditional channels, neatly packaged, easily sold.”

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Just Like Honey

The function of culture is to provide a respite to life’s hardships, a way to contextualize what is around you, or both. But in the 1980s, to put it lightly, things were gloomy. In his excellent 2011 Psychocandy retrospective for The Quietus, author Julian Marszalek writes that in 1985, pop music—the beacon we naturally turn to during fraught times—had become practically as unpleasant as the political climate surrounding it. It had failed its public. “Daytime radio was fronted by any number of goons more concerned with their own increasing fame than the music they played and pop itself was becoming increasingly sterile,” he writes. “No longer a haven for outsiders and misfits, pop did its best to play safe as it increasingly relied on the promotional video becoming an end in itself.” Pop music was once the place where paisley-toned weirdness flourished, helmed by misfits-turned-superstars like Jimi Hendrix and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. Fifteen years later the landscape had become barren, with Wham!, Adam Ant, and Spandau Ballet cropping up instead, much to the disgust of the Mary Chain. Of the few hits out there that directly addressed •

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on the ground struggle was New Model Army’s “No Rest,” which aptly paralleled the emotional and physical conundrums plaguing a burgeoning generation, at once desperate for change but unsure how to fix deep-rooted social and political problems. The Billboard Top 200 Albums list reveals that some of the bestselling pop artists of 1985 included the likes of former Genesis drummer Phil Collins’ solo effort No Jacket Required and Wham!’s smash record Make It Big. Predictably, the biggest British music publications had a more alternative take on 1985’s biggest records, while the indie mags and readers’ polls predicted the ones that would become cult classics. New Musical Express ranked Tom Waits’ brooding Rain Dogs at the very top, with Psychocandy coming up at number 2. The Melody Maker critics’ poll proclaimed the Cure’s The Head of the Door as the year’s best record, followed closely by rough-andtumble Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, the Smiths’ Meat is Murder and Scritti Polliti’s Cupid & Psyche ‘85 soon after, in addition to Psychocandy. The year 1985 was pivotal for politics and music alike as artists began to deconstruct then overhaul the canonical popular culture surrounding them. Eschewing all odds, Psychocandy was an immediate critical and commercial hit upon its release in November 1985, surging to number 31 on the charts. It was especially popular amongst young people in England. It was unusual, intriguing, and irresistible. It was unlike anything else on the pop landscape, because these songs might actually kill you. Why did Psychocandy, with its divergences and deviated form of pop music, reverberate with people immediately •

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upon its release? I suspect the resonance went from mere public appreciation to feverish love because Psychocandy oozed a sense of urgency that people embraced. On the one hand, it’s plucking at that teenage hurry to grow up fast and experience what the world offers outside one’s isolated corner of the globe. But it’s also mimicking the sickness that a toxic love might breed, the loss of sleep and the refusal to eat, the heartache and the inability to think of anything or anyone else. Jim Reid, who sings on the majority of Psychocandy, murmuring words like “honey” and “stars” gravely in baritone, in a way dispels the tradition of hyper-saccharine vocals that often accompany melodramatic statements in pop, such as the quintessential trope of “dying for love” and musing about mending a recently broken heart. While he’s singing about Candy’s enthralling walk and talk in the video for “Some Candy Talking,” a young Jim Reid sounds narcoleptic, spent, and sick, exorcizing the feeling of how fraught love actually is. Tasting love with Cindy is like a knife to the head. The Mary Chain had the brilliant and unprecedented approach to crash two seemingly clashing elements together: depravity and sweetness. They didn’t invent this, though. It’s merely an extension of the precedents and ideals set by their heroes. In this way, Psychocandy is a tribute to that special time when you fall in love with culture, as Douglas Hart put it. Unlike some other pop stars who might have been drawn to bright stage lights like stargazing moths, the Mary Chain were also entranced by the kind of darkness that lurked underneath these fantastic facades of fame and fortune. The Jesus and Mary Chain were simultaneously •

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drawing from the sunniness of the infamous Summer of Love and the evil undertones it masked with a haze of paisley and pot. A heroine of theirs, Nancy Sinatra, sung of sand and sundown in her music. But listen behind the string arrangements and swelling in cuts like “Some Velvet Morning” (which Slowdive, a shoegaze band orbiting the Mary Chain, would incidentally cover), and the lyrics all revolve around loneliness and uncertainty. It’s what makes so many modern classics remarkable, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds being a prime example. Sonically, the careful string arrangements and xylophones give an air of effervescence, but Brian Wilson unapologetically poured his sadness into the lyrics, merging the record’s sunny instrumental arrangements with musings on loss, insanity, and heartbreak. Heck, the first 30 seconds of “Cut Dead” sounds like it could be a Pet Sounds b-side, with Jim Reid humming softly over careful acoustic arrangements. One imagines he, like Wilson, might have been sadly swaying in his bedroom while dreaming and scheming what Psychocandy would sound like. And much like Wilson, who may very well be music’s first openly sad rock star, the Mary Chain were interested in the melancholy that loomed over the most bubblysounding pop music. While pop music often has the potential to be commercially viable, it remains the realm of the outsider. Through exploring this, the Mary Chain were entering into a binding sonic contract that speaks to other rebels and miscreants, all over the world, having to put on a smile and bear it. These were the people who could murmur that there’s “something wrong” over and over again backed by a bouncy beat and swathes of swooning guitars behind them. •

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The fourteen tracks in Psychocandy whir on, too, as odes to phantom ideals, sweet ballads addressed to impossible women named Candy, Cindy, and Honey. But instead of dismissing girls as having, say, cooties, they were simultaneously attempting to make sense of what women’s experiences might be like, toying with conceptions of gender along the way. In these songs, boys don’t just fall in love—they trip, stumble, fall, and taste the floor, desperate for the sweetness that R.E.M. would later tell us follows. The unholy clan’s Psychocandy is a sticky nougat confection coated with sacrilege and speed, and remains a crucial imprint of pop history that sowed the seeds for future leathered freaks to create their own culture when they didn’t connect with the one around them. Other outsiders began taking notice. Eugene Kelly of the Vaselines says that the Mary Chain’s debut acted as a catalyst for their band and so many others to finally pick up a guitar and begin performing music, especially in Glasgow. The Jesus and Mary Chain were a light for the othered who thought it wasn’t possible before: “I think the first time [the Jesus and Mary Chain] got played on John Peel, he played ‘Upside Down’ … it’s like an explosion of [an] electricity substation or something. Insane. So I remember thinking, what is this and what is this band?” he said. “A lot of people [in Glasgow] got into them, and they kind of affected what others were doing.” The band made an instantaneous dent on culture, but it’s worth noting how peculiar it is. The instrumentals in Psychocandy shouldn’t work but are somehow synced, eclipsing traditional cycles human or lunar. Psychocandy propels the listener from the terrestrial into a cosmic •

