the jesus and mary chain
 
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Jesus and Mary Chain: chapter, verse and worse
Biba Kopf / NME
16.02.1985
Nine months in the making, the far from immaculately conceived Jesus And Mary Chain from Glasgow, have been alternately heralded as new messiahs or dismissed as a bloody mess. In the gospel according to Biba Kopf those alternatives are the flipsides of the same coin. So please welcome...the bloody messy messiahs! (Pictures: Peter Anderson)

I: BLAST!
When the rock lost its roll we should have guessed we were in trouble. But somebody disguised its stasis with terms like progressive and all of us thought we were still moving forward.

From this vantage point, though, 15 years on from the completion of the cycle begun with Elvis Presley - that is, when the 50's baby boom degenerates brought up on their King (not mine) took control - it would seem we were condemned to repeat that cycle and all its mistakes.

And the more often it is repeated the tighter and more restricting its revolutions become.

The longer the history of rock runs - or should we say crawls - the more apparent it is that the only true movement has not come from within the cycle, but from the outside, from those who have carried out great blasting operations on its massive, unwieldy shape with the intention, subconscious or otherwise, to get it rolling again.

When I think of the great demolition squads blasting away at the foundations of those who would make of rock a citadel for the old-aged, I think of those with a love for its simplicity, its destructive character, its otherness, those like Lou Reed's The Velvet Underground, who had an uncanny understanding of chord changes between A and E. I think of Bolan, Roxy, Bowie, Iggy, The New York Dolls; of those not so readily accommodated, like Cohen, Ayers, Harper; of the great Europeans Can, Kraftwerk, Neu, who have no respect for the Anglo-American rock hegemony. I think of punk, the Pistols, the Buzzcocks; of Hell, Verlaine and the Ramones. I think of Einstürzebnde Neubauten, Birthday Party, Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel; of Hardcore, the Swans, and Sonic Youth.

Eventually I would come to The Jesus and Mary Chain.

2: DAMN!

From Elvis to The Jesus And Mary Chain? Where are the links, the ties that bind? I prefer not to see them as links so much as disruptions from which can be plotted a pattern of disintegration. As with the pattern, so with the sound itself. This is music forced to the point it splinters, breaks up, divides. In each splinter resides new possibilities. In this disintegration, in this pattern of disintegration, I trace the dynamic that keeps the rock rolling, the constants being boys and noise.

3: BOYS

Brothers William (guitar) and Jim Reid (voice), Douglas Hart (bass) and Bobby Gilllespie (drums). All 20 or under, they formed some nine months or so ago in East Kilbride, Glasgow, they soon moved south to London. Presently living three to a room, they are not happy there. Then, it might not be in their nature to be happy anywhere.

"I suppose coming from Glasgow it sounds like we got off to a bad start," postulates Jim. "But it helped us in a way. There might be a feeling of hopelessness in Glasgow, but in London there is hopelessness. You're just a group there in a pile of shit, but in Glasgow there is not much to compete with. People have got this idea that there is where it is all happening, but it is not.
Glasgow never accepted us anyway. We couldn't even get played, they didn't want anything to do with us. We would take our tapes around and people would laugh at us. That's why we had to come here. It didn't bother us."


4: NOISE

A psycho beat and drone pop melody are simultaneously rent apart and swamped in wave upon wave of the guitar feedback that is the group's instant hit. For them feedback isn't the tasteful curlicue to a dying chord brought in on the fade to fool the listener into thinking he's onto something exciting, but the core of what they do.

Placing an unstable, barely controllable noise at their centre lends them their exhilarating, unpredictable edge. Jesus and Mary Chain music could fall apart at any moment. But, contrary to popular opinion, they do have songs to fall back upon. Not many, mind.


5. DOUBT?

Boys and noise? Noise as the refuge of the idle? The noiseboys as the false idols? Do they simply substitute piercing feedback and exploding amps for tonality, struck guitar for carefully plucked, constant crescendo for properly constructed peaks and troughs?

Yes! And why not? Who has the time these days to learn? The cut and slash of Jesus And Mary Chain feedback, while falling short of the total demolition jobs carried out by Einstürzende Neubauten, Boyd Rice et al, might be a shortcut to the ecstasy of noise, but there's no denying its appeal as an escape route from the pervasive flatness.

Any lingering doubts stem from the speed with which it has all happened. In nine short months Jesus and Mary Chain have left home, settled in and unsettled London, released one single ("Upside Down" on Creation) and recorded a second ("Never Understand" for Blanco y Negro/WEA), and received such unenviable comparisons as "best thing since The Sex Pistols" to live down.

The number of gigs they've played add up to handfuls, the minutes they've been exposed to the public barely stretch around the clock. They can just about summon up ten songs, at least two of which - Syd Barrett's 'Vegetable Man' and Vic Godard's 'Ambition' - are covers.

