“Like the heavens had just opened”: How a cheap fuzz pedal defined the sound of The Jesus and Mary Chain
Technology has always driven the wheel of rock and roll progress: where would we all be without the advent of the electric guitar, would 1960s R&B sound the same without the introduction of the Hammond Organ, and how crap would ‘Strawberry Fields’ have sounded without the Mellotron?
Back in the 1980s, Scottish indie pioneers The Jesus and Mary Chain found themselves on the cusp of a similarly important technological discovery.
It was in the wake of the indie explosion that Jim and William Reid formed The Jesus and Mary Chain back in 1983, in the industrial surroundings of East Kilbride. While the prevailing sounds of that particular era were dominated by the indie output of Glasgow, with Postcard Records doing the majority of the heavy lifting by establishing the likes of Josef K, Aztec Camera, and Orange Juice, the Reid brothers were looking for something a little more abrasive and experimental.
In a tale as old as the music industry itself, though, their ambition to capture the harshness of their surroundings in musical form was limited, both by the technology of the day and the band’s ability to get their hands on said technology. Clean-cut guitars and floppy hair-dos simply weren’t going to cut it as far as the Jesus and Mary Chain were concerned.
Eventually, and after much searching, the brothers found the missing part of their sound in a second-hand fuzz pedal being offloaded by a neighbour. As William Reid once recalled to Life of the Record, “This little guy called Queenie, who used to live in our street in East Kilbride, I heard that he was selling this fuzz pedal thing, he was a guitar player.”
As it turns out, the pedal was a Shin-Ei 8Tr Fuzz Wah pedal, a 1970s Japanese number that was, by all accounts, rather difficult to operate as intended. Nevertheless, it suited Reid’s purposes beautifully. “[He] came down to the house, I plugged in a Shin-Ei pedal that he was selling and, oh my god, it was like the heavens had just opened and God had shined his light on me and me and Jim just looked at each other and went ‘Fuck! Fucking hell.’”
“I give Queenie ten quid, and Queenie went about telling the neighbourhood that he sold me a broken fuzz pedal,” Reid recalled with a laugh. As his brother Jim pointed out, though, “It fucking started playing Psychocandy by itself, you know. This is the sound that we’ve actually been sitting here trying to describe.” Remembering, “This guy just mysteriously walks into a room and tries to rip us off – he thinks – and he doesn’t realise that this thing is exactly what we’ve been searching for.”
Armed with that new-old piece of technology, the Jesus and Mary Chain immediately found the harsh, abrasive noise pop sound that went on to define, not only the band itself but the entirety of the indie realm.
Without the discovery of that ten-quid pedal – which, incidentally, is now worth multiple hundreds of pounds thanks largely to its use on Psychocandy – the Jesus and Mary Chain would never have found that distinctive sound and, as a result, the future emergence of groups like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and, of course, Primal Scream (Bobby Gillespie getting his first proper gig as the drummer for the Chain), likely wouldn’t have existed, either.
In the modern age, there is no shortage of fuzz pedals that aim to recreate the very same sound of that legendary 1985 album with far more reliable, easy-to-use, and typically cheaper results than the original Shin-Ei 8Tr, and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s own repertoire of guitar pedals has certainly grown over the years.
Still, it was that unsuspecting purchase that helped to create one of the greatest indie albums of all time, and give Scotland one of its all-time greatest groups – not a bad result for a tenner.