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elsewhere, a place where tinnitus—the condition characterized by a buzzing and chronic ringing in one’s eardrums—is somehow reversed. This album is also the first time this writer understood the sensation of hearing loss in a different way, translated into a pleasurable experience where typically distasteful elements like feedback and white noise could be meditative, beautiful, and desirable all at once. These complexities speak to their talent for having a specific sonic vision but taps into something deeper, a feeling that transcends sound and becomes translated into erotic bodily movement. Maybe even the “psycho” in Psychocandy, that unhinged urge within all of us to make a racket. Still, in 1987, Jim gave Melody Maker’s Steve Sutherland an intriguing insight when he was interviewing him for his column “The State of Pop.” Instead of demonizing the contemporary pop landscape outright, Reid spoke about its unchanging stance as the stuff of simultaneous depression and fascination. “The thing that amazes me about pop is that it’s never changed,” he said. “Everybody talks about the future of pop, where it’s going next but nothing changes, nothing’s ever changed since pop began. The future of rock and roll is for somebody to come along with a new form of music and destroy it but it never happens.”1 It’s interesting that Jim speaks of pop and rock and roll almost interchangeably here, but I think it’s more a commentary about how entwined the two genres have been historically. What is pop music if it doesn’t revolve around tasting something sweet, or the withdrawal when it’s gone? Can’t the same be said of much of modern rock •

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music? It is the melody that encapsulates melodrama, as much as the love at first sight, the passion and pitfalls thereafter. Pop music is thought to have originated in its current iteration some fifty years ago. It was manufactured from rock and roll in the 1950s, teasing out themes of love and mischief in condensed, hooky numbers. It’s certainly no coincidence that the height of the pop craze paralleled the rise of the teenager as a sociological category, which was created in post-World War II America that flourished in the ’50s. Richard Hell put it best in an essay from his recent nonfiction collection Massive Pissed Love, in which he writes, “Rock and roll is pop teenage music. If masses of kids don’t respond to it, then by definition it isn’t good.” Commercialism instead preyed on teenagers as a new demographic group that products could be marketed to, since many of them had new and increased autonomy, leisure time and money to spend on delights including soda, cars, and records. Artists like Chuck Berry exemplified the proverbial teenage life, and gave rise to groups that would go on to craft “pop” as we know it. Pop stars often seem as though they are the ones wielding the power onstage; as ’70s punk auteur and Voidoid Richard Hell put it, “part of the job description of the front person is to be godlike for teenagers.” But the truth is, pop stars’ success—even career trajectories—are entirely the whim of their public, who can just as easily demonize people as they can choose to canonize them as saints. Yet Jim is right about rock and roll and shattering the rules: No one remembers musicians who played it safe or straight. Despite the environs feeling quite dangerous, •

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nothing in popular culture jived with the Mary Chain, reflected their experience, or helped to contextualize what they were going through. It’s not that they didn’t love music—it’s just that the heyday was over. In 1984, the sizzling industrial clangs of Joy Division, bringing to light truths about our insecurities with songs like “She’s Lost Control,” had been buried with Ian Curtis. Even movements made by Kraftwerk and New Order, out of Joy Division’s ashes, had cranked pop into a cycle of analog synthesizers and unchallenging electronic musings. Ziggy Stardust had long fallen, and T. Rex’s Marc Bolan was no longer with us on this Earth. It was time for new idols to emerge.

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Some Candy Talking

With Psychocandy, the Jesus and Mary Chain sought to give the world something sweet, with an unexpected aftertaste that listeners would certainly remember; no wonder one of the album’s most abrasive cuts is entitled “Taste the Floor.” It’s doubtful that the burgeoning stars would have named the title track of their debut album “Just Like Honey” either, if sweetness hadn’t been a central link in the Mary Chain. But to understand the Mary Chain—punks at heart wearing their pop sensibilities proudly on their sleeves— one must understand candy as much as candy-coated pop. Candy manufacturers don’t sell sweets, but rather the experience of sweetness. From Mars Bars to Cadbury crème eggs, the artificial extracts, glycerin and Red 40s in these confections give you, for a lickety-split-second, a taste of something that isn’t actually there. For a fleeting moment the raspberry or honey or bubblegum (whatever you fancy) tastes real. It isn’t, really. But all it takes is a single taste for you to surrender to this kind of sweetness. Which brings us to the subsection of pop music affectionately dubbed “bubblegum.” The name, first used in the late 1960s and lasting through the early 1970s, •

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was coined to describe an effervescent style of music that record company executives had marketed towards teenagers, in order to draw them away from the rock and roll their older siblings had been fed.1 “Bubblegum” was a genre intentionally manufactured by record producers. Its initial formulaic approach and upbeat tempos sounds like it was made almost in a factory assembly line. Bubblegum’s success hinged on singles, not albums, and many of its central groups never saw more than one-hit wonders. However fleeting, the resonance of bubblegum on pop is palpable. It’s not a coincidence, either, that it bears the very same properties of those pesky, wonderful earworm pop tunes you can’t unstick from your brain (Hanson’s “Mmmbop” is a prime example of a hum that lingers in the public consciousness, not unlike the gumminess and addictiveness of your favorite candy). But it’s appropriate; after all, pop music sustains itself by having a semblance of sweetness, literal or figurative. From the Strangeloves’ 1965 hit “I Want Candy” to Mandy Moore’s “Candy,” these sordid sugar bombs comprise pop’s core. Fittingly, there have been two golden eras of bubblegum in history: the 1950s, upon its creation, and a powerful resurgence in the 1990s, just after the Jesus and Mary Chain had clanged their way to the Top of the Pops. The young idols that came to define pop music in the 1990s, including Moore, Christina Aguilera, and especially Britney Spears, were cribbing from the sweet sensibilities of bubblegum and bringing them to a new generation of teenagers. “More than any other single artist, Britney Spears was the driving force behind the return of teen pop in the late •

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’90s,” says Allmusic’s Steve Huey. Britney became a pop diva by becoming a triple threat—singing, dancing, and acting (who can forget Crossroads?), but also by crafting perfectly punctuated, resonant pop songs alongside Swedish hit-maker and producer Max Martin, who would work with her on her debut … Baby One More Time, as well as Celine Dion, *NSYNC, and Backstreet Boys. Part of her success was that she recognized her bubblegum roots—immortalized in songs like “Soda Pop”—and used them to speak to millions. Songs like Spears’ “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” are impossible to forget, hard to scrape from your mind, and may give you a cavity. These sweet songs’ popularity endures not just because of catchy arrangements, but because the words sung are more than relatable—they evoke universal human truths. No matter who you are, there’s universality to loving and losing, and pop music is hinged on exploring the breakdown and reconstruction of the human spirit, preand post-heartbreak. It’s a fundamental paradox: Going through a miserable breakup often breeds insightful art, but often at the expense of the wellbeing of the person creating it. For instance, if Fleetwood Mac hadn’t been breaking up, making up, and taking up other lovers, would we have the inimitable Rumours? If Amy Winehouse’s relationship to Blake Fielder-Civil hadn’t been charged, unpredictable, and tense, would she had been able to pour her soul into the cathartic, wrenching Back to Black? Spears has flexed hordes of these odes, ranging from “Toxic” to “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart.” And Mandy Moore’s aforementioned “Candy” might even be •

