Jesus Wept
Max Bell / The Face
06.1985
06.1985
Can they build a wall of sound on foundations of youthful rancour? Will they surmount their skin problems and find a place in the affections of teenage girls? And do we hear a hallelujah for Jesus And Mary Chain?
According to Mr Geoff Travis, chief of staff at the born again, doubly hip Rough Trade records (purveyors of high class pop to the gentry), the best group in the world is The Smiths. This is not surprising news. Firstly, it's probably true and secondly Travis was the only major record company executive to take The Manchester Moan semi-seriously and you can bet he's glad he did.
If we play this little party game, choose the best group in the world, and confine its parameters to white chart-orientated music with something other than air between the ears, then The Smiths take the title. Travis follows them with Everything But The Girl which gets my blue pencil but let that pass. His third choice is an as yet little-heard quartet from the newtown slums of East Kilbride, the splendidly named Jesus And Mary Chain, christened thus by guitarist William Reid during an afternoon TV session in which Bing Crosby cropped up playing a priest or some such nonsense.
Travis believes that the Jesus And Mary Chain, whose legend as obnoxious teen terrors has preceded them to remarkably good effect, are that most old fashioned of entities, "the perfect pop group writing perfect pop songs."
Strong stuff, but Travis isn't given to wasting words on no-hopers. Neither is Rob Dickins, the top Warners executive who forged a symbiotic relationship with the band when he performed one of those major to minor sleight-of-hands and issued the group's second single, "Never Understand", on the Blanco y Negro label (Warner Bros with a fancy underground name).
Dickins, no stranger to the fat six-figure salary and a man notorious for the care he takes with money, endorses the perfect pop group bit. He has to, he's signed them for five albums. "Their songwriting strengths are universally understandable. Their evolution is exciting because I like to think they'll get bored with their current non-conformist stance. They should do. The Fall got boring. At present there is a natural resistance to their sound; it's technically unacceptable to radio programmers. If our pluggers take the DJs and producers a Mary Chain record their attitude is, 'what's all the fuss? It's just interference and badly used feedback.' When you hear them on the radio most people's reaction is to try and retune the station."
The Jesus And Mary Chain certainly make a fine racket. Guitars are pitched to distortion, feedback snarls, rhythms filter through to create a polyphonic and massive effect. Yet within this healthy maelstrom lurk conventional melody lines, whose impurities are matched by their catchiness. Travis is right. What we have here is our old friend, the Wall of Sound.
Whether this wall will ever be scaled by any more than the 30,000 who bought "Never Understand" (that's 28,000 more than first latched on to debuts by Echo And The Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and Joy Division) is a moot point. Travis reckons that The Jesus And Mary Chain write "classic teen rebellion songs that encapsulate the mood of the people who like them."
Teen rebels? At this stage of the game? Sadly, no longer being a teenager I can't vouch for this fulsome praise, but if I cast my mind back I can see that their opening salvo of "Upside Down", "Never Understand" and "You Tripped Me Up" might qualify as "little symphonies for the kids" (Phil Spector, 1964).
What is interesting about The Jesus And Mary Chain is that their best potential market isn't the earnest type who fills up the correspondence pages of the NME and Sounds each week with his diatribes for and against the band. Nor is he the essentially academic journalist who pretends to champion the band while simultaneously accusing them of cretinous behaviour: love the sound, don't trust the image. No, their market has to be the same one that until now has been quite happy consuming Wham!, Duran and Frankie, the lip-gloss pop stars. In other words, the teenage girl.
Travis again: "Kids in South London schools are beginning to pick up on them. Our spies tell us that there is a buzz, a word of mouth. I don't want to socialise because that should be done after the event. If they fade away I'll look silly, but their songs carry succinct messages. They've got vitality and unity, they chip away the edges. It's corny but I have tremendous faith in them. They are so talented it's exciting to see how far they can go."
The Jesus And Mary Chain are managed to fairly spectacular effect by Alan McGhee, the manic but friendly owner of the independent Creation label. McGhee it was who first put the band on stage at London's Living Room club and promptly signed them up on June 9, 1984. He spends his time now concocting outrageous morsels about his charges which he feeds to Fleet Street and the pop weeklies. It's standard sex, drugs and rock'n'roll stuff - mild smut and sleaze; like the time the drummed died in a motorbike accident; that one band member has never had sex indoors; that another lad was caught in flagrante delecto with a German promoter's wife on one of their many European jaunts.
