19.03.2015

Behind the Psycho drama

Zoë Howe Barbed wire kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain story Polygon, 2014, pp306, £12.99

Anyone who reads a lot of music biographies or watches music documentaries on BBC4 will be familiar with the following archetype for groups or bands entering the music industry.

The group has initial success and develops a following and media profile. Said group signs to a major music corporation and gets a manager. Hard edges get knocked off sound and image gets cleaned up. Group begins to struggle by the time of third album (sometimes earlier). Group gets fed up with market expectations and with touring - drug and/or alcohol use escalates. If group is lucky enough to survive, it returns to original sound and this is hailed as ‘getting back to our roots’. Group splits, with band members vowing never to talk to each other again (often the manager runs off with the money). Occasional pieces appear in the media over the following decade with a ‘will they/won’t they get back together?’ shtick. Group re-forms and tours; all its recordings are reissued; articles and books appear stating how important the group actually was to the progression of modern culture, and so on.

If this story endlessly recurs it is because it is anchored in the hard reality of the commodification of the music industry. The more clever practitioners of this biographical industry might relate the history of this or that group to a social backdrop, although usually the product (the music or the image) is magically absolved from this process. In the ultimate perversion, this biographical music industry has shown an interest in recent years in celebrating music labels - ie, the business arrangements used to release music. It does not seem to matter whether you have a massive enterprise such as EMI or a much smaller ‘indie’ label such as Rough Trade - or even if you have a coffee-table book of hip Blue Note jazz covers: it is business that is actually being celebrated here.

The trajectory of The Jesus and Mary Chain in the 1980s, 90s and beyond, as featured in this book, does not differ wildly from the archetype set out above, although the group does not seem to have suffered unduly from corrupt management. Added into the tale are that The Jesus and Mary Chain was formed by brothers Jim and William Reid (guitars and vocals), who generally come across as pretty depressed, insular characters and often unwilling to play the music industry’s myriad games. (The group was also initially composed of Douglas Hart, bass, who has since become a filmmaker of some repute; and Bobby Gillespie, drums, the well-known front man of Primal Scream.)

The band formed in 1983 in East Kilbride, Scotland, and released their first single, ‘Upside down’, on the independent or ‘indie’ (ie, unconnected with any major music label) Creation Records. Swathed in echo and oceans of feedback (ie, the so-called ‘mistake’ that happens when you hold a guitar too close to an amplifier), the record meant that scruffy, miserable kids like me in 1984 saw the Mary Chain as messiahs. The buzz quickly got about from music papers such as NME, Melody Maker and Sounds - which had important roles as arbiters of hype in the pre-internet era - that the Mary Chain were the ‘new Sex Pistols’; gigs descended into riots after the group refused to play longer than 20 minutes, with ear-splitting feedback the norm. In 1985, the Mary Chain signed to an offshoot of major label Warner Brothers and, in November 1985, released the album Psycho candy, which instantly assumed a ‘classic’ status among the cognoscenti.

Zoë Howe outlines these events in a perfectly component and well-documented manner, but it is very much the history of the Mary Chain in a bubble. The big question that I was interested in seeing answered - namely, why the group became the great hope of 1985 for some - is simply absent. The knock-on effect is that Howe cannot really explain the band’s obvious decline after Psycho candy, other than by overbearing narratives of familial dysfunction and bad personal habits. By this point you might as well be reading about Fleetwood Mac or some other monstrosity.

The Mary Chain would probably despise me for writing this, but it was part of a movement of bands in the 1980s that is sometimes referred to as ‘shambling’ or ‘cutie’ (often this got translated into ‘indie’ or ‘indie kids’; or later into ‘C86’, after an infamous compilation album of the same name). These groups were a reaction to the glossed and polished sound of much of the ‘clean’, sequenced pop music in the charts at the time - Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and other unmentionables - an overtly commoditised form that appeared to embrace the prevailing Thatcherite ethos. The ‘indie’ bands were definitively retro; embracing a 1960s guitar-led sound that usually translated into a set of amateurish pop songs. In clothing and style, the 1960s also prevailed with mop-tops, Chelsea boots and scruffy hand-me-downs to the fore. This often took on an aspect of immaturity, with children’s anoraks becoming popular. Lyrics to songs were sometimes self-obsessed, but, in a kind of savage inversion of corporate individualism, this was made over into an insular universe, where a procession of doomed souls expressed varying degrees of anomie. Everything in this movement was defiantly out of time, unfocused and primitive, and therefore it was a fairly clear form of protest against the gloss of the mainstream. The Pastels, another Scottish group, were perhaps the archetypal ‘shambling’ band and influenced scores of others, very few of which are memorable.

