Tag: Jim Reid

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My favourite gigs

 

© Chrysalis

 

My previous blog-post was about seeing Deep Purple live in concert.  This was the most recent of many gigs I’ve been to.  Indeed, by my calculations, I’ve seen about 160 musical acts perform live, starting with veteran Scottish hard rock / heavy metal group Nazareth, whom I saw in Aberdeen in 1984.

 

Anyway, this has got me thinking about the best gigs I’ve ever been to.  Here are my favourite eight.

 

The Proclaimers – Aberdeen Ritzy, 1987

I didn’t know what to expect when some mates got me along to a concert by Craig and Charlie Reid, better known as Scottish folk-pop duo the Proclaimers.  I liked the Reids – their hit song that year, the politically charged Letter from America, was already becoming Scotland’s great anti-Maggie-Thatcher anthem – but I had no idea what they’d be like live.  Also, they were performing at Aberdeen Ritzy, a place I had an aversion to because I’d once worked there as a member of the floor-staff and it was the least enjoyable job I’d ever had.

 

I had no reason to be apprehensive.  The gig felt like a giant, joyous football match where the entire crowd supported the same team and that team was winning 10-0.  I suspect one reason why the Proclaimers went down so well that night was because the Aberdonian audience could relate to their song Throw the R Away, which is about the frustrations caused when standard English-speakers can’t understand your accent.  Which is a common hazard if you speak Aberdonian.

 

The Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine, Blur – the Rollercoaster Tour, London Brixton Academy, 1992

From Craig and Charlie Reid to two more Scottish siblings called Reid.  These were Jim and William Reid of the feedback-drenched East Kilbride noise-niks the Jesus and Mary Chain.  Their Rollercoaster Tour date at Brixton Academy in 1992 offered not only excellent support from American alternative rockers Dinosaur Jr and dreamy, swirly shoegazers My Bloody Valentine, but also a chance to sample a young, up-and-coming band called Blur.  Though my reaction when I saw Damon Albarn onstage wasn’t that he was destined to be an icon of the future Britpop movement but that he resembled a very young, musical version of Norman Wisdom.

 

© Blanco y Negro

 

Meanwhile, the headliners blew me away.  Promoting their recent album Honey’s Dead (1992), which was packed with behemoth tunes like Reverence and Sugar Ray, the Jesus and Mary Chain performed in silhouette against a giant blood-red backdrop.  This made them look like the imperious Masters of the Universe.

 

The Manic Street Preachers – Sapporo Penny Lane, 1993

Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers were promoting their album Gold Against the Soul when they turned up in the Japanese city of Sapporo, at whose Hokkai-Gakuen University I worked at the time as a lecturer.  Though in Britain they were seen as having a punk edge, the Japanese took their fondness for glam clothes and eyeliner as meaning they were another Guns n’ Roses.  Thus, their gig at Sapporo’s Penny Lane drew a lot of Japanese girls wearing silk scarves and floppy hats, who kept squealing “Rich-ee!” at the Manics’ guitarist, Richey Edwards.  The gig was both excellent and dramatic – the drama coming when the highly-strung Edwards freaked out about an illuminated fire-exit sign at the other end of the auditorium that he claimed was putting him off his performance.

 

Since then, that gig has haunted me in two ways.  Firstly, around the same time, I bought the Japanese edition of Gold Against the Soul.  Years later, long after Edwards’ tragic and never-explained disappearance in 1995, I listened to it again and discovered the CD case contained a second tray that I hadn’t noticed before.  In it was a bonus CD, a live one of them performing in Japan.  When I played it, I felt poignantly transported back in time – for there, in the crowd, were those Japanese girls shouting “Rich-ee!” again at poor, doomed Richey Edwards.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Nakagami

 

Secondly, when I saw the Manic Street Preachers again last year, in Singapore, they played a new song called Still Snowing in Sapporo, which I learned was inspired by that long-ago gig in 1993.  How weird, I thought, to be in the audience listening to them playing a song about a concert 30 years earlier… knowing I was were probably the only person in the audience who was at that concert.

