The 10 best songs by The Jesus and Mary Chain
It’s incredible to think how utterly alien and confounding The Jesus and Mary Chain‘s impact was on the UK indie scene back in the mid-1980s. Confrontational in a wholly lethargic and nonchalant way, the band would typically rip through 20-minute sets with their backs to the audience, zero interaction with the crowd in any way, guitars deliberately out of tune and reducing the bass down to two strings. Such aloof provocation resulted in a barrage of bottles and flying missives hurling their way at their ’84 ICA Rock Week set.
Formed in East Kilbride as a reaction against “the crap coming out of the radio”, brothers Jim and William Reid spent five years on the dole writing songs and conceptualising their image, eventually honing their trademark feedback noise-pop, an intriguing weld of their love for groups like The Velvet Underground and The Stooges as much as The Beach Boys and The Monkees.
Struggling to make an impression in the Glasgow area, they decamped to West London’s Fulham. With good fortune, a demo tape found its way to fellow Scot and Creation Records founder Alan McGee, who subsequently began promoting and managing the band. Recruiting future Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie on drums, their debut album Psychocandy dropped to unanimous critical acclaim in 1985, establishing their signature harsh, sonic style all following albums would be inevitably compared to.
While managing to stick to their creative guns and bringing the mainstream to them rather than the other way around, The Jesus and Mary Chain have become the ultimate ‘cult’ band, with a body of work that maintains their fiercely independent and uncompromising approach to their razor-blade pop, but also finding their way into the upper echelons of pop culture, their work featured in Lost in Translation and referenced in The Simpsons, that two lads signing on in early ’80s South Lanarkshire could never have dreamed of.
The 10 best songs by The Jesus and Mary Chain
10. ‘Blues From a Gun’ – Automatic
An overlooked and critically dismissed album, 1989’s Automatic‘s pursuit of brawny, propulsive heft courtesy of a popping drum machine and the band reduced to the core of just the Reids lend the record a kinetic drive that feels welcome listening today. The use of synthesized bass and Alan Moulder’s engineering chops push the band to a sonic proximity with the industrial artists of Wax Trax! Records as much as UK indie.
Automatic‘s lead single, ‘Blues From a Gun,’ is an obvious choice. A throbbing bass pulses underneath a furious guitar attack and envelops William’s laconic vocal delivery, not the usual singer Jim’s, atop a subtly synthetic wash of bluesy twang. The States took to it well, and it was their biggest-selling single in the US up to that point.
9. ‘Save Me’ – Stoned & Dethroned
After a heavy year’s touring, including billing on ’92’s travelling Lollapalooza Festival, JMC sought to abandon the abrasive racket they were known for and go all in for an initially conceived acoustic album. Although Stoned & Dethroned does follow a more gentle, alternative rock direction beyond the album’s initial conception, it’s their most mellow and languid record, the sound of a band catching their breath after a punishing touring schedule.
While the duets with Shane MacGowan or Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval are album highlights, ‘Save Me’ shines with its breezy, nocturnal verses detailing private confessionals, its Gallagher-like solo lifting the song to the closest JMC’s ever got to anthemic at odds with its lyrical ambiguity.
8. ‘Catchfire’ – Honey’s Dead
Continuing their interest in drum programming, and slyly referencing their ‘Just Like Honey’ hit in a bold declaration of their new musical direction, JMC smatters ’92’s Honey’s Dead with undercurrents of electronica and loops infused with washes of shoegaze that propelled them to American college radio and eventual Lollapalooza booking.
‘Catchfire’ expertly captures the sonic mood they were in, with caustic guitars dripping with feedback and digital scree atop a skulking beat, its nebulous, shifting textures and dynamics slithering across Jim’s dispassionate vocal drawl serve as an essential deep cut for the band.
7. ‘Fall’ – Darklands
Tired of the cynical perception that their use of feedback was a gimmick, JMC dialled down the wall of noise for sophomore LP Darklands, offering their keen pop knack and solid songcraft some visibility with the aural smog now wafted away.