If the JAMC have been compared too frequently to the Sex Pistols for their own comfort then McGhee's would-be svengalism has cemented that parallel. His heroes are Andy Warhol, Brian Epstien, Colonel Tom Parker and Malcolm McLaren. He talks a blue streak but is too soft to be offensive.
McGhee sounds more like a football manager than an ogre when he tells me that "rock and roll is about lies and deceit." He's too cheerful to be McLaren and too much of a music buff. When McLaren talked about plans for his Chicken magazine, the whole sordid Bow Wow Wow saga, a bad taste was left in the mouth. When McGhee talks about opening a shop to sell Jesus And Mary Chain shirts bearing such slogans as "Fuck Fuck Fuck Candy Fuck" and mentions that the ultimate JAMC anthem is stil unrecorded "Jesus Suck" you tend to laugh. The guy is mad but he's harmless.
To McGhee the band don't write message songs - as Daryl F. said: if you got a message, use Western Union. "Controversy is what this band seeks. Don't ask Jim Reid (the singer) about human suffering. He's not Bob Geldorf. Ask him about the price of hamburgers. Jim's selfish. He's interested in himself, just like everyone else.
"This group is the epitome of 1985," McGhee adds, warming to his theme. "We've had the shit and the sweeties now let's have the substance."
The trouble is that this substance is still only ectoplasm. The Jesus And Mary Chain myths are amusing enough for those in the business, like the tales of them lifting eighty quid out of Rob Dickins' wallet while their benefactor was in camera, or the reports of them terrorising the WEA offices, or scribbling obscenities on in-house gold records but it's myths without hits to back it up. It's all too rock'n'roll.
"Well, I have invented a few things," admits McGhee, "but they've worked. We over-publicised the riots at gigs." (Like the North London Poly show, which can be filed nextt to the Pistols' infamous Screen on the Green display - you were there of course). "We've proved that if you're clever enough, which is not very, you don't have to be Duran Duran to take the companies for thousands. The Mary Chain boys want to be rich and anyone who doesn't admit that is a lyin' fuckin' bastard," he enthuses. "Record companies are basically comprised of totally stupid people with more money than sense. They want new messiahs? We'll give them that. We've been adopted. I've got no qualms about taking their money."
So young and yet so cynical? "Don't get me wrong. I love their music too. I want them to be everywhere, to be like Coronation Street, totally over the top."
But do Jesus And Mary Chain want that? Off the record, they are just four quiet boys with an attitude which can be interpreted as a chip or typical teenage moroseness. They make great records but their live shows are often shambolic. And they're over too quickly. "We play 25 minutes maximum because there's never been a group good enough to play any longer." Jim Reid is adamant. "Never has been, never will be. People get bored, the group gets boring. They start getting into it. Anyway, we've only got enough songs to play for that long. Ten songs, none of them longer than two and a half minutes."
Reid worries about the cult of violence which followed the group's last English tour and led to several cancellations. No PA company will go near them. The pure punks despise them. Their self-description - "Eighties beatniks with an image that is shoddy but stylish" - won't endear them to the fashion-conscious.
At 19 Reid already bears the slightly haunted and deranged look of someone who has been forced into a negative corner, enforced by journalists concentrating on riots, patronising their motives ("to get rich and make classic pop records like 'Leader Of The Pack'.") They live in an eternal turmoil of self-justification.
They're not cute looking either. On the day we met Reid was sporting a variant of the Glasgow Kiss on his lower lip. Their clothes are DIY, standard gothic black. They're prone to all the usual adolescent skin eruptions. Reid sighs at the unfairness of it all. "People think we're rabble, a joke to be ignored and then we'll go away. We're serious about this, it's all we want to do. I don't do anything that isn't serious."
Aah! The inflexibility of youth has drawn the charge that The Jesus And Mary Chain are whingers. Perhaps even sensitive and tortured artists? Reid sniggers. "Most people say we're just four drunken bastards. We attract too much bad press. The North London Poly wasn't our making. The students were to blame for keeping ticket holders outside all night. They could nae run a minodge."