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the most visceral example, in which she describes feeling addicted to the love that her significant other is feeding her, going so far as to call it “withdrawal” when she doesn’t have it. Love is the drug, and everyone craves it to some degree or another. The Mary Chain themselves said as much in Psychocandy’s “Some Candy Talking,” in which they talk about wanting their lover’s “candy” and needing some of that “stuff” (the sexual references are not lost here, either). But we don’t just want this stuff. We need it. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has calculated that we routinely consume roughly 152 pounds of sweeteners (cane sugar, natural and artificial sweeteners) a year.2 The bubblegum pop trickles into advertisements, feature film trailers, restaurants, and convenience stores. It’s inescapable, and irresistible. But say that our beloved candy-coated pop is hardened and tarred to the concrete below our feet. If the music retains its sweetness deep inside, does it still count as pop if it’s slightly warped? Is chocolate still technically candy when it’s melted and stuck to the wrapper? If it’s jagged, does it lose the central quality that makes it a confection altogether? In the mid-1980s, a group of four Scotsmen clanged and crashed their way into pop’s royal chambers and proved that it doesn’t. The Jesus and Mary Chain completely turned our perception of “sweet” pop music inside out and upside down. It’s no coincidence, either that their first single to hit the charts, in November 1984, was entitled “Upside Down”—they wanted to shake up pop music, as much as the world. Psychocandy is, then, the product of childhood dreaming writ large, and four •

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young men took a page from the book of their punk heroes and harnessed a characteristically youthful anger, the frustration of a working-class generation, and the drive to create something new and necessary that would transcend the radio airwaves and would ensue in guitardriven activism on the ground. They didn’t just want to offer audiences a performance; they wanted to share with them a new universe, even an entire reality. Despite their punkified aesthetic and trench mentality, the Mary Chain differed from their contemporaries in that they did want pop stardom. They’re not that different from the Moores and the Strangeloves, the Spearses and the Nancy Sinatras of yesteryear, who were reaching out to lovelorn young people with their candycoated pop. But they wanted it on their own terms. And that meant crawling out of their desolate upbringing, working day and night to map the perfect band, diving into an abysmal underground of noise, and climbing to the peak of Top of the Pops, Jimmy Savile’s music program probing the top songs of the time, following a lysergic trajectory that had been mapped out before them from girl groups like Honey Ltd. to Can to Marc Bolan’s electric ascent to glam stardom with T. Rex. They were creating something singular. Their hyper-focused approach paid off, since Psychocandy is a sonic assault of scuzzy and sugar rushes. It’s an astounding debut, capable of standing alone as a love letter to pop and simultaneously functioning as a scintillating statement created out of necessity. The Reids resented the lack of options they had moving forward in life. Their teenage heroes Marc Bolan and David Bowie, despite growing up in mod London, were •

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fellow freaks turned superstars, and ones who toyed with conventional notions of gender and traditional performance. Iggy Pop, another deity of theirs, embodied punk in its purest form; an almost carnal, fervent expression borne out of a simultaneous love affair with music and a desire to shake people out of their skulls. While they never donned space-age bodysuits or red platform go-go boots themselves, the Jesus and Mary Chain furthered the vision of their glam and punk step­fathers, disproving the notion that you must be of a certain social class, a classically trained musician, or a prodigy by society’s standards in order to move a generation of young people with your sense of expression. All you needed was the insatiable hunger to create something original, and the cojones to actually do it. What helped the Mary Chain achieve this—besides the careful marriage of time and place—was maintaining a careful, specific vision for their art. And, of course, an enormous appreciation for destruction: Of conventions, eardrums, expectations, and traditions. On this gorgeous, sputtering pop record they breathed a personal and social chaos, unleashing everything that had been previously repressed, especially on numbers like “Cut Dead” and “The Hardest Walk.” And upon its release, the response to Psychocandy was feverish, because it did what no other album preceding it had managed to do. It was sweet enough to fit within the traditional canon of bubblegum pop music while simultaneously subverting it, unapologetically speaking to the social unrest people in the United Kingdom (and beyond) were feeling— particularly the working class and teenagers—but were not addressing or could not address outright. •

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The pink-and-black skid mark Psychocandy left on culture is partially due to how utterly extreme this pop record sounds, from how it resonates with the body (and potentially shatters eardrums), to the dualities it forged into one album. It is at once the manic and the depressive, the sun covering the shadows, the life that distracts from the inevitability of death, the noise crashed against lilting pop: In other words, the psycho and the candy. Elements that shouldn’t work together somehow do on Psychocandy. “If Nancy Sinatra had Einsturzende Neubaten as a backing band, that’s how we wanted to sound,” Jim Reid recalled thirty years later. “We wanted to fuck with the genres.” And they did. Dense clouds of psychedelia and drone, pummeling white noise, sugar-drenched pop harmonies, skittering proto-punk, galloping percussion, and the melodrama of Motown converge in Psychocandy, a cocktail of noise that shouldn’t even be palatable to our ears. It’s more than palatable, however. It’s desirable. One might say just like honey.

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Taste the Floor

While recording Psychocandy in January 1985, Bobby Gillespie remembers that songs like the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” were played constantly at John Loder’s Southern Studios in London, where they recorded. Infamously, the drum break at the beginning of the classic tune is the very same heard in the album opener “Just Like Honey,” too. But why would a group of Scottish guys be completely infatuated with Ronnie Spector and her group’s honeyed harmonies? Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that songs like The Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” inspire hope in the seemingly darkest times. It was the notion that the most othered, lonely, isolated people in various corners of the world were capable of loving and being loved; that similar kids who were desperate and on welfare and lost could create something beautiful, too. Bobby Gillespie remembers that they were drawn to music that was sunny on the surface, as “the lyrics were dark, apocalyptic and cynical. Basically, outsider rebel music. So then we started listening to stuff from the ’60s and we saw that there were similarities and a shared attitude, an outsiderness.” These were the •

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kinds of men who despised the static and just wanted the electricity. That’s partly why the band was so electric, even in their earliest days as the Daisy Chain: They worked to give their audiences one hell of a show. They adopted a kind do-it-yourself attitude, out of necessity and the need to control their vision. But it didn’t necessarily matter if they even knew how to play their instruments. It was more important to ride on the feeling. The carefully manicured image of diva-esque pop stars was a marketing tool that the Jesus and Mary Chain innately understood. During the Motown era, girl groups were given matching costumes, dolled-up hair, and were instructed to perform careful choreography, things that the Jesus and Mary Chain drew from building their own performances too. These carefully crafted groups often had a mentor intent on making them as palatable to the public as possible, and popular. But girl groups occupied a curious sphere in culture: the women were at the forefront of an artistically prolific period of time and worked incredibly hard, but got virtually no recognition and were often cheated of their fair of profits by money-grubbing guys. Girl groups emerged at a time when males (more) heavily dominated the music industry. The movements they made in popular music, though, caused a legion of women to feel independent and confident enough to branch out as musicians on their own. But curiously, many people still hold that girl groups eventually ceased to be overwhelmingly popular, as they had been in the early 1960s, when a group of mop-headed guys from Britain named the Beatles co-opted their harmonies. •

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“It’s ironic that in appropriating this girl group sound a male band inadvertently destroyed it through their own successes,” Lucy O’Brien writes.1 When we meet over coffee and pastries one wispy February day in north London, Bobby Gillespie made me rethink the Mary Chain entirely. I was always under the impression that they were stamping out pop, bringing their punk sensibilities to the masses. A sort of Sex Pistols revamped. But one of the first things he said about his initial connections to the Mary Chain was that he thought what was on the Top 40 was cool—because it was pop. There’s a reason why this music is popular, and arguably populist, sure. But he relates that to the working-class Mary Chain, a large part of pop’s appeal stemmed from the fact that it as an entity signified success. If they were successful, they could then usher in change. This is the same belief that goes behind the notion of being fly or fresh-dressed: well-tailored clothes and the elevation of the stage symbolize that you have made it, and arrived somehow. This sensibility is partially what made them not identify with the indie crowd at the time, either. When I ask Jim about why the Mary Chain isolated themselves from people making currents in more underground scenes, he told me that back then he felt the “indie scene represented failure.” The fatalistic glorification of misery championed by the indie society at the time didn’t mean anything to them. It was just another dead end. For the alternative crowd, “it was definitely not cool to be on Top of the Pops,” he says. “People would bring a record out and they would be happy if it sold twenty copies. And most of those were their relatives buying •