 

The Beastie Boys – Sapporo Jasmac Plaza, 1995

I almost didn’t attend this gig, which also took place while I worked at Sapporo’s Hokkai-Gakuen University.  The show was due to begin at 7.00 PM – concerts in Japan tended to start when the tickets said they would – and the same evening I had to give a late lecture until 7.20 PM.  Plus I calculated that by the time I got from the university campus to the venue, the Jasmac Plaza, the Beastie Boys would already be an hour into their gig.  It didn’t seem worth it.

 

However, a few weeks before the concert, it was announced that work had been completed on a new Sapporo subway line, which had a station called Gakuen-Mae directly below the campus where I was working.  I also discovered that the next station along the new line, Hosui-Suskino, had an exit that was only a block from the Jasmac Plaza.  And a subway train left for Hosui-Susukino from Gakuen-Mae every evening at 7.30.  I figured that if I caught the 7.30 train, and moved very fast, I could be at the concert hall in the Jasmac Plaza ten minutes later – hopefully not yet halfway through the Beastie Boys’ set.  Fate seemed to be urging me to buy a ticket, so I did.

 

That evening, I finished my lecture on the stroke of 7.20, ran like hell for the subway station and charged down what seemed like half-a-dozen escalators, descending deeper and deeper into the earth.  The train was already at the platform and I ran and jumped through its about-to-close carriage doors.  At Hosui-Susukino, I sprang out of the train, ran up more escalators, ran along a city block into the Jasmac Plaza and up several staircases to its fourth floor, where the concert hall was.  Live music blasted out of speakers above me.  I dashed into the hall, gasping for breath, my university lecturer’s suit, shirt and tie soaked in sweat…  And I discovered that the Beastie Boys weren’t on stage at all.  What I was hearing was a support act that hadn’t been mentioned on the bloody ticket.  The Beasties didn’t appear until forty minutes later.

 

After that, it needed to be a superb gig to justify all the hassle and indignity I’d suffered.  Which, thankfully, it was.

 

© Mute

 

Nick Cave – Edinburgh Princes Street Gardens, 1999

During the 1999 Edinburgh Festival, goth-rock troubadour Nick Cave – without his band the Bad Seeds – performed in Edinburgh’s Princess Street Gardens, which meant he had the craggy Edinburgh Castle rock, crowned by the battlements of the castle itself, as a spectacular backdrop.  But there was a problem.  Taking place in the castle was the Edinburgh Tattoo, that celebration of tartan-swathed, bagpipe-wailing Scottish military kitsch held every August; and the Tattoo organisers were not happy about having to compete against a concert below in the Gardens.  Indeed, a few evenings earlier, the Gardens had hosted the psychedelic / space-rock outfit Spiritualised and their percussive beats had caused the Lone Piper – the bagpiper who appears on the ramparts at the Tattoo’s finale to play the lament Sleep Dearie Sleep – to lose concentration and mess up the tune.  This evening, to placate the Tattoo, Cave wasn’t allowed to start playing until it had finished, meaning the audience turned up at the time specified on the tickets but then had to wait an hour.  To keep us entertained, some local performance-poets were brought onstage, including the late, lamented Paul Reekie.

 

One consequence of this was that when Cave finally did come on, the end-of-Tattoo firework display was erupting above the castle.  Talk about a spectacular entrance.  And the ensuing gig was worth the long wait.  The songs, mostly stripped-down versions of stuff from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call and 1996’s Murder Ballads, were wonderfully enhanced by the gothic surroundings – the rock, the castle and finally a gorgeous full moon ascending into the starry Edinburgh sky.

 

The Waterboys – Newcastle, Tyne Theatre and Opera House, 2003

In the mid-1980s, there was a considerable buzz about the Waterboys, who were expected to go stratospheric and join U2 and Simple Minds as one of the big Celtic rock bands of the era.  Instead, under the leadership of Edinburgh man Mike Scott, they decamped to Ireland, became a folk band for a while, and rock superstardom never arrived.  I actually preferred their folky stuff (like 1988’s When Ye Go Away) to their rather bloated rock stuff (like 1985’s The Whole of the Moon).

 

For this 2003 gig in Newcastle, the band did an hour of gentle, melodic music, kicking off with a version of the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses, which Scott decided to play because he’d “had it in his head all day,”  There was an interval during which the Geordie crowd enjoyed a pint or four in the Opera House bar.  And then it was back into the auditorium for a second hour of up-tempo rock music.  The relaxed and nothing-more-to-prove Scott clearly wanted to have a good time and wanted to give his audience a good time too – which he did, in spades.