Reid ceases to be so world-weary when he emphasises the positive aspects of the band. He wants to make records that are twenty years ahead of their time, to be louder and nastier. He also thinks they write great love songs. "We want recognition as the major talent we are. We aren't extremely competent musicians but that doesn't matter." Such belief is not to be deflated but given that we live in an era where nothing is new, the past is constantly paraded before our eyes and the future is three months old, they'll have an awfully hard job impressing their willful genius on a blasé public.
Reid disagrees: "There is nothing left-field about us. Everything hasn't been done. That's wrong. No-one has never made a record remotely like 'Upside Down'."
Jim Reid talks about his generation and he can't get satisfaction. He's a rebel and he'll never be no good.
David Toop was quite correct when he described the Mary Chain in these pages as being "profoundly traditional" but I don't think they should be lumbered with too many Velvet Underground and "Anarchy" - era comparisons. The fracture they explore predates the marriage of pop and psychadelia. It recalls the real classic period of American teen anthem, the time of Dick Dale, the dumbest Brian Wilson, Jackie DeShannon, Spector's surf and city swerve.
To obtain that sound the group produce their own records because "we don't know any other way that's better. What do producers do anyway? You can't trust engineers. We say 'turn the treble up' and when you look away they turn it down again. They won't let you near the desk to learn because we say and do all the things you're not supposed to. It's always 'get your hands off, sonny'. We shouldn't be in the pop business."
But they are. They've even made two videos despite professing to loathe the medium. The recent video for "You Really Tripped Me Up", shot in Portugal, is a sort of two-minute Spaghetti Western. One of the video team who accompanied the JAMC into the scrub recalls them sitting around a fire playing Byrds songs, there being little in the way of nightlife.
One evening a member of the entourage suggested that to alleviate the boredom they retire to his room "to smoke a bit of grass". The Jesus And Mary Chain were aghast. "We don't smoke grass! It makes you stupid. We don't smoke anything. We only take acid and speed!" It's good to see they have a moral code after all.
Finally, a few facts about the next tycoons of teen. Their fave colours are torquoise and yellow, their fave food is a fish supper, their fave TV shows are Aussie afternoon soaps and their motto is Ready Steady Jesus, Jesus Suck.
Nice boys. Should go far.
According to Mr Geoff Travis, chief of staff at the born again, doubly hip Rough Trade records (purveyors of high class pop to the gentry), the best group in the world is The Smiths. This is not surprising news. Firstly, it's probably true and secondly Travis was the only major record company executive to take The Manchester Moan semi-seriously and you can bet he's glad he did.
If we play this little party game, choose the best group in the world, and confine its parameters to white chart-orientated music with something other than air between the ears, then The Smiths take the title. Travis follows them with Everything But The Girl which gets my blue pencil but let that pass. His third choice is an as yet little-heard quartet from the newtown slums of East Kilbride, the splendidly named Jesus And Mary Chain, christened thus by guitarist William Reid during an afternoon TV session in which Bing Crosby cropped up playing a priest or some such nonsense.
Travis believes that the Jesus And Mary Chain, whose legend as obnoxious teen terrors has preceded them to remarkably good effect, are that most old fashioned of entities, "the perfect pop group writing perfect pop songs."
Strong stuff, but Travis isn't given to wasting words on no-hopers. Neither is Rob Dickins, the top Warners executive who forged a symbiotic relationship with the band when he performed one of those major to minor sleight-of-hands and issued the group's second single, "Never Understand", on the Blanco y Negro label (Warner Bros with a fancy underground name).
Dickins, no stranger to the fat six-figure salary and a man notorious for the care he takes with money, endorses the perfect pop group bit. He has to, he's signed them for five albums. "Their songwriting strengths are universally understandable. Their evolution is exciting because I like to think they'll get bored with their current non-conformist stance. They should do. The Fall got boring. At present there is a natural resistance to their sound; it's technically unacceptable to radio programmers. If our pluggers take the DJs and producers a Mary Chain record their attitude is, 'what's all the fuss? It's just interference and badly used feedback.' When you hear them on the radio most people's reaction is to try and retune the station."