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it, and they would play in a pub in front of their mates, getting clothes they bought at a fucking Oxfam. As soon as I could afford them I bought leather trousers! I’d watch Top of the Pops and I’d get a shiver up my spine to see Marc Bolan there. I didn’t want to be some spotty indie kid playing in front of my friends in my bedroom.” This was coupled with Jim’s larger worldview, too. Looking back, he says he thought the best bands in the ’80s indie scene “did have their eye [on the] top of the charts and Top of the Pops. The ones that were any good went on to do that anyway, like [Echo and the] Bunnymen and all of that. The Cocteau Twins … It was odd pop music, but it was pop music nonetheless.” Perhaps it’s because pop, as a form, signified success as something entirely at odds with most of the counter­ culture’s conscious removal from the mainstream. The Jesus and Mary Chain occupy a very particular space in music because of this. On the surface, they were outsiders who didn’t fit in with anyone else’s vision of success and wanted to make music on their own terms instead of giving in to the status quo. Even Geoff Travis, who signed the Mary Chain on the Warner Music group Blanco y Negro for the record “Never Understand” (and then Psychocandy) was fascinated by the Mary Chain’s selfimposed isolation, as much from the record company and other musical movements going on at the time. “They’re very insular, very Scottish, they were fiercely proud of what they were doing,” he told Zoë Howe in Barbed Wire Kisses. “They didn’t want to join in with the outside world that much.” I have a theory that the resonance this record had also surged a free-form madness that previously didn’t •

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exist in pop music. Despite the heaviness of its lyrics and intense live performances, Psychocandy has an added depth: It’s cheeky. I hadn’t realized this fully until I went to Scotland, but Psychocandy oozes with dark, selfdeprecating, and acerbic Scottish humor. The Scots laugh at the expense of themselves and everyone else. It’s in good faith, but it sounds horrific to the untrained ear. Take a “Glasgow” kiss, for instance. That’s not a peck, that’s a headbutt. The humor whirring in these songs is distinctively Scottish, with a large chip on the shoulder and an embracement of the macabre. Who else would sing about being stuck inside a hole, talk casually about having knives in their heads, being tripped up, and cut dead? Psychocandy is a black comedy that doesn’t denounce the woe, but rather finds it funny. They were purveyors of gallows humor, cracking wise at their own expense, a humor that would usually jar people when they expected to meet a magnetic, charismatic foursome backstage. Psychocandy resonates long after the decade that marred and made it, but the album arguably couldn’t have had the same crater-like impact on culture had it been released in, say, 1962. Or 1992, for that matter. I doubt a clan of leathered, crusty-haired, candycoated freaks could have usurped the pop throne at any other time. Yet by today’s standards the Mary Chain’s thought process could be described as poptimist, a hotly-disputed term that “contends that all pop music deserves a thoughtful listen and a fair shake, [and] that guilty pleasures are really just pleasures,” according to the •

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Washington Post’s pop music critic, Chris Richards. The word incited a tired, fraught debate amongst music critics after the release of a 2014 New York Times article by Saul Austerlitz. In the piece, Austerlitz argues that an increasing number of critics and fans were guilty of “a studied reaction to a musical past” and developing poptimism as “an ideology to counteract rockism,” which champions guitars over synthesizers, and breaking on through to the other side instead of setting the world on fire. Dismissing people who champion pop, Austerlitz says that poptimist attitudes “privilege the deliriously artificial over the artificially genuine.” But all poptimism means is recognizing the value of popular music and not dismissing it solely on the basis that it is popular. Let’s be honest: whether you identify as a precocious indie kid, an unabashed poptimist, or a casual pop listener, who hasn’t, at the very least on the karaoke stage, entertained the thought of being draped in proper pop star attire, à la Stevie Nicks or Marc Bolan, in shawls, leathers, and lace? Pop means something to me, and if you’re reading this book, I’d wager it means something to you, too.

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Taste of Cindy

“Human life,” Brazilian author Clarice Lispector once wrote, “boils down to the pursuit of pleasure, to the fear of it, and above all to the dissatisfaction of the time in between.”1 It’s true: In the end, it’s all about him, or her, or them. What do we do in life if it isn’t for the one we want, the one we need, the one we love? If pop music from the past century has taught us anything, it’s that it’s largely a meditation on how pleasure, passion, or pain (or all three) impact us. But pop music has a storied, upsetting history with demonizing women both in song and on the stage. As does punk, and rock and roll. In their landmark work The Sex Revolts, Joy Press and Simon Reynolds wrote that “rock in the ’60s was founded on … an opposition between rebel masculinity and woman and conformist incarnate.”2 The sexual allusions on Psychocandy are boundless, and hardly shrouded from their direct resemblance to the simultaneous mystique and terror of female anatomy (honey dripping, taste of Cindy). The cryptic title itself could be interpreted as feminine, adhering to the antiquated idea of women’s hysteria that’s removed from •

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the sweetness and loveliness they’re socially expected to impart upon the world. Yet these invocations aren’t about subordinating women, but about understanding and empathizing with them. Forever marginalized and scrutinized regardless of social status, class, or race, women are the ultimate outsiders even amongst outsiders—achieving empowerment and freedom through consensual acts of erotic self-realization. Cindy, Alice, Honey, Candy, and even Cherry too. While the names seem handpicked from a Manson family lineup, the women invoked by the Mary Chain are true manifestations of what punk sought to accomplish. By embodying toxic screens and screams, the Mary Chain were turning the idea of hysteria—the misaligned, gendered condition stemming from the Greek word for uterus, which asserts that women are inextricable from madness, from this “disease” of the uterus—upside down. Some psychiatrists would prescribe masturbation as a way to “cure” women of this so-called hysteria. In a similar way, the Mary Chain posited that madness could be a form of purifying the self, pop music, and society. But a fundamental problem remains: When women toy with ideas about madness it’s coded as clinically insane, whereas the man who plays with madness as performance is viewed as someone working to actively transcend it. So for the Mary Chain to get up there and use hysteria as protest, rendering a social and personal madness alive and imploring honeys to use them, men, as toys was jarring to the public’s ears, to say the least. This is but one of the dualities demonstrated by William Reid’s lyrical bent in Psychocandy. It is both •

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desperate for female attention and can be read as feminist. This is highly unusual of typical pop music produced and written by men. Historically, popular music has concentrated on men’s tactics in eventually “getting the girl,” as though women are a piece of property to own. But the Jesus and Mary Chain subvert this notion entirely on Psychocandy from the very beginning of the record. The boys are helpless compared to the women who have complete agency over them—at least, that’s what the lyrics suggest. Women’s dominance over men in the tune “Just Like Honey,” arguably the Jesus and Mary Chain’s most memorable tune and the album’s opener, reigns: In it, a sincere Jim Reid offers to be a woman’s plastic toy. Karen Parker provided backing vocals on this tune on a whim, as Jim encouraged her to sing them in the middle of a John Peel session. She later became a mainstay, as her contribution provides the singular warmth that continues to resonate through “Just Like Honey.” Parker tells me she remembers this moment, and then working with the guys later on Psychocandy, as a dream. “It was a completely euphoric moment in time,” she says. “I just loved every second of it, and we were all really happy.” It’s powerful that the first line of the song blatantly brings girls to the front, asking the listener to “listen” as the girl takes on the big, bad world. The industrial clangs and buzzing saws are reminiscent of Motown’s girl groups, with total control over their sound and attitude. But the lush images of honey dripping and beehives within the lyrics suggest a clean break with how we, as people, are expected to shush the nature of our body fluids; whether that be tears, saliva, mucus, or urine. •