 

© Geffen Records

 

Alabama 3 – Newcastle, University of Northumbria, 2005

This was the best blues / country / techno / electronica / indie / trip-hop / acid-jazz gig I’ve seen, courtesy of the best (and possibly only) band in the world whose music ticks all those boxes, the Alabama 3.  They’re not from Alabama, but from South London.  Also, there’s eight or nine of them rather than three.  With so many band-members onstage, and such a stew of different sounds, this gig at the University of Northumbria was inevitably a bit of a shambles – but what a glorious shambles.  Their track Woke Up This Morning, which at the time served as the opening theme for The Sopranos (1999-2007), was particularly epic.

 

Primal Scream – Norwich UEA, 2009

I wasn’t expecting a great deal in 2009 when the Bobby Gillespie-fronted alternative rock band Primal Scream turned up at the University of East Anglia, where I was in the middle of doing a full-time MA.  Feeling creaky and long in the tooth by then, I assumed my best gig-going days were behind me.  I was too old for the mosh-pit, for jumping around and getting into the exuberant spirit of things.  Meanwhile, I’d seen Primal Scream a few times before and found them a bit hit-and-miss.

 

But I ended up really, really enjoying myself.  I managed to snag a position right at the edge of the stage, giving me a perfect view.  And Gillespie and the gang were in blistering form.  Primal Scream concerts can feel schizophrenic because their music veers between harsh, experimental electronica (like 2000’s Kill All Hippies) and loose-limbed, traditional Rolling Stones-style rock ‘n’ roll (like 1994’s Jailbird), but here it didn’t matter.  They just alternated.  They’d do one hardcore electronica number (accompanied by a brain-frying lightshow), followed by a Stonesy number, then another electronica one, then another Stonesy one, and so on.  Somehow, tonight, it worked brilliantly.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Phil Guest

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Live bands behaving badly

 

© Warner Bros.

 

I see the rock band Royal Blood have landed themselves in hot water.  They took to the stage at Radio 1’s Big Weekend event in Dundee on May 28th and reacted to what they felt was the crowd’s lack of energy and enthusiasm by impersonating Victor Meldrew in the TV sitcom One Foot in the Grave (1990-2000).  They behaved like curmudgeonly old farts.  Vocalist and bassist Mike Kerr berated the audience, who mainly consisted of folk come to see the also-on-the-bill popstars Niall Horan and Lewis Capaldi, with such cantankerous remarks as: “Well, I guess I should introduce ourselves seeing as no one actually knows who we are.  We’re called Royal Blood and this is rock music.  Who likes rock music?  Nine people, brilliant…”  And: “We’re having to clap ourselves because that was so pathetic…”  Plus, he flipped the crowd off while leaving the stage.

 

Small wonder that the band has been roasted on social media since then.  Particularly brutal was a Twitter posting likening them to the long-running British TV glove puppets Sooty and Sweep.

 

Now I quite like Royal Blood’s music and I have a copy of their eponymous 2014 debut album somewhere in my record collection.  Also, not being a pop fan, I would probably find a concert featuring Niall Horan (who was once in One Direction) and Lewis Capaldi (who I admit does have an awesome second cousin once removed) about as pleasurable as poking a sharp stick into my ear and twisting it.  But if you’re in a rock band and find yourself lined up to play at an event that’s obviously going to be thronged with pop fans, you should know what to expect, leave your prejudices offstage, get on with the show and make the best of it…  Or just cancel your appearance.

 

Come to think of it, I did once attend Radio 1’s One Big Sunday event in Ipswich in the summer of 2002, while I was working in the area.  That was because I wanted to see two bands on the bill, Edinburgh rockers Idlewild and Bristol electronica outfit Kosheen.  I didn’t let the fact that the bill also contained Liberty X, Ms Dynamite and Natalie Imbruglia, whom I had zero interest in, interfere with my enjoyment.  As I said, at an eclectic do like this, you make the best of things.

 

Anyway, the recent stushie involving Royal Blood has made me look back over my gig-going career and wonder…  What instances of bad behaviour by live bands have I witnessed in my time?