The Jesus And Mary Chain certainly make a fine racket. Guitars are pitched to distortion, feedback snarls, rhythms filter through to create a polyphonic and massive effect. Yet within this healthy maelstrom lurk conventional melody lines, whose impurities are matched by their catchiness. Travis is right. What we have here is our old friend, the Wall of Sound.
Whether this wall will ever be scaled by any more than the 30,000 who bought "Never Understand" (that's 28,000 more than first latched on to debuts by Echo And The Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and Joy Division) is a moot point. Travis reckons that The Jesus And Mary Chain write "classic teen rebellion songs that encapsulate the mood of the people who like them."
Teen rebels? At this stage of the game? Sadly, no longer being a teenager I can't vouch for this fulsome praise, but if I cast my mind back I can see that their opening salvo of "Upside Down", "Never Understand" and "You Tripped Me Up" might qualify as "little symphonies for the kids" (Phil Spector, 1964).
What is interesting about The Jesus And Mary Chain is that their best potential market isn't the earnest type who fills up the correspondence pages of the NME and Sounds each week with his diatribes for and against the band. Nor is he the essentially academic journalist who pretends to champion the band while simultaneously accusing them of cretinous behaviour: love the sound, don't trust the image. No, their market has to be the same one that until now has been quite happy consuming Wham!, Duran and Frankie, the lip-gloss pop stars. In other words, the teenage girl.
Travis again: "Kids in South London schools are beginning to pick up on them. Our spies tell us that there is a buzz, a word of mouth. I don't want to socialise because that should be done after the event. If they fade away I'll look silly, but their songs carry succinct messages. They've got vitality and unity, they chip away the edges. It's corny but I have tremendous faith in them. They are so talented it's exciting to see how far they can go."
The Jesus And Mary Chain are managed to fairly spectacular effect by Alan McGhee, the manic but friendly owner of the independent Creation label. McGhee it was who first put the band on stage at London's Living Room club and promptly signed them up on June 9, 1984. He spends his time now concocting outrageous morsels about his charges which he feeds to Fleet Street and the pop weeklies. It's standard sex, drugs and rock'n'roll stuff - mild smut and sleaze; like the time the drummed died in a motorbike accident; that one band member has never had sex indoors; that another lad was caught in flagrante delecto with a German promoter's wife on one of their many European jaunts.
If the JAMC have been compared too frequently to the Sex Pistols for their own comfort then McGhee's would-be svengalism has cemented that parallel. His heroes are Andy Warhol, Brian Epstien, Colonel Tom Parker and Malcolm McLaren. He talks a blue streak but is too soft to be offensive.
McGhee sounds more like a football manager than an ogre when he tells me that "rock and roll is about lies and deceit." He's too cheerful to be McLaren and too much of a music buff. When McLaren talked about plans for his Chicken magazine, the whole sordid Bow Wow Wow saga, a bad taste was left in the mouth. When McGhee talks about opening a shop to sell Jesus And Mary Chain shirts bearing such slogans as "Fuck Fuck Fuck Candy Fuck" and mentions that the ultimate JAMC anthem is stil unrecorded "Jesus Suck" you tend to laugh. The guy is mad but he's harmless.
To McGhee the band don't write message songs - as Daryl F. said: if you got a message, use Western Union. "Controversy is what this band seeks. Don't ask Jim Reid (the singer) about human suffering. He's not Bob Geldorf. Ask him about the price of hamburgers. Jim's selfish. He's interested in himself, just like everyone else.
"This group is the epitome of 1985," McGhee adds, warming to his theme. "We've had the shit and the sweeties now let's have the substance."
The trouble is that this substance is still only ectoplasm. The Jesus And Mary Chain myths are amusing enough for those in the business, like the tales of them lifting eighty quid out of Rob Dickins' wallet while their benefactor was in camera, or the reports of them terrorising the WEA offices, or scribbling obscenities on in-house gold records but it's myths without hits to back it up. It's all too rock'n'roll.
"Well, I have invented a few things," admits McGhee, "but they've worked. We over-publicised the riots at gigs." (Like the North London Poly show, which can be filed nextt to the Pistols' infamous Screen on the Green display - you were there of course). "We've proved that if you're clever enough, which is not very, you don't have to be Duran Duran to take the companies for thousands. The Mary Chain boys want to be rich and anyone who doesn't admit that is a lyin' fuckin' bastard," he enthuses. "Record companies are basically comprised of totally stupid people with more money than sense. They want new messiahs? We'll give them that. We've been adopted. I've got no qualms about taking their money."