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This notion is especially applicable for women, who comprise over 50 percent of the world’s population and are still prevented from speaking openly about their menstrual cycles, and what goes on with their bodies, for the sole reason that it makes men feel uncomfortable. “Just Like Honey,” in a way, deconstructs the dual fear and obsession our world has with women’s bodies; forever desirable but just as disposable. What’s the problem then with just letting the honey drip, let women be as they are without policing their bodies? Even though they looked hard and cool, the Mary Chain weren’t really promoting tough-guy malarkey. They consciously made their vulnerabilities bare on Psychocandy, with the exception being the motorcycle death-wish anthem “The Living End.” Often on this album the band is at the whim of their loved one, as Jim Reid admits on Psychocandy’s gentlest number, “Cut Dead.” Here, he’s lamenting that the object of his obsession and desire has him stumbling and fumbling after honeybees, a euphemism perhaps for sex. Or death. Is he speaking about chasing the birds and the bees—as in chasing sex—or is he ambling about, lovesick and utterly heartbroken as women subvert traditional gender roles and instead take the reins? In their music, the band embraces being completely enthralled by the powerful women in their lives, whether it’s the phantom Candy, the elusive Honey, and later, in their second album, Cherry. They speak of being stuck inside holes, building their underground tunnels to serenity, and offer to be plastic toys to be played with at will, as Jim Reid famously expressed in the opening chords of “Just Like Honey.” This subversion of power •

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and submission crops up everywhere in Psychocandy: “She has me,” he says on “Taste of Cindy,” referring to the hold she’s got on him. “It’s so hard to be unlike a doll,” Reid posits on “It’s So Hard,” Psychocandy’s final number. Us girls can relate, Jim. Even in the woozy ballad “Cut Dead,” the Mary Chain don’t wax poetic about the flesh of a woman freshly murdered, as tradition has held with songs like these. Here they’re detailing an experience they had with the death of the heart and spirit after moving too slowly into a relationship. Sharks, after all, die by standing still. They’re not passive—they are chasing honeybees, as Reid says it—but he still implores the said person to call him a fucked up kind of guy. Scottish black humor oozes from this track too, specifically when he invites this person to kick his head and nail him down, not unlike the image of Christ before he’s about to be nailed to a cross, then elevated once again upon resurrection. It’s reminiscent of local slang like the infamous “Glasgow kiss” or a “Glasgow smile,” when someone takes a knife and slashes another person’s face, lifting up the corners to become a sinister, permanent smile not unlike that of the infamous Black Dahlia murder. Yet “Cut Dead” is also a salient reversal of socially conscripted roles, as the trope of the dead woman continues to be a morbid topic of discussion in song. The image of the deceased woman is sung, scatted, and obsessed about continuously in art, with the purveyors of this voyeurism being almost always the ogling eyes of men, from the horror pastiche of the Cramps’ odes to headless bodies to the macabre images in countless Nick Cave songs. •

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The S&M undertones of Psychocandy and the members’ own personal politics deconstructed the notion that women are prizes to be won, instead of great people to learn from and cherish. This core reversal of gender may explain why the Jesus and Mary Chain is frequently name-checked as one of the key influencers of genres like twee and indie pop. Both genres emerged as responses to the misogyny of close-minded punk rock spheres, a welcoming group embracing hand-drawn kittens and cardigans worn by men (symbols recalling the simplicity of childhood and most explicitly seen in the artwork of Olympia, WA, indie tastemaker Calvin Johnson, of K Records, and his group Beat Happening). These movements were pivotal, because unlike much of what the history of art has dictated, this expression relied on women’s ideas and innermost thoughts, not just considered them in passing. In this way, bands like the Mary Chain were bringing women to the front—first Candy and Honey, then Cindy and Cherry and Alice.

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Reverence

Wielding an instrument onstage has the potential to elevate an ordinary person to the level of a deity. Looks don’t necessarily matter all that much up there. Talent helps, but is not essential (ahem, Sid Vicious). It’s more about what one does when on that pedestal, which is like a Mount Olympus of sorts. “Onstage we’re one of the sexiest groups you can imagine,” Jim said of the band in 1985, goading yet another interviewer. “Three or four guys in leather, rolling around and showing their backsides to the audience.” But what does it mean for a self-proclaimed sexy band—named the Jesus and Mary Chain, no less—to infiltrate the sacred canon of pop music with their arms crossed and black shades on, avoiding the spotlight altogether? Is what they’re doing sacred or sacriligeous? Either way, the band knew the word “Jesus” would be enough of a trigger to get people talking about them. They had taken a page from one of their favorites, the Sex Pistols, a name that had been chosen by their cunning manager Malcolm McLaren. A band named the Sex Pistols was as unprecedented for the press at it was for the public, according to Trevor Dann, who helped land •

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the Mary Chain one of their first video performances on BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test before Psychocandy’s release. “The [Mary Chain] was the first big thing we’d had since the Sex Pistols. Because here’s a list of things [you] shouldn’t do: You shouldn’t name yourself something that presenters have a hard time saying,” Dann notes. “So being called the Sex Pistols … you forget how radical that was. Sex was not a word that you said!” This radical idea recalls that old Oscar Wilde quote, “The only worse thing than being talked about is not being talked about.” By consciously changing their name from the Daisy Chain to the Mary Chain—one that dripped with intrigue and controversy—it was more a good marketing move on their part instead of sacrilege. The name Jesus and Mary Chain had been chosen by William and was intended to be puzzling. “I don’t know where [William] got it from, but he just said ‘The Jesus and Mary Chain.’ And at first it sounded like, ‘Naah, no way,’” Jim Reid told Philadelphia’s Phawker in September 2015. “And then you kind of think about it, you think, ‘Well, fuck, that sounds like no other band.’ So we went with it.” The name “Jesus and Mary Chain” could mean anything. And nothing. By invoking the names of both Jesus and Mary, were they implying a sense of partnership? Was it a slight nod to fellow bands of outsiders they admired, like Echo and the Bunnymen or Teenage Jesus and the Jerks? Was it all just a joke? The “chain” bit was reminiscent of a bike gang, a gaggle of greasers, or a group of train-hopping vagabonds. Or were the chains a reference to teenagers feeling shackled by mom and dad? Trevor Dann has his own theory: “I  100 •