 

The most memorable onstage meltdowns came while I was living in the city of Sapporo, in Hokkaido, northern Japan, during the 1990s.  Visiting Western performers frequently got annoyed at what they saw as the passivity of Japanese audiences, forgetting that there were obvious cultural reasons why a Japanese crowd might seem less extrovert and exuberant than a Western one.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Mari

 

The number-one musical misery-guts during my Japanese years was Ian Brown, frontman of the Stone Roses, who performed at the Sapporo Factory venue in 1995 to promote their recently-released album Second Coming.  Brown soon got riled by what he perceived as the audience’s inactivity.  “Sapporo,” he snarled, “wake up!”  At this point, some New Zealand guys whom I knew yelled from the back of the hall, “Oh, you’ve remembered which city you’re in!  Well done!”  Brown then commented sourly about “those people at the back with faces like well-skelped arses.”  I was standing a few yards from the front of the stage and couldn’t help shouting back at him, “That’s rich coming from you!”  My comeback seemed to rattle Brown and I saw him both gesturing towards the side of the stage and pointing furiously down at me.  “Oh shit,” I thought, “he’s trying to get the venue’s security staff onto me!”  I decided I should make myself less conspicuous.  This was difficult because I was rather taller than the average Japanese person and my head and shoulders stuck up prominently above the crowd.  I spent the rest of the gig with legs awkwardly bent at the knees, trying to reduce my height, so that Brown and his security goons wouldn’t notice me.

 

To be fair, Brown had recently been beaten up in a club in Tokyo, supposedly by a trio of Australian bodybuilders, which’d no doubt left him in a foul mood for the rest of his band’s Japanese tour.  Still, he behaved like a dickwad that evening and put me off the Stone Roses for a long while afterwards.

 

Also losing it with their northern Japanese audience were the punk band Fluffy, who in 1996 supported the Sex Pistols (in the middle of their Filthy Lucre reunion tour) at the Hokkaido Koseinenkin Hall.  Singer Amanda Rootes sneered at the end, “Thank you, Sapporo, for your boring hospitality!”  But it was hardly the crowd’s fault.  The Hall seemed designed to strangle any atmosphere at birth – as far as I remember, it was an all-seater venue, which limited one’s ability to get up and bop and jump around to the music, and it was brightly lit.  Also, the tickets had said nothing about a support band and people were still filing in to take their seats while Fluffy performed onstage.  The band continued to fume about the experience later.  A mate of mine who worked in a pub in Susukino, Sapporo’s nightlife district, reported that the band came into his establishment for a drink after the gig and had a moan about how horrible the city was.

 

On the other hand, I’ve seen a Japanese audience – well, a Japanese audience sprinkled with a number of foreigners – have a go at a band for not being lively themselves.  In the mid-1990s the American outfit Sugar played at Penny Lane, Sapporo’s best small venue.  Their singer, guitarist and leader Bob Mould was so intense, wrapped-up-in-himself and non-communicative between songs that, eventually, someone with a North American accent roared at him, “Why don’t you speak to us!”  I should say that years later I saw Mould again, performing solo at the Oran Mor arts / entertainment centre in Glasgow, and he seemed way more chilled and looked like he was enjoying himself much more.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Nakagami

 

Penny Lane was also where I witnessed a meltdown by Richey Edwards, the iconic but doomed guitarist – two years later, he’d disappear, never to be seen again – with the Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers.  This was in 1993 and the Manics were promoting their new album Gold Against the Soul.  The gig was excellent, but Edwards was clearly on edge.  At one point he raged against an illuminated fire-exit sign at the auditorium’s far end that he claimed was distracting him.  In a typical face-saving Japanese compromise, the venue manager didn’t turn the sign off.  He just tied a big strip of cardboard over it so that nobody, including Richey, could see it, but it stayed switched on in accordance with fire regulations.