The Pastels were one of the few contemporary groups for whom The Jesus and Mary Chain had any respect. However, the Mary Chain came from the same movement. Musical references were retro (Phil Spector, the Shangri-Las, the Beach Boys, early Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground). The group’s clothing and style was a scruffy approximation of the Beatles’ Hamburg-era look and other 1960s influences, albeit with a punkier edge. Words used in song titles such as ‘candy’, ‘honey’ and ‘Cindy’ had a quaint feel to them. Primitivism was the hallmark of the band’s chaotic live performances: Douglas Hart played a bass with only two strings; drummer Bobby Gillespie stood up to play a floor tom and a snare; and vocalist Jim Reid rolled around the floor. Feedback and distortion meant the Mary Chain’s early recordings were the very opposite of the gloss and so-called ‘sophistication’ demanded by radio producers of the time.

However, there were also strands in the Mary Chain that set them apart from the serried ranks of ‘indie’ dross in 1984-85. First, it did not see itself in competition with other ‘indie’ groups, hence the amenability to signing with Warner Brothers. Jim Reid said in 1985: “We’re a very commercial group; we’ve got our eye on the charts in the USA, Britain and all over the world. Our direct competition is Culture Club and Duran Duran; we’re competing with those groups. We’re not competing with anyone in the independent charts at all. That’s pointless. We’re trying to do what the Beatles did in the 1960s.”¹ This bravado was rare among bands that were then emerging from the ‘indie’ sector, where there was almost a neurotic fear of being successful, or ‘selling out’ from most quarters. This kind of thinking appeared to pose the Mary Chain as the leaders of some kind of vague movement to sanitise popular music.

Second, the group’s relentless use of feedback on recordings lent the songs an epic sonic quality that very few ‘indie’ groups, with perhaps the exceptions of The Smiths and the Cocteau Twins, could match in 1985. Lyrics were highly condensed and striking approximations of the ‘shambling’ movement’s sense of individual alienation, and thus they functioned with a distinct ‘pop’ sensibility that had not been lost on music industry moguls.

The Psycho candy album was therefore a particularly powerful distillation of a rebellion against the prevailing public mores of Britain, projected through a bastardised and perverted notion of individuality against a landscape of feedback, noise and distortion that obscured and subverted the clean lines of commodification then infecting most mainstream music. Lyrics had seemingly no collective points of reference, perhaps best summed by the song, ‘Something’s wrong’: “Another day goes by me/Another day of life without you/And as I look around me/I feel so lonely there’s no-one/No-one here beside me/No-one here to help to see me through.” This territory of broken communication and insular, romanticised misery was repeated across the album and is clearly expressed by the song titles: ‘Never understand’, ‘You trip me up’, ‘Cut dead’, ‘In a hole’, ‘Taste the floor’, ‘Inside me’, ‘My little underground’, ‘The hardest walk’ and so on.

The music writer, Simon Reynolds, says that Psycho candy “deserves its classic status because of the thrilling manner in which [the Mary Chain] juxtaposed their always faintly déjà vu melodies … against an oddly serene wall of feedback, with the two elements of their sound - the noise and the pop - not really integrated at all”.² This judgement is partly a result of treating popular music merely as a funereal procession of styles. Both ‘sides’ of Psycho candy, although separate to the ear, are enmeshed if you grasp their relation to the Britain of 1985; its lyrics suggest that the individual is merely a repository of misery, while its epic wall of feedback was a critique of the way that popular music in general had slid into a bland grave of ‘new pop’, where all the bends had been straightened out and everything was meant to be shiny and new. Psycho candy suggested that even the sweetest moments had been corrupted and rubbed in the dirt.

Of course, it could not last much beyond that point and by the time that The Jesus and Mary Chain’s second album, Darklands, came out in 1987, the more radical gestures had been replaced by an underwhelming pastiche of a variety of rock and blues styles. When Automatic (1989) appeared, the group had produced a more synthesised sound designed to appeal to US radio, and a host of Americanisms were incorporated into the songs and imagery (although their image was never truly cleaned up and the Reid brothers remained relative outsiders in the industry). The Mary Chain had had its ‘moment’ in 1985 and it became just another band. By commercialising its sound - in relative terms - it partially escaped the bounds of the indie movement of yore, marginalising itself in the process.

In any case, by the end of the 1980s, the ‘shambling’ bands had become definitively old hat and the new ‘baggy’ rebellion was taken forward by ‘indie’ groups incorporating dance rhythms into their musical armoury (Primal Scream, The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Charlatans and so on). Notions of collectivism, enhanced by drugs such as Ecstasy, reappeared and optimism reappeared, as such groups carved out much bigger working class audiences than The Smiths or The Jesus and Mary Chain had ever managed.

The era of Psycho candy was long past.

Howard Phillips

Notes

1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY4ZXpsoOUg. The interview is wrongly listed on this website as being from 1986.

2. Simon Reynolds Rip it up and start again: post-punk 1978-1984 London 2005, p521.