I once wrote on this blog that the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Scottish alternative rock band whose core members are brothers Jim and William Reid, was “on at least three days of the week… my favourite band of all time.” Incidentally, I’d say on the other four days of the week my favourite all-time band is the Rolling Stones between 1969 and 1974, when Mick Taylor played with them.
However, when I heard that the Jesus and Mary Chain intended to perform in Singapore, my current abode, in the middle of this month, I felt a little apprehensive. For one thing, though I often cite the first time I saw the band live – at London’s Brixton Academy in 1992, while they headlined the Rollercoaster tour and the support bands were American alternative rockers Dinosaur Jr, swirly shoegazers My Bloody Valentine, and a young, up-and-coming band called Blur (whatever happened to them?) – as one of the best gigs, if not the best gig I’ve ever attended, the last time I saw them was a different affair. That was in Edinburgh in 1998, when relations between Jim and William had decayed so badly they spent the show telling each other to shut up. It presaged a disastrous performance soon after at the Los Angeles venue House of Blues, where Jim turned up drunk and William stormed offstage. To no one’s great surprise, the following year they announced the band had split up – though they reformed in 2007.
Would 2025’s Singapore gig be closer in spirit to the 1992 one or the 1998 one?
Also, last year, they released a new album called Glasgow Eyes whose sound was something of a departure. Though simultaneously dreamy and scuzzy in the best Jesus and Mary Chain tradition, a strong dose of electronica infused it. I assumed their 2025 set would contain a good number of songs from Glasgow Eyes, which was fine, but it’d mean a lot of the music wouldn’t be what I immediately associated with the Jesus and Mary Chain.
There was the age issue too. With Jim and William Reid now 64 and 67 years old respectively, I wondered how kind time had been to their performing abilities. After all, I hadn’t seen these guys sing and play onstage for nearly 30 years. 30 years – wow!
And lastly, it just seemed weird that the Jesus and Mary Chain was playing in a famously sensible, serious and clean-living place like Singapore. After all, this is a band that initially made its name with chaos and disreputability. When the Reids first performed in 1983, they generated controversy with their habit of delivering gigs just 15 minutes long, with their backs to the audience and their sound cloaked in squalls of feedback, which went down so badly with the punters that – according to the British tabloid press – ‘riots’ ensued. And their Singaporean show was scheduled for the Esplanade Concert Hall, a venue whose floorspace is entirely covered in seating. I honestly couldn’t imagine a Jesus and Mary Chain gig where everyone had to sit.
Thus, as I entered the Esplanade Concert Hall on the evening of the show, I had plenty of concerns. But I needn’t have worried. This was a great concert.
Before things kicked off, I ordered a few beers at a bar just outside the auditorium’s entrance and sipped them whilst taking in the appearances of my fellow concert-goers. It genuinely surprised me how many Singaporeans had come tonight. They consisted mainly of young goths or middle-aged folk who looked like they’d been art-college students in an earlier era. There was a lengthy queue, mainly of Singaporeans, to buy T-shirts. An especially popular purchase was a T-shirt featuring the cover of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1985 debut album, Psychocandy, which depicted Jim and William in their svelte youth.
© Blanco y Negro
(Among the non-Jesus and Mary Chain T-shirts I observed folk wearing were, not unexpectedly, ones bearing the names of the Cure and the Cocteau Twins… And, in one case, of Radio Clyde, which was unexpected.)
But there were Westerners around too. Whilst queuing for a beer, I got chatting to an English fellow who was wearing a T-shirt featuring the title of Blur’s 1993 album Modern Life is Rubbish. “I actually saw Blur supporting the Jesus and Mary Chain,” I said, “back before they were famous.”
He replied, “That would have been the Rollercoaster tour. I saw it in Birmingham.” He added wistfully, “Don’t remember much about it, though.”
I should have come back with the obvious quip, “Yes, it was all a bit of a blur!” But, alas, I wasn’t as quick-thinking as that.