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always thought it was in the tradition of John Lennon saying ‘The Beatles are more popular than Christ,’” he says. Given their love of the Beatles’ look and sonic sensibilities, it’s not out of the question. But the name had no origin story. It was just a jumble of words William drew out of his mind, as he would later say. “Jesus,” “Mary,” and “chain” were but three nouns strung together into a rather confounding phrase. They knew they’d be asked about it, though, and they were ready with an arsenal of conflicting stories to keep people guessing. According to Barbed Wire Kisses, the band said that they drew the name from a line in a Bing Crosby film. Later, they would deny this statement completely. Then there was also the yarn they spun about seeing it on the back of a cereal box, in an advertisement for a “gold Jesus and Mary Chain.” None of the band members were raised Catholic, though. But their curiosity about religion is evident in their lyrics—which, over six studio albums, continue to revolve around themes of prayer (“Her Way of Praying”), hell (“Gimme Hell”), Jesus (“Bo Diddley is Jesus”), reverence (a concept important enough to make for the eponymous title of a song bearing the same riff as the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”), and death (“Cut Dead,” “In a Hole”). Hell, Psychocandy could very well be read as a concept album probing questions of life and death, not unlike one of their favorites, The Velvet Underground & Nico. So while their band name might not have been influenced by religion directly, they were at least interested in it as something to wonder about. “It’s kind of a fascinating subject,” Jim told Phawker’s Jonathan Valania. “I discovered the Bible when I was like  101 •

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in my late teens and out of curiosity read through it to see what it was all about. But, in the end, came away with the idea that it’s kind of a lot of mumbo jumbo.” Regardless, the British press took the opportunity to read more deeply into the name and use it as a means to judge the band. Thus the Mary Chain were consistently praised as either the Second Coming or crucified as one of the worst things to happen to popular culture. “The idea that you say the word ‘Jesus’ in the context of a pop song, and worse, in the name of a band … it was deliberately courting a controversy,” remembers Dann. “It was the sort of thing that the tabloid newspapers picked up on, the flame was fanned for a little while, and some gigs got banned.” In a 1986 profile of the band, the journalist Richard Lowe, writing for The Hit, found the band’s “naiveté” and idealism touching, but questionable: “The Jesus And Mary Chain are not the ‘new messiahs’ that some have claimed them to be; simply three lads from East Kilbride who want to give the bland and boring world of pop music a much-needed kick up the backside,” he wrote, adding, “Wish them luck in their crusade—at least someone’s trying.” Their crusade may have even got them banned from American television in 1987, though. CBS had wanted to run one of their videos on the Top of the Pops’ iteration in America. While the Mary Chain had by then appeared on Britain’s Top of the Pops, the network’s Program Practice Department had a hunch that U.S. networks wouldn’t be as keen to run a video by a band bearing this possibly inflammatory name. They were right: The network attempted to level with the Mary Chain, and work out a compromise that would announce them as  102 •

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the J and M Chain instead. As Craig Rosen of the Los Angeles Daily News reported at the time, the band refused, complaining that the name “sounded like a discount shoe store.” So their dreams were dashed.1 It was all the better for them to attract attention, though. “It was good being hated, but also knowing that you were doing that without even trying,” Gillespie says to that effect. Even today, there are crusaders setting out to either pigeonhole or demonize bands whose names bear slight religious undertones. See: “Black Sabbath,” “Eyehategod,” the “Jesus Lizard,” and “Lamb of God.” Many of these bands named themselves without actually writing anti-Christian lyrics: The Jesus Lizard named themselves after the colloquial term for a basilisk, and even Lamb of God (originally entitled Burn the Priest) aren’t necessarily spouting anti-religious rhetoric in their revered black metal tunes. Whether they were consciously courting this kind of controversy or not, naming themselves the Jesus and Mary Chain was an ingenious way for the young musicians to both attract attention and self-actualize their project. Lest we forget that marrying extremes, too, is an indelible component of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s aesthetic: depravity and sweetness, noise and pop, darkness and light, and heaven and hell are prevalent dualities merged in Psychocandy. Consequently, these are the very mysteries of the universe that religion attempts to unpack, or at least lend a crutch towards understanding. It’s what makes bands like the Velvet Underground so powerful. Velvet Underground songs frequently probed questions of heaven and hell, and Lou Reed actively  103 •

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invoked black angels of death and challenged God directly in his lyrics. “For the Velvets the roots of sin are in this ingrained resistance to facing our deepest, most painful, and most sacred emotions,” writes Ellen Willis. “The essence of grace is the comprehension that our sophistication is a sham, that our deepest, most painful, most sacred desire is to recover a childlike innocence we have never, in our heart of hearts, really lost.”2 Leave it to the young Mary Chain to carry forth that tradition and to seek those intense emotions of salvation, devotion, and redemption through creating music. The larger-than-life reverence that the band had been yearning to achieve for years would be realized not just upon Psychocandy’s success, or from the press’s mixed reactions. It was really when fans across the world began donning the same disaffected stares, hair that looks like it had electricity shot through it, leather jackets, and shades. When the Mary Chain first traveled to New York in early 1985, Jim recalls being struck to look out into the crowd and it being almost a mirror: Everyone there resembled their clan. Their audiences wanted to join their tribe! During our conversation in Glasgow, Jim also mentioned that recent travels to South America in 2014 had resulted in another kind of surreal encounter: The band encountered crowd after crowd that looked exactly like them in the 1980s, down to the fuzzed-out hair and leather pants. Sadly, there isn’t an organized group of Mary Chain fans bearing a wonderful pun, such as those of Beyonce’s “Beyhive” and Justin Bieber’s “Beliebers.” Nor did they have idiosyncratic phrases such as the one Primus fans use to know they’re in the presence of other Primus  104 •

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aficionados (“Primus sucks!”). People dressed up to see the Mary Chain. It was a mutant ball from hell, and everyone was invited to this worship of music. In truth, pop music might as well have been their religion. These extremes of good–evil, heaven–earth, and angels–demons are part of Psychocandy’s crack-nougat center. The album is a feverish love letter to pop in all its complications, craving the way one can submit to it and let the rest of the world disappear, while understanding its possibilities to grapple with learning something potentially uncomfortable about the self in that process. So whether it’s sacrilegious or sexless, droning or decisive in your mind, it’s undeniable that something embedded in Psychocandy’s skittering tunes wraps its arms around our waists and seduces us, right before driving a stake through our hearts.

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Epilogue: Cut Dead

The human body is resilient, possessing the ability to tolerate severe noise whether it’s standing next to a power drill or at an especially loud rock concert. But this elasticity has a price: permanent and irreversible damage to eardrums. There’s something masochistic about how we consciously expose ourselves to danger, and punishingly loud concerts and 20-minute tremolo bar noise jams gift us with irreversible tolls on our eardrums. These songs are unforgiving and get off on drawing blood from the listener. The chaos of early Mary Chain performances is entirely removed from the band’s current Psychocandy reunion performances, though. But mercifully, their feedback-laden core remains. Years ago I had the opportunity to see the Jesus and Mary Chain perform at Washington D.C.’s 9:30 Club. I’d foolishly forgotten earplugs (hey, it was college), although I had read about the band’s blisteringly loud performances and watched YouTube videos of them. When the Jesus and Mary Chain barreled into their headlining set that night, strumming their instruments with simultaneous abandon and care, my blood curdled.  107 •