 

Away from Japan, I’ve observed some unprofessional behaviour onstage that was the result of physical or emotional dysfunction within the band.  In 1995, in New York, I went to a gig by Shane MacGowan and the Popes.  The famously raddled MacGowan – who’d already parted company with his earlier and more famous band the Pogues because of his ongoing state of dissolution – lasted all of two songs before sinking onto his haunches, clutching his head between his hands, and then slinking offstage.  The rest of the band, the Popes, gamely played a few instrumental tunes for another 25 or 30 minutes.  Then they buggered off too.  And then there was a riot.  Happily, when I saw MacGowan on two later occasions – with the Popes at the 1998 Fleadh Festival in London’s Finsbury Park and together again with the Pogues in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2004 – he was in better physical shape.  Well, a bit better.

 

Meanwhile, by the time I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain in Edinburgh in 1998, the relationship between the band’s founding members, brothers Jim and William Reid, had become toxic.  It showed onstage.  (Jim Reid once said of the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain experience: “It’s like being locked in a cupboard with somebody for 15 years.  If it wasn’t your brother, you could kick him out.”)  At one point, in front of the audience, Jim roared, “William, just shut up!” when his sibling started singing a song intro off-key.  It was no surprise when, the following year, the news came through that the band had split up.

 

© Creation / Astralwerks

 

I’ve also seen folk, full of boisterous, joking bonhomie, fail to read the room and say something they regretted.  Most notably, I remember Primal Scream playing on the bill at a one-day event on Glasgow Green in 2000.  While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, bass-player Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield cheerfully barked into the microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!”  That went down like a cup of – appropriately enough – cold sick among the multitude of Glaswegians assembled before them.   So pissed off were they that, later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only jesting and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!”  Incidentally, this was in the days before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘amazingly good or impressive’.  (I should add that I think Mani, most famous for playing in the Stone Roses alongside Ian Brown, is a decent bloke.  His surname even inspired the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, which I use when I write horror stories.  That day, he just let his mouth run a little bit ahead of his brain.)

 

Elsewhere, I recall seeing the Subways in Norwich in 2008.  Singer Billy Lunn didn’t endear himself to me or the rest of the audience when, sporting a cheesy grin, he raised a hand and exclaimed at us, “Aha!” in the manner of Alan Partridge – Steve Coogan’s gormless, idiotic TV-presenter character who, of course, is supposed to hail from Norwich.  “What a knobhead,” I thought.

 

Finally, I can think of a few examples of the opposite happening – when the audience behaved badly and the people onstage managed the situation with admirable skill.  Back in 1984, I saw the late, legendary Mark E. Smith’s band the Fall at Aberdeen Ritzy, with support provided by abrasive post-punk / noise-rock band the Membranes.  The audience was populated with serious Fall fans desperate for the support act  to exit the stage as quickly as possible so that their hero Smith could come on.  Accordingly, they kept yelling “F*ck off!” at the Membranes between songs.  Bassist / vocalist John Robb took it in his stride and started doing funny impersonations of the abusers.  “F*****ck off!” he drooled into his microphone.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Frank Schwichtenberg

 

And in 1997 in Melbourne, I was at a gig by the Henry Rollins Band when a woman at the edge of the stage got a little too vociferous in telling the band which songs she wanted them to perform.  The fearsomely muscled Rollins declared, loudly, patiently, contemptuously: “Lady, we decide what songs we play, when we play them, how we play them.  Sometimes you get what you want in life.  Sometimes you don’t.”

 

It’s been a long time since I saw a live band behaving badly.  This is probably because I spent most of the 2010s living in Sri Lanka, where the only option for seeing live rock music (away from the country’s holiday resorts, where hotel bands played cover versions of the Eagles and Bryan Adams to audiences of sweaty middle-aged Western tourists and local would-be hipsters) was to indulge in the thriving Sri Lankan heavy metal scene.  And many of those heavy metal bands had an amusing habit of showing boundless Sri Lankan politeness and gratitude to the audience for turning up to see them.  In between songs, they kept saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for coming, thank you so very much…”  Then, a half-minute later, they were emitting blood-curdling, throaty black / death metal gurgles and screaming “F*CK!  F*CK!  F*CK!”