Just before eight o’clock, the gig’s start-time, everyone made their way into the auditorium. However, when the lights dimmed, it wasn’t for the Jesus and Mary Chain’s set but for that of a support act, the Singaporean singer-songwriter Shye. Although Shye’s Wikipedia page describes the musical genres she works in as ‘folk-rock, neo-soul, electronic, R&B’, what she and her backing band served up tonight sounded pretty shoegazer-ish to me – not too far removed from the songs at the mellower end of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s repertoire. Her performance went down well.
Then the main attraction appeared. The moment the band – Jim, William, guitarist Scott Von Ryper, bassist Mark Crozer and drummer Justin Welch – came onstage and immediately tore into Jamcod, the most blistering track on Glasgow Eyes, the crowd rose to their feet as one and stayed on their feet for the entire 19-song set. And I knew at once from the band’s poise and confidence, and the audience’s euphoric reaction to them, that everything about this show was going to be right.
Every phase in the Jesus and Mary Chain’s career was acknowledged tonight, with material played from all eight of the band’s studio albums – plus the 1986 Some Candy Talking EP, unsurprisingly represented by the song Some Candy Talking, whose ambiguous lyrics so upset the late disc jockey Mike Smith that he blacklisted it on the BBC’s Radio One. As it turned out, songs from Glasgow Eyes were limited to four. They actually fitted in seamlessly with the rest of the set, even if their opening cascades of beeping sounds told you they were coming.
I was delighted that the band played three songs from my favourite Jesus and Mary Chain album, 1989’s Automatic: Between Planets, Halfway to Crazy and Head On. I always felt Automatic got a bad rap from the critics and was sorely underrated. Also well-represented was 1987’s Darklands, whose brooding numbers added both melody and melancholy to proceedings and balanced the set’s more abrasive parts: the album’s title track, Happy When It Rains and, appropriately, April Skies. (Well, the show was taking place under the April skies of Singapore.) And for fans who’d been with the band from the very beginning, three numbers were aired from Psychocandy: In a Hole, Taste of Cindy and Just Like Honey.
On the original Just Like Honey, the female backing vocals were provided by Karen Parker, the then-girlfriend of then-Jesus and Mary Chain drummer Bobby Gillespie (who, of course, would go on to front Primal Scream). So versatile was Ms. Parker that on one occasion she stepped in and played drums at one of their gigs after Gillespie had hurt his hand. Also, Scarlett Johannson did those vocal duties when the band played Just Like Honey during their first performance after reforming in 2007. Tonight, Jim Reid invited Shye, the support act, onstage again to sing it with him. She also co-sang Sometimes Always from 1994’s Stoned & Dethroned – stepping into the shoes of Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval, who’d shared the vocals on the original recording. Shye acquitted herself beautifully.
I doubt if many people would rate 1998’s Munki or 2017’s Damage and Joy as the best-ever Jesus and Mary Chain albums, but I had absolutely no problem with the songs played from them tonight: Cracking Up and I Hate Rock ‘n’ Roll off the former and All Things Pass off the latter. Everything, in fact, was performed with great aplomb. As frontman, Jim Reid kept the talk between songs to a minimum and just got on with delivering the goods, i.e., singing. At the end of the main set, though, he did comment drily, “We have to go now… But if you make some noise, we might come back.”
My only regrets about the evening were a few songs I’d have liked them to play, but they didn’t. These included Blues from a Gun and UV Ray from Automatic, and Nine Million Rainy Days from Darklands. I would also have enjoyed hearing something off their two compilations of singles, B-sides and rarities, 1988’s Barbed Wire Kisses, (for example, Sidewalking) and 1993’s The Sound of Speed (for example, Snakedriver and their cover of the 13th Floor Elevators’ Reverberation). And I’d have loved to hear more from 1992’s Honey’s Dead, though the song they did play from it, Reverence, at the end of the encore brought proceedings to a devastating close. None of this, of course, was the band’s fault. It’s a testimony to the greatness of their back catalogue that they could never cram everything you wanted to hear into a single set.
When I left the Esplanade Concert Hall and stepped out into the Singaporean night, I felt quite a buzz, to say the least. In fact, I felt 30 years younger.
Temporarily, anyway.