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I felt the guitar tone leaving my poor ears and crumbling into other parts of my body. The meaty bass rumblings seemed to lodge themselves within the crevices of my ribcage, even though it wasn’t exposed. I could feel the feedback throbbing in the cavity of my clavicle. Until then, I was unaware that music could become such a visceral physical experience, hitting different parts of my body in alternating ways. This was a feeling unlike the punk rock shows I had moshed around in. It was completely different than the collective head sway an audience adopts at a good hip-hop performance. That night I realized that the Jesus and Mary Chain possessed the inimitable power to move internal organs and emotions. My ears may have been cut dead, but I felt very much alive. That night they played both popular and deeper cuts from their catalog, which spans six studio albums. Psychocandy numbers included the swelling “Some Candy Talking” and “Taste of Cindy,” a swooning ballad that stands out against the album’s instrumental decay. Then, something bizarre happened shortly into the performance. Despite the unholy volumes, my desire and necessity for earplugs inexplicably dematerialized. Allured, my body and ears became engrossed within the gauzy guitars and volatile echoes, reverberating heartbreak and healing all the same. I sobbed giant tears right next to my roommate Stefan during “Cut Dead,” moved by noise in ways I couldn’t explain. Underneath the feedback, these men were—like all of us—just aching for a singular connection, to be understood by one person at a particular moment. I suffered from tinnitus for days afterward, but the experience validated the tinny pain in  108 •

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my eardrums and the knowledge that I would never hear at the same decibel level again. I got smart to eargplugs the second time I saw the Mary Chain, at their homecoming Psychocandy performance at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom in November 2014. But even that couldn’t shield the deafening effects of this band’s throttling, all-encompassing sound. Them included. The next day, Jim grumbled to me about his bad ear following the show. “I could not believe how loud [William] got his guitar. It was literally ear splitting. Actually, at the Barrowland I wore an earplug in this ear, thinking, ‘I can’t be doing this to my ear every night.’ And it didn’t help! It’s gotten even worse! That brother of mine will just not turn his fucking amp down,” he says. This wasn’t so much the case when they hit America in 2015, however. I caught one of the Psychocandy reunion performances in September 2015 at New York’s massive Terminal 5, almost a year to the day I had seen them in both Glasgow and London. There was no entrance video indebted to their youth in East Kilbride. They walked onstage and launched into the set. But the real difference was that it sounded polished, as though they had scrubbed so much of that delicious feedback away. I didn’t even need earplugs! Perhaps it was just a product of needing to lock into a groove, though. As they barreled through deeper cuts—like Darklands’ “Nine Million Rainy Days,” which I’d never seen performed live—they were getting louder, more steady, filling out the huge room. The noisier Psychocandy cuts—notably “The Living End” and “Inside Me”—sound noisy and terrific, all guitars squaloring. “Inside Me” was especially  109 •

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alluring, with drones that prompted me to momentarily drift and leave the venue altogether. Despite thirty-plus years of touring, Jim Reid is nearly expressionless while singing onstage; in fact, the only time he acknowledged the crowd’s response is when someone yelled “Fuck you, Scotland!” just as “Something’s Wrong” came on. William Reid, however, was buried into his guitar the entire time. It’s still all about the music.

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Notes

The Living End 1

Zoë Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014, p. 91.

In a Hole 1 Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses, p. 1 2 “Post-war Housing and New Towns,” 20th and 21st Centuries, Scotland’s History, Education Scotland, http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scotlandshisto ry/20thand21stcenturies/postwarhousing/index.asp (accessed May 1, 2014). 3 “William Beveridge,” BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ history/historic_figures/beveridge_william.shtml (accessed November 10, 2015). 4 “Scotland’s New Towns,” Scotland on Screen, National Library of Scotland, Creative Scotland and Education Scotland, http://scotlandonscreen. org.uk/database/record.php?usi=007-000-000425-C (accessed October 1, 2015).  111 •

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5 6

“Scotland’s New Towns.” “Postwar Housing and New Towns.”

My Little Underground 1 Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses, p. 7. 2 Jocey Quinn, “Lifting the Hood: Lifelong Learning and Young, White, Provincial Working Class Masculinities,” British Educational Research Journal 32 (5) (October 2006): 735–50. 3 Dorian Lynskey, “The Jesus and Mary Chain on Psychocandy: ‘It Was a Little Miracle.’” Guardian, October 26, 2014, http://www.theguardian. com/music/2014/oct/26/jesus-and-mary-chainpsychocandy-live-interview (accessed March17, 2016). 4 Upside Down: The Creation Records Story, dir. Danny O’Connor, perf. Jim Reid, Douglas Hart, Kevin Shields, Alan McGee, Revolver Entertainment, 2010 (DVD). 5 Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 74. 6 Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses, p. 16. 7 Lucy O’Brien, Shebop: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul, chapter 3: “The Real Thing: Motown, Spector and ’60s Svengalis,” New York: Penguin, 1995.

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Sowing Seeds 1 Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses, p. 7. 2 “Magic Mushrooms,” BBC Radio 1, http://www. bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/34BZx513f5vhwlsM gNy10tN/magic-mushrooms (accessed March 17, 2016).

Upside Down 1 Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses, p. 17. 2 Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses, p. 59. 3 John Robb, “Like a Virgin,” ZigZag, February 1985, April Skies, http://aprilskies.amniisia.com/articles/ art_copy.php?id=35&sort=interview (accessed March 15, 2014).

Never Understand 1 2

Upside Down. Ian Gittins, “Shoegaze: An Oral History,” Wondering Sound, http://www.wonderingsound. com/feature/shoegaze-oral-history-slowdive-ridelush/ (accessed March 17, 2016). 3 Upside Down. 4 “Glasgow: The Outsiders,” episode 3 of Music Nation, Channel 4, 2014, http://www.channel4.com/ programmes/music-nation/on-demand/59730-003 (accessed March 17, 2016). 5 Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses, p. 75. 6 Reynolds and Press, The Sex Revolts, p. 109 (accessed July 10, 2015).  113 •

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7 8

Quinn, “Lifting the Hood,” 735–50. Quinn, “Lifting the Hood,” 735–50.

Inside Me 1

Robert M. Lindner, Rebel Without a Cause: The Story of a Criminal Psychopath, New York: Grune & Stratton, 1944, p. 17. 2 Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses, p. 52. 3 Michael Goldberg, “Jesus and Mary Chain: Have They Got a Prayer?” Rolling Stone Australia, April 1986, April Skies, http://aprilskies.amniisia.com/ articles/art_copy.php?id=42&sort=interview (accessed April 30, 2014).

Something’s Wrong 1

Scottish Government: Communities Analytical Services, Quarterly Poverty Briefing – March 2015, http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0047/ 00474300.pdf (accessed March 17, 2016). 2 Martin Coldrick, “Margaret Thatcher and the Pit Stop in Yorkshire,” BBC News, Yorkshire, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-22068640 (accessed August 2, 2014). 3 Robb, “Like a Virgin.” 4 Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses, p. 77. 5 Howe, Barbed Wire Kisses, p. 84. 6 Richard Lowe, “Sweet Things,” Hit, October 26, 1985, April Skies, http://aprilskies.amniisia.

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N otes

7

8

com/articles/art_copy.php?id=68&sort=interview (accessed February 20, 2014). Julian Marszalek, “Brown Acid Black Leather: The Story Of The Jesus And Mary Chain’s ‘Psychocandy,’” The Quietus, November 8, 2011, http://thequietus.com/articles/07301-jesus-andmary-chain-psychocandy (accessed February 1, 2014). Marszalek, “Brown Acid Black Leather.”

Just Like Honey 1

Marszalek, “Brown Acid Black Leather.”

Some Candy Talking 1

2

Kim Cooper, Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears, Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2001. United States Department of Agriculture, Office of Communications, Agriculture Fact Book 2001–2002, Chapter 2: “Profiling Food Consumption in America,” USDA, http://www.usda.gov/documents/ usda-factbook-2001-2002.pdf (accessed March 17, 2016).