 

The pandemic obviously ended my gig-going for a few years.  Now that I’ve relocated to Singapore, I’ve been able to see a couple of Western bands again and they’ve been impeccably well-behaved.  Even Guns N’ Roses, who had a reputation for being dicks and subjecting audiences to some notoriously poor concerts over the years, were perfect gentlemen when I saw them at Singapore’s National Stadium last year.  They even treated the crowd to a three-hour set.  Maybe they were simply happy, post-Covid-19, to be on the road again.  Actually, considering how expensive concert-tickets are here, the last thing I’d want would be to find myself in a pricy gig with the performers being arseholes onstage.

 

Mind you, if one of those Korean pop bands like BTS or Blackpink, massively popular in Singapore and elsewhere in East Asia, were to play here and sign up Royal Blood as the support act…  I might pay money to see that.

 

From twitter.com / © Cadell’s Ltd / Entertainment Ltd 2003

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Why I love the Jesus and Mary Chain

 

© Mike Laye

 

The Jesus and Mary Chain are an alternative rock band from the Scottish town of East Kilbride who’ve been in existence for 29 of the last 37 years.  They are essentially the brothers Jim and William Reid singing vocals and playing guitars, with a long and ever-changing cast of drummers and bassists, including Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, filling out the rhythm section.  On at least three days of the week, they’re my favourite band of all time.  (I’d say on the other four days of the week, my favourite all-time band are probably the Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones.)

 

However, it wasn’t until four years after their formation in 1983 that I started listening to them. When they first came to prominence, the media focused not on their music but on their habit of delivering gigs just 20 minutes long, something that the Reid brothers later blamed on not having enough decent songs to play.  Also, they’d perform with their backs to the audience and cloak their sound in squalls of feedback.  This didn’t go down well with the punters and resulted in bottles being thrown and much general disgruntlement.  Not having had a rock-and-roll bogeyman to demonise since the days of the Sex Pistols, the tabloid press happily described these gigs as ‘riots’.

 

A mate of mine went to see the band in Aberdeen in 1985, got the 20-minute, backs-turned, wails-of-feedback routine and then wrote a review for a student newspaper in which he called the gig ‘a load of bollocks’.  And for some time afterwards, I felt reluctant to part with my money for the sake of the Jesus and Mary Chain.

 

It wasn’t until 1987 that I accidentally heard some of their music.  My brother had recorded an album by the Pogues on a cassette tape for me and, to fill some remaining space on the tape, stuck the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Some Candy Talking EP (1986) on it too.  The EP I found surprisingly tuneful, in a lugubrious sort of way.  The following winter, I worked in a ski-resort hotel in Switzerland, where I procured a tape of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s second studio album Darklands (1987) from an alternative music-inclined English girl who was employed in the hotel’s bar.  I liked that enough to track down, soon after, their first studio album Psychocandy (1986) and a compilation album of their B-sides and rarity tracks, the fabulously titled Barbed Wire Kisses (1988).

 

© Blanco y Negro

 

Psychocandy is a combination of abrasive noise and, less expectedly, some wistful, haunted melodising that makes you imagine you’re hearing the ghosts of the Shangri-Las singing through a spirit medium.  Among the songs in the noise category are The Living End, In a Hole, Inside Me and It’s So Hard, while the melodic ones include the opener Just Like Honey, The Hardest Walk, Cut Dead, Sowing Seeds and the aforementioned Some Candy Talking.  Other songs are hybrids that somehow manage to fall into both camps, like Taste the Floor, Never Understand and My Little Underground.

 

Darklands, meanwhile, largely eschews the noise and embraces the melodic but melancholic. Most of its songs fit the mood suggested by its gloomy title but, in spite of themselves, are often exhilarating too.  The standouts for me include the title song and Cherry Came Too, Happy When It Rains and Nine Million Rainy Days, which contains the cheery lines, “As far as I can tell / I’m being dragged from here to hell / All my time in hell was spent with you…” Nine Million Rainy Days, however, veers off in an unexpected direction towards the end when it borrows the famous ‘woo-woo’ backing vocals that grace the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (1969), though here they mutate into ‘woo-woo, woo-woo, woo!’  Evidence, if it didn’t exist already, that the Reid brothers were, for all their modish abrasiveness, happy to ransack the annals of classic rock music for ideas and inspiration.

 

Q magazine, I think, once likened the songs on Darklands to ‘Scottish blues’, though you could also identify the album as a prototype record for the soon-to-be-popular shoegazer movement, but with more drive and focus.  You could even call it an outlier in the already popular goth-rock genre, though without goth’s self-conscious melodrama.  Actually, I suspect if you told Jim and William Reid they were goths, they’d punch you in the face.