So young and yet so cynical? "Don't get me wrong. I love their music too. I want them to be everywhere, to be like Coronation Street, totally over the top."
But do Jesus And Mary Chain want that? Off the record, they are just four quiet boys with an attitude which can be interpreted as a chip or typical teenage moroseness. They make great records but their live shows are often shambolic. And they're over too quickly. "We play 25 minutes maximum because there's never been a group good enough to play any longer." Jim Reid is adamant. "Never has been, never will be. People get bored, the group gets boring. They start getting into it. Anyway, we've only got enough songs to play for that long. Ten songs, none of them longer than two and a half minutes."
Reid worries about the cult of violence which followed the group's last English tour and led to several cancellations. No PA company will go near them. The pure punks despise them. Their self-description - "Eighties beatniks with an image that is shoddy but stylish" - won't endear them to the fashion-conscious.
At 19 Reid already bears the slightly haunted and deranged look of someone who has been forced into a negative corner, enforced by journalists concentrating on riots, patronising their motives ("to get rich and make classic pop records like 'Leader Of The Pack'.") They live in an eternal turmoil of self-justification.
They're not cute looking either. On the day we met Reid was sporting a variant of the Glasgow Kiss on his lower lip. Their clothes are DIY, standard gothic black. They're prone to all the usual adolescent skin eruptions. Reid sighs at the unfairness of it all. "People think we're rabble, a joke to be ignored and then we'll go away. We're serious about this, it's all we want to do. I don't do anything that isn't serious."
Aah! The inflexibility of youth has drawn the charge that The Jesus And Mary Chain are whingers. Perhaps even sensitive and tortured artists? Reid sniggers. "Most people say we're just four drunken bastards. We attract too much bad press. The North London Poly wasn't our making. The students were to blame for keeping ticket holders outside all night. They could nae run a minodge."
Reid ceases to be so world-weary when he emphasises the positive aspects of the band. He wants to make records that are twenty years ahead of their time, to be louder and nastier. He also thinks they write great love songs. "We want recognition as the major talent we are. We aren't extremely competent musicians but that doesn't matter." Such belief is not to be deflated but given that we live in an era where nothing is new, the past is constantly paraded before our eyes and the future is three months old, they'll have an awfully hard job impressing their willful genius on a blasé public.
Reid disagrees: "There is nothing left-field about us. Everything hasn't been done. That's wrong. No-one has never made a record remotely like 'Upside Down'."
Jim Reid talks about his generation and he can't get satisfaction. He's a rebel and he'll never be no good.
David Toop was quite correct when he described the Mary Chain in these pages as being "profoundly traditional" but I don't think they should be lumbered with too many Velvet Underground and "Anarchy" - era comparisons. The fracture they explore predates the marriage of pop and psychadelia. It recalls the real classic period of American teen anthem, the time of Dick Dale, the dumbest Brian Wilson, Jackie DeShannon, Spector's surf and city swerve.
To obtain that sound the group produce their own records because "we don't know any other way that's better. What do producers do anyway? You can't trust engineers. We say 'turn the treble up' and when you look away they turn it down again. They won't let you near the desk to learn because we say and do all the things you're not supposed to. It's always 'get your hands off, sonny'. We shouldn't be in the pop business."
But they are. They've even made two videos despite professing to loathe the medium. The recent video for "You Really Tripped Me Up", shot in Portugal, is a sort of two-minute Spaghetti Western. One of the video team who accompanied the JAMC into the scrub recalls them sitting around a fire playing Byrds songs, there being little in the way of nightlife.
One evening a member of the entourage suggested that to alleviate the boredom they retire to his room "to smoke a bit of grass". The Jesus And Mary Chain were aghast. "We don't smoke grass! It makes you stupid. We don't smoke anything. We only take acid and speed!" It's good to see they have a moral code after all.
Finally, a few facts about the next tycoons of teen. Their fave colours are torquoise and yellow, their fave food is a fish supper, their fave TV shows are Aussie afternoon soaps and their motto is Ready Steady Jesus, Jesus Suck.
Nice boys. Should go far.