‘Fall’ injects a dose of doomy, goth strut to Darklands‘ otherwise brighter character, a gripping swagger of quasi-religious explorations of lust and temptation, ‘Fall’ is a sexy punch to the face as the LP’s prior songs have lulled you into a false sense of security. Also contains one of their best lines: “I’m as dead as a Christmas tree”.
6. ‘Moe Tucker’ – Munki
Often considered the ‘break-up’ album, it being JMC’s last record before their eight-year hiatus and recorded during a fractious period between the Reid brothers, their feelings were made on the acerbic ‘I Hate Rock ‘N’ Roll‘, a blistering rebuke against the music industry, and possibly each other. Munki‘s sardonic lead single was countered by their third, ‘I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll’ ensuring their sixth album wasn’t mired in total negativity.
Recruiting their younger sister Linda for vocal duties, and titled after their beloved Velvet Underground drummer, ‘Moe Tucker’ has a joyous, infectious energy that blooms from underneath its prickly, fuzzed-out abrasion. Evoking an air of assuasive conciliation between the brothers, ‘Moe Tucker’s a cut that shows JMC at their most playful.
5. ‘Taste the Floor’ – Psychocandy
The classic, signature record that will always define them and one of the finest debuts ever, ’85’s Psychocandy stunned the music world with its clashing solder of bubble-gum pop and punishing din. Jim Reid’s skewed balance of guarded passion and acidic aura turned him into an unlikely thrilling frontman despite his back to the stage.
‘Taste the Floor’ effortlessly displays their natural ability to conjure big, bold punk impact from a front of sheer apathy. Gargantuan, swallowing riffs batter and pummel mercilessly, Jim’s lyrical exhalations “can’t you hear the sound of it, just like a big brass drum” as much a warning of their own, impending arrival.
4. ‘Mood Rider’ – Damage and Joy
Their first album in 19 years, ’17’s Damage and Joy saw JMC let bygones be bygones and indulge in a clearer, more flagrant exercise in pop-rock, albeit spiked with their low-level acidity. While underwhelming as a whole, its buoyant effervescence carries the record a long way.
‘Mood Rider’ is the album’s standout cut, a big yet introspective wander of dusky rock and shadowy lyrical intimations that demonstrated the Reid brothers’ undimmed gift for stirring and affecting songcraft.
3. ‘Jamcod’ – Glasgow Eyes
Adopting a ‘let’s see what happens’ approach to this year’s Glasgow Eyes, Reid confessed that, like the ‘old days’, they recorded their eighth album at the namesake city’s Castle of Doom Studios with little to no plan, and it paid off. A beguiling LP that crawls and wriggles with synths and electronic hiss, Glasgow Eyes has a remarkable impromptu energy running throughout.
Lead single ‘Jamcod’ was the perfect album tease, a synth-twisted lurch of motorik percussion and battery-acid post-punk that showed JMC still knew how to wield sonic chaos toward their own unique pop sensibility.
2. ‘Happy When It Rains’ – Darklands
Darklands is all things at once. Gillespie’s replacement with the drum machine pushed JMC to similar sonic territory to New Order’s indie flourishes of the era, but the Reids’ pop affections also near The Cure‘s romantic Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me‘s dramatic vignettes. Then there’s the rain-soaked atmosphere of Darklands‘ mordant production, earning stripes with the ethereal, 4AD crowd hooked on Cocteau Twins.
Darklands‘ second single ‘Happy When It Rains’ captures their penchant for evocative drama succinctly, an almost cinematic flaunt of melancholic soar that wrestles a galvanising energy from its morose front, showcasing JMC’s expert dynamics and emotional dimensions.
1. ‘Just Like Honey’ – Psychocandy
What else could it have been? Psychocandy‘s third single proved to be the album’s most successful and the defining JMC song. An exemplary synthesis of their love for ’60s pop and post-punk’s volatility, ‘Just Like Honey’ is both tender and biting, a possible love letter to oral sex or alluding to something far more mysterious in the realms of love and desire.
Gillespie’s carnal drumming, borrowed from The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’, heightens the song’s sensual electricity, and the smothering feedback inadvertently invented shoegaze. An extraordinary pop song that, more than any other of their hits, pulled the mainstream toward them with its enduring, divine energy.