 

But it was Barbed Wire Kisses and especially the track Sidewalking that finally made me fall in love with the band. Sidewalking is a massive, swaggering thing that sounds like a bastard child of the Velvet Underground and T. Rex, a combination I found irresistible.  Elsewhere, Kisses reaffirms the band’s love of late 1950s / early 1960s American pop and rock music by offering cover versions of the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ USA and, particularly good, Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love?

 

By the end of the 1980s, I’d started a job in northern Japan.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s latest album, Automatic (1989), in a Tower Records store in the prefectural capital, Sapporo.  Automatic is commonly regarded as the runt in the litter of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s albums – it made heavy use of a drum machine, which offended a lot of people – although I remember it being enthusiastically received at the time and getting into the ‘albums of the year’ lists of publications like the Melody Maker and New Musical Express.  Personally, it’s my favourite of all the band’s records, with that crunchy Velvet Underground-meets-T. Rex swagger to the fore.  Its tracks that were released as singles, Blues from a Gun and Head On, are great.  Head On even had the honour of being covered by the Pixies in their 1991 album Trompe le Monde.  However, for my money, the best thing on the record is the riff-tastic but overlooked song UV Ray.

 

© Blanco y Negro

 

Although the Jesus and Mary Chain had a signature sound and you were never in doubt about whom you were hearing, they were surprisingly varied.  Just as Psychocandy had that dichotomy of discordant noise and yearning soulfulness, so they’d moved from the exquisite cry-into-your-beer moroseness of Darklands to the strutting, sneering panache of Automatic in the space of two years.

 

For me at least, the Jesus and Mary Chain were on a roll and their next album, Honey’s Dead (1992), was another stormer.  Especially memorable is its opening track, Reverence, whose lyrics provocatively declare, “I want to die just like Jesus Christ / I want to die on a bed of spikes… / I want to die just like JFK / I want to die on a sunny day…”.  The breezy Far Out and Gone and the blistering Catchfire are splendid too.

 

Around this time, not only did the band get invited to take part in the 1992 Lollapalooza Tour in the United States alongside the likes of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Ministry and Pearl Jam, but they mounted their own scaled-down version of Lollapalooza back in the UK.  This was the Rollercoaster Tour, which they headlined.  I was lucky enough to catch a performance of the Rollercoaster Tour at London’s Brixton Academy.  It featured not only excellent support from American alternative rockers Dinosaur Jr and dreamy, swirly shoegazers My Bloody Valentine, but also a chance to sample a new, up-and-coming band called Blur.  I have to say my impression when I saw the youthful Damon Albarn ambling about onstage, cheerfully gormless, wasn’t that he was destined to be an icon of the future Britpop movement but that he resembled a musical version of Norman Wisdom.  Meanwhile, the headliners blew me away.  Promoting Honey’s Dead, the Jesus and Mary Chain played their set as dark silhouettes against a huge blood-red backdrop and were simultaneously glorious, imperious, uncompromising… and a bit terrifying.

 

With hindsight, the early 1990s was when the Jesus and Mary Chain peaked for me and I didn’t enjoy the albums they produced later in the decade as much as I’d enjoyed Automatic and Honey’s Dead.  1994’s Stoned and Dethroned is a comparatively mellow affair, at times almost a Jesus and Mary Chain Unplugged, although it does feature a collaboration with Shane MacGowan, recorded a few years after he’d parted company with the Pogues.  This track is called God Help Me and, given the condition MacGowan was in at the time, it was probably aptly titled.

 

1998’s Munki has a brilliant single, Cracking Up, which yet again shows that the band know what to do when they get their teeth into a memorable guitar riff.  Elsewhere, Virtually Unreal bounces along nicely and I Hate Rock ‘n’ Roll is enjoyably caustic, offering such bad-karma lines as “I love the BBC / I love it when they’re pissing on me / And I love MTV / I love it when they’re shitting on me / I hate rock ‘n’ roll / And all these people with nothing to show…’  But there are a few other tracks on the album that go on for too long.