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Taste the Floor 1 O’Brien, Shebop, p. 65.

Taste of Cindy 1 2

Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, New York: New Directions, 1990, p. 44. Reynolds and Press, The Sex Revolts, p. 8.

Reverence 1

2

Craig Rosen, “Band Runs Afoul of Name-Conscious Network,” Los Angeles Daily News, December 8, 1987, http://articles.sun-sentinel. com/1987-12-08/features/8702100526_1_marychain-darklands-band (accessed October 1, 2015). Ellen Willis and Nona Willis Aronowitz, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011, p. 61 (“Stranded”), http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2015/05/12/ reverb-rivalry-and-resurrection-jim-reid-on-thejesus-and-mary-chains-psychocandy/ (accessed March 17, 2016).

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References

Austerlitz, Saul, “The Pernicious Rise of Poptimism,” New York Times Magazine, April 4, 2014, http://www.nytimes. com/2014/04/06/magazine/the-pernicious-rise-ofpoptimism.html?_r=0 (accessed March 17, 2016). “Bubblegum,” AllMusic, http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/ bubblegum-ma0000002487 (accessed March 17, 2016). Byrne, David,  How Music Works, San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2012. Coldrick, Martin, “Margaret Thatcher and the Pit Stop in Yorkshire,” BBC News, Yorkshire, http://www.bbc.com/news/ uk-england-22068640 (accessed August 2, 2014). Cooper, Kim, Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears, Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2001. Didion, Joan, “The White Album,” The White Album, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979, pp. 41–42. East Kilbride: The Making of a Town, dir. Orlando Simpson, South Lanarkshire Council Archive, 1990, http://www. heraldscotland.com/life_style/14331390.VIDEO__Memory_ lane___East_Kilbride__the_making_of_a_town/?ref=rss (accessed March 17, 2016). Gittins, Ian, “Shoegaze: An Oral History,” Wondering Sound, http://www.wonderingsound.com/feature/shoegaze-oral-history-slowdive-ride-lush/ (accessed March 17, 2016).  117 •

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“Glasgow: The Outsiders,” episode 3 of Music Nation, Channel 4, 2014, http://www.channel4.com/programmes/music-nation/ on-demand/59730-003 (accessed March 17, 2016). Goldberg, Michael, “Jesus and Mary Chain: Have They Got a Prayer?”  Rolling Stone Australia, April 1986, n.p.,  April Skies, http://aprilskies.amniisia.com/articles/art_copy.php?id=42& sort=interview (accessed April 30, 2014). Hayden, Dolores, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life, New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Hell, Richard, Massive Pissed Love, New York: Soft Skull Press, 2015. Howe, Zoë,  Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014. Lindner, Robert M., Rebel Without a Cause: The Story of a Criminal Psychopath, New York: Grune & Stratton, 1944, p. 17. Lispector, Clarice, Near to the Wild Heart, New York: New Directions, 1990. Lowe, Richard. “Sweet Things,” Hit,  October 26, 1985, April Skies, http://aprilskies.amniisia.com/articles/art_copy.php?id=68& sort=interview (accessed February 20, 2014). Lynskey, Dorian, “The Jesus and Mary Chain on Psychocandy: ‘It Was a Little Miracle.’” Guardian, October 26, 2014, http:// www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/26/jesus-and-marychain-psychocandy-live-interview (accessed March 17, 2016). “Magic Mushrooms,” BBC Radio 1, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/articles/34BZx513f5vhwlsMgNy10tN/ magic-mushrooms (accessed March 17, 2016). Marszalek, Julian, “Brown Acid Black Leather: The Story Of The Jesus And Mary Chain’s ‘Psychocandy,’”  The Quietus, November 8, 2011, http://thequietus.com/articles/07301jesus-and-mary-chain-psychocandy (accessed February 1, 2014). “New Towns,” BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/education/ as/sixties/standard/rural/new_towns.shtml (accessed July 1, 2015).  118 •

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R eferences

O’Brien, Lucy, Shebop: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul, New York: Penguin, 1995. “Post-war Housing and New Towns,”  20th and 21st Centuries, Scotland’s History, Education Scotland, http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scotlandshistory/20thand21stcenturies/ postwarhousing/index.asp (accessed May 1, 2014). Quinn, Jocey, “Lifting the Hood: Lifelong Learning and Young, White, Provincial Working Class Masculinities,” British Educational Research Journal 32 (5) (October 2006): 735–50. Reid, William, and Jim Reid. Psychocandy, perf. Douglas Hart and Bobby Gillespie, the Jesus and Mary Chain, 1985 (CD). Reynolds, Simon, and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Richards, Chris, http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/ music/at-the-top-of-the-pop-music-heap-theres-no-criticizing-the-view/2015/04/16/d98d53a8-e1f2-11e4-b510962fcfabc310_story.html (accessed March 17, 2016). Robb, John, “Like a Virgin,” ZigZag, February 1985, April Skies, http://aprilskies.amniisia.com/articles/art_copy.php?id=35& sort=interview (accessed March 15, 2014). Rosen, Craig, “Band Runs Afoul of Name-Conscious Network,” Los Angeles Daily News, December 8, 1987, http://articles. sun-sentinel.com/1987-12-08/features/8702100526_1_ mary-chain-darklands-band (accessed October 1, 2015). “Scotland’s New Towns,” Scotland on Screen, National Library of Scotland, Creative Scotland and Education Scotland, http:// scotlandonscreen.org.uk/database/record.php?usi=007-000000-425-C (accessed October 1, 2015). Scottish Government: Communities Analytical Services, Quarterly Poverty Briefing – March 2015,  http://www.gov.scot/ Resource/0047/00474300.pdf (accessed March 17, 2016). Sutherland, Steve, “The State of Pop, Part 4,” Melody Maker, 1987.  119 •

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United States Department of Agriculture, Office of Communications, Agriculture Fact Book 2001–2002, Chapter 2: “Profiling Food Consumption in America,” USDA, http:// www.usda.gov/documents/usda-factbook-2001-2002.pdf (accessed March 17, 2016). Upside Down: The Creation Records Story, dir. Danny O’Connor, perf. Jim Reid, Douglas Hart, Kevin Shields, Alan McGee, Revolver Entertainment, 2010 (DVD). Valania, Jonathan, “Q&A With Jim Reid, Lead Singer of the Jesus and Mary Chain,” September 7, 2012, http://www.phawker. com/2012/09/07/incoming-some-candy-talking/ (accessed August 5, 2014). William Beveridge,” BBC,, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ historic_figures/beveridge_william.shtml (accessed November 10, 2015). Willis, Ellen, and Nona Willis Aronowitz, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011, http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2015/05/12/reverb-rivalry-andresurrection-jim-reid-on-the-jesus-and-mary-chainspsychocandy/ (accessed March 17, 2016).

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Also available in the series: 1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard 12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz 19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. Endtroducing … by Eliot Wilder 25. Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy 31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar

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35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by Eric Weisbard 42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris 58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. XO by Matthew LeMay 64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. One Step Beyond … by Terry Edwards 67. Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol 70. Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Song Cycle by Richard Henderson

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A lso available in the series

75. Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton 86. Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Entertainment! by Kevin J. H. Dettmar 92. Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. ( ) by Ethan Hayden 100. Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica by David Masciotra 109. A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. Geto Boys by Rolf Potts

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115. Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi

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