Unsurprisingly their sets have been known to splutter to an abrupt halt long before the expected concert span.

"So how do you work out money's worth, anyway?" challenges Bobby.

6: DISMISSED!

"It's happening again," sighs William. "It's all coming back, that musicianship snobbery. That snobbish musicianship type attitude. You see it in a lot of live reviews you read these days, where the reviewers say something like, they're not very good, but they're good and tight, competent at their instruments. I think that's a horrible thing to say. It doesn't matter how competent you are at your instrument, though it's something people seem to admire. It's whether you can write a good song."

"It's the end result what counts," asserts Douglas. "It's beside the point how you get there."

"But we're not saying that to make a thunderous noise you have got to be a bad guitarist," adds William defensively. "Look at The Birthday Party, their guitar sound was brilliant and I don't believe he was a shitty guitarist. People might call me a shitty guitarist, but I get what we want."

"A lot of people look at us and think we're amateur," says an incredulous Jim. "That's totally absurd. Why call us amateurs? They way we sound is the way we want it to sound. We're totally competent, we do what we want to do. What's so amateur about that?"


7: DISGUST

Jesus and Mary Chain as blasting operation:

"We don't want anyone to go away from our gigs and say, hmm, not bad," spits Jim. "We're trying to avoid being not bad. The sort of people who despise us are the sort of people we want to despise us. The sort of people who think we're great are the sort of people we want to think we are great.

Who do you want to despise you?

"People with the opposite attitude to us. People who tune their guitars before going onstage, people that make a point of things like that. We don't make a point of not tuning guitars, mind, but people call us assholes for not doing it anyway. People who say we shouldn't be allowed to exist because we cannot play very well. I'm equally disgusted with them as they probably are with me.

"We're totally outnumbered," he admits. "Since we've been in a group we seem to come up against people who deliberately get in our way. But when we started this group we thought we'd do what we want, please ourselves, but everyone tries to stop us. That may sound paranoid but it's the truth! We can't play our gigs, we can't get a sound man to do what we tell him. In the studio we ask for feedback, say turn it right up and they tell us, that's as far as it'll go, son."

"Don't you think it's quite funny that sound men don't understand the word treble?" quips William. "It's as if there's a secret bible written just for soundmen, saying what they can and cannot do."


8: UNLOVED

The beauty of thriving on antagonism, feeding off your own unloveable self is, of course, that your own behaviour ensures you need never go hungry.

The Jesus And Mary Chain will not let up or make things easy for themselves. They convert the energy invested in others' hatred into the flailing noise they fling back at audiences.

"When we're playing live and somebody shouts, play some music, that gives us fuel," posits Bobby.

Just so their contract with the record industry. If once Creation were the only label willing to give them a chance, they had the majors clambering over each other with enticing offers after they'd been marked as "the best things since The Sex Pistols". Having signed a one-off deal with Blanco Y Negro/WEA, their contact with the majors confirms all the worst they'd heard about them.

The one-off deal would also indicate that Warners have as little faith in the Jesus And Mary Chain as they have in the company.

"That was us!" corrects Jim. "We didn't want to be tied to a thing like that. The longterm deals they were asking of us were a joke. Like no feedback on records. Or put a little bit of feedback on just to please the fans. It seems that do what we tell you and you'll make lots of money is the deal. But the one-off deal gives us the power to do what we want."

"And if it's a hit we'll have the upper hand," interjects William.

"But for the moment it seems we're this month's scruffs," concludes Jim. "Everytime you walk into the place they greet you with a smile. Everything's great!"


9: PUNK?

Jim: "As I have said, attitude is important. We've got an attitude and I want it to come across. I want people to feel it, stop, change their minds, look at their situation or whatever. That's what happened to me when I heard punk rock. Punk rock covers a lot. It isn't just the Sex Pistols, Clash or Buzzcocks. Punk rock was an attitude and we have that attitude. A lot of people have had it... That's it."


10: SACRED

Jim: "Sacred? Well nothing that springs to mind, but probably something."

11: SACRILEGE?

Why fuck about with Vic Godard's 'Ambition'? It seems that (on the B-side to the forthcoming 'Never Understand' ) fuck is all they've added to the chorus.

"Well, at our first gig we had seven songs and needed ten. We thought 'Ambition' is something that could have been done better. If we didn't, then there would be no point in doing it. A lot of people might be upset by it. I dunno."


12: DISCLAIMER

The opinions expressed in this article unless directly quoted are those of the author and do not necessarily coalesce with those of the Jesus And Mary Chain. Jesus And Mary Chain, however, soundtrack these opinions.


13: ABANDON

In the beginning was the word and the word was abandon. Jesus And Mary Chain extracted the band from abandon and their messy, massively exhilarating noise was born.

"It's not just like that," contradicts William. "It's not just a party we're having."

Contrary sods, Jesus And Mary Chain.

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