 

© Creation

 

Rather better is the band’s second compilation of B-sides and oddities, 1993’s The Sound of Speed.  Among other things, this features the band having a go at such standards as Smoky Robinson’s My Girl, Willie Dixon’s Little Red Rooster and Leonard Cohen’s Tower of Song.  They also manage a gloriously rumbunctious take on Jerry Reed’s Guitar Man, which was famously covered by Elvis Presley in 1967.  So much did I like the Jesus and Mary Chain’s rendering of Guitar Man, and so unfamiliar was I with Elvis’s oeuvre at the time, that when I subsequently heard the 1967 version the first thought that popped into my head was: “Wow, is that Elvis attempting a Jesus and Mary Chain song?”  And yet another praiseworthy cover on The Sound of Speed is their wonderfully lithe, snaking version of the 13th Floor Elevators’ Reverberation.

 

By the late 1990s the vitriol expressed in the lyrics of I Hate Rock ‘n’ Roll had seemingly overpowered the band.  The relationship between Jim and William Reid had often not been easy, especially when they were under pressure onstage or in the studio, and they’d long been known in the British music press as ‘the Brothers Grim’.  Their one-time drummer John Moore once remarked that they’d experienced ‘enough fraternal conflict to make the Gallagher brothers look like princes William and Harry’ and quoted Jim as saying: “It’s like being locked in a cupboard with somebody for 15 years.  If it wasn’t your brother, you could kick him out.”

 

When I saw them in concert again in the summer of 1998, in Edinburgh, it was clear that things weren’t rosy in Jesus and Mary Chain World.  “William, just shut up!” Jim yelled in the front of the audience when his brother started singing a song intro off-key.  In September that year, a bust-up at the House of Blues venue in Los Angeles, wherein Jim was inebriated and William stormed off the stage, resulted in a gig that echoed the chaos at the start of the band’s career by lasting all of 15 minutes.  It was no surprise when, the following year, it was announced that the band had split.

 

I missed the Jesus and Mary Chain during the noughties.  Ironically, during the years when they weren’t around, it seemed you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting some new band that’d obviously been influenced by them – for example, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the Raveonettes, the xx and even the Scottish indie rock band Glasvegas.  Meanwhile, I felt a pang when I saw the Sofia Coppola-directed movie Lost in Translation (2003) because, unexpectedly, the song accompanying the final scene when Bill Murray bids farewell to Scarlett Johansson was none other than the first track on the first Jesus and Mary Chain album, Just Like Honey.

 

© Artificial Plastic Records

 

Yet somehow Jim and William managed to patch things up in 2007 and they performed at that year’s Coachella festival in California (with Scarlett Johannsen showing up to provide vocals for Just Like Honey) and Meltdown festival in London.  Since then, the Jesus and Mary Chain have done intermittent tours and gigs and overseen new releases of their old material.  But it wasn’t until 2017 that they finally got around to putting out a new album, Damage and Joy.

 

Their seventh studio album starts off powerfully with a clutch of songs that, in the way the Jesus and Mary Chain of old managed so effortlessly, fuse together the sunny harmonies of late-1950s / early-1960s bubble-gum pop music with some 1980s guitar distortion and general bad attitude – the sinewy Amputation, the meditative War on Peace, the irrepressible All Things Must Past.  Thereafter, among the album’s total of 14 songs, there are a few things that could have been excised to create a leaner package.  But there’s still lots of good stuff.

 

The band remain capable of penning lyrics that are amusingly provocative, as demonstrated by the avantgarde Simian Split.  The song boasts, ‘I killed Kurt Cobain / I put the shot right through his brain / And his wife gave me the job / Because I’m a big fat lying slob’.  Let’s hope this song never finds its way onto Courtney Love’s iPhone, or indeed, her lawyer’s iPhone.  Elsewhere I love the uplifting The Two of Us, the bouncy Presidici (Et Chapaquiditch), and Facing Up to the Facts, which channels part of Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues (1959) amid its muscular guitar work.

 

Incidentally, Facing Up to the Facts contains the lyrics, ‘I hate my brother and he hates me / That’s the way it’s supposed to be’.  Which suggests that, at long last, the Jesus and Mary Chain have achieved a dark but stable peace.

 

From nativetongue.com.au